Author: Anela Dokso

Microsoft’s offtake agreement with Varaha for biochar-based carbon dioxide removal in India highlights a growing shift toward agricultural waste streams as a scalable, verifiable source of long-term removals, while also exposing the operational and integrity challenges that still define the sector.

More than half of India’s steel exports now flow to the European Union, a market that has effectively rewritten the economics of carbon-intensive manufacturing. With the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism entering its implementation phase this month, Indian steelmakers face the prospect of paying levies tied directly to the emissions embedded in their products, a shift that threatens to erode price competitiveness built on coal-based production.

Green hydrogen projects aimed at industrial decarbonization increasingly face a nontechnical constraint that is proving decisive: local consent. That reality came into sharp focus in Speyside, where plans for a hydrogen production facility backed by £3.1 million in Scottish Government funding have been abandoned after sustained opposition and a planning refusal by Moray Council.

Europe’s push to decarbonize refining is increasingly shifting from policy targets to physical assets, with Plug Power completing the installation of 100 megawatts of PEM electrolyzers at Galp’s Sines refinery in Portugal.

Hungary’s grid-scale battery buildout is moving into a more capital-intensive phase, with state-owned utility MVM committing roughly EUR 26 million to a 31 megawatt battery energy storage system at its Tiszaújváros site.

Borealis has announced a EUR 49 million investment at its Burghausen site in Germany to expand commercial-scale production of Borstar Nextension polypropylene.

Clifton Park, New York, has formally banned battery energy storage projects within the town, closing the door on future installations and signaling a growing tension between local safety concerns and state-level renewable energy ambitions.

UK aviation decarbonization policy is entering a more exposed phase as government funding for hydrogen and sustainable aviation fuel is rolled out alongside some of Europe’s most contested airport expansion projects.

BASF Coatings has replaced its internally developed carbon accounting system with a new digital solution capable of calculating Product Carbon Footprints for roughly 120,000 sales products in real time, reflecting a broader push by chemical suppliers to standardize and audit emissions data at scale.

Singapore-based developer DayOne has announced plans to build a new data center in Nurmijärvi, north of Helsinki, adding to a pipeline that is already straining regional grids and planning authorities.