Add information about the intermediate goods consumed by your installation during the specified reporting period. These are goods other than CBAM goods and raw materials. The key difference from raw materials is that intermediate goods have undergone some form of processing. For instance, limestone is a raw material whereas calcined lime is treated as an intermediate good.

IMPORTANT: The intermediate goods dropdown list includes some CBAM-covered goods, such as pig iron and direct reduced iron (DRI). These are listed only for cases where you use the bubble approach. If you purchase any of such goods from external suppliers, you must input them using the Purchased CBAM Good form and request actual emissions data from your suppliers.

What is the Bubble Approach?

General rule: When producing CBAM goods under separate aggregated goods categories, you must define a separate production process for each category.

Bubble approach: The bubble approach simplifies this by allowing you to define a single production process, attributing all inputs from the installation to that process rather than to individual production processes.

For instance, if you operate an integrated steel mill, you can define a single production process for your finished iron or steel products, rather than separate processes for sintered ore, pig iron, crude steel, and iron or steel products. This approach simplifies monitoring, as you can attribute all electricity, fuel, and materials to a single process instead of tracking consumption for each process separately.

In this case, the intermediate goods are not external inputs from another installation but outputs from earlier production stages within your facility that did not need to be defined as separate production processes.

However, the bubble approach is only valid if all precursor goods are used to produce the subsequent CBAM good. If any precursors, such as sintered ore or pig iron, were sold to third parties instead of being fully consumed in the production of the next CBAM good, the bubble approach would not be permitted.

The emissions associated with your intermediate goods will contribute to your direct (Scope 1) emissions.

For calculating emissions from fuels and materials, the EU CBAM allows the use of various data sources, some of which are considered to be of higher quality than others. The highest-quality data source is laboratory analysis, which can be used to determine calculation factors such as carbon content, emission factor, and/or conversion factor of the raw materials consumed by your installation.

Alternatively, you may use a proxy for the carbon content or emission factor, provided you establish an empirical correlation at least once per year using laboratory analysis. The key difference is that, with this approach, laboratory analysis is only required once a year to establish the correlation, rather than for each batch of material, which helps reduce monitoring costs.

The lowest-quality data, though still permitted when other options are technically unfeasible or would incur unreasonable costs, is the use of standard values. The image below illustrates the hierarchy of these data sources based on their quality.

You have two options:

Currently, we use the following data sources for the carbon content and emission factor values of intermediate goods: