Carbon offset study OK’d for Oconto County forests

County board accepts non-disclosure agreement regarding company’s analysis
By: 
Warren Bluhm
Editor-in-chief

A company that specializes in the development of carbon offset credits wants to study Oconto County public forests to assess their potential.

Monty Brink, the county forest and park administrator, and Josh Strauss, senior vice president for Anew Carbon Development LLC, provided the Oconto County Board with a primer in carbon offset credits during the board’s monthly meeting on March 23.

The presentation was made to clarify issues before the board voted on a resolution to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Anew as a condition of the preliminary study, which would be done at no cost to the county.

Carbon offsets are tradable “rights” or certificates linked to activities that lower the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Brink and Strauss said the county is being considered for a project because of the difference between the number of acres it leases for harvesting every year and the “total annual allowable cut” of 1,100 acres permitted by law.

“Since I’ve been here we’ve never butted up against that 1,100 acres,” Brink said. “Actually this next week I’ll be doing our annual review of how many acres we’ll be putting up for sale in May 2023, and it looks like we might be around the 800 mark this year. Last year it was about 600, so we’re only harvesting 50-70% of our allowable cut, and that’s why Josh feels that we might have a viable project, which the analysis will show.”

Asked about the need for a non-disclosure agreement, Strauss said it’s mainly to protect the company’s intellectual property.

“The non-disclosure agreement is strictly concerned with our opportunity analyses, so the idea being that we provide this free pre-review, the detailed report of what we think the carbon potential is for the county,” Strauss said. “We just want to make sure that the county respects the fact that that is a, you know, there’s proprietary information there that we do like to keep confidential. If folks that are interested in entering the space and competing with us in this area get our document, they can say, ‘OK, here’s how Anew does it, maybe we can try and reverse engineer how they calculated this.’”

If the study shows the potential for some carbon offset credit revenues, the company would seek a partnership with the county to develop a project, Strauss said. Eventually the American Carbon Registry analyzes the documentation and issues carbon offset credits, defined as about a ton of CO2 equivalence per unit.

He emphasized that the resolution presented March 23 does no commit the county to spend any money.

“There’s no obligation, no cost, we’re just going to look and see if it’s worth pursuing any further,” Strauss said.

The resolution passed by a vote of 19-7, with “no” votes from Supervisor Jolene Barkhaus, David Nehrend, David Christianson, Brandon Dhuey, Gary Frank, Elizabeth Holman and Keith Schneider.