Carbon Pulse

California Carbon Allowance (CCA) prices vacillated this week as activity remained light ahead of the Q2 WCI auction, while bid-side interest in RGGI Allowance (RGAs) was robust on reported demand from emitters.

Frontloading more EUA sales over the next two years to raise cash for the bloc’s Innovation Fund would help accelerate the clean energy transition with limited bearish impact on carbon prices, ICIS analysts said in a position paper that suggests various scenarios for an upcoming EU proposal.

Offset project developer and retailer Bluesource on Thursday announced it has received the first offsets from improved forest management (IFM) projects explicitly tagged as removals, while voluntary carbon market (VCM) participants are already witnessing the price premium commanded by such credits over reduction-based units.  

Utility Dominion Energy on Thursday asked Virginia to suspend its existing rate case to recover RGGI allowance costs, as the company anticipates Governor Glenn Youngkin (D) will remove the state from the power sector cap-and-trade programme.

Senior MEPs are nearing agreement on parts of EU ETS reform, with alignments emerging on expanding the market to new sectors and backloading cap cuts, according to EU sources on Thursday.

Criticism abounds for carbon credits stemming from projects that do not result in any additional climate benefits, encouraging experts to figure out how the UN’s new crediting mechanism can avoid making the same mistakes in the post-2020 era.

A record volume of carbon credits traded on Xpansiv market’s CBL platform in Q1, although activity dropped sharply in April, the company announced Thursday.

California-based tech firm Pachama on Thursday announced it has raised an additional $55 million to develop forest offset projects and technologies that unlock the potential of nature, the latest instance of massive investment sums flowing into the voluntary carbon market (VCM).

Stakeholders have largely welcomed the European Commission’s initiative to develop a carbon removal certification mechanism, so long as emissions cuts remain the EU's priority and the bloc clarifies the relationship between removals, the EU ETS, and the voluntary carbon market.

China’s central bank is ramping up its support for the coal industry in a latest sign that energy security concerns are currently overriding climate policy priorities for the world's top greenhouse gas emitter.

EUA prices rose above €91 for the first time in ten weeks as technical buying emerged after the market broke through a key resistance level, while energy markets continued to advance amid the prospects of a ban on Russian oil.

Italy’s Enel and Portugal’s EDP both reported a surge year-on-year in ETS-covered fossil generation in Q1 2022 due to weak hydro production and a rise in demand, according to quarterly reports.

The longer-term fate of Papua New Guinea’s moratorium on new REDD+ projects for the voluntary market hangs in the balance amid a complex domestic political situation, with next month’s election adding to uncertainty over whether the government will lift the ban by 2023, as some have speculated.

Australian oil and gas company Woodside plans to develop a carbon-to-products pilot project with the use of technologies being developed by two US-based companies, it announced on Thursday.

A US-based technology start-up has pre-sold at least $14 million of its tokens backed by nature-based offsets, after striking a deal to sell at least $10 mln worth of credits to a mobile blockchain platform, it announced Thursday.

The concept of handing out offsets to projects adding carbon to soils is flawed because of higher-than-expected mineralisation levels, and funding would be better spent preparing soils to be more resilient to a changing climate, a study has found.

The Timor-Leste government has struck an agreement with a major South Korean emitter to develop large-scale forest carbon opportunities as well as CCS.

A daily summary of our news plus bite-sized updates from around the world.

Intensifying wildfires and tree-based pathogens may completely wipe out the portions of California’s forest offset buffer pool that are filled by those risk categories, researchers argued in a new study.

*PREMIUM LISTING - As part of Volkswagen ClimatePartner, you will be responsible for the quality assurance of carbon offset projects being in the initiation phase or already in the portfolio. You will ensure compliance with the standards both with contractors and projects developers.