17 August 2026 – CBAM: the Commission has added more than 430 pages of guidance to a body of rules already exceeding 3,000 pages, in order to explain its simplified Regulation. thyssenkrupp is renegotiating the funding conditions for its €3 billion direct reduction plant. Following approval by the Commission, the funding may now flow without an immediate requirement to use hydrogen. The money is coming. The hydrogen is not.
Green Steel Was Never a Plan. It Was a Price Tag.
Duisburg, August 2026. thyssenkrupp is renegotiating the funding conditions for its €3 billion direct reduction plant. Two thirds of the amount comes from the German federal government and the state, originally tied to the use of hydrogen, a premise that has since become unrealistic. The funding granted in 2023 was explicitly intended to support the “early phase out of natural gas”: first use of hydrogen in 2028, full operation in 2029, 143,000 tonnes annually, 5.6 TWh.
Following approval by the Commission, the funding may now flow without an immediate requirement to use hydrogen. The money is coming. The hydrogen is not.
We have been writing about this since 2021
Electrolyser capacity, green electricity, water, pipelines: none of it was ever foreseeable at the scale required. That was not a forecast. It was arithmetic. The only thing that is new is who is admitting it, and when. On the same day, thyssenkrupp raised the lower end of its earnings forecast.
The Other Side of the Calculation
For this promise, the industry received CBAM, protective tariffs, quotas and direct subsidies. The levels further down the value chain are paying for it. How openly corrupt can this actually become?
| Steel production | Steel processing and construction | |
|---|---|---|
| Employees | 298,000 | 24.2 million |
Fabricated metal products account for 3.56 million employees, mechanical engineering for 2.92 million, vehicle manufacturing for 3.20 million and construction for 14.55 million.
Construction, of all sectors, accounts for 37 per cent of EU steel consumption, making it the largest consumer, yet it is practically absent from the industrial policy debate.
There are 24.2 million jobs in downstream industries, whilst there are only a handful of steelworkers. 24.2 million jobs, the vast majority of which are in SMEs – with no legal departments, no offices in Brussels and no teams tasked with securing funding – and which are quite clearly being sidelined by the Commission.
The Asymmetry Is the Business Model
The corporation renegotiates its conditions. The steel fabricator in Upper Austria or Baden Württemberg negotiates nothing. It pays premiums on scarce EU steel, calculates with ever tighter margins, completes CBAM reports for volumes that a blast furnace produces within hours, and loses orders that nobody counts as losses because they are spread across ten thousand company nameplates.
Conditionality, in Both Directions Only
If the condition disappears, the consideration must disappear as well. No hydrogen, no protective fence.
In concrete terms: suspend EU steel tariffs and quotas, introduce a binding SME test, conduct an independent cumulative impact assessment and grant SMEs a complete CBAM exemption.
Otherwise, Europe is regulating away 24 million jobs in order to finance a promise for 300,000 that nobody could keep and nobody ever truly intended to keep.
CBAM: 430 Pages of Instructions for a “Simplified” Law
Friday, 14 August. The Commission published ten guidance documents for the definitive CBAM phase, four general documents and six sector specific ones containing calculation examples for cement, hydrogen, fertilisers, iron and steel, aluminium and electricity. More than 430 pages, added to a body of rules already exceeding 3,000 pages. The most extensive sector guidance is, unsurprisingly, for steel.
The Simplification That Was Not One
In October 2025, Brussels adopted a “Simplification Regulation”. Ten months later, this simplified law requires 430 pages of explanation. Anyone who has to write an instruction manual of this length does not have a communication problem. They have a bureaucratic problem.
The Addressee Is Outside, the Liability Is Inside
The guidance documents are aimed at operators outside the EU, while the legal obligation rests with the authorised CBAM declarant in Europe. The importer must obtain data it does not collect, from installations it does not control, using a methodology it first has to explain to its supplier. If the plant does not provide the data, default values remain applicable, resulting in higher certificate requirements. If the plant provides incorrect data, the declarant remains liable.
Guidance is not law. It does not bind any authority, protect anyone during an audit or replace any of the legal acts that still exist only in draft form. For small and medium sized enterprises in the metal processing sector, or traders importing 300 tonnes of tubes per year, the same CBAM machinery applies as for a corporation importing 300,000 tonnes, only without a compliance department or billions in subsidies from Brussels.
Thorsten Gerber, CEO of the Gerber Group, said today: “A law that takes 430 pages to make sense of is not just far too complicated. It is incomplete and legally untenable. We’ve been expected to report correctly since January, and it’s only in August that we’re being told what was actually meant. In any other area of law, that would be called retroactive application. Here, it’s called ‘support for implementation’.”
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