Selected
Article:
New
company helps environment, provides opportunity
Delta
native behind ingenious concept
Landowners
in the Delta, the state of Mississippi and across the Southeast
can help minimize the greenhouse effect while earning a
little “green” in the process.
American EnviroTech, LLC, a Mississippi-based company started
three months ago by Dr. Phil Combs of Edwards and Thad Miller
of Greenwood, is assisting landowners with selling carbon
sequestration credits.
Miller says new emission standards are requiring a reduction
in the emission of carbon dioxide by all industry. “This
can be met by changes in equipment, technology improvements
and the carbon sequestration by, among other ways, reforestation,”
he says.
As a “stop-gap solution for industries,” Combs
says both U.S. and international companies are purchasing
credits from landowners or “paying landowners to plant
trees.” Sequestration is keeping the carbon from being
emitted into the atmosphere.
The concept, says Combs, “is very similar to wetland
mitigation.”
“Trees give off oxygen and store carbon,” Combs
says. “There’s an enormous amount of land in
the Delta that qualifies. Fundamentally, you’re not
giving up a whole lot. If you’re interested in growing
trees, it’s not a problem.”
Miller says the company is working with landowners to “maximize
the financial return to the landowner for their environmental
assets.”
“This brings in revenues–there is the potential
for the landowners to be paid about $400 per acre for a
70-year period of growing trees and about $450 per acre
for a 99-year period of growing trees,” Miller says.
American EnviroTech is working with several firms brokering
these credits to buyers. The selling of these carbon sequestration
credits began in June. “They’re put up on the
futures market,” says Combs. “There’s
going to be additional sales behind this. We’re going
90-miles-per-hour getting all the data and everything lined
up.”
Reforestation of former cropland, pasture and other fallow
lands is a direct means of sequestering carbon and has other
benefits to the landowner and the environment. Lands that
were in these uses during the time period of 1990 “will
most likely qualify for the carbon sequestration credits,”
Miller says.
Like the Federal Conservation Reserve Program, which is
reforesting highly erodible land, the reforesting of cropland,
pasture and other fallow lands “will not only reduce
the production of carbon, but will reduce erosion, improve
wildlife management and provide unique income opportunities
for the landowner,” says Miller.
The cost to the landowner to participate in the carbon credit
program is $25 per acre. Included is an assessment of the
land, environmental evaluation, soil testing, carbon biomass
accumulation and potential. A third party, Fields to Forest,
LCC, a Louisiana-based company, is in charge of these assessments
and registry of the credits in an international database.
Combs says American EnviroTech is working with The Carbon
Fund, a Mississippi-based nonprofit organization, to hold
the necessary easements for the necessary time period.
Persons interested in enrolling their land should call American
EnviroTech at 601-852-4528. DBJ
