Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By RICHARD JENKINS
Hurley — Iron County may develop another source of income from its county forest as the Iron County Forestry Committee approved exploring the use of the county’s timberlands to sell carbon offset credits last week.
There will be counties in Wisconsin that pursue using their land for carbon credits, Iron County Forester Eric Peterson said, adding that if Iron County waits too long it may miss a valuable opportunity.
“There’s some uniqueness to it, so I guess I feel now is the time to look at it,” Peterson said. “Especially with no upfront commitment from us.”
The study would be the first step towards using the land for the credits, and the county wouldn’t bear any costs for the feasibility study beyond the time needed to organize the relevant data.
The decision came after a presentation on carbon credits from Forrest Gibeault, the analysis and technology director with Steigerwaldt Land Services.
The carbon markets work similar to the wetland mitigation process, according to information presented at the meeting, and allow companies to purchase carbon credits to offset their carbon emissions.
Each credit is equivalent to 1 metric ton of CO2 in the atmosphere, according to Gibeault,
Gibeault explained Steigerwaldt works with the brokers that bring the carbon credits to the marketplace, but wouldn’t necessarily be involved in any Iron County projects.
He said a variety of factors were used to calculate both the amount of carbon fixed in the trees in an acre of forest, as well as how much additional carbon will be sequestered in those trees as they grow over the 40-year lifespan of the credits.
Gibeault detailed the state of the market, saying up until recently the market was largely limited to private lands.
“The marketplace has been evolving and there’s so many businesses around the world — Microsoft, Delta Airlines, the list goes on — they’ve all committed to being carbon negative or neutral within the next 15 to 20 years,” he said. “Most of them are going to commit to being carbon negative, which means they’re going to have to find a way to offset all their emissions.”
The American Carbon Registry — a group that registers the credits and can prove to the purchasers that they exist and are capturing the carbon the sellers say they are — is now open to some state and municipal land owners, with a 90,000-acre state forest in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula just approved as the first public forest enrolled in a carbon credit program.
Gibeault described the credits as a new forest product, no different from the products generated from logging the land.
“My professional career is based on helping people monetize timberland. I’m a forester, my favorite tree is horizontal on a log truck,” he said. “The reality is, this is no different. I help my timber investment clients use this as a tool to sustainably manage their forests into the future and extract a value — which is a green value, it’s an environmental value that is actually being monetized.”
He said the developers can’t currently keep up with demand, especially with U.S. projects, and he is working with a county forest in Wisconsin that is looking to make over $10 million in the first 10 years by using roughly 150,000 acres of county forest while doing business as usual regarding sustainable logging.
The fact that using county land for carbon credits is possible without sacrificing the current revenues being generated from the forest is possibly the biggest benefit.
“This is an opportunity for us, not changing the way we do business, but capturing another revenue source,” Peterson. “We are not changing our day-to-day operations significantly. … Our general annual harvest and stumpage — that continues on. This is something in addition that we would be trying to tap into.”
The county doesn’t harvest its full growth each year, Peterson said, and the surplus is where the credits would be sold.
“We’re growing about 53,000 cords of (aspen and northern hardwoods) each year. So our harvest is set up at 48,000 cords, so we’re actually … not harvesting all of our growth annually,” Peterson said. “So this carbon market dips into that difference between what we’re growing and what we’re cutting — along with all the other stands (that aren’t productive to log).”
Gibeault said Iron County could also arrange so any land that might be valuable for another purpose, such as mining development, could be excluded from the land being used for carbon credits. The county could also withdraw land from the program if it simply pays back the credits it sold.
Gibeault said he felt Wisconsin county forests are particularly valuable for carbon credit projects as they don’t have the same protections as some state or federal lands, which makes for a better sales pitch.
“If times get tough, the reality is these (county forests) in Wisconsin — 2.4 million acres — could be on the marketplace to be sold, and the hurdle to get there is not all that high. So the reality is in the context of the voluntary market, there’s a lot of interest in the Wisconsin county forest system as a place to protect — not to protect the trees, but protect it to stay forest long term — because it is at risk,” Gibeault said. He added this translated to the credits being worth more to the market
“It’s a better story,” he added, explaining that the companies selling the credits look to stand out from the competition with the stories about what the purchase of the credits are protecting.
With no costs or commitment, several committee members felt there wasn’t a downside to pursuing the feasibility study and some seemed supportive of pursuing the idea beyond just the study.
“It makes sense to take the stuff you’re typically managing and make money as it grows,” supervisor Scott Erickson said. “You might as well allow your trees to make money.”
