Carbon Dioxide Removal Series: BECCS- Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage | Market Compass | 2026
- May 29
- 3 min read
Current Landscape
The BECCS market has scaled substantially over the last few years. Operational BECCS capacity globally is approximately 2.975 million tCO2e per year, primarily concentrated in the U.S. ethanol facilities and a small set of European power and waste-to-energy plants. Planned capacity is roughly 70 million tCO2e per year by 2035 across more than 100 announced projects, with biofuels expected to remain the largest contributor, followed by power and heat, and waste-to-energy applications.
Investments in BECCS
Capital deployment has accelerated in parallel. Cumulative investment across BECCS developers has crossed USD 2.5 billion, with 2025 alone accounting for roughly USD 2 billion - the largest annual figure to date. The capital stack is heavily weighted toward grants, which represent approximately 90% of cumulative funding, with debt at roughly 7% and equity at roughly 3%. The single largest commitment is the Swedish Energy Agency’s USD 1.8 billion (~SEK 20 billion) reverse-auction grant to Stockholm Exergi, which will fund Europe’s largest BECCS facility once operational. Other public catalysts include the U.S. Department of Energy’s grant to ADM’s Illinois Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage project, Denmark’s NECCS Fund, the EU Just Transition Fund’s to INEOS Greenport Scandinavia, and the UK Government’s emerging GGR Business Model and HyNet Track-1 Expansion package.
Market Demand
Offtake activity has scaled even faster than capacity. Cumulative contracted volume has now passed 36 million tCO2e, growing from approximately 2 million tonnes in 2022 to 25 million tonnes in 2025. The buyer side is concentrated: Microsoft accounts for approximately 30 million tCO2e of contracted volume across multiple suppliers,
making it the single largest BECCS demand counterparty in the market today. Frontier, Respira, JPMorgan Chase, and Equinor round out the top-tier buyer list. On the supply side, AtmosClear, Stockholm Exergi, CO280, Orsted, and Drax dominate cumulative contracted volumes.
Verified credit issuance and retirement remain modest by comparison. To date, approximately 596,000 BECCS credits have been issued across registries, and approximately 334,000 have been retired. This concentration reflects the fact that most BECCS supply remains pre-issuance and contracted forward via offtake rather than traded.
This year’s Compass profiles participating developers in detail: The Carbon Removers (Scotland), which operates a modular biogenic CO2 capture model targeting anaerobic digestion plants, with TCR Scotland operational at 3,000 tCO2/yr (gross) and TCR Scandinavia under construction at 50,000 tCO2/yr (gross), storing CO2 via Project Greensand in the Nini West reservoir offshore Denmark.
cCarbon Viewpoint
BECCS is the most commercially mature engineered CDR pathway, and over the next three to five years, it will remain the workhorse of large-volume, durable carbon removal supply. The structural reason is that in BECCS, most project revenue comes from the energy or fuel business, with carbon removal as an additional layer. At an effective carbon cost, projects can generate respectable returns and attract private capital, creating a virtuous cycle that other engineered pathways cannot yet replicate.
In the near to mid-term, cCarbon sees the strongest commercial potential in two segments: (i) U.S. corn-ethanol producers retrofitting carbon capture to existing fermentation streams, where biogenic CO2 is already approximately 99% pure and capture costs are at the low end of the BECCS curve; and (ii) European waste-to-energy and biomass power plants integrated into emerging CO2 transport-and-storage clusters such as the UK’s HyNet and East Coast clusters, Norway’s Northern Lights, and Denmark’s Project Greensand. Both segments benefit from policy tailwinds: U.S. Section 45Q credits at USD 85 per tonne for secure geological storage, and the UK’s GGR Business Model Contracts for Difference, which provide a strike-price topping mechanism for verified greenhouse gas removals.
The most decisive policy development of the past 12 months is the EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework, which entered into force on 26 December 2024. The CRCF establishes a Union-level voluntary certification scheme covering permanent removals (including BECCS), carbon farming and soil emission reductions, with the first technical certification methodologies expected to be adopted via delegated acts during 2026. CRCF certification is the most credible near-term route to integration with the EU Emissions Trading System and to higher-quality buyer demand from EU-based corporates.
Three risks warrant explicit attention: (1) feedstock sustainability and scale - particularly for power-and-heat BECCS that depends on imported wood pellets; (2) CO2 transport-and-storage infrastructure timing - capture is rarely the bottleneck, but cluster permitting and pipeline build-out is; and (3) demand concentration - with Microsoft accounting for the bulk of contracted volume, sector resilience depends on diversifying buyer base across compliance frameworks, hard-to-abate sectors, and other voluntary buyers.
