Canada has taken a major step in its mining history. The country recently approved the first large-scale uranium mine in more than 20 years. This new project is part of Canada’s effort to support clean energy and nuclear power production.
The federal and provincial governments approved the Phoenix In Situ Recovery (ISR) uranium mine. This mine is part of Denison Mines’ Wheeler River Project in Saskatchewan. This approval allows the construction of both the mine and its processing mill.
Phoenix will use ISR mining, a method seen as more environmentally friendly than traditional open-pit or underground mining. The technique uses liquid to dissolve uranium underground. It then brings the uranium to the surface for processing. This method reduces land disturbance compared to traditional methods.
With its license now issued and environmental reviews completed, construction is expected to take about two years. The project remains on track for its first production by mid-2028.
The approval is a milestone for Canada’s nuclear fuel sector. It signals renewed interest in uranium mining at a time when nuclear power is gaining traction as a low-carbon energy source.
A New Era for Canada’s Uranium Sector
Uranium is the key fuel for nuclear power plants. Nuclear power provides large amounts of low-carbon electricity around the world. As countries seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear energy is playing a growing role in clean energy strategies.
Canada is one of the world’s top uranium producers. Mines like Cigar Lake, McClean Lake, and Rabbit Lake in Saskatchewan have been supplying uranium for decades.
However, no new large mining projects had been approved at the federal level in over two decades before Phoenix. Canada can now boost uranium production. This will help support nuclear fuel supply chains at home and abroad.
The Phoenix mine will create economic benefits. This includes jobs during both construction and operations in northern Saskatchewan. It will also contribute to local tax revenue and community development.
Rising Power Needs Put Nuclear Back in Focus
Nuclear power accounts for a significant share of clean electricity globally. Nuclear reactors produce constant, reliable power that does not depend on weather like wind or solar. Many countries view nuclear energy as critical to meeting climate goals while maintaining grid stability.
As electric grids transition to cleaner energy sources, the demand for uranium — the core fuel for nuclear plants — is rising.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global electricity demand grew by 3 % in 2025, following a 4.4 % increase in 2024. The agency expects demand to rise by about 3.6% each year from 2026 to 2030. This growth will come from industrial use, electrification, electric vehicles, cooling needs, and more data centers.
This growth underscores the need for reliable, low-carbon generation capacity. Nuclear energy is a strong candidate because it supplies large volumes of consistent electricity with low emissions.
Tech Sector Turns to Nuclear for 24/7 Power
As electricity demand grows, especially from data centers, tech companies are focusing on long-term power solutions.
Executives at NexGen Energy, developing Canada’s largest uranium project in Saskatchewan, say they’ve talked with data center providers. They discussed financing uranium mining projects and securing a long-term uranium supply. These talks aim to ensure stable fuel for nuclear plants that could help power future data infrastructure.
CEO Leigh Curyer said,
“It’s coming. You’ve seen it with automakers. These tech companies, they’re under an obligation to ensure the hundreds of billions that they are investing in the data centres are going to be powered.”
NexGen is working on the Rook I uranium project in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin. This area is one of the richest for uranium and hosts Canada’s largest development-stage uranium project.
The company anticipates full government approval soon, and it aims for production around 2030. NexGen executives say the mine could supply more than 20 % of global uranium demand once operational.
NexGen’s discussions with data center operators focus on financing and long-term supply agreements. The idea is like car makers investing in battery material mines. They do this to secure vital supplies for electric vehicles.
These talks do not involve giving tech firms any control of NexGen. Instead, they focus on ways to help ensure uranium supply and potentially support early project development.
- MUST READ: From Now to 2060: How Canada’s SMRs and Maritime Nuclear Power Will Drive a Net-Zero Future
Why Tech Firms Are Interested in Nuclear Fuel
Modern data centers need a lot of electricity. This is especially true for those supporting AI, cloud computing, and large digital services. Power demand from data centers is a key driver of rising global electricity use, according to the IEA.
Unlike intermittent renewables, nuclear power provides 24/7 electricity that is not affected by weather. This reliability makes it attractive for companies that need stable energy for critical infrastructure.
Some technology firms have already signaled interest in long-term arrangements with nuclear energy providers. These supply arrangements might involve financing for mining, long-term fuel contracts, or offtake agreements when projects start production.
Long-term contracts for uranium can help companies lock in fuel supply for decades. This can reduce risks related to supply shortages or price volatility in commodity markets.The discussions show how energy security and climate goals are intersecting with corporate planning in the tech sector.
- SEE MORE: Project Matador: America’s $90B Nuclear Power Solution for AI, Semiconductors, and Data Centers
Tight Supply and Rising Prices Reshape the Market
The uranium market has tightened in recent years. Uranium prices have gone up. This rise shows supply issues and increasing interest in nuclear energy. Recent trading values put uranium at almost US$89 per pound, after briefly exceeding US$100 per pound in end of January.
Projections suggest that global nuclear capacity will need more fuel in coming decades as new reactors come online and existing ones are extended. Countries like China and India are expanding nuclear power to meet their growing electricity needs.
In Canada, new mines such as Phoenix and big projects like Rook I can fill global supply gaps. They also support national energy plans.
Global Supply Strain: U.S. and China Reshape the Uranium Market
The scramble for uranium supply is accelerating beyond Canada.
In the United States, a ban on Russian enriched uranium imports will take full effect in January 2028. Russia holds around 44% of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity. In 2023, it provided 27% of U.S. utility enrichment purchases, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.
To reduce this dependence, the U.S. Department of Energy announced $2.7 billion in task orders to expand domestic enrichment capacity. The funding supports Centrus Energy, General Matter, and Orano Federal Services.
- Orano got $900 million to build a new enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They expect to submit a license application in the first half of 2026.
Conversion capacity is also expanding. Solstice Advanced Materials plans to increase uranium conversion output by 20% at its Metropolis Works plant in Illinois. The facility is expected to exceed 10 kilotonnes of UF₆ production in 2026, and it is reportedly sold out through 2030.
At the same time, China’s nuclear buildout is adding pressure to global supply. China operates 58 reactors, with 34 more under construction. Citi Research estimates China’s uranium needs will rise from 35 million pounds in 2025 to 58 million pounds by 2030, equal to about 27% of global demand. Yet, China produces only around 4 million pounds domestically.
Global uranium demand could reach 400 million pounds by 2040, more than double today’s levels. Meanwhile, about 70% of post-2027 uranium requirements remain uncontracted, highlighting the growing supply gap.
S&P Global expects a uranium market upcycle until 2028, fueled by rising nuclear demand, especially from AI data centers. Global capacity is set to double, reaching 561-992 GW by 2050. Production jumps 141% to 141.2 million pounds by 2033, generating $14.9 billion revenue at $98.7/lb—65% above current prices.
Kazatomprom and Cameco will lead in 2025, generating $5.4 billion in revenue. This accounts for 86% of the group’s output. After 2028, NexGen and Denison will drive the supply wave, peaking at $1.6 billion in capex. Big Tech (Meta, AWS, Google, Microsoft) signs PPAs and equity deals.
Nuclear Fuel Security Becomes a Climate Strategy
The approval of a new mine after more than 20 years shows that uranium is regaining importance in global energy planning. The Phoenix ISR project and other potential mines reflect renewed confidence in nuclear fuel production.
Early interest from tech companies in securing uranium supply shows a shift in energy planning. As power demand increases, companies are exploring new clean energy options. They want stable, low-carbon electricity.
For countries pushing decarbonization, nuclear power — supported by a stable uranium supply — offers a path to reduce emissions while meeting baseload electricity demand.
In this context, the Canadian uranium sector is poised for growth. New mines and potential private sector involvement may strengthen nuclear fuel security, supporting both national and global energy transitions.
The post Canada Approves First Uranium Mine in 20 Years as Tech Giants Eye Nuclear Fuel for AI Power appeared first on Carbon Credits.
What auditors actually test, where projects actually fail, and the contract clauses that protect you before signature.
The meeting happens about fourteen months after the contract was signed. Your assurance provider has reached the nature-based investment line in your Scope 3 file, and the partner across the table has exactly two questions. How do you know the reductions happened? And how do you know they would not have happened anyway?
The first question is MRV: measurement, reporting, and verification. The second is additionality. Between them, they decide whether your nature-based investment counts, in your inventory, in your disclosure, and in front of your board. Everything else in the project documentation is supporting material for these two answers.
This article walks through what each question actually tests, where projects most commonly fail, what digital MRV has changed (and what it has not), and the contract clauses that protect you. The goal is to give you the diligence framework before you sign, because after the credit issues is the wrong time to discover the answers were weak.
What MRV actually verifies
MRV is the machinery that turns a field intervention into a defensible number. Measurement covers the data: biomass surveys, soil sampling, remote sensing, activity records from participating farms. Reporting covers the translation of that data into claimed reductions under a recognised methodology. Verification covers the independent check: an accredited third party tests the reporting against the methodology and the evidence.
The methodologies live in registries. Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard and the Gold Standard are the two largest for nature-based projects, and each publishes the methodology documents, monitoring requirements, and verification protocols that a project must follow. The ICVCM Assessment Framework now sits above the registries, assessing whole methodologies against the Core Carbon Principles and granting the CCP label to those that pass.
For a buyer, the practical questions are concrete. What is the monitoring frequency, and is it specified in the project design document or left vague? Who is the verifier, how were they selected, and how often do they rotate? What raw data do you, the buyer, get access to, and in what format? A project that answers these in writing is a different procurement than one that answers them in a sales call.
What additionality actually proves
Additionality asks whether the intervention caused the reduction, or whether the reduction would have happened anyway. The test is a counterfactual: what would this landscape, this farm, this forest have done without the project’s money?
Three forms matter in practice. Financial additionality asks whether the project needed the carbon revenue to proceed. Regulatory additionality asks whether the activity was already required by law. Common-practice additionality asks whether the activity is already standard in the region, in which case paying for it buys you nothing the world was not getting for free.
The reason additionality dominates audit conversations is recent history. Research published in 2023, including the Science paper examined at length in our piece on conventional offsets and boardroom credibility, found that a large share of REDD+ credits failed the counterfactual test because baselines were inflated. The market response was a wave of methodology revisions at Verra and the arrival of independent ratings agencies whose entire business is re-testing additionality claims. The Carbon Credit Quality Initiative publishes transparent scoring of methodologies on exactly this dimension, and it is free to consult before you sign anything.
Where projects most commonly fail the test
Five failure modes account for most of the wreckage.
- Inflated baselines. The counterfactual assumes more deforestation, more degradation, or lower yields than the evidence supports. The claimed reduction is the gap between reality and the baseline, so an inflated baseline manufactures reductions from nothing.
- Unaccounted leakage. The project protects one forest and the logging moves to the next valley. The methodology is supposed to net this out; weak projects estimate it optimistically.
- Thin permanence protection. Nature-based carbon can reverse: fire, pest, drought, or a change of landowner. Buffer pools and insurance mechanisms exist for this, but their adequacy varies enormously between projects.
- Attribution and double counting. In supply chain settings, the same reduction can be claimed by the supplier, the buyer, and a credit purchaser unless contracts prevent it. Our Insetting vs Offsetting piece covers the inventory rules; the point here is that the auditor will ask who else is counting this tonne.
- Stale monitoring. Data collected at validation and never refreshed. The IPCC AR6 Working Group III land-sector chapter documents how quickly carbon stocks respond to disturbance; a three-year-old measurement is a historical artifact, not a current claim.
What digital MRV changes, and what it does not
Digital MRV is the genuine improvement in the field. Satellite remote sensing, including the free archives at NASA Earthdata, allows biomass and land-cover change to be monitored continuously rather than at multi-year verification intervals. Soil carbon models calibrated with physical sampling reduce the cost of agricultural measurement. The practical effect is more frequent data at lower cost, which compresses the window in which a problem can hide.
What digital MRV does not change is judgment. Baselines are still human decisions about counterfactuals. Additionality is still an argument, not a measurement. Research groups such as the Oxford Smith School have been clear on this point: better sensors improve the M in MRV, but the integrity questions live in the assumptions, and assumptions need governance, not gadgets.
For a buyer, the test is simple. Ask the provider what is measured by instrument, what is estimated by model, and what is assumed by methodology. A provider who can answer that question crisply understands their own evidence chain. A provider who cannot is selling you their confidence rather than their data.
What to require in your contract
The diligence above converts into five contract clauses.
- Monitoring cadence and buyer data access, specified by dataset and frequency.
- Verifier independence, named accreditation, and rotation terms.
- Baseline revision triggers, so the counterfactual updates when the methodology or the evidence changes.
- Reversal liability and buffer adequacy, with the mechanism named and sized.
- Documentation handover in audit-ready form, so the evidence file your assurance provider needs already exists.
None of these clauses is exotic. All of them are absent from weak contracts, and their absence is the most reliable early signal that the MRV and additionality answers will be weak too.
If you are evaluating a nature-based investment and want the MRV and additionality stress-tested before signature rather than after, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can run that review against any project on your shortlist, and design nature-based supply chain investments where the evidence chain is built audit-first. Schedule a consultation.
Sources and further reading
- ICVCM: Core Carbon Principles Assessment Framework
- Verra: Verified Carbon Standard
- Gold Standard for the Global Goals
- Carbon Credit Quality Initiative: Methodology quality scores
- University of Oxford Smith School: Sustainable finance research
- IPCC AR6 Working Group III, Chapter 7: AFOLU
- NASA Earthdata satellite remote sensing archive
EU Directive: Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT)
The EU Directive, Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT), takes effect on September 27, 2026.(1) The goal of ECGT is to protect consumers by ensuring that environmental claims are fair, understandable, and reliable. This regulation does create a new compliance requirement for businesses, but it also provides sustainability and marketing teams with important guidance that helps create consistency in sustainability communications.
Key takeaways
- ECGT takes effect September 27, 2026, and prohibits claims that a product or service has a neutral, reduced, or positive environmental impact based on offsetting alone.
- Named example phrases the regulation prohibits include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, climate compensated, reduced climate impact, and limited CO2 footprint.
- ECGT does not want to deter investment in carbon credits. It wants companies to communicate the real benefits of the projects they support instead.
- SBTi’s guidance recommends framing carbon credits as taking responsibility for ongoing emissions, not as making a product or company neutral.
- Voluntary carbon projects deliver real climate progress: reducing super-pollutants, protecting and restoring ecosystems, and supporting communities.
Regarding carbon credits specifically, voluntary carbon projects deliver important climate progress and environmental benefits that provide many talking points for companies. They reduce climate super-pollutants by removing industrial emissions like methane, N2O, HFCs and others. They protect and restore valuable ecosystems and carbon sinks like forests, mangroves and grasslands. They help communities by reducing local pollution, creating employment opportunities, improving access to healthcare, and more.
The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), a global leader in business climate action, concludes that alongside aggressive decarbonization, we should also use high quality carbon credits to take responsibility for our ongoing emissions. SBTi recognizes that carbon credits are important “to help limit temperature overshoot, mitigate transition risks, and support climate solutions.”(2)
ECGT language on carbon offsetting says that they do not want to deter investment in carbon credits. They just want companies to focus on communicating the benefits of the projects they support and avoid claims beyond the scope of carbon credits, which is good for everyone, companies and consumers alike.
The regulation reinforces that carbon credits do not change the sustainability of your products, so carbon credit buyers should not suggest that their products are more sustainable because of carbon credits. Instead, companies need to promote their climate contributions as a way to compensate or take responsibility for their carbon emissions by supporting projects that do great things like reducing global carbon emissions, reducing pollution, preventing deforestation, restoring forests, and more.
ECGT language related to carbon offsetting
The regulation is particularly focused on prohibiting claims, based on offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, that a product or service has a neutral, reduced, or positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. These claims are prohibited in all circumstances because they mislead consumers into believing the claim relates to the product itself, or to how it was made and supplied, or into thinking that using the product carries no environmental impact at all.
Named examples of prohibited claims include:
- climate neutral
- CO2 neutral certified
- carbon positive
- climate net zero
- climate compensated
- reduced climate impact
- limited CO2 footprint
These claims are only allowed when they rest on a product’s actual lifecycle impact, not on offsetting emissions outside that product’s value chain, since the two are not equivalent. This prohibition does not stop companies from advertising their investments in environmental initiatives, including carbon credit projects, as long as they present that information in a way that is not misleading and that meets the other requirements of Union law.(1)
SBTi also provides guidance on climate contribution language in its Corporate Net Zero Standard Version 2.0 Draft for Second Public Consultation, November 2025. While the SBTi language is fairly technical, it has a good framework for crafting a climate contribution message.
SBTi Language for Carbon Credits(3)
- Take responsibility for ongoing emissions by delivering mitigation impact contributions
- Carbon credits certify the mitigation outcomes of projects that reduce, avoid, or remove carbon emissions
- Activities that reduce emissions from emission sources not located within the company’s value chain
- Activities that conserve, protect, and enhance natural carbon sinks
- Activities that capture and store carbon in storage pools
SBTi’s draft standard also walks through sample claim language for this kind of contribution. In general, the samples move from a simple percentage statement, to naming a specific verified tonnage tied to that percentage, to a fuller statement that breaks the tonnage into reductions versus removals. Across all three, the framing stays consistent: a company took responsibility for a defined share of its ongoing emissions over a set period, by funding a specific, verified amount of mitigation, achieved through emission reductions or removals.(3)
FAQ: ECGT and Carbon Credit Claims
When does the ECGT directive take effect?
The rules apply across the EU from September 27, 2026, after member states transposed the directive into national law by March 27, 2026.
Does ECGT ban carbon offsetting?
No. It bans specific marketing claims that a product or service is environmentally neutral, reduced impact, or positive based on offsetting. Advertising investment in carbon credit projects themselves is still allowed if it is not misleading.
What phrases does ECGT specifically prohibit?
Named examples include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, climate compensated, reduced climate impact, and limited CO2 footprint, when those claims are based on offsetting rather than a product’s actual lifecycle impact.
How should a company describe its carbon credit purchases instead?
SBTi’s guidance recommends stating the specific verified tonnage of emissions reductions or removals funded and describing that as taking responsibility for a defined share of ongoing emissions, rather than claiming the company or product is neutral.
Does this rule apply to company level sustainability claims too?
ECGT is focused on claims about specific products and services in consumer marketing. Broader company level sustainability communication is a separate matter still governed by other existing rules.
While ECGT does add a new compliance burden for businesses, it helps create consistency in sustainability messaging that is important to building confidence in voluntary carbon projects and scaling the industry to help us achieve progress on global carbon emissions.
Disclaimer: Terrapass does not provide legal or regulatory advice. Any interpretation of regulation must be approved by your legal representative.
References:
(1) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/825/oj
(2) https://files.sciencebasedtargets.org/production/files/Corporate-Net-Zero-Standard-version-2.pdf
(3) https://files.sciencebasedtargets.org/production/files/CNZS-V2-Second-Consultation-Draft.pdf
The post The EU’s New Green Claims Rules and Carbon Credits appeared first on Terrapass.
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