CBAM Compass: Intelligence Report

The European Commission has published its first real CBAM data.

Not projections. Not modelled estimates. Not a think tank's best guess. Actual data from seven quarters of importers filing reports on the carbon embedded in their goods.

156 million tonnes of CBAM goods imported. 167 million tonnes of CO2 embedded in them. And between 89% and 92% of importers used default values rather than actual emissions data in the early quarters.

That last number is the one that should keep procurement teams awake at night.

Because default values are not free. They are not even cheap. For aluminium importers, the gap between a default value filing and an actual-data filing could run to hundreds of euros per tonne once free allocation phases out. For steel, it is tens of euros per tonne. And the Commission has just confirmed that if you use defaults for emissions, you must also use defaults for the free allocation adjustment and the carbon price deduction. No mixing and matching. It is all or nothing.

We have spent the last quarter pulling apart the Commission's data, sector by sector. Iron and steel. Aluminium. Cement. Fertilisers. Electricity. Hydrogen. Plus the UK CBAM, which starts in January 2027 and which most people are not thinking about yet.

The result is the CBAM Compass Q1 2026: a sector intelligence briefing built entirely from Commission source data and live EU ETS pricing. No estimates without labelling. No cross-period calculations without flagging the mismatch. Every figure traceable to a named source.

What you will find inside:

- The real cost exposure for each sector, at today's ETS price and at consensus forecast
- Why the "7 billion euro" steel figure you have seen in the press is not what importers will actually pay (and what the real 2026 number looks like)
- The six things we learned from the Commission's first CBAM webinar on 19 March that have not been reported anywhere else
- Why there are zero accredited CBAM verifiers in existence today, and what that means for your filing strategy
- The UK CBAM timeline that most importers are ignoring

The executive summary is free and can be downloaded here. The full six-sector briefing is behind an email gate because we would quite like to know who is reading it, if you would like to receive it please sign up here.