The agreement with partners Anew Climate and Aurora Sustainable Lands calls for the reduction of timber harvesting across 300,000 hectares in 10 states - the idea being that the preserved trees will sequester CO2 and prevent it from entering the atmosphere and increasing global temperature levels.
The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has encouraged the voluntary use of such programs, which produce carbon credits that companies use to offset the CO2 released by their own business.
However, recent studies found that several large forest protection projects failed to deliver their promised emissions reductions, shaking confidence in the offset market, which shrank for the first time in at least seven years in 2023.
"TotalEnergies has very positively received the U.S. government’s recently published guiding principles on Voluntary Carbon Markets and is committed to follow them to contribute to strengthening integrity and transparency in these markets," Adrien Henry, TotalEnergies' vice president of nature-based solutions, said in a statement on Friday.
The companies did not say how many offsets would be generated by the investment. TotalEnergies has a goal of spending $100 million per year on projects offsetting at least 5 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2030.
The credits will offset part of the CO2 directly emitted by Total's sites — less than 10% of its overall emissions — beyond 2030.
Last year TotalEnergies emitted 390 million tons of CO2-equivalent, the vast majority of which was released when its customers burnt its fuels for heat and energy.
While the oil major is working to reduce greenhouse gases from its own operations, it has not planned for a large reduction in emissions from its products by 2030, as the company expands its oil and gas exploration and production alongside the building of renewable energy capacity.
