Planet Portfolio update - July 2023

As climate change increases droughts and catastrophic wildfires, reforestation is critical for carbon capture and maintaining forests that communities rely on. Many areas in the Western US are now burning so fiercely that trees are not growing back on their own for decades after fire, and active reforestation is needed.

TIME CO2 is supporting Mast (previously called DroneSeed) in reforesting an area in Oregon called Henry Creek that was devastated by recent wildfires. The Henry Creek project, Mast's first, is on track, with 105,000 tree seedlings planted with drones and hand-planting across 300 acres in May 2023. Carbon credits from the Henry Creek project will be issued in 2024 after being verified by an independent auditor.

Over the past six months, DroneSeed created a parent brand called Mast Reforestation, to better reflect its evolution into an end-to-end partner for landowners. Mast acquired CalForests Nursery in California (producing 90%+ of all seedings grown in California) in addition to Silvaseed Nursery in Washington (the largest private forestry seed supplier in the Western U.S), and entered into a project finance partnership with Carbon Streaming Corp. Following its success with Henry Creek, Mast is now working on reforestation projects across the western US.

Biochar is created from plant residues that are burned at hot temperatures without oxygen. Biochar is an effective way to store carbon in the ground, instead of having it be released into the atmosphere as CO2 when plant residues decompose.

Carbofex is a biochar producer based in Finland, using wood waste from forestry to create biochar that improves soil in public parks and other areas. Over the past six months, Carbofex expanded its biochar production and doubled its carbon removal capacity to 6,000 tons of CO2 per year.

TIME CO2's funding is supporting Living Carbon in restoring heavily degraded lands in Georgia, in the southeastern US. Over the past six months, Living Carbon began its first large-scale commercial plantings for this project in GA--planting 155,000 native tree seedlings, including 5% engineered seedlings. They also began their first large-scale commercial plantings for sites in OH and PA, and completed fundraising for their Series A.

Healthy mangrove forests are a rich natural store of carbon, both in their roots and in the surrounding soils, and also important natural barriers to extreme storms and sea-level rise. Through TIME CO2's funding, Conservation International (CI) is supporting a women-only community mangrove group in coastal Ecuador called Estero Porteño. CI is training the group in mapping and monitoring their lands, and in preventing future mangrove loss through sustainable alternatives to shrimp farming and other destructive activities.

CI is also helping to register the women's association to receive additional payments from the Government of Ecuador, in exchange for protecting their mangrove area. Estero Porteño officially applied to the government's Socio Bosque program at the end of September 2022, and is now awaiting final government approval.

The 24 women in the association protect coastal mangroves spread across 130 ha, representing an estimated 21,912 tons of irrecoverable carbon (equivalent to 80,400 tons of CO2).

CarbonCapture Inc. is a startup developing an ambitious direct air capture and underground storage project in the US. CarbonCapture initially expected to begin operating their direct air capture plant at their Project Bison facility in Wyoming in 2023-2024, but now expect to begin operations and carbon credit issuance in 2025. Capturing CO2 from the air requires large amounts of electricity, and the delay faced by CarbonCapture is primarily due to difficulties procuring scalable renewable energy close to their expected underground carbon storage locations.

Such delays are not uncommon in the nascent engineered carbon removals industry, with other direct air capture project developers facing similar “first-of-a-kind” challenges in scaling their operations. While awaiting access to underground storage and sufficient renewable energy, CarbonCapture is iterating on their technology and working with local utilities to improve Wyoming's electricity mix, 73% of which is currently powered by coal.

VGrid produces high-quality biochar, clean electricity, and liquid fertilizer from spent pistachio shells in California. In addition to storing carbon, VGrid's biochar helps improve soil quality and water retention on farms, vineyards, golf courses, and even the San Francisco Giants' Oracle Park baseball arena. TIME CO2 was VGrid's first carbon credit buyer, and this purchase funded VGrid's expansion to a new site in Lost Hills, California.

VGrid initially created a single mobile biomass gasifier that is colocated with pistachio orchards and converts the shells into biochar. With the success of the initial Bioserver, VGrid and The Wonderful Company, a large pistachio producer, now plan to expand the site to include 30 Bioservers and 18 generators. This would result in expected carbon removals of 12,000t CO2 and 13,500 MWh of clean electricity produced annually.

Through this project, TIME CO2 supported the non-profit organization Nia Tero to engage with two indigenous territories in the Solomon Islands, a remote archipelago in the South Pacific. The 2,300 members of the indigenous territories were engaged to map and eventually protect the 341 ha of island forests known as "Sky Islands," which are home to many rare species but are threatened by extensive illegal logging and mining.

In the past six months, the project successfully completed initial stages of Indigenous Terrain Mapping (ITM) for the two territories (Waihau and Ferafolia) at the national, local, and project levels, paving the way to Indigenous support for future forest conservation measures.

After experiencing devastating wildfires across their territories, many Tribal Nations across North America want to begin restoring their forests, but often lack access to capital, seedlings, and sufficient planting labor. TIME CO2 funded American Forests to support business plan development for Indigenous-owned tree nurseries, and therefore build resilient Tribal businesses and workforces.

American Forests and the Native Indian Carbon Coalition (NICC) spent the past six months building trusted relationships with the Yakama Nation in Washington State, which has endured large, severe wildfires in recent years, as well as with two other indigenous groups in Hawaii and Montana.

In June through August 2023, the American Forests-NICC consortium is supporting internship programs and further nursery business plan development. This initiative has proven extremely popular, with other Tribal Nations also expressing interest.