2021 brought us our Aylesbury, Saskatchewan project, nearly 200 acres of range located on the Louis Riel Trail. Looking back, this is developing into one of the most personally satisfying projects in our portfolio.
A lot of things were brought into focus, but as 2021 closes, and with nearly two months spent on site, one has our attention more than others - water. There is plenty of press on what is going on, but there is nothing quite like feeling it by being there, and it's nothing short of remarkable how much of the Amazon looks exactly like Saskatchewan. One of the more enjoyable things is a walk back through history to the Crown grant, as we build a property information portfolio.
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As consultants, we are relatively sophisticated in terms of understanding complex issues, but the carbon credit paradigm has a problem - it's practically incomprehensible to both the average farmer and and the carbon producer, and nobody wants a poorly understood covenant tying up their land.
Our "protocol" is simple. Our projects buy tonnage of our certified agricultural carbon (biochar) and we dump that on our non-arable prairie acreage, where it retains water, improves the soil biome, grows more grass, and makes grazing cattle healthier and less farty. This doesn't just sequester the biochar carbon. Grass is a big solar panel that keeps on sucking CO2 out of the air and depositing it below ground in the root system and biome. For example, a residential real estate development generates around 56 tonnes of CO2e per house. The developer includes a line item in the house sale to fund a CO2e of biochar, and once we spread that on the prairie it is basically sequestered forever. Industrial quantities of biochar currently exceed $250/tonne, or $14,000 per house, which is probably a bit much, but with houses selling for over $1,000,000, of which the regulatory burden is in the neighborhood of $250,000 each unit, it's feasible if marketed properly. It's just another load of construction waste that needs to be disposed of. A lot. This describes the protocol developed to market prairie grasslands as a carbon credit.
This article does a good job of explaining the economics.
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Where the heck is Aylesbury, Saskatchewan?Archives
April 2024
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