Carbon Centric shares feedback on the revised EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS)

The European Commission's proposal to revise the Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), COM(2026) 616, would allow the EU to purchase up to 250 million tonnes of permanent carbon removal between 2031 and 2040, financed by auctioning additional allowances. The proposal also includes an own-use provision: operators that capture and permanently store their own biogenic emissions could use the resulting CRCF-certified removal units to offset their own fossil emissions.

Carbon Centric has shared feedback on how the proposal can work across different ownership and business models in the industry. Carbon Centric makes carbon capture accessible to small and medium-sized plant owners, including through Carbon Capture as a Service (CCSaaS), where the company builds, owns and operates the capture plant at the customer's site.

The feedback highlights three main priorities:

• Ownership-neutral own use. Eligibility should follow where the biogenic emissions are captured and how the units are allocated by contract, not who owns the capture plant.
• Recognise CCSaaS. Third-party-owned capture under long-term service agreements should count as a qualifying decarbonisation investment under the free-allocation conditionality, including plants completed before 2031.
• Treat removals in EEA EFTA States as domestic. Norway and the other EEA EFTA States apply the EU ETS, and removals generated there should count as domestic.

The feedback also includes further recommendations and concrete proposed amendments to the legal text. The full position paper is available in the knowledge bank: Supplier-neutral and ownership-neutral: making the ETS carbon removal mechanism work for every capture plant.

The proposal is now with the European Parliament and the Council, so the details are still open. Carbon Centric is following the process closely, and is happy to share more with anyone interested.