China has issued 3 million CCERs eligible for compliance use in its pilot emissions trading schemes, the NDRC announced Monday, but the majority of the projects receiving offsets are ruled out in most markets.

The NDRC, China’s carbon market regulator, issued the offsets following a February meeting where 22 projects were approved to receive the offsets they applied for while four projects were denied.

In total, around 17 million CCERs have now been issued, while the seven pilot markets – which face their annual compliance deadlines over the next six weeks or so – allow up to 110 million CCERs to be used.

No information was available on the amount specifically issued to each project, but according to analysts at Crystal Carbon, only five of the successful projects were eligible to sell their offsets to Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai, where strict eligibility regulations rule out CCERs from emission reductions made before Jan 1, 2013.

Three of the projects were so-called Category 2, meaning they are from schemes that at some stage were given Letters of Approval under the CDM, but for various reasons were never registered.

The remaining 14 projects to be given CCERs were pre-CDM projects, known as Category 3.

Four of the projects were located in Hubei and will be able to sell the offsets to the provincial ETS, which almost exclusively allows Hubei-generated CCERs.

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