Buyers tool

The targets are set. The supply is not.

486 companies have a 2040 net zero target and 1,807 have 2050, all of them needing removals in the same years. Committed European capacity is about 1.4 Mt a year, a new facility takes four to seven years to build, and from 2031 the EU buys centrally at the scale of the whole market. Whether and when that binds you depends on what you report under, which is what this works out.

2,293 companies with a validated net zero target for 2040 or 2050, all buying into the same years

1.4 Mt a year is all the European removal capacity that has reached a final investment decision

4–7 years to engineer, permit and finance a new facility, so 2035 supply is being decided now

The question is not whether removals get cheaper. It is whether the tonnes exist when your target year arrives, and whether you are in the queue by then. From 2031 the EU enters as a central buyer at a scale comparable to the entire European market.

Target-year counts from the SBTi target dashboard, 486 at 2040 plus 1,807 at 2050. That is the validated minority; roughly 8,000 EU companies stay in CSRD scope and most hold targets outside SBTi, so the real figure is higher and nobody measures it. Capacity from company disclosures at final investment decision; the EU purchase programme from COM(2026) 616 Art. 9c. Sources and the arithmetic in the detailed analysis below.

Does it count for you?

Towards an SBTi target: Yes, and only removals. They neutralise residual emissions at net zero under C46, and from 2035 cover a rising share of ongoing emissions under C45. Long-lived gases need long-lived removals, so afforestation and soil carbon do not substitute there. CRCF units stay eligible.
In your CSRD report: Separately, under ESRS E1-7. Gross Scope 1 to 3 stays unadjusted, so buying does not lower your reported emissions. It is disclosure, not netting.
Under the EU ETS: It does not oblige you to buy. The ETS covers installations, not companies in general, and under Art. 14(1a) even a covered operator can only count removals it captures and stores itself, not credits it buys. What the ETS proposal does create is one very large buyer: from 2031 the Commission auctions 250 million allowances and spends the revenue on CRCF-certified BioCCS and DACCS. You compete with it for the same European tonnes.
In a public claim: Unsettled. The Commission is drafting guidance on what buyers may say with CRCF units, expected around the end of 2026. Until it exists, claims are a judgement call for your own counsel.

Where you stand

No figures to hand? Start from a profile. The four differ only in emissions size, target year and framework, so replace the numbers with your own.

Scope 1 and 2 emissions tCO₂e a year Scope 3 emissions tCO₂e a year Net zero target year Accounting framework Residual emissions in the target year share of today’s 9%

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Advanced mode

Target detail

Share of long-lived GHGs CO₂, N₂O, SF₆ 80% Your largest customer’s target year optional

Size, decides whether the 2035 rule applies to you

Size

Turnover €m Employees FTE

Incorporated in a high-income country World Bank classification

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If you also have fuels, buildings or a fleet

Mandatory side

Fuels, buildings and fleet t/yr ETS2 price €/t

Installation in EU ETS 1 usually no

If you buy steel, cement, aluminium or fertiliser

Purchased inputs

Steel t/yr Aluminium t/yr

Cement t/yr Fertiliser t/yr

of which imported from third countries 30% Pass-through rate, EU suppliers contested 100%

Contract now or wait: the parameters

Forward vs spot

Delivery year 2041 Forward price vs today’s spot discount is negative 0%

Discount rate %/yr Delivery failure % risk

Payment profile offtakes rarely pay in full today Insure the delivery risk Price scenario, long-lived in effect: does supply scale?

All three falling-price sources predate the EU purchase programme. BCG's forecast dates from around September 2023 and McKinsey's cost work from around September 2025; the Commission proposed buying 250 million allowances' worth of removals on 17 July 2026. None of them can have priced in the single largest announced buyer. That does not prove prices will rise, but it is a known gap in the inputs. This choice is also a bet on whether supply gets financed. The falling paths assume capacity scales with demand, which only happens if enough buyers sign offtakes. Three modelled sources agree that durable removal prices fall: BCG implies $200→$155/t for 2030→2040, McKinsey sees technology costs down 30–60% by 2035, the Commission floor falls 2.9%/yr. Against that stands one measurement: transacted prices rose 10–11% in 2026. McKinsey expects nature-based prices to rise on land scarcity, so the two baskets diverge.

Price assumptions

Removal price

Long-lived mix BioCCS ↔ DACCS 70% Market mark-up on the cost floor

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Short-lived price €/t · no official source

Findings

What follows from your inputs

Derived from the inputs above and updated with them. None of it is a recommendation to buy.

Forward versus spot

Contract now or wait?

Locking a price today beats buying later only if prices rise faster than the cost of capital and the risk of non-delivery combined. The figure below is that threshold. It is not a forecast.

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Method. Per tonne required in the delivery year. Spot pays the future price once, discounted; the forward pays today, and on non-delivery the tonne still has to be bought spot. Break-even solves F = (1−p) · S₀(1+g)ⁿ / (1+r)ⁿ for g. Escalation scenarios are derived: BCG from its volume and market-value ranges, McKinsey from its stated 30 to 60% cost reduction by 2035, the Commission from Table 4. All three describe durable removals; McKinsey expects nature-based to move the other way. Delivery insurance premiums of 3 to 8% of credit price are reported by Sylvera, a secondary source. Today’s price is the Commission cost floor times the selected mark-up; the cost table starts in 2030 and is held flat before.

The case for contracting early is not a price argument. A BioCCS or DACCS facility takes years to engineer, permit and finance. Committed European capacity is about 1.4 Mt a year against the 15 to 25 Mt a year the Commission expects for 2035, and central EU buying does not start before 2031. Without voluntary offtakes in between, the supply does not exist at any price. The threshold above answers whether waiting is cheaper, not whether there will be anything left to wait for.

The answer differs by method. Three modelled sources put durable removal prices on a falling path. McKinsey expects nature-based prices to rise on land scarcity. A single verdict for the whole basket is therefore not supportable; the price ranges per method are on the method pages.

Volumes

Required volume by year

Coverage rises from 1% in 2035 to 100% in the target year while emissions fall. The requirement therefore peaks before the target year, not in it.

of which long-lived required remaining removal requirement dashed: peak year and target year

Required removal volume per year, split into long-lived required and remaining requirement

Supply

European supply under construction

Announced capacity is not capacity. Counted here are projects that have reached a final investment decision.

European BioCCS removals	Capacity	Status	Online
Ørsted, Asnæs and Avedøre (DK)	430,000 t/yr	operational	from early 2026
Stockholm Exergi, Värtan (SE)	800,000 t/yr	FID, under construction	2028, commercial 2029
Hafslund Oslo Celsio (NO)	~175,000 t/yr	FID	~2029
Committed European BioCCS removals	~1.4 Mt/yr	by 2029	—
DACCS in Europe	tens of kt/yr	negligible at this scale	—

Set that against what the path requires

The Commission expects 4 Mt a year of BioCCS and DACCS in 2030 and 15 to 25 Mt a year in 2035. Its own purchase programme is 250 million allowances over 2031 to 2040, auctioned so the revenue buys an equivalent value of removals. That is allowances, not tonnes, so the tonnage it actually funds depends on the price gap in the 2030s and is likely well below 25 Mt a year. Committed European removal capacity today is about 1.4 Mt a year, arriving 2026 to 2029.

Across all of European CCS, fossil capture included, ten projects reached FID between December 2024 and October 2025, together about 4 Mt a year of capture. Exactly one industrial facility is fully operational, Heidelberg Materials’ cement plant at Brevik, and that one captures fossil CO₂, so it produces no removals at all. The EU’s binding target is 50 Mt a year of injection capacity by 2030.

The gap is in final investment decisions, not in announcements. Reported constraints are permitting delays, slow infrastructure build-out and weak funding signals. Announcements are plentiful: 37 proposed CCS projects in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe alone.

Sources: company disclosures for the three BioCCS projects; Clean Air Task Force review of European CCS progress for FID counts and the operational facility; SWD(2026) 616 Part 3 for the Commission’s supply estimate; COM(2026) 616 Art. 9c for the purchase programme. Project-level figures are announced capacities, not verified output, and the biogenic share at Celsio is approximate.

Demand structure

When demand arrives

Of 2,723 companies with a validated net zero target and a stated target year, 96.8% sit on a round year. Neutralisation demand therefore steps up at 2030, 2035, 2040, 2045 and above all 2050 rather than ramping, and each step is permanent, because residuals have to be neutralised every year thereafter. This is the committed minority, not the population; see the caveats below.

Target year	Companies	Share	Cumulative
2030	45	1.7%	53
2035	60	2.2%	127
2040	486	17.8%	632
2045	239	8.8%	887
2050	1,807	66.4%	2,721
other years	86	3.2%	2,723

The steps are steep. 2040 adds 486 companies at once, quadrupling the cumulative count. 2050 adds 1,807 and roughly triples it again in a single year. And this is only today’s population: SBTi-validated net zero targets grew 61% during 2025 alone, so the 2050 step will be far larger by the time it arrives.

Does that mean prices must rise? Not automatically, and this is where the sources genuinely disagree. BCG’s high-demand case for 2040 is 870 Mt, which already embeds this cliff, and it still implies a lower average price than 2030 because it assumes supply scales with demand. The Commission’s own supply estimate for the EU is 15 to 25 Mt a year in 2035. The open question is therefore not demand, which is reasonably well evidenced, but whether supply can follow. No source we found settles it.

Limits of this sample

SBTi is a committed minority, not the population. These 2,723 companies went through validation. Many companies hold a net zero target without SBTi. The Net Zero Tracker counts 1,245 companies with net zero targets across the Forbes Global 2000 alone, $36.6tn of revenue, but records the target year only as a binary “2050 or earlier”, so it cannot corroborate the shape. Nobody publishes a target-year distribution for the full population.

CSRD widens the field considerably. Roughly 8,000 EU companies remain in scope after Omnibus I, down from about 50,000, plus around 1,200 non-EU companies. From financial year 2027, where climate is material, ESRS E1-1 requires disclosure of a transition plan, and a company that has none must state whether and when it will adopt one. That is real pressure to produce a plan with a residual emissions figure in it. It is not an obligation to have one, and it is not an obligation to buy anything: the CSDDD duty to adopt and implement a transition plan was deleted in Omnibus I.

The 2050 spike is partly a ceiling. SBTi requires net zero no later than 2050, so a company that would have picked 2055 cannot appear here at all. Read 66% at 2050 as “at the limit”, not as “chosen”.

The 2040 spike, by contrast, looks real. SBTi requires 2040 for the power sector, which would explain it away, but only 11% of that cohort are electric utilities. The rest are professional services, software, food and beverage, telecoms and apparel. That is choice, not rule.

Source: SBTi target dashboard export, all rows with target type “Net-zero” and a stated target year, deduplicated by company; sector split from the same file. Counts companies, not tonnes; the dashboard carries no emissions data, so a few very large emitters could shift the picture entirely.

Eligibility

What counts in which year

Drag the year. The matrix shows what counts towards which track in that year. Under SBTi there are three tracks with different rules, not two: the voluntary OER programme, the post-2035 requirement, and neutralisation in the target year.

2026 —

Select year

202620352045

Market frameworks

These decide whether a unit exists at all, whether it carries an integrity label and how it enters the inventory, independently of the accounting framework above.

Market frameworks per methodology
Methodology	EU ETSArt. 9c · proposal	EU CRCFcertifiable	ICVCM CCPintegrity label	GHG Protocol LSRfrom 1 Jan 2027

Open questions

Unresolved rules

Each switch is an open question whose outcome changes the result. All start on the position that applies today.

Where to start

European developers by method

Each method page lists the developers we have for it, the price range we could source, and three points to check before signing.

BECCS Direct air capture Biochar Carbon farming Forestry Full directory

We take no commission and sell nothing. Every entry carries at least one piece of evidence that does not come from the developer, and the date we last checked it.

Beyond removals

Other carbon costs

Separate from the removals above, and earlier. They are shown because they compete for the same budget, not because they count towards a target. Enter the matching figures under Advanced mode.

ETS2 from 2028

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applies almost everywhere

Purchased inputs

Carbon cost in purchased inputs

Two routes, one calculation. Steel bought in the EU carries the cost its supplier passes on as free allocation falls away; steel imported carries CBAM certificates from 2026. Both rise with the same factor, because the CBAM factor mirrors free allocation. From 2038 the full carbon price applies either way.

Carbon cost in your inputs, 2038

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Carbon cost in purchased inputs per year
Year	effective share	EUA	Carbon cost, inputs	vs today

EU ETS 1 Proposal

When free allocation runs out

Who this hits: the hard number path applies to CBAM goods, meaning steel, cement, aluminium, fertiliser, hydrogen and electricity, plus district heating separately and waste incineration from 2031. For the remaining ETS sectors, such as glass, ceramics, paper, lime and non-CBAM chemicals, the proposal contains no defined phase-out to zero. The great majority of companies are not in ETS 1 at all.

For CBAM goods the proposal lowers the share of free allocation step by step: 95% in 2027, 59% in 2030, 27% in 2033, 15% from 2034 to 2037 and 0% from 2038.

Compliance cost 2038

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Free allocation, purchase requirement and cost per year
Year	free allocation share	free allocation	to be purchased	Cost

The EUA price path is your input. The Commission publishes no EUA price forecast. The default for 2038 is oriented on its statement that BioCCS becomes cost competitive against the allowance price in 2036 to 2038, at BioCCS costs of €184 to €192 at that time.

Evidence

What is sourced and what is not

Quantity	Origin	Status
SBTi eligibility rules	CNZS V2.0, C41 / C45 / C46, verbatim	sourced
Coverage path 1 → 100%	CNZS-C45.1	sourced
Long-lived path 10 → 100%	CNZS-C45.4, base is the long-lived gas share	sourced
Cost floor per tonne, BioCCS and DACCS	SWD(2026) 616 Part 3, Tab. 4 (technology costs)	sourced
Market mark-up over the floor	CDR.fyi / OPIS survey, May 2026; detail tables paywalled	indicative
Supply estimate 15–25 Mt/yr in 2035	SWD(2026) 616 Part 3, citing Ramboll 2025	sourced
CBAM factor to 0% in 2038	COM(2026) 616, Art. 10a(1a)	proposal
Residual level, cross-sector	SBTi cross-sector pathway: 91% cut by 2050, so 9% residual	sourced
Residual level per company	SBTi publishes global sector totals, not company shares	not derivable
Emission intensity of inputs	indicative; binding values in Impl. Reg. (EU) 2025/2621	indicative
Short-lived removal price	no official source exists	user input
ISO 14068: no like-for-like	ECOS comparison, not verified against the standard	unverified
Mapping methodology to short/long-lived	interpretation; the standard defines by duration only	interpretation
Growth curves, nature-based	not included, not needed for this result	open

Sources

Primary sources

SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0, 11 June 2026, effective 1 February 2027
SBTi Basis for Conclusions Report, June 2026
COM(2026) 616, ETS revision, proposal of 17 July 2026
SWD(2026) 616 Part 3, impact assessment
CRCF certification methodologies, European Commission
European Climate Law, 2040 target, Council, 5 March 2026
GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, 30 January 2026, effective 1 January 2027
VCMI Claims Code of Practice v3.0, April 2025
ICVCM, CCP-approved methodologies, as of 2026
CDR.fyi / OPIS durable CDR pricing survey, May 2026
SBTi FLAG Guidance v1.2, March 2026
CBAM definitive regime, since 1 January 2026

Deliberately out of scope: sector compliance regimes such as CORSIA for international aviation, the SBTi Financial Institutions Net-Zero Standard (July 2025) for banks, insurers and investors, the other SBTi sector standards, and national rules. This calculator covers corporate net zero accounting in the real economy.

This calculator is informational and does not replace legal or professional advice. It is independent, has no affiliation with any project developer, collects no user data and computes entirely in your browser. Results are orders of magnitude under disclosed assumptions, not assurances. Rules as of early August 2026; this field moves quickly.

The targets are set. The supply is not.

Where you stand

Target detail

Size

Mandatory side

Purchased inputs

Forward vs spot

Removal price

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What follows from your inputs

Contract now or wait?

Required volume by year

European supply under construction

When demand arrives

What counts in which year

Market frameworks

Unresolved rules

European developers by method

Other carbon costs

Carbon cost in purchased inputs

When free allocation runs out

What is sourced and what is not

Primary sources

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