By Alina Toporas, Communications Manager, Negative Emissions Platform
An offtake agreement can secure a buyer’s commitment without satisfying a lender. Insurance can cover a risk without resolving the concerns holding up a transaction. And a project can be ready to advance while the infrastructure it needs remains years away.
These were among the challenges explored at Carbon Unbound Europe in London, where the Negative Emissions Platform (NEP) participated as a buyer workshop partner and one of the event’s main partners. Across two campfire sessions moderated by NEP Secretary General Chris Sherwood, participants discussed how stronger collaboration could help the sector move forward.
What connected these conversations was the difficulty of making progress when decisions depend on organisations with different priorities and requirements. Understanding those differences early can prevent months of work from ending in a deal that cannot proceed.
A double thank you goes to the organisers for making space for these exchanges and to the participants who spoke openly about the difficulties behind the deals.
Aligning the decisions behind a project
Consider the position of a developer negotiating an offtake. The buyer may want flexibility over delivery dates or volumes, while the lender needs confidence that revenues will arrive in time to cover repayments. Unless those requirements are discussed together, the developer risks agreeing to terms that secure a purchase but cannot support financing.
The campfire discussions highlighted precisely this problem: a mismatch between the duration of an offtake and the repayment period required by a bank, even where the overall contract value appeared sufficient.
Bringing procurement and credit expertise into the conversation earlier would allow payment schedules, delivery obligations and remedies to be considered together. It would also help everyone understand which conditions are essential and where there is room to adapt.
Sometimes that means being willing to “kill your darlings” and letting go of a preferred contractual arrangement because it prevents the wider deal from working. That is easier when each party understands the constraint the other is trying to address.
The same principle applies to insurance. Although products have developed, participants described gaps in coverage, understanding and uptake. A policy may address one concern while leaving another unresolved. Developers, insurers, buyers and lenders therefore need to establish what is covered, what remains uninsured and who will manage the remaining risks.
Beyond the transaction itself, projects also depend on shared infrastructure. A permanent removal project and an industrial facility capturing process emissions may need the same CO₂ collection, transport and storage services. By coordinating volumes and connection schedules with infrastructure operators and public authorities, they can help make those services viable. It goes without saying that their accounting must still distinguish atmospheric or biogenic carbon removal from the capture of fossil process emissions.
Policy decisions shape these arrangements too. The Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation establishes a voluntary certification framework for permanent removals, carbon farming and carbon storage in products. Its methodologies determine how projects demonstrate their climate benefit. Meanwhile, discussions on permanent removals in the EU Emissions Trading System address the demand and revenues that could support deployment.
For developers, buyers and lenders, these are connected questions. A clear certification route supports confidence in what is being purchased, while predictable demand helps make investment possible. Policymakers need feedback from all sides to understand whether those elements will work together in practice.
Building buyer readiness together
Even when the policy and financing conditions improve, a company still needs to be ready to buy. This brought another tension into the campfire discussions: suppliers want more access to buyers, while buyers can feel overwhelmed by the number of CDR pathways presented to them.
Part of the difficulty lies within the purchasing organisation. A sustainability team may be interested, but finance still needs a budget and a business case. Procurement needs a process for comparing offers, and legal teams need clarity on delivery obligations, remedies and claims.
Before suppliers can engage meaningfully, those colleagues need enough agreement on the purpose and conditions of a purchase. Otherwise, unresolved internal questions can emerge late in negotiations, leaving both sides frustrated.
Buyers and suppliers can help each other work through this. Buyers can explain which information supports approval and which uncertainties prevent a decision. Developers can show how purchasing conditions affect costs, financing and delivery. Together, they can distinguish a project constraint from an information gap or an internal decision still to be made.
This cross-fertilisation of knowledge also has value beyond individual purchases. It can reveal where certification information needs to be clearer, which contractual requirements are difficult to meet and how policy could better support procurement.
Communicating with shared purpose
The need for better understanding extends beyond the organisations already buying and supplying removals. Participants in the campfire sessions also pointed to gaps across politics, the media and adjacent industries, all representing audiences whose decisions will influence the sector’s development.
Reaching them requires cooperation between people who understand the technology, those delivering projects and those who can explain why it is relevant. Attention is valuable real estate, so a policymaker, editor or prospective buyer needs a clear reason to give carbon removal space on an already crowded agenda.
Hyping up every CDR method in every single engagement makes that harder. Different approaches have different requirements, advantages and constraints. Developers, researchers, buyers and communicators can help audiences understand those differences without turning every comparison into a contest for superiority.
The same restraint should apply to how the sector describes its progress. Stakesflation, i.e. presenting every announcement as a defining moment and every setback as an existential threat, makes it difficult to judge what deserves attention. If the implied message is always “EVERYBODY PANIC”, there is little room left for a useful discussion of what should happen next.
At the same time, there is a risk of a Pavlovian feedback loop between negative coverage and corporate reluctance to speak publicly. Criticism can encourage silence, leaving fewer concrete examples available to inform the debate.
Breaking that pattern takes shared effort. Operational teams can provide evidence, independent experts can scrutinise it, and communicators can make it accessible. Together, they can give specific answers to questions about energy use, permanence, costs and delays, including where uncertainty remains.
Making local partnerships part of project development
Conversations also need to reflect the experience of people delivering projects locally. The Global South discussions reflected on the Carbon Unbound stage were particularly useful in bringing local developers, workers and communities into focus.
Speakers described the difficulty of securing early capital and the role of patient investment, while emphasising the expertise already available locally. Their contributions also showed the limits of assessing a project from a distance.
Local partners may identify conditions that a financial model misses: seasonal feedstock availability, competing uses of resources, land access or practical demands on workers. Involving them in project design gives developers and investors a better basis for decisions.
Community engagement adds another source of knowledge. When people can question proposals, understand expected benefits and raise concerns, projects have a better chance of identifying difficulties early and agreeing on how to address them.
For that cooperation to last, expectations need to be clear. Farmers supplying biomass or applying biochar should understand their responsibilities, training arrangements and payment terms. Promised community benefits need to be tracked, with realistic explanations of employment opportunities and other expected outcomes.
Site visits and open explanations of operations can support this understanding, particularly where a technology is unfamiliar. Documented responsibilities, transparent dealings with public authorities and accessible channels for concerns then provide a basis for resolving problems.
Giving collaboration continuity through trade associations
Across these discussions, collaboration meant different things: aligning a contract with financing requirements, bringing colleagues into a purchasing decision, sharing evidence or involving communities in project design. Each requires sustained work after the initial introduction.
Trade associations can give that work continuity. They can identify difficulties recurring across organisations and turn them into shared priorities for policy and market development.
NEP Secretary General Chris Sherwood’s contribution to the buyers’ workshop highlighted several benefits of participation: policy intelligence, peer exchange, collective advocacy and opportunities to raise an organisation’s profile. Those benefits grow when membership brings together the expertise needed to understand a problem fully.
| Participant | What they can help resolve through collective work |
|---|---|
| CDR suppliers | Whether certification, procurement and policy rules reflect project costs, timelines and delivery requirements |
| Buyers | Whether purchasing mechanisms and claims guidance support credible procurement and internal approval |
| Insurers | Which risks need better evidence, clearer responsibilities or different contractual treatment |
| Registries | Where certification and tracking requirements create uncertainty or duplication, while preserving independent assurance |
| Marketplaces | How information and transaction processes help participants compare opportunities and complete purchases |
| Investors and lenders | Whether policy frameworks and contracts support predictable revenues and financeable projects |
Buyer participation is particularly valuable because procurement experience can expose problems that are difficult to see from outside a purchasing organisation. Bringing that knowledge into an association can improve policy proposals and help suppliers understand how demand develops.
Of course, it doesn’t come as a surprise that members will not always agree. Suppliers, buyers and investors may favour different approaches, so collective advocacy involves examining those differences and developing positions that account for delivery, procurement, verification and financing requirements. It also allows smaller organisations to contribute to discussions they would struggle to follow consistently on their own.
Cooperation between associations extends that exchange across policy levels. National bodies bring knowledge of domestic permitting and investment conditions, European associations work on common market frameworks such as the ETS and international cooperation connects those experiences with wider climate discussions.
For suppliers, buyers, insurers, registries, marketplaces and investors, joining a trade association such as NEP offers a way to help shape the conditions their organisations depend on.
Ultimately, the opportunity identified at Carbon Unbound is to make collaboration part of everyday decisions: involving lenders before a contract is finalised, colleagues before a purchase is approved, communities while a project is being designed and market participants while policy is taking shape. Doing this consistently takes time and a willingness to adapt. It is also how the sector can turn separate efforts into projects that move forward together.
