Our Projects

When you buy a Certificate of Carbon Neutrality from Carbon Neutrality your money supports clean energy and other projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon Neutrality funds several different project types including clean energy produced by wind power; farm power which makes good use of animal wastes; and landfill gas capture, which reduces the impact of our own wastes.

We are creating a diverse emission reduction portfolio and standards vary among different emission reduction project. For instance, standards used to track the amount of carbon dioxide a new wind power facility avoids is much different than calculating the carbon dioxide absorption rates a new forest conservation project can sequester over 100 years. However, every project is conducted and verified according to one of the following appropriate standards: Voluntary Carbon Standard 2007, Green-e Climate, Chicago Climate Exchange Offset Protocols, California Climate Action Registry, EPA Climate Leaders, ISO 14064-2, and Gold Standard.

Carbon Neutrality publishes the standard to be used for each project on our website when we solicit comments for new projects, and in our annual project portfolio. All Carbon Neutrality projects are verified by an independent accredited organization according to a published offset standard.

Merit Energy Shute Creek
Sour Gas Processing Plant

Location: Wyoming

Project Highlight: Merit Energy is capturing CO2 emissions from a natural gas processing facility, and using it to replace the ground-sourced CO2 normally used in oil production.

Carbon dioxide is a necessary part of oil drilling; it is pumped into the ground to force the oil out. Traditionally, when a company needs CO2 for this purpose, it simply pumps it out of naturally occurring under-ground sources of CO2. At the same time, many energy facilities freely release CO2 into the atmosphere during their operations.

Linking these two issues, Merit Energy has developed an infrastructure to capture the atmospheric releases of CO2 emissions from the Shute Creek natural gas processing facility in Wyoming, and deliver it to oil production fields where it is sequestered below the earth’s surface. This prevents CO2 from being released into the atmosphere at two points: the vent-stack of the natural gas facility, and the underground CO2 reservoir from where the necessary CO2 would have been pumped.

Tyson Methane Capture,
Flare, and Utilization Project

Location: Continental United States
Commercial Online Date: 2000
Click HERE to learn More about this project

Project Highlight: Tyson Foods, Inc. (“Tyson”) is the world’s largest supplier of protein, operating poultry, swine, and beef processing plants. Wastewater from Tyson’s processing plants is treated at wastewater treatment plants owned and operated by Tyson. Tyson’s 100 wastewater pre-treatment and full-treatment plants treat over 100 million gallons of water a day.

During primary treatment, the wastewater is traditionally held in uncovered anaerobic lagoons. Uncovered anaerobic lagoons lead directly to the production and release of methane “biogas”) into the atmosphere as a result of the anaerobic digestion process that takes place. Biogas production is due to the degradation of organic matter by acidogenic and methanogenic bacteria. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, having a Global Warming Potential of 25 times that of carbon dioxide over 100 years. Five Tyson wastewater facilities in Illinois, Nebraska, Texas, and Iowa capture this greenhouse gas and flare it or transport it to boilers which use the gas as a fuel in an energy recovery system.

Val Verde Carbon Dioxide Pipeline Project

Location: Texas
Commercial Online Date: 2004

Project Highlight: In 1998, Petro Source Carbon Company entered a partnership with MCNIC and an affiliate of BP to construct an 82 mile, 10-inch CO2 pipeline in West Texas known as the Val Verde Pipeline. The total initial capital cost of the project was $17.6 million. As recently as 2007, additional incremental investments, totaling to $10 million, have been made to expand the pipeline system. The pipeline enables the capture of CO2 from five natural gas processing plants, avoiding CO2 venting to the atmosphere.

Once gathered, dehydrated and compressed, the CO2 is transported to an existing CO2 distribution system in the Permian Basin of West Texas for eventual delivery to Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) markets. EOR projects inject CO2 into mature oil producing fields both to increase the viscosity of the oil and to sweep the oil toward the producing wells. Permian Basin EOR projects typically consume an average of 1.5 billion cubic feet per day (BCFD) of “fresh” CO2, which is primarily sourced from underground supplies. It is important to recognize that no new or incremental oil is produced as a result of capturing and utilizing anthropogenic CO2, since underground sourced CO2 would have been used in its place anyway.