Chestnut carbon obtains $ 160 million to transform old farms into forests
The carbon elimination startup based on nature Chestnut Carbon has raised 160 million dollars in series B financing, the company told Techcrunch. The startup buys marginal and degraded agricultural land, plants them with native trees and harvests the resulting carbon credits.
Carbon credits have become a hot goods, especially among technological companies that seek to compensate for the soaring emissions caused in part by the frightening expansion of data centers serving clients of the Cloud and the AI.
The new round included the investments of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Cloverlay and DBL Partners as well as nameless university allocations, family offices, funds and other institutional investors.
For Chestnut carbonThe $ 160 million is actually a somewhat modest sum. When the company was founded, the Kimmeridge investment company capitalized by promising up to $ 200 million. The company generally invests in oil and gas companies, but the general partner Ben Dell has seen the opportunity to bring a complaint on the growing carbon credit market.
To get there, he acquired Forest Carbon Works, a startup founded by Kyle Holland who helped families manage their forests to sell carbon credits. Holland continued with Chestnut, where he is currently product director.
With Chestnut, the team has expanded its objective to include projects developed by the company, not just the management of existing forests.
Chestnut currently has more than 35,000 acres of marginal and degraded agricultural land in the south-east of the United States. Part of the objective of fundraising is to considerably develop the assets of Chestnut. The startup hopes to extend its carbon credit capacity to 100 million metric tonnes by 2030, which will require hundreds of thousands of acres into forests.
Last month, Chestnut made a deposit on this objective with the sale of 7 million carbon credits in Microsoft. (A carbon credit is worth a metric tonne of carbon.) The 25 -year agreement will help the chestnut rehabilitating 60,000 acres in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Chestnut uses the gold standard to certify its carbon credits for 100 years.
The new financing lap should help the startup considerably expand its operations. Although there is a lot of high -quality carbon credits demand today, the CHESTNUT objective of 100 million metric tonnes represents a fraction of one percent of annual carbon emissions, which reached 37, 4 billion metric tonnes in 2023, according to at the IEA.
However, if the chestnut can get its foot on the carbon credit market, afforestation and reforestation have great potential to curb the effects of pollution of global warming.
A Study in 2019 have found that the world can support 2.2 billion acres of forest more than today. Once these forests have matured, they would hold 205 billion metric tonnes of carbon, about a quarter of the carbon currently in the atmosphere.
