Eight months after Alt Carbon and Japan’s shipping giant Mitsui O.S.K. Lines (MOL Group) struck a multi-year deal for the removal of 10,000 tonnes of atmospheric CO2, Alt Carbon has issued the first batch of credits under this deal, marking Asia’s largest issuance of enhanced rock weathering (ERW) credits.
For MOL, this issuance aligns with the shipping company’s decarbonization agenda, which includes the Blue Action 2035 strategy, focused on emissions reductions of about 45% by 2035 and net-zero across all operations by mid-century.
The company recognized Alt Carbon’s high-potential CO2 removal approach, selecting it as a trusted partner to help advance MOL’s sustainability plans.
Commenting on the credit issuance, MOL executives shared that the verification fortifies the confidence in future batches, especially as the company explores long-term CDR alongside fuel transitions and efficiency optimizations.
The issued credits come from Alt Carbon’s Darjeeling Revival Project that restores degraded soils in the Darjeeling region in India, known as a major tea production hub.
Alt Carbon’s operations in this region include spreading waste basalt rock dust across agricultural land in tea gardens and neighboring rice-growing fields, where the basalt material reacts with rainwater and atmospheric CO2 emissions, triggering a process that locks in the CO2 as stable bicarbonate ions.
Through a network of rivers and streams, the ions eventually make their way to the ocean, where they remain for over 10,000 years as calcium carbonate (CaCO3), in the form of corals & seashells.
Relevant: Alt Carbon Secures $12M In Seed Funding To Scale ERW In The Global South
To quantify and validate the achieved carbon removal from the project, Alt Carbon employs a comprehensive scientific architecture based on on-site field monitoring, distributed weather-station networks, ocean modeling for downstream alkalinity losses, and large-scale soil, porewater, and river chemistry datasets.
These activities are further supported by the company’s planetary tech stack (Feluda), which enabled a fully timestamped and geotagged workflow for this first credit issuance, aligned with the requirements provided in Isometric’s high-rigor Enhanced Weathering Protocol.
Going forward, Alt Carbon intends to grow the Darjeeling Revival Project toward 100,000+ acres of land and 100,000 credits annually from 2026, logging all measurements on the publicly accessible Isometric Registry.
Read more: Mitsubishi Corporation And Alt Carbon To Scale ERW Carbon Removal In South Asia
