A Co Limerick dairy farmer and forestry owner has secured close to €9,000 for the carbon credits from 100ac of semi-mature woodland.
John Hourigan told the Farming Independent that there was strong interest in the carbon credits from his plantations, which he had offered to a number of local firms.
Mr Hourigan milks 150 cows and keeps replacements on 245ac of grazing ground at Murroe in east Limerick. However, he also owns 204ac of forestry in three sections in counties Tipperary, Clare and Limerick.
Based on calculations by St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, he estimates that the plantations sequester 3t/ac of CO2 on average each year. The 300t of CO2 sequestered by a 100ac block of Mr Hourigan’s plantations was recently sold for €30/t, or €9,000, for 2021.
“I intend drawing up a very simple contract with the buyer. I will give an undertaking that I won’t use the carbon credits on that section of forestry, or sell them to anyone else this year,” Mr Hourigan said.
“Since farmers can’t deduct the carbon they sequester from their farm’s carbon footprint, then the obvious thing to do is sell it to someone who can,” the Limerick farmer maintained.
“I have been quietly contacting businesses locally, and asking them if they were interested in buying carbon credits. All were interested.”
“Some of the businesses had been looking into buying credits online, but they felt that a lot of those being traded were of very dubious provenance,” Mr Hourigan explained.
“When I showed them my forestry, they were delighted. It was tangible, it was near and it was real. All I was offering them was an undertaking that the carbon sequestered by that forestry is committed to the buyer for this year and I wouldn’t double sell or claim it myself.
“I have customers for all the carbon credits I can provide. I won’t have anything available to put against my farm’s carbon footprint for 2021.”
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It remains unclear whether the carbon sequestration rights of forestry plantations are the property of the plantation owner or the State.
When asked if a forestry owner was legally entitled to trade the carbon sequestration rights of their plantations, the Department of Energy and Climate Change pointed out that while the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) has created a carbon market for heavy industry, aviation and power-generation, no such trading structure exists for carbon sequestered or produced on a private landowner scale, including for private forestry.
However, Mr Hourigan claimed that businesses and landowners could not wait indefinitely for clarity around the matter of ownership of carbon sequestration rights.
He said that a strong market was emerging for carbon credits with a local and verifiable provenance, and that farmers should not be excluded from capitalising on the opportunities it presented.
“We are actually looking into the possibility of setting up a trading platform dedicated to trading carbon credits generated on farms,” he added.
