Carbon compensation
Business
Decarbonisation
Colombian fuel distributor Primax Colombia retired 414,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂e) of carbon credits in a single week. Most of the volume came from two large tranches of Colombian REDD+ credits issued under the CerCarbono standard. REDD+ projects reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
The retirements lift Primax's total for 2026 to nearly 2 million tCO₂e. That figure already exceeds its volume for the whole of 2025.
Colombia led the week. Trading company Uno Corp retired a further 150,000 tCO₂e from domestic renewable energy projects, and Colombian buyers accounted for 583,000 tCO₂e of all retirements in the period.
Colombia leads the week’s retirements infographic.
The national carbon tax drives this demand. Created under Article 221 of Law 1819 of 2016, the tax falls on wholesale fossil fuel distributors. They can claim an exemption by cancelling verified credits from national mitigation projects, in a volume equal to the emissions from the fuel they sell, according to Colombia's Ministry of Environment. Colombia's new government has proposed reducing the share of emissions companies can compensate this way, Quantum reports.
Read more: Energy majors post record carbon credit retirements as nature-based solutions lead the way
Demand also reached beyond Colombia. German municipal utility Stadtwerke Duisburg retired 65,000 tCO₂e from Indian renewable energy projects under Gold Standard. Singapore-based trading group Jebsen & Jessen retired 81,000 tCO₂e from Chinese landfill gas projects, its first purchase since 2024. Eden Exchange bought 28,000 tCO₂e linked to South Africa's carbon tax, bringing its 2026 total to 164,000 tCO₂e. UK steelwork contractor Caunton Engineering retired 29,000 tCO₂e, mainly from methane capture in Bangladesh.
Demand reaches beyond Colombia infographic.
Multi-year corporate contracts add forward volume to this weekly demand. Salesforce has agreed to buy 500,000 carbon credits over five years from Mitti Labs. The credits come from rice-farming projects in India that cut methane through alternate wetting and drying. Mitti agreed a four-year deal for one million credits with Google in September and plans to issue 2 million credits a year by 2028.
Forward deals and rising budgets infographic.
Corporate budgets for carbon credits are rising in parallel. TotalEnergies spent $30 million on carbon credits in the third quarter of 2026, according to its third-quarter results, up from $1 million in the second quarter.
Read more: What Scope 3 looks like traced back to the land
Compliance schemes such as Colombia's carbon tax and multi-year corporate offtakes give project credits two sources of recurring demand. Green Earth develops nature-based carbon projects end to end, with oversight from project design through to credit issuance, building the kind of verified supply this demand draws on. For businesses planning their compensation strategy, Green Earth's verified carbon credits connect each tonne to measurable benefits for forests, biodiversity, and local communities.
