JPMorgan makes one of the biggest investments ever on carbon capture

JPMorgan Chase and Co just announced one of the largest investments to date in carbon removal technologies. The bank has agreed to spend more than $200 million on several long-term agreements to remove and store the equivalent of 800,000 metric tons (mt) of CO2.

The company revealed its first $75 million commitment in April through Frontier, a carbon removal fund that was launched by payment processor Stripe. Frontier has attracted several tech giants such as Alphabet, Meta and Shopify, who have collectively pledged $1 billion to speed up the development of carbon removal technologies.

JPMorgan signed a landmark $20 million agreement with Climeworks, a global leader in carbon dioxide removal (CDR) that operates the world’s only commercial direct-air capture (DAC) project.

The agreement, which is one of the largest of its kind, will see Climeworks remove the equivalent of 25,000 mt of CO2 from the atmosphere over a nine-year period. Last year, JPMorgan helped the Swiss startup raise $650 million to scale its DAC project.

The Wall Street bank also recently signed a deal with Charm Industrial, a carbon storage company that converts excess organic plant waste into a bio-oil, to remove and store the equivalent of approximately 28,500 mt of CO2 over five years.

Although the carbon removal market is still in its infancy, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects the equivalent of 10 gigatons of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050.

Carbon capture initiatives have been gaining momentum, with several funds like Frontier being launched to help advance carbon removal technologies. However, another essential component for reaching net-zero goals is carbon avoidance through direct carbon reduction measures, such as the household device carbon projects developed by Base Carbon Inc. (NEO:BCBN) (OTCQX:BCBNF).

Unlike carbon removal initiatives which will eventually remove existing CO2 once they are operational, Base Carbon provides funding into projects and climate action projects that immediately avoid carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere.

Instead of focusing on removing existing CO2, Base Carbon sees it this way - one ton of carbon avoided today is one less ton that needs to be removed later.

Unlike low-quality carbon-avoidance projects, Base Carbon is offering ongoing solutions that are already improving thousands of lives, eliminating millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, and strengthening this company's place in the growing industry. This strategy delivers immediate carbon reduction, benefits to the project communities and a return on capital invested.

Base Carbon Reports First Revenues from Carbon Credit Sales

On June 6th, Base Carbon announced that it has received the first revenues from the sale of carbon credits generated by the Vietnam Household Devices Project under the offtake agreement with Citigroup Global Markets Limited.

The cookstove and water purifier carbon reduction project, which was launched last May alongside developer, Sustainability Investment Promotion and Development Joint Stock Company (SIPCO), involved the distribution of 850,000 cookstoves and 364,000 water purifiers to participating households in Vietnam.

Base Carbon facilitated a carbon credit offtake arrangement for the initial 7.4 million carbon credits issued by the project between Citigroup and SIPCO.

The company has now received full payment for the original 1,020,903 carbon credits created by cookstoves that were forwarded to Citigroup and expects the first carbon credit issuance and associated revenue for the project's water purifier section to follow in the near term.

The success of the Vietnam household devices project reveals Base Carbon's role in bridging the funding gap between project developers and consumers seeking high-quality carbon credits. The Vietnam Household Devices project is a joint effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve living conditions in project regions, and provide a return on investment.

Efficient household devices are critical for decreasing carbon emissions while also providing millions of individuals in families and communities with meaningful and verified social and health co-benefits. One-third of the world's population cooks on polluting fuels such as wood, charcoal, and kerosene. According to the Clean Cooking Alliance, this form of "dirty cooking" contributes significantly to global carbon emissions and kills approximately four million people each year owing to respiratory ailments.

Base Carbon sees project co-benefits as critical drivers of project quality and risk mitigators for stakeholders, and they are quantified based on expected increases in living standards.