An analysis of BECCS industries’ methodology for certifying industrial carbon removals

5 Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: Towards an ambitious Industrial Carbon Management for the EU (COM(2024) 62 final, 6 February 2024). [...] The ‘boundary’ of the project – the processes exclusively initiated by the anticipation of CDR credit revenue – covers the carbon capture, processing, transport and storage components of the BECCS system.17 Emissions that would have occurred anyway, in the absence of the BECCS project, are considered to be baseline emissions and are excluded from the net removals calculation.18 Emissions removals. [...] Biomass is ‘zero rated’ for these purposes because it is assumed, in line with the reporting conventions introduced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that all emissions from changes in carbon stocks from the harvest of the biomass are reported in the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector of the national greenhouse gas inventory of the country of origin (see. [...] This is of course consistent with the zero-rating approach, but it can represent a significant proportion of energy output from the plant, given the need to heat the carbon dioxide absorbent used in the capture cycle to separate the solvent from the captured carbon, and the additional energy required to compress and transport the captured carbon. [...] It is the net impact on the climate compared with the counterfactual, of no extraction for energy, that should underlie the measurement of carbon sequestered, not the crude metric the methodology suggests.