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TOP STORY
Global CO2 emissions up 1% in 2022 but growth tempered by higher clean energy use
Global energy-related CO2 emissions rose by just under 1% to a new high in 2022, reaching 36.8 billion tonnes, although the annual increase was tempered by higher clean energy use offsetting the impact of increased coal and oil demand as the global economy grew by over 3%, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
AMERICAS
California invalidates compliance offsets from Wisconsin project for second time
California regulator ARB on Thursday announced it has for the second time voided compliance offsets from a Wisconsin-based livestock project, after the initiative was found once again to be in violation of a state waste management permit and groundwater standards.
WCI Markets: CCAs spike to 4-mth high on regulatory announcements, WCAs resume trading
California Carbon Allowance (CCA) prices shot up to new 2023 highs this week following a robust Q1 auction clear and encouraging regulatory announcements from several California ARB officials, while Washington Carbon Allowances (WCAs) recorded their first trades in months after the programme’s inaugural auction took place.
Analysts lower 2023 CCA price forecast, expect premium Q1 RGGI auction settlement
California Carbon Allowance (CCA) prices will trend slightly lower this year as GHG output drops from the power and industrial sectors, while next week’s quarterly RGGI auction will clear at a significant premium to current secondary market levels, according to a recent analyst report.
US govt allows California’s Diablo Canyon power plant to continue operation during renewal application
A US government agency granted an exemption to the operator of California’s Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant that allows the facility to run while the agency considers its license renewal application, according to a notice filed on Thursday.
New York biomass facility’s RGGI non-compliance extends into 2022
A New York biomass-fired power facility remains the only entity non-compliant with the RGGI cap-and-trade programme’s true-up deadline for the sixth straight year, according to CO2 Allowance Tracking System (COATS) data published Thursday.
US green group report takes aim at agriculture offset markets, citing Big Ag ‘power grab’
An international network of environmental organisations on Wednesday cautioned against support for US agricultural carbon markets, citing risks that the offsets may fail to live up to environmental claims while enabling the biggest agribusiness corporations (Big Ag) to entrench market power and greenwash operations.
VOLUNTARY
INTERVIEW: Xpansiv could add ratings to standardised carbon credit products
Xpansiv, the owner of the CBL marketplace, could include rating agency grades into the specification of its standardised products for the voluntary carbon market, a company executive told Carbon Pulse on Thursday as the firm gears up for its first carbon credit auction.
INTERVIEW: Insuring credits to ensure voluntary carbon puts a price on risk
Placing a value on risk when buying voluntary carbon market offsets will ease concerns of reputational damage and drive up demand, the founder of a carbon insurance firm that has just received $7 million in seed funding told Carbon Pulse.
Ratings firm downgrades Asian renewables project, puts REDD scheme on watch
A carbon credit ratings agency has downgraded a Verra-accredited renewables project in Vietnam, while putting three more on watch for a potential ratings change.
EMEA
Euro Markets: EUAs drop to two-week low amid steady selling
EU carbon permit prices fell to their lowest in more than two weeks on Thursday, unwinding the gains that saw the market set a new record last week as traders continued trimming long positions in reaction to the recent welter of cautious price forecasts.
EU tries to help energy-intensive companies via joint gas purchasing
Large industrial companies in the EU will be able to buy gas attained via the European Commission’s joint gas purchasing scheme in an effort to lower costs for companies and consumers in the EU, a top official at the Commission told journalists on Thursday.
EU extends investigation into Germany’s lignite phaseout aid
The European Commission has extended the scope of its ongoing in-depth inquiry into a German compensation schemes to support two of the biggest emitters in the EU ETS for the early phaseout of their lignite power facilities, the executive announced on Thursday.
ASIA PACIFIC
Developer EKI signs partnership with UK smart metering firm to enhance digital MRV for biogas offsets
Indian carbon offset project developer EKI Energy has formed a collaboration with UK-based Inclusive Energy (IE) to enhance monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of energy projects in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), it announced on Thursday.
Mitsui subsidiary to launch marketplace for J-Credits
An offset trading platform established by a subsidiary of Japanese trading house Mitsui has said it will start offering trade in units from Japan’s J-Credit programme, making it the country’s first privately-owned marketplace to trade such credits beyond the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
INTERNATIONAL
No silver bullet for decarbonising industry, global modelling work suggests
Industrial greenhouse gas emissions are projected to rise globally by 2050 without additional government interventions, according to modelling analysis published Thursday, but mid-century decarbonisation is still technologically possible even as this becomes more costly as fossil-powered facilities continue to be built.
BIODIVERSITY (FREE TO READ)
Australian philanthropy group commits A$240 mln to ocean conservation, R&D efforts
An Australian philanthropic organisation has committed A$35 million ($23.6 mln) to safeguard some 18 million square kilometres of global ocean biodiversity, as part of a wider A$240 mln pledge made to ocean conservation and research.
Biodiversity Pulse Weekly: Thursday March 2, 2023
A weekly summary of our biodiversity news plus bite-sized updates from around the world. All articles in this edition are free to read (no subscription required).
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CONFERENCES
Argus Asia Carbon Conference – Mar. 14-16, Sarawak, Malaysia: Organised by Argus Media in collaboration with the Ministry of Energy and Environmental Sustainability Sarawak (MEESty), and with host sponsor Samling Group, the Asia Carbon Conference will take place on Mar. 14-16 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. Join us for the first industry leadership conference for carbon offsetting and trading in Asia to get ahead of your competitors in a rapidly growing global market. This is your opportunity to interact, learn, and network, for the answers you need on fundamental questions about carbon offsets: how do they work, and how might they impact Asia? Find out more
North American Carbon World (NACW) 2023 – Mar. 21-23, Anaheim: For 20 years, the NACW conference has been the place for carbon professionals working in North American carbon markets and climate policy to learn, collaborate, and network. Taking place Mar. 21-23 in Anaheim, California, NACW 2023 will dive into new policies and developments that will shape and scale carbon markets and climate solutions with integrity, ambition, and equity. Register now to gain actionable insights for bold climate solutions and participate in premier networking opportunities with an active and engaged audience to strengthen your organization’s strategy for navigating the carbon landscape.
European Climate Summit (ECS 2023) – Mar. 28-30, Lisbon: Registration for the 5th edition of the European Climate Summit organised by IETA and partners is open. The ECS brings together leading private sector experts and policymakers from both the carbon and energy world, to analyse and discuss the current developments and pressing challenges. The summit provides a discussion and networking forum for policymakers, business leaders, and innovators involved in building, scaling, and collaborating on markets for net zero. The event will feature high-level plenaries, cross-cutting deep dives, interactive side events, and quality networking opportunities. Registration here
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BITE-SIZED UPDATES FROM AROUND THE WORLD
Carbon Pulse has teamed up with CME Group to provide its clients with regular updates on the global carbon markets. Check out these briefs for the latest insights on pressing trends and events impacting markets, published every other week. Registration required
INTERNATIONAL
IRA chat – European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will travel to Washington next Friday to meet US President Joe Biden for talks including on the latter’s Inflation Reduction Act, Brussels said in a note late on Thursday that explained how the German politician will first meet Canadian PM Justin Trudeau. The EU and the US have clashed for months over Washington’s flagship green subsidies initiative and its potential harm to the global competitiveness of the EU’s industries. The following week the European Commission is due to present three new legislative proposals for its energy and industrial policy billed as an IRA response.
Green deal – Singapore has inked a deal with the UK aimed at creating business opportunities in the clean energy, low-emission transport, carbon markets, and sustainable finance sectors. The UK-Singapore Green Economy Framework will support economic growth and job creation, while encouraging the decarbonisation of economic activities, noted Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI). The cooperation will start with a focus on three key pillars: green transport; low-carbon energy and technologies; and carbon markets and sustainable finance. Read Carbon Pulse’s coverage of a similar but far more detailed agreement made between Singapore and Australia last October.
Burning boreal forests – Wildfires in the boreal forests that ring the globe’s far northern latitudes are emitting rapidly increasing amounts of CO2, according to an international study using new satellite technology, the Financial Times reported Thursday. Burning boreal forests across Eurasia and North America in 2021 released a record 1.76 bln tonnes of CO₂ — representing 23% of the world’s entire CO2 emissions from fire. Global energy-related CO2 emissions reached a record of almost 37 bln tonnes in the same year. “Boreal forests could be a time bomb of carbon and the recent increases in wildfire emissions make me worry that the clock is ticking,” said Steven Davis of the University of California, Irvine and co-author of the study, released at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington and published in the journal Science.
AMERICAS
Slip sliding away – US President Joe Biden’s far-reaching clean energy goals are slipping further out of reach despite record-breaking legislative support from the last Congress, according to two new analyses, EnergyWire reported Thursday. Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act promised $270 bln in tax incentives for renewable energy, electric vehicles, and other clean energy projects. While clean energy development is now “hard-wired” into the economy, the pace of the transition will fall short unless private investment ramps up dramatically, according to BloombergNEF’s 2022 fact book and an analysis by the Energy Futures Finance Forum, a research project led in part by former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Ethan Zindler, BloombergNEF Americas head, said that for every dollar invested today in clean energy worldwide, slightly more than a dollar is going into fossil fuel projects.
Reviving reeling reactors – The Biden administration said on Thursday it is offering $1.2 bln in aid to extend the life of distressed nuclear power plants which, for the first time, could offer funding to a plant that has recently closed, Reuters reported. President Joe Biden’s climate team believes nuclear power is a crucial source of virtually carbon-free electricity needed to be maintained and expanded to reach his pledge of what it calls 100% clean electricity by 2035. But faced with rising security costs and competition from wind and solar energy and power generated with cheap natural gas, about a dozen US reactors have closed since 2013, leaving 92 across the country.
Gulf Coast CCS – Carbon capture and storage company 1PointFive announced on Thursday that it has leased more than 22,200 ha along the Texas Gulf Coast, through an affiliate, to develop a CCS hub with the capacity to hold approximately 1.2 bln tonnes of CO2. 1PointFive leverages the carbon management experience of its parent company, oil producer Occidental. The Bluebonnet Hub is located in Chambers, Liberty, and Jefferson counties near refineries, chemical plants, and manufacturing facilities along the Gulf Coast from Beaumont to Houston. The hub, which is expected to be operational in 2026, will provide for CO2 captured off-site to be securely stored in saline formations that are not associated with oil and gas production. Separately, Occidental said it is delaying the startup date of what’s aiming to be the world’s largest plant to capture CO2 directly from the air, even as the company unveils plans for a pipeline network to carry the GHG in Louisiana, E&E News reported Wednesday. Occidental announced the delay for the DAC project near Odessa, Texas, in financial materials posted ahead of the company’s Q422 earnings call Tuesday. It said the plant, which would extract emissions directly from the air, now will not be operational until mid-2025.
Steel the night away – United States Steel Corporation and CarbonFree Chemicals Holdings on Thursday announced they have signed an MOU to jointly pursue the capture of CO2 emissions generated from US Steel’s Gary Works manufacturing plant using CarbonFree’s SkyCycle technology. If a definitive agreement is reached, the project is expected to capture and mineralise up to 50,000 tCO2 annually. CarbonFree’s patented SkyCycle technology captures carbon emissions from hard-to-abate industrial sources before entering the atmosphere, converts the CO2 into the specialty chemical precipitated calcium carbonate (PCC), and produces hydrochloric acid (HCl) as a co-product.
Next-gen nuclear – Dow Inc. and private company X-energy said on Wednesday they have agreed to develop and demonstrate the first grid-scale next-generation nuclear reactor for an industrial site in North America, Reuters reported. The X-energy Xe-100 plant featuring four high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors is set to be built at one of Dow’s sites on the US Gulf Coast. The companies plan to finalise the location this year. Nuclear reactor developers want to build a new generation of atomic plants that are smaller than today’s, but if successful, could be used in a wide variety of settings from industrial plants to rural towns to help transition off fossil fuels that emit large amounts of GHGs.
RNG investment – Enbridge is paying $80 mln (C$109 mln) for a 10% stake in a US food waste recovery and renewable natural gas company, and said it could expand the business with up to $1 bln worth of new anaerobic digester projects, The Globe and Mail reported Wednesday. Calgary-based Enbridge said it bought into Divert, a 16-year-old company that focuses on reducing waste and turning food scraps into low-carbon fuel that can be injected into any natural gas pipeline network. The deal represents an expansion of Enbridge’s strategy that has so far focused on providing biogas upgrading and renewable natural gas injection services for producers in Ontario. Its gas distribution arm set a target to increase RNG supply in the province tenfold to 5 petajoules by 2025. The company, best known for its pipeline and gas distribution businesses, calls RNG a “key pillar of its energy transition strategy.” Divert, based in Massachusetts, said Enbridge’s equity investment is in addition to $20 mln from a fundraising round led by its current investor, Ara Partners.
EMEA
Green flying – An advertising campaign by Lufthansa claiming that its green initiatives were protecting the world has been banned by the UK advertising watchdog, which ruled it was misleading consumers over the environmental impact of flying, the Guardian reports. The country’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) launched an investigation into the campaign – which featured a plane with an image of the Earth on its underside and the strapline: “Connecting the world. Protecting its future” – over concerns the German airline was giving consumers a misleading impression of its environmental impact. Lufthansa said the tag line was open to interpretation and consumers would not see it as an absolute promise relating to the environment or that its planes did not cause harm. It said the purpose of the poster campaign, which contained a link to its Make Change Fly environmental campaign website, was to address the need to reduce the impact of flying and making people aware of what Lufthansa is doing.
Back to basics – Finnish utility Fortum said in full-year results on Thursday said it would focus on Nordic low-carbon energy again, after its five-year-long conquest of Germany’s Uniper ended last year with a loss of nearly €6 bln for it. Fortum is recovering from a tumultuous year during which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices soaring in Europe and forced Germany to nationalise its subsidiary Uniper. It added that its business is now fully stabilised and that its new strategy was to focus on Nordic hydro, wind, and nuclear power generation which drove a strong financial performance for it in Q4. Norway’s largest utility Statkraft meanwhile, posted record Q4 operating profits of NOK 23.7 bln ($2.28 bln) as high power prices and a profitable trading business offset lower overall production. (Reuters)
Eastern promise – The federal German government and eastern state governments continue to clash on how a coal exit in 2030 instead of 2038 would impact the country’s energy supply security, newspaper Die Zeit reported. Economy and climate minister Robert Habeck said the government will not do anything that puts supply security in danger and that pulling the phase-out forward, as it has been agreed for the western coal state of North-Rhine Westphalia, would only happen once a safe alternative energy supply source has been made reliably available. The state premiers of eastern Brandenburg and Saxony warned that the country continues to need lignite as a power source and to keep energy prices affordable and claim that grid expansion won’t be able to keep pace. Saxony-Anhalt’s leader said the government’s aims were impossible to achieve due to technical and practical reasons. (Clean Energy Wire)
Vent intent – Member state amendments to the EU’s draft methane regulation would allow coal mines to release additional GHGs equivalent to the combined annual CO2 emissions of Belgium and Czechia, EurActiv reports. According to clean energy think-tank Ember. It found that the latest revisions to the proposal will only cut methane emissions from coal mines by 47%, well below its stated goal of 58% and causing an extra 2.2 Mt of methane emissions by 2050 – 180 MtCO2e.
ASIA PACIFIC
Green sweep — The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, the country’s corporate watchdog, has announced plans to investigate a number of businesses for potential greenwashing, following an internet sweep which found more than half of the businesses reviewed made concerning claims about their environmental or sustainability practices. the ACCC said of the 247 businesses reviewed during the sweep, 57% were identified to have made concerning claims about their environmental credentials. It said the cosmetic, clothing, and footwear and food and drink sectors were found to have the highest proportion of concerning claims among the industries scrutinised, however other sectors also had a “significant proportion” of concerning claims. ACCC Deputy Chair Catirona Lowe said it appeared rather than making legitimate changes to their practices and procedures, some businesses are relying on false or misleading claims. She added that the watchdog already had several active investigations underway across the packaging, consumer goods, food manufacturing and medical device sectors for alleged environmental claims.
Clean deal – Marubeni Corporation signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Public Investment Fund (PIF), one of the world’s largest and most impactful sovereign wealth funds, to set out a framework for the development of a clean hydrogen project in Saudi Arabia, a press release from Marubeni stated. Under the framework of the MOU, Marubeni and PIF will initially conduct a feasibility study for producing clean hydrogen in Saudi Arabia, with the aim to supply clean hydrogen to both domestic and international markets. PIF is playing a critical role in advancing Saudi Arabia’s economic transformation as well as diversification, and is actively developing projects which will help the country achieve its net zero GHG emissions target by 2060. Marubeni, as a leading developer and operator of international IPP and IWP, has ownership interests in four projects in Saudi Arabia. It will proceed with this project together with PIF utilising the knowledge it has acquired through its business development and operations in Saudi Arabia.
VOLUNTARY
Sustainability tie-up – Sustainable investment solution provider u impact on Thursday announced it has joined forces with specialised green banking software provider ecolytiq to introduce innovative sustainable investment products to a wider branch of private investors. Through a combination of u impact’s interactive investment sustainability analysis and the ecolytiq Sustainability-as-a-Service software, this partnership will see two sustainability fintech specialists join forces to increase the accessibility and transparency of sustainable investing, they said in a press release.
AND FINALLY…
Cow cost – The Danish Climate Council advised the government this week to slap a 33% tax on beef as part of a strategy to deter Danes from eating food that’s harmful to the planet. Danes consume twice as much pork, beef, and dairy as the global average, and there are more than twice as many pigs for slaughter in Denmark than people, as pork is a part of the national cuisine. The Scandinavian country would reduce its emissions by between 2.6 and 3.9 MtCO2e if Danes reduced their meat intake to 350 grams per week, from the current 1 kilogram per week. (Reuters)
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