How can we see the tangible, real-world impact of the carbon credits we buy from a project? It’s a request we often get from our Lune customers. 

So, to help bring the impact of business carbon offsetting to life, we’re publishing monthly updates from Lune’s library of curated, high-quality carbon offset projects (we won’t have updates for every project every time, but we’ll share what we do) – and this is the update for January 2023. 

To support any of the projects mentioned in this blog, go to the Lune dashboard to buy carbon credits (you’ll need to sign-up or log-in to access the projects.)

1PointFive – Direct Air Capture 💨

1PointFive signed an agreement with American football team the Houston Texans, who will be purchasing enough carbon removal credits from 1PointFive’s first Direct Air Capture plant to offset the carbon emissions for the team’s air travel to away games for the next three seasons. They also plan to collaborate to educate fans about the role of carbon removal as a climate change solution.

Carbon Engineering, the Direct Air Capture technology provider for 1PointFive, also published their year in review for 2022, sharing their progress over the last year towards their aim of deploying Direct Air Capture at scale, globally.

It includes:

• Major milestones on construction of DAC plants using their technology, including 1PointFive’s sites
• Continued research and innovation, such as an improved carbon capture material which increases efficiency of their DAC technology by 20%
• Climate policy progress made via Carbon Engineering collaborations, including progress on the first DAC plant planned for the UK.

Read the full year in review from Carbon Engineering

CarbonCure – concrete mineralisation 🏗️

Scientific American featured Carbon Cure in an article last month discussing the environmental impact of building materials and how it could be addressed through a circular economy approach.

Concrete is the world’s most widely used building material and is carbon intensive, responsible for 8% of global human-made global emissions. But there are innovative solutions that can reduce this impact, and even make concrete climate positive – like CarbonCure, injecting captured CO2 into concrete during the production process to make concrete itself a permanent store for carbon emissions. 

Read the full article

Charm Industrial – Bio-oil sequestration 🛢

Charm Industrial is one of the projects included in the Frontier portfolio – an advance market commitment (AMC) to purchase $925 million of carbon removal, by some of the world’s largest companies, including Stripe and McKinsey. 

Frontier released a video about Charm Industrial, which includes a behind-the-scenes look at the project:

Living Carbon – biotech-enhanced reforestation 🌳

Living Carbon released their ‘deep time’ project, taking a look back at the Earth’s 4.54 billion years of history to see what lessons can be learnt for our era of climate solutions. 

The project features fascinating insights on the Earth as a snowball, how the first trees nearly froze earth, and more. 

Rimba Raya – forest conservation 🌳

Rimba Raya has been officially verified by the Sistem Registri Nasional (National Registry System, SRN) in Indonesia – meaning that it has been validated as complying with Indonesia’s regulations on carbon projects. It’s the first REDD+ carbon project to achieve this status.

In October 2022 Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment & Forestry set out a framework for carbon trading which enforces that all carbon projects hosted in Indonesia must be registered, validated, and verified by the SRN to ensure real impact is made. 

UNDO – enhanced weathering 🪨

Last month Puro.earth announced that their enhanced rock weathering is now approved – the first methodology for enhanced weathering projects to follow to produce real, verified, trusted carbon benefits.

Puro.Earth worked closely with the UNDO team to develop this new methodology.

And, in other news, UNDO also shared a video of their crushed basalt rock being spread at a corn farm in Washington, complete with freshly fallen snow! ❄️

Running Tide – ocean carbon removal 🌊

Throughout 2022, Running Tide have been building up their operations at their Iceland sites, to an 11 person team across 3 sites in December 2022, and they’ve already seen huge wins:

• Support from Mayor Sævar Freyr Þráinsson, bringing ‘new energy and future focus’ to Iceland.
• Scaling up research efforts, with a macroalgae lab and nursery and tech-enabled seedstock production facility.
• Producing over 22,000 tons of biomass ready to be put into buoys along with kelp seeds – and deployed.
• Deploying sensor systems into the North Atlantic in December, enabling the team to collect detailed monitoring data on their kelp buoys, and to test how their monitoring equipment fares out in the open ocean.

The team has also been focusing on their quantification and verification methods in 2022 – aiming to increase confidence in the real-world carbon impact of their ocean carbon removal techniques. A big part of this has been the setting up of their Scientific Advisory Board, and the expertise this has offered the team. 

For an inside look at progress so far, take a look at this Twitter thread from Max Chalfin, Head of Research at Running Tide.

Want to know more?

Curious about how we go about sourcing and evaluating the high-quality carbon projects we include in our library at Lune? Take a look at our project evaluation guide.