The draft Adipic Acid Production Protocol is available for public review and comment. The protocol provides guidance for nitrous oxide emission reductions at adipic acid production facilities in the United States.

A summary document of public comments submitted for the draft Soil Enrichment Protocol and the Reserve’s responses to comments is now available

California Air Resources Board provides additional information on criteria for direct environmental benefits

Under the California Cap-and-Trade Program, compliance entities may use ARB offset credits to meet up to 8 percent of their compliance obligation for emissions through 2020, 4 percent for emissions from 2021-2025, and 6 percent for emissions from 2026-2030. Starting in 2021, at least half of the usage limit must come from projects that provide direct environmental benefits in the state (DEBS). CARB includes a DEBS flag in CITSS and the ARB Offset Credit Issuance Table to identify projects that meets DEBS requirements.

Offset projects that are located within the State of California are automatically considered to provide direct environmental benefits in the State. Ozone depleting substance (ODS) projects with some California-sourced ODS will be classified as DEBS regardless of where the destruction occurred and without a minimum threshold of California-sourced ODS destroyed.

Out-of-state projects can apply for DEBS determination by providing documentation in the form of peer reviewed scientific papers, reports from governmental or multinational bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or project specific data. CARB has provided an Application for Direct Environmental Benefits Status form. Projects wishing to apply pursuant to section 95989(b) may complete and submit this form. New offset projects must submit the documentation during the first (initial) reporting period and existing offset projects have until December 31, 2021 to submit documentation for review. Once a project has been determined by CARB to provide DEBS, the project will be considered to provide DEBS for the duration of the project life.

California Air Resources Board – Direct Environmental Benefits

Please share your feedback on the Reserve website! Your responses will help us improve functionality and content. To thank you for your participation, you may enter into a drawing for a $50 gift card upon completion of the survey. The survey closes on August 21, 2020. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/reservewebsitefeedback

Join us July 1 for the 3rd meeting of the Adipic Acid Production Protocol V1.0 Workgroup

Taking Full Stock: Opportunities and Challenges around Reforestation

Although reforestation has long been recognized for its promise to extract large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and offer other ecological benefits, it is only now beginning to gather attention at a scale that could possibly approach that of its potential. One way we are able to implement reforestation initiatives at an impactful level is due to advance investments and forward crediting, making now a great time to take stock of how reforestation can contribute to climate change mitigation efforts.

The Climate Action Reserve recently convened a panel to discuss the opportunities and challenges around reforestation as well as how investments are being set up to support reforestation projects. Below are insights and quote highlights from: PJ Marshall, Founder and Executive Director, Restore the Earth; Anastasia Behr, Technology & Sustainability Leader, Dow; Lisa Gonzales-Kramer, Environmental Scientist/Project Manager, California State Parks; and Jeremy Manion, Lead of Forestry Carbon Markets and Natural Climate Solutions, Arbor Day Foundation.

Nature-based solutions, such as reforestation, provide excellent opportunities to achieve climate solutions and important co-benefits

“For any organization or corporation that’s addressing the future carbon neutral goals, landscape scale restoration is really a cost effective and simple nature-based solution to removing carbon out of the atmosphere. And if you look at reforestation along with grasslands and wetlands, there really is the ability to provide for 1/3 of the carbon emission reduction goals for the 2030 Paris Agreement. There’s been a big buzz and promotion about mobilizing funding and support for restoring our forests. So, we’re gaining opportunities for funding, and we’re also gaining some innovative approaches for accounting, forecasting and accrediting carbon emissions,” said PJ Marshall.

“There are a lot of opportunities for carbon projects using nature-based solutions, and specifically, reforestation. As somebody is looking at specific opportunities, they would be looking for a myriad of factors, such as permanence, and we know that varies based on ecosystem, location, and whether or not that entity is state owned or is on a conservation easement. I would also say that when looking for reforestation projects, the one thing that is not always understood is that we’re looking at reforestation mostly. The reforestation projects are looking at ecosystem restoration, not specifically optimizing for carbon. And so those co-benefits are going to be extremely important to consider as a company evaluates a project, again, getting back to the measurement of those co-benefits. More than any other project type, reforestation has to encompass even more than the carbon optimization,” said Lisa Gonzales-Kramer.

“We need additional focus on nature-based solutions. When you think about, say insulation, you put it in the house and the house uses less energy to operate. You’re reducing your emissions in the future, but you’re not capturing anything out of the atmosphere that’s currently there. One of the critical elements of the Restore the Earth project we support was the fact that this project allowed us to articulate the co-benefits of the carbon reduction and the reforestation project in Louisiana, where we do have facilities. For us, being able to quantify and pursue opportunity in the water quality space was one of the internal values added to the fact that it generates carbon reductions,” said Anastasia Behr.

“A lot of the folks that we work with in the Mississippi Delta are at the very impoverished part of the country. And so there’s an environmental and social justice and equity piece to it as well. And, you know, we need to do a better job of tracking the economic impact that exists with these reforestation projects because ultimately rural economies, whether in the US or internationally, have been left out of a lot of economic gains over the last few decades,” said Jeremy Manion.

A case study in reforestation: the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park Reforestation Project

“The Cuyamaca Rancho State Park Reforestation Project started in 2007, so we’re going on 13 years now of experience with a forest carbon project. The Cuyamaca Rancho State Park Reforestation Project was initiated in the aftermath of the 2003 Cedar Fire, which burned over 273,000 acres in San Diego County. It was the largest wildfire in California’s recorded history for 14 years and it burned through our 25,000 acre park at a high intensity over thousands of contiguous acres. The park had almost 10,000 acres of forest habitat at the headwaters of three San Diego County watersheds prior to the fire. And the fire burned virtually everything down to bare mineral soil. It incinerated the seed bank that normally holds the forest duff, the seeds in that forest litter for regeneration, and it also destroyed the forest canopy, which would normally produce more seeds. So there really was no way for the forest to naturally regenerate on its own. It lost its canopy and the seed bank. In previous fires, there had been patches of forest burned at lower intensity or not at all, so there were ways for the forest to recover previous to this. In Cuyamaca, however, this was the first time that the forest could not recover to any degree.

“So California State Parks initiated the reforestation project in 2007 with the goal of restoring about 25% of the pre-fire forest habitat. This is where our action varied from the baseline of business as usual. We stepped in to say, ‘OK. We’ve lost too much of this resource and it’s so important that we do need to restore this.’ And that’s the additionality that’s a requirement of every forest carbon project. We are planting in a mosaic of restored areas, and then as the trees mature, we are expecting that these restored areas will act as centers of seed dispersal and will assist with additional recovery of the sky island forest over time. We mimic a complex relationship between the different vegetation types and really make it an ecosystem mosaic as it was before the fire.

“It was with the help of a sister agency, Cal Fire, and in conversation with the Climate Action Reserve and their revision of the Forest Project Protocol to include projects on public lands, and in conversation with our first funding partner, American Forest, that created this synergy of all of these things coming together at the same time that really allowed us to find ways to restore our sky island habitat,” said Lisa Gonzales-Kramer.

The challenges of reforestation projects: funding and permanence

“Reforestation projects are complex, and for anyone doing a forest carbon project, part of the conversation is how do you get these projects funded. If it’s through a carbon agreement, that carbon credit is not issued until the forest actually has grown, and then is measured, and the credits are issued after they’re verified. The initial investment has to be a large investment upfront, with a very long time of waiting. The Cuyamaca project has a 100-year crediting period. That’s one of the challenges around reforestation projects—to enlist funders or corporations interested in putting that money upfront to help do the work and wait for the credits. And that is one reason, why the Climate Forward* program is really essential for allowing projects like ours to be replicated across the larger landscape. The other difficulty for attracting funders is the fact that reforestation credits are more expensive than any other carbon credits that are available. The challenge and opportunity for us is to effectively communicate the costs involved in actually managing these forests as carbon sinks, as ecosystems, and all of the co-benefits that are that come out of that,” said Lisa Gonzales-Kramer.

“As these kinds of greater awareness of the potential for reforestation rollout, eg Trillion Tree program, the challenge in looking at some of that is the permanence of those potential projects, which could depend on the stability around the globe, and in government, and in land ownership, etc. Any tree going into the ground is of value, but where folks want to make a major investment, they want it to be in something that’s going to have impact not only locally and nationally, but maybe globally, so it’s important to look for high quality reforestation projects and know how to evaluate or begin to inform themselves on high quality reforestation projects,” said PJ Marshall.

“Private landowners across the US own around 60% to 2/3 of the land. That’s where we’ve had to have incentives to make sure that those landowners can not only get paid for carbon, but also have other diversified income streams that keep those forests there for the project term and even longer. And that is in addition to the payments for carbon. So, some money for some selective harvesting of the trees. We usually do a very dense planting at first on a lot of our carbon projects in the Mississippi River Delta, for example. And then start thinning those trees out at about year 10 to 15 and continue to manage that forest through year 40 to mimic a hardwood natural ecosystem. So, we have carbon credits and timber selective harvesting. We also have folks coming to those private landowners for recreational activities, hunting, fishing, hiking, camping. And then there’s money from the USDA for wetland and conservation protection. When you start layering these income streams available for the landowners that increases the level of permanence in addition to what the standards and methodologies require,” said Jeremy Manion.

Four types of reforestation allow businesses to find the right type of reforestation to fit their goals

“One of the things that we’ve been doing is just trying to demystify the current options that exist related to reforestation today. We really try to understand what the business goal is and try to find the right type of reforestation to fit that goal. We’ve drawn four main types of reforestation. The first two are non-market-based solutions. One is doing community tree plantings and distribution events in cities and towns around the US and around the world. And these are good opportunities for corporations to get their employees and customers engaged in tree planning activities and in green infrastructure projects in more urban environments. The second type is looking at large-scale reforestation of public land, of the federal, state, county level, and working with folks like Lisa can make sure that we can drive additional funding to high quality projects. And a lot of our partners’ goals there are looking at watershed health, biomass accounting.

“The other two are carbon market programs. Forward looking units like with Climate Forward* that are designed to address future emissions. We’re still navigating through that process and we see some good potential on public lands. What we’re trying to figure out is how do companies appropriately make claim with these future emission profiles. And then we have the verified ex post credits, in which the emission removal has already taken place. That’s where we’re focusing on climate neutrality goals, carbon removal goals, net zero goals,” said Jeremy Manion.

New trends in reforestation

“So some things that we’re seeing that we’re taking special note for corporations right now is this shift in the market from companies that have been participating in buying reforestation carbon credits to not just want to offtake the credits, but to find a way to help expand these projects, help find a way to plant more trees, help find ways to quantify water benefits. And so, with that happening, we’re seeing opportunities to start to be able to stack investment and for corporations to be able to stack their goals together, not only on the carbon front, but on the water replenishment quality and quantity side. We’re seeing more and more corporations in addition to their carbon commitment, also setting tree planting goals, and trying to preserve large tracts of acreages or hectares. We’re trying to not only think about the carbon, which is what we transact these credits on, but all the other co-benefits getting much more detailed and quantified and telling that story, which helps companies validate these investments and want to do greater things moving forward,” said Jeremy Manion.

“How do we continue to manage and guarantee those trees are going to stay there and those ecosystem services is going to be performed? That’s where I think the Climate Forward* methodology has an interesting opportunity—to take the Forecasted Mitigation Units (FMUs) and convert them to the traditional offset unit, the CRT unit, over time. And I think that’s really where there’s a really interesting opportunity for corporations to make these investments upfront where the project makes sense, and then, as they make the claim, possibly make that conversion to the ex post unit, where the removal has already taken place,” said Jeremy Manion.

Footnote:

*The Climate Forward Reforestation Forecast Methodology provides ex ante crediting to shift project economics forward for reforestation carbon projects. For reforestation projects to occur, investment capital is required early in the process – for site acquisition, site preparation, seedlings, planting, and management. Under an offsets program, the project owner may have to wait decades for the reforested trees to grow sufficiently to sequester large amounts of carbon before seeing a return on investment through the sale of offsets. Under Climate Forward, the early investments necessary to cover initial costs for reforestation project economics to make sense see an earlier return on investment through FMUs, which are earned early in the project lifespan and can be sold to companies that are looking to mitigate emissions from future projects, whether due to compliance with regulations such as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) or due to voluntary commitments such as net zero building development.

Join us Friday, June 19 for the Soil Enrichment Protocol Workgroup Meeting 4

Carbon Capture and Storage Offers Potential for Climate Mitigation

One of the most discussed options for climate mitigation revolves around carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Significant capital has been invested into various CCS options, with a number of notable advances potentially offering credible solutions for carbon mitigation. The Reserve recently held an NACW 2020 Virtual Series webinar exploring the latest technological developments in the CCS arena, the applications that seem to have the best potential for commercialization, challenges that still need to be resolved and the latest on the economics of CCS, among other issues.

Below are some insights that we gained from panelists: JP Brisson, Partner, Latham & Watkins; Steve Bohlen, Program Manager, Energy and Homeland Security, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Maris Densmore, Manager of Carbon Capture Solutions, California Resources Corporation; Julio Friedmann, Senior Research Scholar, Center for Global Energy Policy, Columbia University; and Beth (Hardy) Valiaho, VP, Strategy & Stakeholder Relations, International CCS Knowledge Centre.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the technological process of capturing carbon dioxide, often from large point sources such as power plants and refineries, compressing it as a liquid, and injecting it in deep underground geologic formations for permanent sequestration.

Climate scientists highlight CCS as a key tool to achieving deep decarbonization and net zero goals, and its success in reducing criteria pollutants

“If you really want to get to deep decarbonization, if you want to get to net zero, CCS is required. There are many, many studies that support this, including from the International Energy Agency and the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. If you don’t have CCS, 50% of the models fail. They simply can’t solve what needs to be solved. And all of the two degree scenarios have a lot of CCS. If you have a 1.5 degree model, they not only have a lot of CCS, but they also have a lot of CO2 removal using things like bioenergy with CCS, or direct air capture with CCS,” said Julio Friedmann.

“Data on how CCS, especially post combustion CCS, impacts criteria pollutants exists and we know it from projects like Boundary Dam and Petra Nova in the US. It is generally the case that you see something like a 90 or 95% drop in criteria pollutants following post combustion retrofits. And in some cases, certain kinds of pollutants get even more profound drops, well beyond 99% reduction,” said Julio Friedmann.

“We actually get 100% of the SO2 off of the Boundary Dam facility, which is like acid rain. You have to get that out before you can even access CO2. 50% of the nitrous oxide is also removed from a separate process. And then you’re getting large amounts of particulate matter 2 and 2.5 and particulate matter 10. So this is something that, for instance, Asia is really looking at, because they’re looking to clean up the air before they even get to the fact that they’re cleaning up their CO2 in a lot of their coal plants. So sometimes we get asked about CCS application, just to clean up those things,” said Beth Valiaho.

CCS is not limited to coal

“A lot of people think about CCS as a specific kind of power technology, like it’s good for coal. That is simply not the case. If you look at a place like California, which is already extremely clean, the biggest levers you can pull are all CCS levers: natural gas capture in the power sector, light duty vehicle fuel reduction through the LCFS using CCS, and CCS on industry. So think about this like a Swiss Army knife, it can be applied in many sectors and to many positive ends,” said Julio Friedmann.

“Under the International Energy Agency Sustainable Development Scenario, 10 billion tons of CO2 needs to be captured from iron and steel, five billion tons from cement, and 14 billion tons from the chemicals industry. So there’s a lot of work to be done. And let’s not forget there’s also the option to get negative emissions and we see that coming out of the IPCC scenarios with bioenergy CCS,” said Beth Valiaho.

Facilities around the world are already doing CCS and costs are dropping

“This is proven and demonstrated. The Boundary Dam coal power plant has carbon capture on it. It’s the world’s first operating commercial scale CCS facility and has been operating since 2014. If you can clean up coal, you can clean up anything. With the Boundary Dam facility, it’s a post combustion capture. Coal is the dirtiest emission out there. You have to separate all the different particles, then you finally can access the CO2. Once we access the CO2, we compress it into a supercritical liquid, and put it under the ground. We’ve proven it. We’ve understood it. We’ve de-risked it. We can capture two million tons per year capacity at $45 US. In terms of capture, the Boundary Dam Plant has the ability to capture 90% of the emissions off the coal plant, making it much cleaner than any switch to natural gas combined cycle facility right now,” said Beth Valiaho.

“The technology is established. We’ve been capturing CO2 from industrial facilities since 1938. We’ve been doing deep injection and disposal of CO2 since 1972. We’ve run CCS projects just for climate benefits since 1996. Almost all of that has actually been done at industrial facilities, and so it’s important to realize that, again, this has a broad application base,” said Julio Friedmann. “One of the biggest CCS projects in the world and in the country is at an ethanol plant at Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur, Illinois. That project injects about a million tons of CO2 a year. And, in fact, cuts the carbon footprint of that fuel by 50%, so there’s a big carbon reduction associated with this. There are hundreds of ethanol plants around the country where the capture cost is very low, on the order of $20 or $30 a ton, and in those contexts, that’s low hanging fruit.”

“There are these low hanging fruit options, which are below $50 a ton. And we can get a certain amount of that today, say, using the 45Q tax credit. For other things like cement or natural gas power, the cost is incrementally higher. Since 2009, we now have 20 projects around the world. We have 12 companies offering technology that they can use to do the decarbonising. We have learning by doing. We have performance guarantees. We have technology advancements. And all of these have led to cost reductions,” said Julio Friedmann.

Location, location, location

“We’ve got a lot of options for storing carbon. The most common one is in saline formation. These are deep geologic formations that contain water with high concentrations of dissolved solids. These are very deep waters (minimum of 800 meters deep) and not something that humans are ever going to need or going to access. These locations are ubiquitous. They’re everywhere, but a lot of work is required when you actually want to potentially look at permanent sequestration. Another location is oil and gas fields. And this can be done through enhanced oil recovery, which is where a lot of the CCS to date has happened, where you inject CO2 into the reservoir to maintain pressure as you’re taking out oil and natural gas, you’re putting CO2 in to support that extraction, and also to permanently sequester the CO2. We know that they can actually hold the CO2 because, in some cases for millions of years, they’ve been holding methane and oil and other hydrocarbons. So these are a good place to do it, but they’re not quite as widespread. Some of the slightly less common options are in coal seams—you can inject CO2 into coal seams and the coal geochemically binds to the CO2 and so you get geochemical sequestration,” said Maris Densmore.

“(Regarding appropriate geologic formations) One place to look is where the world’s oil fields are, where Mother Nature has held hydrocarbons for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. We know those are pretty good containers to hold supercritical, or liquid, CO2. It turns out that in California, Mother Nature has been particularly kind. California exemplifies some of the best places around the planet to store CO2. And that is in relatively young sedimentary basins. In the central US and in California, there are very large sedimentary basins. They’re quite young—they are several million to a few, tens of millions years old. They have high porosity, a lot of pore space and they have good permeability, so you can inject the fluids relatively easily. Some of the best geology in the world is in California where some formations have 35 – 40% pore space. Globally, you look for oil and gas fields and sedimentary basins where there are interbedded sandstone—those are the rocks that typically have high porosity and permeability, and then, shales, compressed mud stones and so forth that actually seal the reservoirs and prevent migration of the fluids from escaping from the reservoir that they are intended to be injected into. North America has some of the best geology. Those are the needed features: young sedimentary basins, interbedded sandstones and shales of some thickness, and, of course, the world’s oil and gas fields,” said Steve Bohlen.

Addressing potential concerns for CCS

“We need to have education and time for the public to understand the depth and robustness of this technology, and the fact that it’s been proven throughout the world. And that, I think, will go a long way to gaining some public acceptance, as they understand this is a technology not terribly different from wind and solar, and other new technologies that are critical for our climate future,” said Steve Bohlen.

“As governments and regulatory bodies start to get serious about this, they establish protocols for what is becoming a more familiar term, which is reservoir surveillance. Monitoring is a very important part so that one actually knows that what you think is going to happen in the subsurface is actually happening. The good news is, if there is a well-chosen site, one that is well characterized and well understood through seismic surveys and other geophysical surveys, one can have pretty high confidence that the CO2 compressed as a liquid is going to stay there. It has a lot of the physical characteristics of oil. And we know that geology can contain fluids for millions of years, so it’s not a great surprise that we have fairly high confidence. And the 20 or so CCS projects around the world have confirmed this,” said Steve Bohlen.

Join us Thursday, June 11 for our next NACW 2020 Virtual Series webinar – Taking Full Stock: Opportunities and Challenges around Reforestation

The webinar recording of the NACW 2020 Virtual Series: Carbon Capture and Storage: Promising Developments on the Horizon discussion is now available!