Over the last few days, I’ve been sitting in conversations around the EU Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) framework: discussions spanning methodologies, demand, finance, infrastructure, standards, procurement, and policy design.
What struck me most was the broader shift in the conversation itself.
A few years ago, most carbon removal discussions centered almost entirely around pathways and technical feasibility. Increasingly, the conversation feels different. The methodologies have now been published for Carbon Removals (i.e., DACCS, BioCCS, and Biochar). There are draft Carbon Farming methodologies for agriculture and agroforestry on mineral soils, peatland rewetting and restoration, afforestation.
The central question has evolved from ‘can we remove carbon?’ to ‘how do we build the institutions, incentives, and systems required to do it at scale?’
Below are a few themes that kept surfacing across the conversations.
1. The bottleneck is shifting from intervention development (R&D) to coordination
One of the clearest narratives across conversations was that many emerging challenges are no longer purely technical; they are coordination problems.
Bankers talked about delivery and revenue risk as well as insurance and liability-based derisking, buyers talked about long-term procurement certainty and quality assurance, and implementers talked about demand, infrastructure, and operational bottlenecks.
Coordination at this scale and across the ecosystem requires that we:
Harmonize methodologies and MRV
Enable interoperability across registries and accounting systems
Create long-term, bankable contracting structures
Understand how to allocate risk and liability, especially around insuring carbon removal
Coordinate and build out permitting and storage infrastructure
Design effective procurement programs, including compliance markets.
Individually, none of these are small problems. Together, they are quite challenging to solve in parallel. They determine whether technically viable interventions can actually become financeable, deployable, and durable at scale.
That doesn’t mean that developing interventions no longer matters. It clearly does. However, the field increasingly feels like it’s entering a phase where institutional alignment matters just as much (if not more than) technical innovation.
The EU seems to be trying to solve several of these coordination problems simultaneously. Current efforts increasingly connect R&D support (Horizon Europe, among member-state incentives), first-of-a-kind deployment funding (Innovation Fund), commercialization support (European Innovation Council), evolving decarbonization policy (including the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism [CBAM] and Emissions Trading Scheme [ETS]), and emerging voluntary standards for carbon management credits through the EU CRCF framework.
This makes carbon removal look less like a collection of isolated interventions and more like an interconnected system that requires finance, infrastructure, governance, and public institutions to evolve simultaneously.
2. Demand certainty was a common refrain (and a solvable problem)
The EU launched its Buyers Club: a voluntary procurement mechanism intended to help coordinate demand for carbon removal under the CRCF framework. Across multiple sessions, variations of the same idea kept resurfacing: large-scale deployment depends on durable, bankable demand.
This matters because carbon removal projects often face a chicken-and-egg problem. Buyers want lower-cost, lower-risk projects that have already reached commercial maturity or taken final investment decisions (FID). But projects need long-term revenue certainty to secure financing and reach that scale in the first place.
Without predictable demand, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to finance first-of-a-kind or infrastructure-scale projects. Long-term offtake agreements, coordinated procurement programs, advance purchase commitments, and harmonized contracting structures help bridge that gap by reducing uncertainty around future revenue streams.
Several discussions also pointed toward a broader reality: the field needs demand beyond purely voluntary buyers. Voluntary markets can help early deployment, but reaching climate-relevant scale in a market-based system requires compliance mechanisms, public procurement, or other forms of durable policy-backed demand. Discussions around eventual integration pathways into the EU ETS reflected this tension directly.
But, this feels solvable. Unlike many technical bottlenecks, demand certainty is fundamentally an institutional design problem. Governments, coalitions, procurement bodies, and buyers can choose to create long-term market visibility if they decide carbon removal is a public priority worth supporting.
3. Carbon farming continues to expose the tension between environmental value, social value, and market value
One of the key undercurrents across the carbon farming sessions was that many participants were talking about what society is actually paying for.
Several speakers pointed out that carbon farming and land-based removal projects often deliver multiple forms of value simultaneously: carbon sequestration, water retention, biodiversity, soil health, climate resilience, food system resilience, and rural economic stability. But current market structures frequently compensate only a narrow slice of that value, and often at prices disconnected from the actual long-term societal benefit.
This tension surfaced repeatedly around peatlands, regenerative agriculture, and landscape restoration. Many projects require long-term land-use changes, upfront investment, and decades of stewardship, yet voluntary carbon markets alone often cannot generate sufficient or stable returns to support those transitions.
That’s part of why so many conversations circled back to blended public-private models, floor pricing mechanisms, demand aggregation, and public procurement. There was an underlying recognition that if carbon removal delivers broad public value, then relying only on narrow voluntary market pricing will systematically undervalue the outcomes society actually cares about.
This conversation was a shift toward how we finance landscape-scale resilience and stewardship in ways that are durable, fair, and economically viable. In many ways, that feels like the deeper challenge underneath carbon farming: translating environmental and social value into systems capable of sustaining real-world land transitions over decades.
Open Questions
At the same time, some unresolved questions sat underneath many of the conversations. Most were fundamentally about credibility, governance, liability, and how the CRCF ecosystem evolves over time.
A few specific questions surfaced:
Sustainable biomass sourcing and land-use emissions, especially as they relate to biochar pathways and long-term feedstock availability.
The relationship between CRCF voluntary credits and eventual integration into compliance systems like the EU ETS.
How liability, reversal risk, and long-term stewardship responsibilities will ultimately be allocated across developers, buyers, insurers, and public institutions.
Whether registries, methodologies, and accounting systems will achieve sufficient interoperability across jurisdictions and emerging corporate standards frameworks (e.g., GHG Protocol and SBTi), and how those systems evolve as scientific understanding and policy mature over time.
What the use cases for CRCF credits ultimately are, including how removals interact with Scope 3 accounting, value-chain interventions, voluntary carbon markets, contribution claims, and eventual compliance systems.
An (Unsolicited) Hot Take
It wouldn’t be a true recap without a hot take (and perhaps a bit too much idealism)!
The EU policy momentum is genuinely impressive. But, underneath it sits a deeper tension: carbon removal is a public good being scaled largely through private capital and private incentives.
The broader philosophy seems to be that coordinated policy, standards, procurement, and early deployment support can help catalyze a self-sustaining carbon removal ecosystem. And, that coordination matters a lot.
To be clear, building systems like this across multiple member states and political contexts is enormously difficult. Fiscal constraints, industrial competitiveness concerns, and differing national priorities all shape what’s politically possible.
But, there’s still a structural challenge around who absorbs risk and who captures long-term value.
Early-stage carbon removal is expensive, uncertain, infrastructure-heavy, and politically exposed. Public institutions are often the ones absorbing a significant share of that early risk through grants, procurement programs, subsidies, guarantees, and enabling infrastructure. Yet if projects mature successfully, much of the long-term financial upside may ultimately accrue to private actors.
That tension matters because financing structure shapes long-term societal cost. Higher-return private capital can accelerate deployment, but it also raises overall system costs and can concentrate long-term ownership and returns. (See my previous post on cost of capital as a key lever in carbon removal).
So one question I kept coming back to was: what would it look like to treat parts of carbon removal infrastructure more like public infrastructure?
Could governments play a larger role in ownership, financing, procurement, or long-term stewardship? Could public investment structures recycle value back into communities, public programs, or future deployment rather than concentrating returns privately?
One possibility that was discussed this week is governments play a larger coordinating role rather than simply subsidizing private deployment directly. For example, public procurement structures could create floor prices or guaranteed demand for verified removals, while private consortia compete to deliver the greatest climate impact per public dollar deployed.
In that kind of model, public capital helps absorb early risk and accelerate deployment, implementers receive more stable compensation, and private actors still compete on execution, efficiency, and innovation. Ideally, that lowers overall system costs while preventing all long-term value from concentrating among a small number of infrastructure owners.
I don’t think there’s a simple answer here. But the structure of these systems matters because financing architecture ultimately shapes who benefits, who bears risk, and how expensive carbon removal becomes for society over time.