CBAM Carbon Sourcing

How it works

The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism turns the carbon embedded in imported steel, cement, aluminium and electricity into a real cost. This tool shows that cost, and where it is lower, before you sign a supply contract.

It leans on one open dataset whose numbers already line up with the regulation, plus a dated snapshot of the EU's own figures. No emissions modelling of our own.

🛰️ Per-plant carbon

Climate TRACE facility emissions, refreshed yearly. Each plant carries an emissionsFactor and its total annual CO2e.

📄 The EU's own figures

CBAM default values (what you file without verified data) from Annexes I and III of the definitive-regime regulation, plus the EU ETS carbon price and the phase-in factor, bundled as a dated snapshot.

1The units already match

The reason this works with no derivation: Climate TRACE reports each facility's factor in the exact unit CBAM cares about.

emissionsFactor = 1.9  "t of CO2e_100yr per t of steel"
                    = embedded-emissions intensity, CBAM's unit

So a plant's dot on the map is its CBAM intensity. Green is a clean plant, red is a carbon-heavy one, and the dot's size is its total yearly emissions, so you see both how dirty per tonne and how big.

2Three numbers, side by side

Click a plant and you compare three intensities. Example, Turkish steel:

This plant (EAF)
0.49
Country average
0.68
EU default (no data)
2.54

The country average is not a plain mean, it is activity-weighted: each plant's factor is weighted by how much it actually produces, so a country that is mostly clean plants reads clean.

country_average = sum(factor_i * activity_i) / sum(activity_i)

The EU default is deliberately conservative, the punitive figure you file when you cannot prove better. Beating it is the whole point of sourcing on carbon. Defaults are per origin and per product, and the published figure carries a mark-up on top that rises each year, 10% in 2026 and 30% from 2028. Turkish steel is 2.310 t/t in the annex, so 2.541 t/t is what an importer actually files this year.

3From intensity to euros

Intensity becomes a bill through the CBAM cost formula:

embedded  = intensity * shipment_tonnes
cbam_cost = embedded * (ets_price - origin_price) * phase_in_factor

For a 1000 t Turkish steel shipment, filing the EU default versus buying from the electric-arc plant on the map:

€4,764
EU default, 2.541 t/t
€914
EAF plant, 0.49 t/t

A €3,850 saving on one shipment, purely from where you source. The same shipment from a blast-furnace plant at 1.9 t/t saves only €1,202, so the process route is most of the money. The Compare origins button runs this across major producing countries at once.

4Why the process route matters

The single biggest driver of a plant's carbon is how it makes the good. Climate TRACE tags each plant's route (assetType), and we translate it into the decarbonisation lever a buyer or supply-chain team cares about:

5What this is, and isn't

← Try it on real plants