In the United States (US), Gevo Inc., a leading developer of hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals with net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, has announced that BeZero Carbon Ltd., a preeminent global carbon rating agency, has upgraded its rating for the Gevo North Dakota (GND) facility that has carbon capture and storage to an “A” rating.
UK-headed BeZero Carbon Ltd is an independent carbon ratings agency that combines technical expertise, large-scale geospatial and data analytics, and global coverage across all major crediting standards.
Gevo is a pioneer in the voluntary carbon markets (VCM) focused on the production and delivery of carbon dioxide removal certificates, known as CORCs, under the high-integrity Puro.earth standard.
The GND facility is the largest producer of technology-based carbon dioxide removal credits and is the only ethanol carbon capture and storage project to issue credits for thousand-year permanence, under Puro.earth’s “Geologically Stored Carbon” methodology.
CORCs are gaining traction in the growing VCM and are expected to provide valuable co-product revenue for our operations. We anticipate that this BeZero Carbon ‘A’ rating will only improve its value. Our Class VI carbon-storage well has shown outstanding performance since it started in June of 2022, and we believe we are well-positioned with our well, which has 1 million tonnes per year of capacity, to be a consistent source of CORCs at a meaningful scale. This BeZero Carbon ‘A’ rating simplifies the due diligence process for buyers reviewing our project for key quality parameters and places us in a top tier relative to other carbon projects, said Alex Clayton, Chief Business Development Officer at Gevo.
GND sources most of its corn feedstock from within 75 miles of the facility and will be leveraging Verity, a Gevo-developed carbon-tracking platform for upstream agriculture measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) to document sustainable agriculture practices, create transparency in agricultural value chains, and provide tools for land assessment.
We will soon be piloting an updated sustainable biomass sourcing and management program that enables us to gather deeper data on the agricultural practices of our feedstock growers through our Verity platform. We are committed to ensuring the highest level of environmental integrity, which also increases the value of our credits and benefits farmers, said Nancy Young, Chief Sustainability Officer at Gevo.
