How to produce carbon credits

Many different types of businesses can create and sell carbon credits by reducing, capturing, and storing emissions through different processes.

Some of the most popular types of carbon offsetting projects include:

Renewable energy projects,

Improving energy efficiency,

Carbon and methane capture and sequestration

Land use and reforestation.

Renewable energy projects have already existed long before carbon credit markets came into vogue. Many countries in the world are blessed with a natural wealth of renewable energy resources. Countries such as Brazil or Canada that have many lakes and rivers, or nations like Denmark and Germany with lots of windy regions. For countries like these, renewable energy was already an attractive and low-cost source of power generation, and they now provide the added benefit of carbon offset creation.

Energy efficiency improvements complement renewable energy projects by reducing the energy demands of current buildings and infrastructure. Even simple everyday changes like swapping your household lights from incandescent bulbs to LED ones can benefit the environment by reducing power consumption. On a larger scale, this can involve things like renovating buildings or optimizing industrial processes to make them more efficient, or distributing more efficient appliances to the needy.

Carbon and methane capture involves implementing practices that remove CO2 and methane (which is over 20 times more harmful to the environment than CO2) from the atmosphere.

Methane is simpler to deal with, as it can simply be burned off to create CO2. While this sounds counterproductive at first, since methane is over 20 times more harmful to the atmosphere than CO2, converting one molecule of methane to one molecule of CO2 through combustion still reduces net emissions by more than 95%.

For carbon, capture often happens directly at the source, such as from chemical plants or power plants. While the injection of this captured carbon underground has been used for various purposes like enhanced oil recovery for decades already, the idea of storing this carbon long-term, treating it much like nuclear waste, is a newer concept.

Land use and reforestation projects use Mother Nature’s carbon sinks, the trees and soil, to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. This includes protecting and restoring old forests, creating new forests, and soil management.

Plants convert CO2 from the atmosphere into organic matter through photosynthesis, which eventually ends up in the ground as dead plant matter. Once absorbed, the CO2 enriched soil helps restore the soil’s natural qualities – enhancing crop production while reducing pollution.