Microsoft announced Friday that it would purchase 3.7 million tonnes of carbon removal credits from CO280, a project developer working with Pulp and Paper Mills.
The purchase covers 12 years of emissions from the first carbon capture project of CO280 at its Gulf Coast factories. CO280 expects the facility to begin capturing CO2 in 2028.
A Microsoft purchase should help you achieve your goal of becoming a carbon negative company by 2030. This means removing more carbon than your business produces. But even with Microsoft’s enviable balance sheet, it’s a high order. The company generated 17.1 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2023.
To trim that number, Microsoft has purchased a large amount of renewable electricity, and has signed a contract to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to tackle things that cannot be replaced by renewable energy, which has helped offset what cannot be eliminated.
The Microsoft Project is the first of 12 people CO280 has in its work, co-founder and CEO Jonathan Rhone told TechCrunch exclusively. The Rhone, who sold power plants to the pulp and paper industry, said adding carbon capture to the process seemed like a natural fit.
“It seemed like an easy thing everyone had missed,” he said. The pulp and paper industry releases 88 million tonnes of biocarbon carbon per year.
CO280 is working with SLB (formerly known as Schlumberger) and SLB Capturi, a joint venture for Aker carbon capture, to build a carbon capture facility. Capture technology is based on widely used amine processes and can be attached to recovery boilers in large paper mills and helps reuse various chemicals. The boiler also releases a large amount of carbon trapped in the wood itself.
Carbon trapped in wood is usually dumped into the atmosphere. However, by drawing CO2 from this step of the process, the paper mill effectively removes carbon from the atmosphere by photosynthesis. “The tree does all the heavy lifting by capturing CO2 from the atmosphere,” Rhone said.
Once captured, carbon dioxide is sent 40 miles through the pipeline to saline, which is used for CO2 storage. Overall, this first phase of the project will occupy about 40% of the biogenerated carbon dioxide released by the factory and 30% of the total CO2 from the fossil fuels used to power the operation. CO280 is planning a second phase that doubles these numbers.
Rhone said the carbon capture unit will be built as a joint venture with a paper mill. In return, Mills receives a portion of their carbon credit income and helps them make money. CO280 sells credits for around $200 per metre, allowing buyers to claim tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, further reducing costs.
CO280 previously sold carbon removal credits to Frontier, an advanced market commitment created by Stripe, Google, Shopify, Meta and others.
Source link
