CRCF Days: Market signals for CDR suppliers
Our presence at the CRCF Days last week in Brussels gave us a useful reading of where the CDR market is heading.
Around 200 people were in the room, with another 300 online: buyers, suppliers, policymakers, banks, intermediaries and other ecosystem players showed that CDR is no longer a niche policy discussion.
But the tone was not naïve optimism. The market is getting more serious. Buyers, banks and policymakers are asking harder questions: what can be delivered, when, under which claim, with which risk, and with which policy signal behind it?
For suppliers, a few messages stood out.
1. Biochar needs a deliberate policy route
One of the clearest takeaways is that biochar is not going to be part of the first wave of EU ETS integration, as per the draft EU proposal that will be officially released this summer (July 14th).
The current discussion is much more focused on DACCS and BioCCS. For biochar, this raises a strategic question: should the sector keep pushing for inclusion, or should it build other routes into compliance and quasi-compliance markets?
At CRCF Days, the point was made clearly: if biochar is not included in the ETS track, the sector needs something else. But that “something else” should not be improvised later.
Potential routes mentioned included carbon intensity labels in agriculture, CBAM-related tools, clearer corporate claims, national incentives, public procurement, and other compliance-adjacent instruments that reflect where biochar creates value.
This also means there will not be one single CDR market. Different countries will need different tools. What makes sense in Norway may not in Austria or Switzerland. What works for DACCS may not work for biochar. Location, feedstock, end use, heat use and agricultural relevance will all matter.
2. Public demand is starting to move
The EU is not the only actor shaping demand.
One of the more important signals from CRCF Days was the amount of activity at national level. Countries are looking at different ways to support removals: contracts for difference, tax breaks, subsidies, auction schemes, reverse carbon-tax models, and other public support tools. Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany and other countries are all exploring different approaches.
For suppliers, this matters because demand may not come from one place. It may come from EU instruments, national schemes, city-level procurement, public-private buyer coalitions, or sector-specific tools.
3. Buyers want flexibility, not just tonnes
Buyers' interest is growing but risk management is becoming increasingly important. Several risks came up repeatedly: late delivery, failure to deliver, replacement risk, financing risk and project execution risk.
CDR is still “building the plane while flying it”, as one speaker put it. That does not mean the market is blocked. It means projects need to become easier to finance, contract and trust and this trust infrastructure needs to be continuously developed while the market grows.
It is also where Accend can play a useful role. Because we work with a portfolio of projects, we can help reduce buyer exposure to a single asset. If one project is delayed, buyers may have access to similar credits elsewhere in the portfolio as a fallback option.
4. Claim uncertainty is holding demand back
One of the biggest brakes on demand is still claim uncertainty.
Many companies are interested, but CFOs need more than interest. They need answers to three basic questions: Why should we do this? Who else is doing it? Where does it say we should do it? The fact that the EU Green Claims directive, which was supposed to provide answers to this question, has been parked is problematic, but indication was given that some EU guidance for buyers might come within the next two years, hopefully sooner than later.
5. The EU Buyers’ Club is promising, but still opaque
The EU Buyers’ Club, which was presented as a “loose confederation” of European corporate buyers, could become an important demand signal.
In principle, it could help aggregate demand, use public money more strategically and support early offtake agreements. But the process has so far felt opaque. A lot appears to have happened behind closed doors, and it is not yet clear which companies are involved and how projects will be selected.
This matters because there is a risk that early money flows first to projects that are already visible, already backed, or already close to the existing funding ecosystem (a link with having received EU innovation funding was implicitly made). That may help move the market, but it also raises a question: how do other high-quality projects get seen?
Accend raised this point directly at the event. The answer from the panel was that more transparency is coming: a buyer portal and clearer information on how companies and projects can participate. There was also mention of five concrete offtake agreements by the end of the year.
For suppliers, the Buyers’ Club should therefore be seen less as an immediate open procurement route, and more as a corporate demand signal. It may not create broad access to demand straight away, especially if early activity remains focused on BioCCS or projects already close to EU innovation funding. But it can help build a looser federation of buyers, give companies confidence that others are moving too, and make CDR easier to discuss internally.
That is partly where Accend’s role sits: staying close to policy and buyer conversations, tracking where demand is moving, and helping suppliers position before the market becomes obvious.