EUA December-2026 carbon allowances closed at €83.51/tonne on Monday 27 July against €83.40 on Friday the 24th, a change of 0.01 per cent.12 Both prints are aggregator quotes on the EEX December-2026 contract rather than exchange settlement prints, and the aggregators disagree with each other: one secondary report gave €83.88 for the 24 July session, another a €80.01 to €81.07 range for the same day.3 The two dedicated data services agree; the rest do not. Carbon has been range-bound for a fortnight, having drifted back under €81 in mid-July before recovering.
Hold that still print against what the other two spark inputs did across the identical four sessions. Gas handed back the war premium it had built on Gulf risk. German power lost more than two fifths of its value on a wind surge. Carbon moved by a hundredth of a per cent. This desk asked last week whether the carbon leg might ease the pressure on the spark. It did not, and it did not add to it either.
That flatness is doing analytical work. A single de-escalation trade would have pulled carbon with it, because a cheaper-gas world implies more coal-to-gas switching and firmer allowance demand at the margin. Carbon not moving says the market did not process the week as one story. It processed a geopolitical unwind in the fuel leg and a weather event in the revenue leg, and it correctly declined to price either as a change in Europe's emissions trajectory. For anyone modelling the spark, carbon is the input that has held still through every shock this cycle, which makes it the one whose eventual move will not be priced in advance.
