Red Trail Energy ethanol plant is first to enter carbon osetmarket
A carbon capture operation at a western North Dakota ethanol plant is the first to go on a market for buying and selling credits for carbon dioxide removal.
Red Trail Energy deployed carbon capture and storage at its plant near Richardton in 2022. The practice prevents heat-trapping CO2 emissions from entering into the atmosphere and, in this case, sends 180,000 metric tons of CO2 6,500 feet underground for storage in the Broom Creek Formation every year. That has the same impact as taking 40,055 gas-powered cars off the road every year, according to a calculator from the Environmental Protection Agency. Red Trail’s plant sits right above the geology necessary for carbon storage in western North Dakota.
Last week, Red Trail announced it had been approved to sell credits from its carbon capture operation on the Puro Registry, which acts as a voluntary carbon market. Certification involved working with clean energy advisory firm EcoEngineers to credit the company’s carbon capture methods as up to the
standards necessary for the registry which is backed by Nasdaq, a major stock exchange.
Relatively nascent carbon capture technology can make a facility net-zero when successful, meaning it prevents as much CO2 from entering into the atmosphere as the facility produces. Since the corn grown to produce ethanol acts as a sink for the CO2 as well, this facility creates net-negative emissions or CO2 removal. The combination of natural and mechanical carbon storage is known as bioenergy and
carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. CO2 removal is understood as a necessary element for efforts to limit global warming from reaching 1.5 or even 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to a 2022 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is due mostly to the decreasing likelihood that other efforts to reduce emissions will move quickly enough for those thresholds not to be broken in the coming decades. So far Red Trail has registered 150,000 CO2 removal certificates from its 14 months of carbon capture operations. Each credit is equivalent to a metric ton of
CO2.
Almost every major industry faces growing pressures to decarbonize and for some — such as manufacturing and heavy transport — it is especially difficult. Voluntary carbon markets allow companies, governments and people to buy credits that offset their emissions.
