Accounting for industrial CDR: what’s needed for companies to invest in integration

Industrial companies could generate millions of tonnes of carbon removal as part of their operations. It is technically straightforward to implement and operate across a wide range of sectors. It builds on tested strategies: using waste as a resource for CDR, expanding existing practices to optimise carbon sequestration, or capturing and storing biogenic CO2 emissions. And it shifts removals from being a cost into a potential source of value. What’s blocking industrial CDR integration is the lack of answers to a few key questions: if we change our industrial system to produce removals, how does that affect the product I sell, what my customer can recognise, and what I can monetise or claim? The problem is that removals do not show up coherently in carbon accounting standards and therefore companies can’t make a business case. In this session, we bring together industrial executives, carbon accounting experts and those involved in driving global industrial decarbonisation to explore how to get industrial removals integrated into the carbon accounting standards that are currently under revision. We will explore the following questions: ● How can companies and their customers best realise value from integrating removals? ● Can existing mechanisms such as environmental attribute certificates (EACs), environmental product declarations (EPDs) and chain of custody approaches be adapted to removals? ● What role should carbon credits play in the industrial integration of CDR? ● Is product-level or corporate accounting the main driver for integration - and what is the relationship between them? ● How does the new multi-statement framework being used by ISO/GHGP support industrial CDR? ● What guardrails are needed to avoid double counting and greenwashing? ● Who should be responsible for monitoring removals to ensure they are effective? Format