Carbon Direct releases criteria for high-quality low carbon fuels for voluntary market buyers

NEW YORK — June 16, 2026 — Today, Carbon Direct released the Criteria for High-Quality Low Carbon Fuels — a globally applicable, consolidated criteria for high-quality low carbon fuels (LCF) procurement on the voluntary market. The Criteria serve as an expert guide for voluntary market buyers, consolidating six core principles spanning social and environmental integrity, carbon accounting, additionality, feedstock sourcing, and leakage into a single set of criteria, and helps buyers identify where additional diligence may still be needed.

Although existing certifications provide ongoing value, no single framework helps voluntary buyers navigate all of them. The Criteria fill that gap, giving buyers a clear reference to assess their options and make informed decisions and identify what their procurement actually covers.

"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," said Rohan Raman, Senior Hybrid Decarbonization Engineer, Carbon Direct. "The choices made by early voluntary buyers will shape whether the low carbon fuels market develops the credibility and rigor needed to deliver real climate impact at scale.”

The voluntary LCF market is expanding rapidly, and standards, definitions, and quality claims vary widely across regions, certification schemes, and regulatory systems, leaving voluntary buyers without a holistic way to assess what they're actually procuring. Supply chains are often opaque and the science on consequential impacts, including land use change and market displacement, continues to mature.

The Criteria are organized around six core principles that together define what high-quality LCF production and procurement looks like:

• Avoid social harms and environmental justice violations: Producers must identify and monitor social harms, uphold Free, Prior, and Informed Consent processes where Indigenous Peoples are present, comply with international labor standards, and ensure workers receive a living wage for their region.

• Prevent environmental harm: Producers must conduct screening-level environmental risk assessments, develop monitoring and remediation plans with defined thresholds, and regularly inform local communities of identified environmental risks and associated mitigation measures.

• Apply comprehensive and conservative carbon accounting: Both attributional and consequential impacts must be disclosed, co-product emissions must be clearly allocated, and a credible fossil fuel baseline must be established through defensible market analysis.

• Demonstrate additionality: Producers must demonstrate, using financial metrics like internal rate of return, that voluntary market support is genuinely enabling fuel volumes or carbon intensity reductions that would not occur otherwise, accounting fully for all public and policy-driven revenue streams.

• Source feedstocks sustainably and transparently: End-to-end chain-of-custody documentation must be traceable to the point of generation, field-level records must be maintained for agricultural feedstocks, and sourcing practices must protect Indigenous peoples, workers, and local communities and must not threaten protected areas or regional carbon stocks.

• Account for and minimize leakage: Leakage must be assessed across domestic and international markets, including land use change, feedstock displacement, and disruption of existing bio-based product markets.

The Criteria are intended as a living resource, and Carbon Direct is committed to refining future editions as science and market conditions evolve. This resource builds directly on five editions of the High-Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal Criteria co-developed with Microsoft, on sustainable forest biomass sourcing for CDR published in 2024 and 2025, and sustainable agricultural biomass sourcing for CDR published in 2026.

Read the guide: Criteria for High-Quality Low Carbon Fuels

About Carbon Direct 

Carbon Direct is a trusted energy and climate solutions company that combines world-class scientific expertise, technical rigor, and market insights to help clients achieve their business goals. Our team of scientists work closely with our finance, policy, and market experts to design, diligence, and deliver decarbonization solutions across industries. From JPMorganChase to Microsoft, Carbon Direct helps leading companies with carbon dioxide removal, carbon measurement, low-carbon energy solutions, and firm, clean power opportunities. To learn more, visit www.carbon-direct.com.