NZ Emissions Auction Fails to Attract Bids for Second Consecutive Time
No bids were placed in Wednesday’s September quarterly New Zealand emissions unit (NZU) auction, leaving all 7.6 million NZUs unsold and rolled over to the year’s final auction on December 4.
This marks the second straight auction without any participation, following the June 2024 auction, the first on record with no bids. Since March 2023, NZU auctions have struggled to fully clear, with only the March 2024 auction selling a portion of the available units.
The latest result was in line with market expectations, as the auction floor price of NZ$64/mt — the minimum price at which NZUs can be sold — remains higher than secondary market prices, despite a recent uptick.
In August, New Zealand announced it would halve the supply of NZUs available through its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) while maintaining price control settings, which triggered a surge in spot prices. NZUs were last assessed by OPIS at NZ$61.73/mt on Tuesday, a 15.4% increase month to month.
Many market participants have noted that with supply forthcoming at these levels, buying at NZ$64 at auction did not appear to be a rational course of action, trading platform Carbon Match said in an update, seeing little interest despite a reduced supply of six million units to be offered across the whole of 2025.
All 3.525 million units offered in the September auction, along with 4.075 million unsold units rolled over from the March and June auctions, will be carried forward to the next auction on Dec. 4. Unsold units are not carried forward into the following calendar year, as seen in 2023 when 23 million units
were effectively removed from the market.
Following the auction, NZU prices rose, with the most recent trades at NZ$62.25/mt on major platforms around midday, still NZ$1.75/mt below the auction price floor but 52 cents higher than the OPIS assessment on Tuesday.
Reporting by Melissa Goh, mgoh@opisnet.com; Chuan Ong, cong@opisnet.com
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