CBAM Goes Live With 4,100 Authorised Declarants in the First Week

The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its definitive regime on 1 January 2026, ending the transitional reporting-only phase that had run since October 2023. More than 12,000 economic operators had submitted authorisation applications by 7 January, and more than 4,100 had already obtained authorised CBAM declarant status across the union.

The first week's volumes give a sense of where the mechanism actually bites. Between 1 and 7 January, 10,483 import customs declarations containing CBAM goods were validated, covering 1,655,613 tonnes of goods declared in the 1 to 6 January window. Iron and steel accounted for 98% of that volume, ahead of fertilisers at 1.2%, cement at 0.5% and aluminium at 0.3%. Electricity and hydrogen were effectively zero. A 50-tonne annual de minimis threshold determines which importers must hold authorised declarant status before releasing CBAM goods into free circulation.

The engineering consequence is a change in what production data is for. Embedded emissions are now a priced, auditable input to a customs declaration, which means the energy and production metering on a plant floor has stopped being an internal efficiency KPI and become evidence supporting a financial filing.

That raises the bar in familiar ways. Per-batch energy attribution has to be possible, which means metering at a granularity that matches how the product is batched rather than how the switchboard was wired. Data capture has to be tamper-evident, because a number that can be edited after the fact is not evidence. And there has to be an export path from the historian or MES into the reporting format, maintained as the format changes.

For integrators serving steel, cement, aluminium and fertiliser producers — and the EU customers who now have to declare on their behalf — this is the same discipline that regulated industries have applied to quality data for decades, arriving in plants that have never had to apply it to energy.