Reliance makes India’s maiden carbon neutral crude purchase
Reliance Industries Limited recently purchased carbon neutral crude. If you are wondering how on earth this is possible, well, through some clever trading concepts.
A third party company (in this case Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, a sub of Oxy) sequesters CO2 somewhere in the world – either through geological sequestration or by any other means – and when an Indian company buys crude from this third party vendor, the CO2 emissions estimate from the crude is offset against the sequestration. The
crude magically becomes carbon neutral. These are termed carbon offset mechanisms.
So, are these just accounting tricks? Not really, because in this case Reliance is indeed indirectly responsible for the sequestration, though not in India.
The bigger question is – how much of these offsets will be available in future. As offsets provide an easy avenue for many of these large carbon emitters, the day perhaps is not far off when every large company wants offsets but there are not enough sets that have been offed. You get the point.
Read more – https://lnkd.in/gNNi3kr
See my LinkedIn post on this topic
