An Arkansas company using long-term forestry practices to offset carbon emissions has had its first project in Louisiana verified for the sale of carbon credits and has already begun making sales, company officials said.
NativState’s project sets aside 20,000 acres of hardwood bottomland forests inside the Mississippi River Delta of northeastern Louisiana and western Mississippi for the program to offset emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change, officials added.
Home to black bears, alligators and a variety of other wildlife, the woodlands in the “Bottomland Forests of Louisiana Plains” project are part of the Mississippi Flyway, one of the nation’s primary routes for migratory birds.
Most of the Louisiana lands are in Tensas Parish along the Tensas River and near Tallulah east of Monroe, a company official said Friday.
With 450,000 acres of U.S. timberland already conserved, NativState is among a group of companies trying to amass large, wooded acreage for voluntary carbon credit markets. It is based in Conway, Arkansas but has a Louisiana office in Monroe.
Trees, which take in carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, naturally store carbon in their woody mass and have become a means of offsetting carbon emissions.
Last year, Louisiana forestry industry officials said local landowners were beginning to take interest in the carbon credit programs as a way to generate more revenue.
And the carbon credit program is another way rural Louisiana is drawing global interest in the drive to decarbonize power and industry. Carbon capture and sequestration, the controversial method of storing carbon dioxide emissions underground, also has drawn focus on the state’s wide-open spaces.
Mark Fortune, vice president of marketing for NativState, said the company’s conserved acreage has nearly doubled in the last year as interest in carbon credits has grown. More projects in Louisiana and elsewhere are being prepared this year for verification and new sales.
Fortune said he didn’t think a shift in presidential administration would change the growth trend.
Only a few Western states require carbon credits. In other states, the purchases are voluntary. Fortune explained that companies seek credits for a number of factors, including market demand for lower carbon products, investor and employee pressure to reduce a company’s carbon footprint, leadership philosophy, and a desire to buy offsets close to where the emissions are happening.
He said the companies are making long-term decisions not affected by shifting political winds.
“Our corporate partners that are looking to buy credits and offset emissions are planning much, much longer than any four-year administration term,” Fortune said.
He did not disclose what companies have bought credits from the new project in Louisiana, but said royalty checks for landowners’ share of the credit sales have started going out.
NativState’s business niche is to bring together collections of smaller and medium-sized landowners to build carbon credit projects. The new project in Louisiana and Mississippi involves 19 landowning families.
“NativState began with a vision of providing access for small landowners to engage in the global Voluntary Carbon Market,” Stuart Allen, NativState’s founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Our unique aggregation model is making that vision a reality. We are honored to work alongside our landowner and corporate partners to generate meaningful environmental and financial benefits at scale.”
The Louisiana Plains project had 400,000 credits available in its first batch and NativState projects having 2 million over the 40-year life of the project.
Though the price for specific credits can vary, Fortune explained, fees generally range from $13 to $30 per ton of carbon. Each ton is equivalent to one carbon credit.
To create credits, companies use methods that stretch out timber harvesting cycles more than typical commercial methods, thereby allowing trees to grow longer and hold more carbon. That difference in timber practices creates a net carbon storage gain that can be used for credits.
“There’s a concept in our business, or a mandate in our business, it’s called ‘additionality,’ which basically means change versus the business-and-as-usual case,” Fortune said. “So, when we go through a verification process, we’re making a case that says, ‘But for our program, the business-as-usual case for a lot of these forests is the potential for (more aggressive) harvesting.'”
NativState officials said verification of their credits was completed last month through ACR, one of the third-party registries that check that forestry projects deliver the carbon savings being promised.
NativState used the registry’s forestry and credit calculation methods, the company said. Founded in 1996, ACR, which used to go by the name American Carbon Registry, is the oldest registry in the voluntary market business.
