Microsoft (MSFT stock) has signed a long-term carbon removal agreement that highlights both the scale and direction of the emerging carbon market. The company will purchase 626,000 tonnes of durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits over 15 years from the North Star project in Saskatchewan, Canada.
This project is being developed by Svante Technologies Inc. in partnership with the Meadow Lake Tribal Council (MLTC), through their joint venture North Star Carbon Solutions LP.
The facility will use bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and store it permanently underground. Notably, the project will be co-located at the existing MLTC Bioenergy Centre and powered by waste biomass from a nearby Indigenous-owned sawmill.
This makes it one of the first fully integrated, Indigenous-led BECCS projects in Canada and a landmark deal in Microsoft’s growing carbon removal portfolio.
Indigenous-Led Carbon Project Sets New Benchmark in Canada
The North Star project stands out not just for its technology, but also for its ownership model. It is expected to be Canada’s first major Indigenous-owned, high-quality carbon removal project. The Meadow Lake Tribal Council, which represents several First Nations communities, plays a central role in both ownership and development.
This structure ensures that economic benefits stay within the local community. During construction, the project is expected to create around 50 jobs. Once operational, it will support a smaller but steady workforce while also boosting demand for nearby businesses. As a result, the project delivers both climate and economic value.
Equally important, the facility will rely on an existing industrial ecosystem. The MLTC Bioenergy Centre already generates renewable energy using wood waste.
That waste comes from the NorSask Forest Products sawmill, which is owned by MLTC and supplied through sustainably managed forests. This close integration reduces costs, improves efficiency, and strengthens the project’s environmental credibility.
Phillip Goodman, Director of Carbon Removal Portfolio, Microsoft, said:
“We’re pleased to work with North Star Carbon Solutions and Meadow Lake Tribal Council to help advance high-quality, durable carbon dioxide removal. To meet our climate goals, we need to help scale solutions that deliver durable storage and are backed by rigorous monitoring and verification. This agreement supports an Indigenous-led collaboration that enables the infrastructure needed to bring durable carbon removal online in Canada, thus creating a pathway for additional projects over time.”
How the North Star BECCS System Works
The North Star facility uses BECCS, a technology widely seen as critical for achieving net-zero emissions. It combines renewable energy production with carbon capture to deliver negative emissions.
- In this system, trees first absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere as they grow. When these trees are processed for wood products, leftover biomass is used as fuel to generate energy.
- Normally, this process would release carbon back into the air. However, in this case, the CO₂ is captured before it can escape.
- The captured carbon is then compressed, transported, and injected deep underground into a secure geological formation.
This ensures long-term storage, often lasting hundreds or even thousands of years. Continuous monitoring systems track the stored carbon to ensure safety and permanence.
Here’s a representation of the BECCS process:
A Fully Integrated “Source-to-Sink” Model
From the process explained above, it’s clear that one of the most important features of the North Star project is its fully integrated design. It connects every step of the carbon removal process, from biomass supply to permanent storage.
This end-to-end system improves efficiency and reduces uncertainty. It also strengthens the credibility of the carbon credits produced.
Significantly, Svante will fund the project through its early stages, supporting development until a final investment decision is made. Commercial operations are expected to begin in early 2029.
Reliable Carbon Removal, Verified and Transparent
At full capacity, the facility is expected to capture up to 90,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually. Over the 15-year contract period, this will translate into the delivery of 626,000 tonnes of verified carbon removal credits to Microsoft.
All credits will follow strict monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) standards, ensuring transparency and quality.
Microsoft Scales Up Carbon Removal Strategy
This agreement is part of Microsoft’s broader push to scale carbon removal. The company has rapidly increased its purchases over the past few years, signaling a shift from small pilot projects to large, long-term commitments.
In 2023, Microsoft contracted roughly 5 million tonnes of carbon removal. By 2024, that number rose to 22 million metric tons. In 2025, the target surged further to around 45 million tonnes, as announced by the company. This sharp increase shows how quickly the company is building a diversified carbon removal portfolio.
Importantly, Microsoft does not rely on a single technology. Instead, it spreads its investments across multiple pathways, including BECCS, direct air capture, and mineralization. This approach reduces risk while supporting the development of different solutions.
Recent agreements reflect this strategy. These include multi-million-tonne deals with BECCS facilities in the United States and Europe. Together, they position Microsoft as one of the most influential buyers in the global carbon removal market.
Rising Emissions Make Carbon Removal Essential
Despite its climate commitments, Microsoft faces a growing emissions challenge. The company’s total emissions have increased by more than 30% compared to 2020 levels. This rise is largely driven by the rapid expansion of data centers, cloud services, and AI infrastructure.
These operations require vast amounts of energy and materials, making it difficult to cut emissions quickly. As a result, carbon removal has become a key part of Microsoft’s strategy.
However, the company is clear about its priorities. It focuses first on reducing emissions through efficiency and clean energy. Carbon removal is used only for emissions that cannot be eliminated.
This approach supports Microsoft’s ambitious net-zero goals. The company aims to become carbon negative by 2030 and aims to run on 100% renewable electricity and eliminate all historical emissions by 2050.
BECCS Market Gains Momentum
The North Star deal also reflects growing interest in BECCS technology. While still at an early stage, the global BECCS market is expanding rapidly. Analysts expect it to grow at a CAGR of around 19.27% from 2024 to 2030 as governments and companies seek reliable carbon removal solutions.
BECCS is particularly valuable because it can deliver durable removals. Unlike some nature-based solutions, which may face risks like fires or land-use changes, BECCS stores carbon permanently underground. This makes it attractive for companies looking for high-quality credits.
According to the International Energy Agency, BECCS could play a major role in climate mitigation. It may contribute up to 15% of the emissions reductions needed by 2100 to limit global warming to 2°C.
At the same time, challenges remain. Concerns about biomass sourcing, land use, and storage safety continue to shape the debate. Even so, projects like North Star aim to address these issues through sustainable sourcing and rigorous monitoring.
North Star Marks a New Era in Carbon Markets
In conclusion, the Microsoft–North Star agreement highlights how quickly the carbon removal market is evolving. Large buyers are now committing to long-term deals that help bring new projects to life.
At the same time, the project sets a new benchmark for inclusive climate action. Indigenous ownership ensures that local communities benefit directly from the energy transition.
As demand for durable carbon removal continues to grow, more projects like North Star are likely to emerge. These developments will play a critical role in helping companies meet climate targets while building a scalable, high-integrity carbon market.
In that sense, this deal is more than just a contract. It is a clear signal that carbon removal is moving from concept to reality—and becoming a core part of global climate strategy.
The post Microsoft Signs 626,000-Tonne Carbon Removal Deal with Svante and Indigenous-Led North Star Project in Canada appeared first on Carbon Credits.
What auditors actually test, where projects actually fail, and the contract clauses that protect you before signature.
The meeting happens about fourteen months after the contract was signed. Your assurance provider has reached the nature-based investment line in your Scope 3 file, and the partner across the table has exactly two questions. How do you know the reductions happened? And how do you know they would not have happened anyway?
The first question is MRV: measurement, reporting, and verification. The second is additionality. Between them, they decide whether your nature-based investment counts, in your inventory, in your disclosure, and in front of your board. Everything else in the project documentation is supporting material for these two answers.
This article walks through what each question actually tests, where projects most commonly fail, what digital MRV has changed (and what it has not), and the contract clauses that protect you. The goal is to give you the diligence framework before you sign, because after the credit issues is the wrong time to discover the answers were weak.
What MRV actually verifies
MRV is the machinery that turns a field intervention into a defensible number. Measurement covers the data: biomass surveys, soil sampling, remote sensing, activity records from participating farms. Reporting covers the translation of that data into claimed reductions under a recognised methodology. Verification covers the independent check: an accredited third party tests the reporting against the methodology and the evidence.
The methodologies live in registries. Verra’s Verified Carbon Standard and the Gold Standard are the two largest for nature-based projects, and each publishes the methodology documents, monitoring requirements, and verification protocols that a project must follow. The ICVCM Assessment Framework now sits above the registries, assessing whole methodologies against the Core Carbon Principles and granting the CCP label to those that pass.
For a buyer, the practical questions are concrete. What is the monitoring frequency, and is it specified in the project design document or left vague? Who is the verifier, how were they selected, and how often do they rotate? What raw data do you, the buyer, get access to, and in what format? A project that answers these in writing is a different procurement than one that answers them in a sales call.
What additionality actually proves
Additionality asks whether the intervention caused the reduction, or whether the reduction would have happened anyway. The test is a counterfactual: what would this landscape, this farm, this forest have done without the project’s money?
Three forms matter in practice. Financial additionality asks whether the project needed the carbon revenue to proceed. Regulatory additionality asks whether the activity was already required by law. Common-practice additionality asks whether the activity is already standard in the region, in which case paying for it buys you nothing the world was not getting for free.
The reason additionality dominates audit conversations is recent history. Research published in 2023, including the Science paper examined at length in our piece on conventional offsets and boardroom credibility, found that a large share of REDD+ credits failed the counterfactual test because baselines were inflated. The market response was a wave of methodology revisions at Verra and the arrival of independent ratings agencies whose entire business is re-testing additionality claims. The Carbon Credit Quality Initiative publishes transparent scoring of methodologies on exactly this dimension, and it is free to consult before you sign anything.
Where projects most commonly fail the test
Five failure modes account for most of the wreckage.
- Inflated baselines. The counterfactual assumes more deforestation, more degradation, or lower yields than the evidence supports. The claimed reduction is the gap between reality and the baseline, so an inflated baseline manufactures reductions from nothing.
- Unaccounted leakage. The project protects one forest and the logging moves to the next valley. The methodology is supposed to net this out; weak projects estimate it optimistically.
- Thin permanence protection. Nature-based carbon can reverse: fire, pest, drought, or a change of landowner. Buffer pools and insurance mechanisms exist for this, but their adequacy varies enormously between projects.
- Attribution and double counting. In supply chain settings, the same reduction can be claimed by the supplier, the buyer, and a credit purchaser unless contracts prevent it. Our Insetting vs Offsetting piece covers the inventory rules; the point here is that the auditor will ask who else is counting this tonne.
- Stale monitoring. Data collected at validation and never refreshed. The IPCC AR6 Working Group III land-sector chapter documents how quickly carbon stocks respond to disturbance; a three-year-old measurement is a historical artifact, not a current claim.
What digital MRV changes, and what it does not
Digital MRV is the genuine improvement in the field. Satellite remote sensing, including the free archives at NASA Earthdata, allows biomass and land-cover change to be monitored continuously rather than at multi-year verification intervals. Soil carbon models calibrated with physical sampling reduce the cost of agricultural measurement. The practical effect is more frequent data at lower cost, which compresses the window in which a problem can hide.
What digital MRV does not change is judgment. Baselines are still human decisions about counterfactuals. Additionality is still an argument, not a measurement. Research groups such as the Oxford Smith School have been clear on this point: better sensors improve the M in MRV, but the integrity questions live in the assumptions, and assumptions need governance, not gadgets.
For a buyer, the test is simple. Ask the provider what is measured by instrument, what is estimated by model, and what is assumed by methodology. A provider who can answer that question crisply understands their own evidence chain. A provider who cannot is selling you their confidence rather than their data.
What to require in your contract
The diligence above converts into five contract clauses.
- Monitoring cadence and buyer data access, specified by dataset and frequency.
- Verifier independence, named accreditation, and rotation terms.
- Baseline revision triggers, so the counterfactual updates when the methodology or the evidence changes.
- Reversal liability and buffer adequacy, with the mechanism named and sized.
- Documentation handover in audit-ready form, so the evidence file your assurance provider needs already exists.
None of these clauses is exotic. All of them are absent from weak contracts, and their absence is the most reliable early signal that the MRV and additionality answers will be weak too.
If you are evaluating a nature-based investment and want the MRV and additionality stress-tested before signature rather than after, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can run that review against any project on your shortlist, and design nature-based supply chain investments where the evidence chain is built audit-first. Schedule a consultation.
Sources and further reading
- ICVCM: Core Carbon Principles Assessment Framework
- Verra: Verified Carbon Standard
- Gold Standard for the Global Goals
- Carbon Credit Quality Initiative: Methodology quality scores
- University of Oxford Smith School: Sustainable finance research
- IPCC AR6 Working Group III, Chapter 7: AFOLU
- NASA Earthdata satellite remote sensing archive
EU Directive: Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT)
The EU Directive, Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT), takes effect on September 27, 2026.(1) The goal of ECGT is to protect consumers by ensuring that environmental claims are fair, understandable, and reliable. This regulation does create a new compliance requirement for businesses, but it also provides sustainability and marketing teams with important guidance that helps create consistency in sustainability communications.
Key takeaways
- ECGT takes effect September 27, 2026, and prohibits claims that a product or service has a neutral, reduced, or positive environmental impact based on offsetting alone.
- Named example phrases the regulation prohibits include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, climate compensated, reduced climate impact, and limited CO2 footprint.
- ECGT does not want to deter investment in carbon credits. It wants companies to communicate the real benefits of the projects they support instead.
- SBTi’s guidance recommends framing carbon credits as taking responsibility for ongoing emissions, not as making a product or company neutral.
- Voluntary carbon projects deliver real climate progress: reducing super-pollutants, protecting and restoring ecosystems, and supporting communities.
Regarding carbon credits specifically, voluntary carbon projects deliver important climate progress and environmental benefits that provide many talking points for companies. They reduce climate super-pollutants by removing industrial emissions like methane, N2O, HFCs and others. They protect and restore valuable ecosystems and carbon sinks like forests, mangroves and grasslands. They help communities by reducing local pollution, creating employment opportunities, improving access to healthcare, and more.
The Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), a global leader in business climate action, concludes that alongside aggressive decarbonization, we should also use high quality carbon credits to take responsibility for our ongoing emissions. SBTi recognizes that carbon credits are important “to help limit temperature overshoot, mitigate transition risks, and support climate solutions.”(2)
ECGT language on carbon offsetting says that they do not want to deter investment in carbon credits. They just want companies to focus on communicating the benefits of the projects they support and avoid claims beyond the scope of carbon credits, which is good for everyone, companies and consumers alike.
The regulation reinforces that carbon credits do not change the sustainability of your products, so carbon credit buyers should not suggest that their products are more sustainable because of carbon credits. Instead, companies need to promote their climate contributions as a way to compensate or take responsibility for their carbon emissions by supporting projects that do great things like reducing global carbon emissions, reducing pollution, preventing deforestation, restoring forests, and more.
ECGT language related to carbon offsetting
The regulation is particularly focused on prohibiting claims, based on offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, that a product or service has a neutral, reduced, or positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. These claims are prohibited in all circumstances because they mislead consumers into believing the claim relates to the product itself, or to how it was made and supplied, or into thinking that using the product carries no environmental impact at all.
Named examples of prohibited claims include:
- climate neutral
- CO2 neutral certified
- carbon positive
- climate net zero
- climate compensated
- reduced climate impact
- limited CO2 footprint
These claims are only allowed when they rest on a product’s actual lifecycle impact, not on offsetting emissions outside that product’s value chain, since the two are not equivalent. This prohibition does not stop companies from advertising their investments in environmental initiatives, including carbon credit projects, as long as they present that information in a way that is not misleading and that meets the other requirements of Union law.(1)
SBTi also provides guidance on climate contribution language in its Corporate Net Zero Standard Version 2.0 Draft for Second Public Consultation, November 2025. While the SBTi language is fairly technical, it has a good framework for crafting a climate contribution message.
SBTi Language for Carbon Credits(3)
- Take responsibility for ongoing emissions by delivering mitigation impact contributions
- Carbon credits certify the mitigation outcomes of projects that reduce, avoid, or remove carbon emissions
- Activities that reduce emissions from emission sources not located within the company’s value chain
- Activities that conserve, protect, and enhance natural carbon sinks
- Activities that capture and store carbon in storage pools
SBTi’s draft standard also walks through sample claim language for this kind of contribution. In general, the samples move from a simple percentage statement, to naming a specific verified tonnage tied to that percentage, to a fuller statement that breaks the tonnage into reductions versus removals. Across all three, the framing stays consistent: a company took responsibility for a defined share of its ongoing emissions over a set period, by funding a specific, verified amount of mitigation, achieved through emission reductions or removals.(3)
FAQ: ECGT and Carbon Credit Claims
When does the ECGT directive take effect?
The rules apply across the EU from September 27, 2026, after member states transposed the directive into national law by March 27, 2026.
Does ECGT ban carbon offsetting?
No. It bans specific marketing claims that a product or service is environmentally neutral, reduced impact, or positive based on offsetting. Advertising investment in carbon credit projects themselves is still allowed if it is not misleading.
What phrases does ECGT specifically prohibit?
Named examples include climate neutral, CO2 neutral certified, carbon positive, climate net zero, climate compensated, reduced climate impact, and limited CO2 footprint, when those claims are based on offsetting rather than a product’s actual lifecycle impact.
How should a company describe its carbon credit purchases instead?
SBTi’s guidance recommends stating the specific verified tonnage of emissions reductions or removals funded and describing that as taking responsibility for a defined share of ongoing emissions, rather than claiming the company or product is neutral.
Does this rule apply to company level sustainability claims too?
ECGT is focused on claims about specific products and services in consumer marketing. Broader company level sustainability communication is a separate matter still governed by other existing rules.
While ECGT does add a new compliance burden for businesses, it helps create consistency in sustainability messaging that is important to building confidence in voluntary carbon projects and scaling the industry to help us achieve progress on global carbon emissions.
Disclaimer: Terrapass does not provide legal or regulatory advice. Any interpretation of regulation must be approved by your legal representative.
References:
(1) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/825/oj
(2) https://files.sciencebasedtargets.org/production/files/Corporate-Net-Zero-Standard-version-2.pdf
(3) https://files.sciencebasedtargets.org/production/files/CNZS-V2-Second-Consultation-Draft.pdf
The post The EU’s New Green Claims Rules and Carbon Credits appeared first on Terrapass.
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