NewsAuthorsSergey Belskiy

AlCircle News Edited By "Sergey Belskiy"

Sergey Belskiy
Sergey Belskiysergey.belskiy@metalsupplyexperts.com

Sergey Belskiy is the founder and managing director of Metal Supply Experts GmbH, a Swiss commodity execution and advisory firm (est. 2018). He previously served as director of sales and marketing and chief operating officer at RUSAL Marketing GmbH in Zug, with commercial oversight of roughly 8 per cent of world primary aluminium flows. He writes on the structure of aluminium and commodity trade.

The blind border: Who actually wins from aluminum’s first CBAM year
Sustainability

The blind border: Who actually wins from aluminum’s first CBAM year

On April 7, 2026, the industry got what it had waited three years for: the European Commission priced carbon at the border for the first time. A CBAM certificate for the first quarter costs EUR 75.36 per tonne of CO2 equivalent, for the second EUR 75.28. Every tonne of aluminium entering the European Union now has two prices: one for the metal and one for its origin. The logic seems obvious from here: the dirtier the metal, the more the border charges, clean producers win, coal-based producers lose. That is how the mechanism was conceived and how the market reads it. Walk through the first-year rules with a calculator, however, and the picture turns upside down. A border built to see carbon does not yet see most of it - and so it rewards not the cleanest producers but the best-organised...