Biogenic carbon credits explained: how fermentation CO₂ becomes certified revenue

The phrase "carbon credits" gets thrown around to mean very different things. Some are credible. Some are not. For drinks producers exploring whether captured fermentation CO₂ might be a revenue stream as well as a sustainability win, the relevant subset is small, specific, and worth understanding properly.

This is a short introduction to biogenic carbon credits — what they are, why fermentation CO₂ qualifies, how the Verra and CRCF certification pathways actually work, and what the realistic timing looks like for revenue.

Step one: the difference between avoided and removed

Most carbon credits on the market today are "avoided emissions" — paying someone not to do something they otherwise would have done. A forest preserved from logging. A coal plant kept off-line. These have their place, but they've taken a serious credibility hit over the last five years, with several high-profile schemes shown to be over-credited.

"Removal" credits are different. They represent CO₂ physically taken out of the atmosphere and stored somewhere it won't easily come back. Direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar — these are all removal pathways. So is permanent geological sequestration of captured biogenic CO₂.

Removal credits trade at a meaningful premium. The market values them more because they're harder to fake.

Step two: why biogenic CO₂ is special

When you capture CO₂ from a coal flue, you're taking long-cycle carbon — carbon that's been locked underground for millions of years — out of the atmosphere where it shouldn't have been put in the first place. That counts, but the chemistry is the same regardless of source.

When you capture CO₂ from a fermentation tank, you're catching short-cycle carbon. The carbon in your beer or wine came from the grain or grape, which absorbed it from the atmosphere via photosynthesis in the last 12-24 months. If you let it vent, it goes back into the atmosphere and the cycle continues. If you capture it and lock it underground permanently, you've taken biogenic carbon out of the short cycle and put it into long-term storage. Net atmospheric carbon goes down.

That's what makes biogenic CO₂ capture eligible for genuine removal credits, not just avoided-emission credits. The EU formally recognised this on 3 February 2026 with the first methodologies under its Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation, which explicitly cover biogenic emissions capture with carbon storage as a certifiable activity.

Step three: where Verra and CRCF fit

Two registries matter.

Verra is the world's largest voluntary carbon credit registry. Their standards — particularly the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) — set the methodology for how a project must measure, verify and report its carbon removals. A Verra-certified credit has gone through third-party verification, an independent monitoring period, and registration on a public ledger.

The EU's CRCF is newer but increasingly important. Adopted in February 2026, it's the world's first voluntary state-backed standard for permanent carbon removals — covering DACCS, BioCCS (the fermentation-CO₂ pathway), and biochar. For producers selling into the EU, CRCF-certified credits will increasingly be the recognised currency for proving climate claims to EU-facing customers and regulators. The Commission has also announced an EU Buyers' Club for permanent removals and carbon farming, designed specifically to aggregate corporate demand for these credits — a demand-side mechanism that doesn't exist for most voluntary credit markets.

For a small drinks producer, building your own methodology under either standard from scratch isn't realistic — it takes years and costs hundreds of thousands of pounds. The practical path is to be part of an aggregated programme where multiple capture sites pool their volume into a single registered methodology and share the certification overhead.

That's part of what we do at Cork & Capture: we operate the capture, handle the certification administration, and route the credits to market on behalf of the producer.

Step four: what it's actually worth

Verra-certified and CRCF-eligible biogenic removal credits are set to trade in the £350 per tonne range as of 2025-26 — a significant step up from the £30-£100/tonne range that avoided-emission credits typically command. The premium reflects what these credits actually are: physical CO₂ removed from the atmosphere via a biogenic process (ie plant growth) and verifiably stored long-term, rather than emissions that "would have happened otherwise". The European Commission's recent announcement of an EU Buyers' Club for permanent removals — designed to aggregate corporate demand for CRCF-certified credits under the new Bioeconomy Strategy — is likely to put further upward pressure on this pricing over the next 24-36 months.

For a 100,000 hl mid-sized brewery producing 400 tonnes of CO₂ a year, that's around £140,000 of potential annual credit revenue — a material number alongside the avoided CO₂ purchase cost, the supply-resilience benefit, and the ESG positioning.

The honest caveat: storage infrastructure timing

There's an important nuance here that I'd rather you hear now than discover halfway through a project. Biogenic carbon credits depend on the CO₂ being permanently stored. In the UK, that means geological sequestration in saline aquifers or depleted oil and gas reservoirs, primarily in the North Sea. Multiple large-scale storage projects are under development in the UK right now — the Northern Endurance Partnership, Net Zero Teesside, Acorn in Scotland, HyNet in the North West - as well as the brilliant private sector-led projects like Bacton Net Zero in Norfolk and Spirit Energy in Morecambe Bay — but realistic full operational capacity at scale is broadly expected by around 2030. In Norway CO2 sequestration in the North Sea has been underway for more than 20 years, with the latest high profile launch of Northern Lights (https://norlights.com/what-we-do/) in June 2025. In the US, Australia, Algeria and other major oil exporting countries, CO2 injection and storage has been in operation for more than 20 years.

What that means in practice for wine, spirits and beer makers: capture today, contract forward, accrue credits as storage capacity comes online. Several voluntary market buyers are now offering forward contracts for CRCF-eligible removal credits, allowing producers to lock in future revenue today. But it's important to understand that this is a near-future revenue stream, not a spot-cash one for most producers in 2026.

The cost-savings side of capture (eliminating purchased CO₂ and protecting against supply disruption) lands immediately. The credit revenue side is a 2027-2030 build-up. Both matter — but the timing differs.

What about double-counting?

A fair question. If you both reuse some of your captured CO₂ on-site (for carbonation, sparging, blanketing) and sell credits on the surplus, can both count? The answer is yes — but only on the surplus. You can't claim removal credits on CO₂ you've put back into your own product, because that gas re-enters the short cycle when the bottle is opened. The credit applies to the portion permanently sequestered.

The Cork & Capture commercial model is built around this distinction. On-site reuse displaces purchased CO₂ and reduces your costs. Off-site surplus becomes credit-eligible and generates revenue once storage capacity is online.

Talking it through

If you'd like to understand what credit revenue looks like for a site your size — or whether your specific fermentation profile is a good fit for the CRCF and Verra pathways — get in touch. We can run a worked detailed estimate from your production figures in around an hour, and get you a realistic assessment of when you could bank the value of the associated credits.