Turkey's cement industry has warned that the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) risks becoming a non-tariff trade barrier if Brussels sticks to punitively high default values for carbon emissions intensity without providing a means for exporters to verify actual emissions.
The default emission values imposed on countries without EU-approved data significantly inflate CBAM-related costs for Turkish clinker and cement exports, the Turkish Cement Manufacturers' Association (TurkCimento) said.
The EU did not specify cement product default values for Turkey, the largest supplier of clinker and cement to the EU, leaving its shippers to be classified under the "other countries" category. These would charge importers based on a default of 1.551t of CO₂/t of Turkish clinker, although exporters' actual emissions reported during the CBAM transition period averaged only 0.88t of CO₂/t of clinker.
While the default values are designed to be punitive to encourage companies to verify their actual emissions, the process to do so remains unclear. Slow verification timelines and limited accredited verifier capacity could delay registering actual emissions in the CBAM system.
The association therefore pressed the EU to use actual emission data until the verification infrastructure becomes fully operational. It also suggested that Turkey should be assigned a country-specific default value based on data from Turkish plants produced under a longstanding monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) framework aligned with EU requirements.
"To prevent CBAM from becoming a de facto trade barrier, national values based on EU-aligned MRV data should be used instead of general ‘Other Countries' default values", TurkCimento chief executive Volkan Bozay said.
Under the current default values that apply to Turkey, the carbon cost per tonne of clinker jumps from about €20/t ($23.20/t) to €80/t. This is almost twice the price of clinker on an fob Turkey basis, which Argus assessed for February at $44-48/t,
"directly threatening the economic sustainability of exports", Bozay said. These higher costs would also be passed on to EU consumers through higher cement and downstream construction material prices.
All Turkish facilities use low-emission dry process kilns. Turkish producers are also working to expand renewable electricity use, which would further lower embedded emissions, but the benefits would be lost if EU systems do not recognise verified plant-level data.
"Within the scope of CBAM, there is need for clear rules that will allow these investments and the declared actual production data to be recognized in indirect emission calculations." Bozay said.
