The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is in the midst of updating its corporate net-zero standard. This might sound like an arcane technical exercise, but what’s decided here will have major consequences for how companies shape, deliver and communicate their climate strategies for the next decade.

For many corporates, version 1.0 of the standard was a helpful reference point. It gave form and discipline to emerging climate strategies and helped boost ambition. But it also had major gaps, particularly around Scope 3 emissions, the role of carbon credits and how to deal with emissions that can’t yet be reduced.

That’s where version 2.0 comes in. The draft proposals are extensive and rightly so. Getting to net zero requires a credible, science-based framework that sets expectations for companies while also giving them the tools to succeed. But as it stands, the draft could improve in three important areas. Here’s why they matter and what needs to change.

Make room for realism when targets are missed

It’s inevitable that some companies will fall short of their near-term targets. This isn’t a smear, but rather an acknowledgement that emissions reduction is challenging and many businesses are working in uncharted waters. Decarbonizing supply chains and operations is complex, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors and setbacks will happen.

What businesses need is a pathway to stay aligned with the SBTi standard when they underperform without letting ambition slip. The draft standard allows this in limited circumstances, but only for Scope 1 emissions. That’s too narrow; Scope 2 and 3 underperformance must be addressed too, with consistent rules and safeguards.

Corrective measures shouldn’t lower the bar. Companies must explain underperformance, show how they’re addressing it and compensate transparently where needed. The use of high-quality carbon credits, whether for reductions or removals, can be part of that toolbox. Not every company needs the same route, but all should be held to the same standard of integrity.

Mandate interim removal targets

One of the most debated parts of the draft is whether to require companies to start purchasing carbon removals before 2050. In climate and business terms, this is a no-brainer. If residual emissions need to be neutralized in the net-zero year and every year after, companies should be building capacity and momentum now. It’s also essential for scaling the market for removals, which are needed to neutralize residual emissions.

What’s proposed in the draft is a halfway step: interim targets that companies can opt into, rather than being required to set. That creates uncertainty for investors and delays the demand signal needed to scale the market.

What’s needed is a clear requirement for companies across all sectors to set annual interim removal targets for Scope 1 and ideally Scope 2 emissions. These shouldn’t be cumulative, but progressive: building year by year, signalling steady investment and delivery.

Furthermore, nature-based removals must be explicitly included. Forests, grasslands and soils have been sequestering carbon for millennia and keeping global temperatures in check. Recognizing their role isn’t just a nod to tradition — it’s a matter of practical sense. They’re scalable, available now and often directly linked to companies’ sourcing landscapes. Their inclusion would make interim targets more feasible and cost-effective, especially for smaller businesses and those in emerging markets.

Take responsibility for ongoing emissions

The third area that needs more work is what to do about ongoing emissions that fall outside targets or yearly emissions while decarbonization is underway.

Here, the draft proposes that companies opt into recognition for taking “beyond value chain mitigation.” In practice, this means that if a company chooses to invest in mitigation outside its footprint, for example, in forest protection or clean energy elsewhere, it can be recognized for doing so.

But recognition alone won’t cut it. All companies should take some level of responsibility for their ongoing emissions, even if it’s modest at first. And reporting on those plans should be mandatory, not optional. SBTi could align with frameworks such as the Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity Initiative on how claims are made.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, but there is a need to make sure companies can’t hide in the gaps.

Why this matters now

For companies, the new SBTi standard will set expectations not just for target-setting, but for disclosure, procurement, claims and investor engagement. It will affect how climate leadership is perceived, rewarded and regulated.

And for the rest of us, it will shape whether the private sector helps close the emissions gap in the decisive years between now and 2030, or whether it continues to overpromise and underdeliver.

This isn’t a debate about the fine print. It’s about whether we treat net zero as a long-term badge or a real-time discipline. Whether we build the carbon removal sector with integrity and demand. Whether companies are empowered — and expected—to act beyond their direct footprint.

There’s still time to get this right. The SBTi consultation is open until June 1. If you’re a company with a net-zero target, or thinking of setting one, this is your chance to help shape a more effective, credible and inclusive standard.

[Join a vibrant community of leaders and innovators driving cutting-edge tools, business strategies, and partnerships to protect and regenerate nature at Bloom, Oct. 28-30, San Jose.]

The post The SBTi net-zero update is falling short. 3 ways to fix it appeared first on Trellis.

Purchasing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) just got a little easier, thanks to the release of an online platform that allows buyers to quickly compare price and other attributes of different fuels. 

Fuels derived from waste cooking oil and other sustainable sources are at the heart of the aviation industry’s efforts to decarbonize, but purchasing SAF is nothing like booking a flight. Buyers, working individually or through the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA), generally begin by asking SAF suppliers to submit proposals for vetting.

“Those are fairly time-consuming efforts,” said Andre de Fontaine, a managing director at the Center for Green Market Activation, one of the non-profits that runs SABA. “They take somewhere between 18 and 24 months to run.”

Members only

The alliance has moved to streamline the process with today’s launch of SAFc Connect, a platform containing information on carbon intensity, pricing, feedstock and other attributes of SAF certificates for fuels pre-vetted by SABA. The platform is open to alliance members, which include Amazon, Deloitte, Netflix among 32 other companies.

“Instead of running an RFP every year whenever they want to buy SAF certificates, they can now go into a managed database confident that the fuel has been vetted for quality criteria,” said de Fontaine. 

At least five SAF providers — Alaska Air, Future Energy Global, International Airlines Group, Targray and Valero — will be part of SAFc Connect at launch. SABA expects up to double that number to come on board in coming months.

Book and claim

The scheme operates on a book-and-claim basis, meaning that buyers can use the certificates to offset Scope 3 aviation emissions without actually flying planes that burn SAF. This approach, also being used in maritime shipping and for rail freight, allows buyers to support sellers even if they cannot directly access the low-carbon transport on offer.

Although de Fontaine would not disclose likely prices, he noted that SABA’s last RFP, while not necessarily predictive of future prices, produced certificates in the range of $300 to $500 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. An economy-class round trip from New York to London creates around 0.6 tons of CO₂, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization.

SABA has worked with corporate buyers to aggregate demand for over $400 million in SAF certificates since launching in 2021 and expects members using SAFc Connect to have immediate demand for around $30 million in certificates.

The alliance also recently released an RFP for next-generation sustainable fuels, including “e-fuels,” which can be synthesized from CO₂ and water in a reaction powered by renewable energy. The move comes as some environmental groups continue to question the sustainability of fuels made from crops, a class of SAF that is expected to play an important role in the short-term growth of the market.

This story was updated on May 28, 2025 to more accurately reflect the price of certificates in SABA’s earlier RFP.

[Connect with more than 3,500 professionals decarbonizing and future-proofing their organizations and supply chains through climate technologies at VERGE, Oct. 28-30, San Jose.]

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For much of the past two decades, the loudest voices in the debate over carbon capture and storage (CCS) were often the critics: The equipment was too expensive or too prone to breaking down. Perhaps most damning was the accusation that the technology would extend the life of fossil fuels and delay cleaner, longer-term solutions.

Now the dynamics have shifted. CCS projects are growing at record rates. The technology continues to improve, economic incentives have aligned and the growth of AI and data centers has increased demand. The critics have not been mollified, but the momentum is with the industry — suggesting that any company with hard-to-abate emissions in its supply chain should engage with the arguments.

“It’s been like a snowball rolling down a hill in terms of corporate interest and investment in the sector,” said Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, an industry group.

Global growth

CCS offers a seemingly simple decarbonization solution: Rather than replace coal power stations, steel plants and other facilities that rely on fossil fuels, why not capture and store the carbon dioxide that the infrastructure emits? In many cases, this involves pushing the gas over an absorbent material, compressing the captured CO2 and piping it to a geological reservoir for permanent storage.

The idea is simple, but during the first half of the 2010s high costs and technological setbacks led to a decline in the capacity of projects in development. Then the tide turned. A federal CCS tax credit, known as 45Q, was made more valuable in 2018 and more valuable still, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, in 2022. The number of projects operational or in development globally grew from 392 to 628 between 2023 and 2024, according to the Carbon Capture Coalition. The U.S. is the leader, with more projects than the next four countries — the U.K., Canada, Norway and China — combined.

The Louisiana Clean Energy Complex, a hydrogen production facility under construction in Ascension Parish, illustrates the trend. Air Products, the industrial giant behind the project, says that 95 percent of the 5 million tons of CO2 emitted annually by the facility will be captured and stored, which the company claims makes it the world’s largest capture and permanent sequestration project. 

Air Products did not return a request for more information, but an analysis published this month by the capture coalition puts capture and storage costs at between $100 and $200 per ton of CO2. The exact price depends on the maturity of the technology used and the concentration of the gas in the waste stream, with higher concentration streams — which includes hydrogen facilities — tending to have lower costs.

More million-ton projects

Other huge projects are coming soon. In early April, a consortium of companies announced plans for an ammonia plant, also in Ascension Parish, that will capture and store more than 2 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. (The parish is part of “Cancer Alley,” a heavily industrialized area with elevated rates of the disease.) Two weeks later, ExxonMobil revealed plans to capture 2 million tons of CO2 from a natural gas power plant near Houston, Texas. 

The bullishness of CCS investors is also evident at the 140,000 square-foot factory opened in Burnaby, British Columbia earlier this month by Svante, a manufacturer of filters that capture carbon dioxide from industrial emissions. 

The factory can produce enough filters to capture 10 million tons of CO2 annually and its opening follows a $145 million investment round for the company.  A confluence of factors is driving the industry forward, said Claude Letourneau, Svante’s CEO, including tax credits and the green premium that some manufacturers can charge for low-carbon commodities, such as hydrogen. 

Smaller companies with innovative solutions are waiting in the wings, hoping to ride the industry’s momentum. Carbon Clean, a London-based startup, has designed a capture unit that fits into a shipping container, which it says is half the size of conventional systems. 

“The biggest challenge for implementing carbon capture is the real estate,” said Aniruddha Sharma, Carbon Clean’s CEO “Nobody has any space.” Following a successful test at a fertilizer plant in Abu Dhabi, the company is now working on further tests in Saudi Arabia and Canada.

Companies that have emissions from hard-to-abate sources — fertilizer, steel, cement — in their Scope 3 inventory stand to benefit from the reductions that CCS brings. And there are other reasons for sustainability professionals to track the technology, noted Sangeet Nepal, a technology specialist at the Carbon Capture Coalition.

The rising demand for uninterrupted supplies of low-carbon electricity can be met by gas power plants with CCS attached, for example. In December, ExxonMobil announced plans to build a gas and CCS facility in Texas to supply low-carbon electricity to nearby data centers.

CCS technology is also opening up new classes of carbon credits.

Svante is targeting its technology at pulp and paper facilities, some of which are using credit revenue to fund the installation of carbon capture. One recent project was funded by a purchase by Microsoft of credits covering 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide over 12 years.

Criticisms linger

This progress has changed the narrative around CCS, but it has not altered the opinions of critics. They continue to question the calculations that underlie the claimed climate benefits of CCS, notably around the issue of where to draw boundaries when assessing the impact of the technology. 

CCS equipment requires energy, for instance. Most developers hope to use renewables, thus avoiding additional emissions. But there’s an opportunity cost in doing so because those renewables could be used to replace fossil power plants, argued Mark Jacobson, an energy systems expert at Stanford University. 

“You can’t just add things to the grid willy nilly,” said Jacobson. “There’s a queue. If you’re adding stuff and using it for carbon capture, you’re not replacing fossils on the grid.”

In one recent study, Jacobson and colleagues compared global decarbonization scenarios in which renewables were used to power either CCS or electrified versions of industrial facilities. After accounting for health costs due to air pollution from continued use of fossil fuels, along with other factors, they found that annual costs in the CCS scenario were at least nine times greater than the electrification alternative. Because CCS systems do not capture all the carbon dioxide that passes through them, atmospheric levels of the gas were also much higher.

Jacobson’s study is global in scope, but individual projects have also been criticized, including Air Products’ hydrogen facility in Louisiana. In a study published in March, researchers at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, claimed that the benefits of the project rest on faulty assumptions about the amount of carbon that will be captured, leak rates of the methane feedstock and other factors. Once the assumptions are corrected, claims the institute, the project becomes a heavy emitter.

Just 10 years ago, debate of this nature played a role in slowing the deployment of CCS. But there is a sense among industry insiders that things have changed. The financial case for the technology has been rewritten. And while the Trump administration appears to have no interest in tackling climate change, backing from oil majors and GOP members in states that house capture projects means that CCS might be one decarbonization technology it can get behind.

“We are making the case,” said Stolark, “and we feel that carbon management squarely fits within this administration’s energy dominance framework.”

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The Greenhouse Gas Protocol is considering emissions accounting rule revisions that will make the process of claiming reductions from corporate renewable energy contracts more complicated, especially for companies with smaller electricity loads or highly distributed operations, according to those with knowledge of the discussions.

The GHG Protocol is the nonprofit that manages the guidelines that 97 percent of companies use to calculate and report on greenhouse gas emissions. Many of its rules are being overhauled after a major call for feedback two years ago, including the one covering Scope 2, emissions associated with energy purchases.

Many clean energy buyers agree that an update is overdue: the Scope 2 guidance was originally created in 2015. Those familiar with proposed changes in the current revision, however, worry that making them mandatory will make it tougher for corporate buyers to justify new deals.

Two influential trade groups, the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA) and the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), sent letters to the chair of the GHG Protocol’s standards board urging it not to make the revisions too strict.

“The Clean Energy Buyers Association is deeply concerned with the current direction of the Scope 2 guidance revision process,” the organization’s CEO, Rich Powell, said in a two-page letter, made public May 23. “If the process stays this course, we fear that many corporate clean energy buyers may pull back on investments in clean energy.”

ACORE’s six-page missive, dated April 25 (shared with Trellis but not made public), sounds a similar alarm: “At a time when clean energy companies face significant global and domestic headwinds, an overly restrictive approach for GHG reporting requirements that shrinks the number of voluntary purchasers could be a breaking point for many companies in the clean energy market.” 

Why the guidance matters

The current Scope 2 rule lets companies claim emissions reductions by buying enough renewable energy certificates from solar, wind and other zero-carbon sources to match their annual electricity load in the same broad market. For example, a company could claim credits from a wind farm in Nebraska or solar installation in Texas to reduce its U.S. emissions, regardless of where their operations are located. 

This framework has inspired hundreds of corporations to sign contracts that put more than 100 gigawatts of clean electricity on the U.S. grid since 2014 — 21.7 gigawatts in 2024 alone. 

Both supporters and critics of the methodology say an update is long overdue, and welcome changes that would give corporate claims about renewable electricity purchases more integrity.

“There is a lack of rigor in the current rules,” said Lee Taylor, CEO of REsurety, a firm that facilitates transactions. “The gaps between the dirtiest grids and the clean ones is getting bigger. The carbon intensity of grids is changing. That reality has been true for some time and it’s only growing.”

What’s on the table

The proposed changes as of April 30 are definitely more rigorous. 

One revision being considered would require big energy consumers to match actual electricity loads to renewable sources on an hourly basis; those using less than 5 gigawatt-hours per year could still report on a monthly or annual basis.

Another potential modification would narrow market boundaries, requiring companies to make their renewable energy purchases on the same regional grids that serve their physical locations.

Alongside the bigger changes, a subgroup is debating metrics to recognize corporate deals that are “consequential.” That might include, for example, providing a way to account for energy storage installations or to recognize contracts that add more renewables in places where grids are heavily dependent on fossil fuels, even if the buyer doesn’t have a physical presence there. 

Minutes of meetings by the technical working group developing the Scope 2 revisions are publicly available and include more details about changes being considered.

GHG Protocol declined to comment on the record, citing the ongoing nature of the process.

What buyers would like to see

Corporate renewable buyers, speaking on background, suggested that the future rules be tiered and some elements made optional. This would give sophisticated buyers a framework for making more specific emissions reduction claims without discouraging companies with smaller loads or that are new to corporate renewable procurement from participating, they said.

“I do think the next phase of procurement needs to be more meaningful than just an annual match and putting it wherever the economics make sense,” said Joey Lange, senior managing director for global renewable energy advisory services at consulting firm Trio. “But you can’t penalize the companies that played by the rules to begin with.”

If GHG Protocol makes the suggestions for more hourly matching and narrower market boundaries mandatory, a majority of CEBA’s 400-plus members would face “serious implementation challenges,” the organization said in its letter. “These accounting changes would fundamentally change the practical context of voluntary procurement.”

A separate survey of clean electricity practitioners conducted between November and February underscores CEBA’s position: 80 percent “lacked confidence” they would be able to comply with scenarios being considered.

“There are companies that feel stuck,” said Roger Ballentine, president of consulting firm Green Strategies, which conducted the survey. Uncertainty over both the rule change and broader macroeconomic conditions is paralyzing the market, he said: “If they want to execute a big deal, are they sure that deal will be okay? It really makes it very tough on procurement people to decide what they should do right now.”

Both CEBA and ACORE urged the GHG Protocol standards board to seek more input from corporate practitioners and renewables developers as the technical working group finalizes its draft. Some of their ideas:

• Solicit more feedback from corporate practitioners.
• Address concerns of renewable energy buyers before a draft is finalized for public consultation.
• Accelerate development of metrics for “consequential” deals, so they are aligned with the broader Scope 2 changes.
• Offer more clarity immediately about how existing contracts will be recognized, so companies don’t postpone new contract negotiations.
• Make some of the stricter proposed revisions optional.  

GHG Protocol is expected to publish a draft outlining high-level changes to Scope 2 in the fourth quarter of 2025. Revisions based on that feedback will be circulated in 2026, according to the GHG Protocol website. A final draft isn’t anticipated until 2027, and it’s likely that there will be a grace period before the changes take effect.

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