Ontario Power Generation Carbon Sequestration and Offsets

• Ontario Power Generation plants thousands of trees annually near its operations and service areas, sequestering thousands of tons of CO₂ every year.
  
  

• Ontario Power Generation (OPG) and US Gen New England (US Gen) successfully completed a GHG emissions trade in April 2000. US Gen sold OPG 1 million metric tons of CO₂e reductions generated by capturing and destroying methane that would otherwise be emitted from the Johnston Landfill in Rhode Island from 1998 to 2000. OPG has committed to have all of its emissions reduction purchases verified by the Ontario, Canada Pilot Emissions Trading Project and report them to Canada’s Climate Change Voluntary Challenge and Registry Inc., where they are transferred and retired.
  

• Ontario Power Generation is part of the Greenhouse Emissions Management Consortium, a non-profit Canadian corporation formed by ten Canadian Energy Companies that invests in emissions offsets.  Among other offsets, the consortium has purchased 6 million metric tons of carbon emission reduction credits from Iowa farmers who use minimum-till and no-till farming practices, cropland retirement, buffer strips, afforestation, reforestation, improved timber management, power generation from biomass, and methane abatement from livestock waste to reduce emissions.
  
  
• OPG will plant 1.6 million trees by 2005 to promote carbon sequestration and conserve biodiversity. This planting effort will offset an estimated 900,000 metric tons of CO₂ over the lifetime of the trees and will add at least 800 hectares of new forest in southern Ontario.
  

To view carbon sequestration and offsets programs of all BELC members, visit What's Being Done in the Business Community section of this site.