Carbon management firm Carbon Direct has released its Criteria for High-Quality Low Carbon Fuels, establishing a globally applicable framework for voluntary low-carbon fuel (LCF) procurement.
The rapid expansion of the voluntary LCF market has led to a proliferation of regional standards and competing quality claims, leaving corporate buyers without a holistic method to assess their purchases. While existing industry certifications offer ongoing value, no single framework currently helps buyers navigate all of them. The newly launched criteria fill this governance gap by consolidating six core principles into a unified reference tool.
The framework organises procurement due diligence around six structural benchmarks:
- Mitigation of social harms: Upholding Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) for Indigenous communities, complying with international labour standards, and ensuring regional living wages.
- Environmental harm prevention: Conducting screening-level risk assessments and establishing remediation plans with strict thresholds.
- Conservative carbon accounting: Disclosing both attributional and consequential impacts whilst establishing a credible fossil fuel baseline.
- Demonstration of additionality: Proving via financial metrics, such as the Internal Rate of Return (IRR), that voluntary market capital is directly enabling emission reductions that would not occur otherwise.
- Transparent feedstock sourcing: Ensuring end-to-end chain-of-custody documentation traceable to the point of generation, including field-level records for agricultural feedstocks.
- Leakage accounting: Assessing both domestic and international market leakage, specifically monitoring feedstock displacement and indirect land-use change.
The unified standard is designed to help early market adopters steer capital toward projects that deliver verifiable climate impacts, establishing long-term credibility for alternative transport and industrial fuels.
Rohan Raman, Senior Hybrid Decarbonisation Engineer at Carbon Direct, commented, “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.”
