Microsoft has inked a contract with Occidental Petroleum to buy 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal (CDR)

Microsoft tries to clear the air with mountains of CO2 credits

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2024-07-10 13:30:15

Microsoft has inked a contract with Occidental Petroleum to buy 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) "credits" over six years to support its overall carbon strategy. The move follows a dramatic rise in Microsoft's CO2 emissions due to datacenter construction.

This latest agreement is with 1PointFive, Occidental's carbon capture and sequestration business, and claimed by the Financial Times to be "worth hundreds of millions of dollars," although the exact value of the transaction has yet to be disclosed.

Carbon credits are a way of buying a verifiable emissions reduction from a third party in other to "offset" one's own emissions, and the concept has come in for some controversy over the years. Nonetheless, Direct Air Capture (DAC), directly extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, has its supporters, with the IPCC stating [PDF] that, while not enough, some form of carbon removal is part of "all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2°or lower by 2100."

1PointFive describes the agreement as the largest single purchase of CDR credits making use of DAC), and says it highlights the increasing adoption of this tech as a solution to help organizations meet their net-zero emission targets.