An oil giant is spending $100 million to preserve US forests
livemint.comA French oil giant is paying $100 million to keep American trees standing. TotalEnergies is purchasing carbon credits that cover timberland in 10 states ranging from the Louisiana lowlands to the Lake States, the Adirondack Mountains in New York and the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia and Kentucky. The outlay is likely the largest ever in the opaque market designed to forestall tree harvesting in the U.S.
The idea behind the offsets is that rather than cut down trees for wood, leave them standing and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. Companies often voluntarily purchase offsets to satisfy their own emissions targets rather than to meet regulatory mandates. Those sold by major U.S.
timberland owners have been a fairly resilient pocket in a carbon-credit market otherwise plagued by allegations of fraud and overstated environmental benefits. TotalEnergies said it is amassing offsets to make up for greenhouse-gas emissions that it cannot eliminate by 2030. Before this year, it had committed $725 million to offsets generated by preserving or restoring natural carbon sinks around the world, including wetlands and forests.
The seller in its latest purchase is Aurora Sustainable Lands, which was created two years ago to carry out Wall Street’s biggest wager yet on forest offsets. Investors led by T. Rowe Price Group subsidiary Oak Hill Advisors—best known as a corporate-debt investor—paid about $1.8 billion for nearly 1.7 million acres of hardwood forests spread over 17 Eastern states.
The latest sale will involve about 740,000 acres. Aurora has since reduced harvest volumes by more than 50% on the properties, said Aurora Chief Executive Jamie Houston. “Historically, harvests were based on
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