Dive Brief:
- Climate solutions company Carbon Direct published guidance Tuesday to help buyers purchasing low-carbon fuels on the voluntary market.
- The “Criteria for High-Quality Low Carbon Fuels” is organized around six core principles. Those include preventing social and environmental harms, carbon accounting, minimizing leakages, feedstock sourcing and proving additionality — which means a project's emissions reductions or removals wouldn't have occurred without the revenue generated from selling carbon credits.
- There is no single framework that can help buyers navigate the multiple existing certifications and assist in traversing an increasingly complex low-carbon fuel market, Carbon Direct said in a release. The new criteria, according to the carbon management firm, helps to “fill that gap.”
Dive Insight:
Carbon Direct said its criteria is designed to be a “living resource” and will be updated annually, with future editions to be more advanced as science and market conditions improve. The firm said forthcoming editions of the criteria will cover topics like synthetic fuel pathways, renewable natural gas and applications related to specific sectors.
“The voluntary low carbon fuels market is complex, crowded, and moving fast. The criteria give buyers something no single existing certification provides: a unified, easily accessible, comprehensive set of quality principles that can be used to assess the sustainability of their procurement," Carbon Direct’s Senior Hybrid Decarbonization Engineer Rohan Raman said in the June 16 release.
Carbon Direct said the low-carbon fuel criteria builds directly on the five editions of the “High Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal Criteria” it developed with Microsoft, the latest of which was released last year. Carbon Direct said the criteria also build on standards it has released on sustainable forest biomass sourcing and sustainable agricultural biomass sourcing for carbon dioxide removal.
The criteria developed with Microsoft was released with the goal of rapidly scaling decarbonization solutions through CDR procurement.
The companies said in July 2025 that despite the availability of several carbon dioxide removal initiatives on the market, many projects suffer from quality gaps that range from underdeveloped monitoring, reporting and verification systems to lack of a common framework. The latest criteria, however, sought to bridge that gap by offering standards and guidance across nine distinct pathways, including natured-based solutions, such as afforestation and soil carbon sequestration, direct air capture and marine carbon removal.
