Chestnut Carbon recently signed a 25-year offtake agreement to provide Microsoft Corporation with more than 7 million tons of credits through its afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation project in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. Chestnut estimates the agreement will restore approximately 60,000 acres of land through the planting of more than 35 million native, biodiverse hardwood and softwood trees.

It is the latest sign of growth for Chestnut, a New York-based entity founded in 2022 with the support of Kimmeridge Energy Management Company. Over the past three years, Chestnut has enrolled more than 160,000 acres in its Improved Forest Management membership program, branded as Forest Carbon Works. Chestnut recently completed its first issuance of carbon credits from the program, with more than 66,000 tons of carbon removal transacted at an average price of $34 per ton, for a total of nearly $2.25 million.

“We are thrilled with the growth of our IFM program footprint,” Chestnut Chief Commercial Officer Shannon Smith said. “We have members in 36 states and are ambitiously trying to bring in as many new landowners as possible.”

Chestnut projects that the new agreement with Microsoft will enable it to increase its afforestation, reforestation, and revegetation portfolio to 500,000 acres by 2030. Smith said many of the private landowners enrolled in the program are individuals with smaller plots of land of 200 to 250 acres.

“There are some very large carbon developers in the US that work with very large landowners, often with 5,000-acre minimums,” Smith said. “Chestnut Carbon specifically wanted to develop a conservation membership program that would cater to much smaller landowners. We do all the work for them. We do the project management, carbon accounting, verify and validate, issue the credits, and sell the credits to corporate buyers. Then we share that revenue with the landowners for conserving their land and forest in climate-smart practices.”