21ST CENTURY ALCHEMY
Novel copper-based material key to safely convert heat into electricity
Staff Writer | November 14, 2022 | 6:06 am Energy Europe Copper Manganese

Copper. (Reference image by the US Geological Survey, Flickr.)

A recent study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie presents a new synthetic copper material that acquires a complex structure and microstructure through simple changes in its composition, thereby laying the foundation for converting heat into electricity.


In detail, the novel material is composed of copper, manganese, germanium, and sulphur, and is produced in a relatively simple process.

“The powders are simply mechanically alloyed by ball-milling to form a pre-crystallized phase, which is then densified by 600 degrees Celsius. This process can be easily scaled up,” Emmanuel Guilmeau, corresponding author of the study, said in a media statement.

Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity. This is especially useful in industrial processes where waste heat is reused as valuable electric power. The converse approach is the cooling of electronic parts, for example, in smartphones or cars. Materials used in this kind of application have to be not only efficient, but also inexpensive and, above all, safe.

However, thermoelectric devices used to date make use of expensive and toxic elements such as lead and tellurium, which offer the best conversion efficiency.

But Guilmeau and his team were convinced that it is possible to create safer alternatives. This is why they decided to explore derivatives of natural copper-based sulphide minerals. These mineral derivatives are mainly composed of nontoxic and abundant elements, and some of them have thermoelectric properties.

The team succeeded in producing a series of thermoelectric materials showing two crystal structures within the same material.

“We were very surprised at the result. Usually, slightly changing the composition has little effect on the structure in this class of materials,” Guilmeau said.

He and his colleagues found that replacing a small fraction of the manganese with copper produced complex microstructures with interconnected nanodomains, defects, and coherent interfaces, which affected the material’s transport properties for electrons and heat.

Guilmeau pointed out that the novel material is stable up to 400 degrees Celsius, a range well within the waste heat temperature range of most industries. He is convinced that, based on this discovery, novel cheaper and nontoxic thermoelectric materials could be designed to replace more problematic components.

GREENWASHING

Vale, other large companies leading reforestation program in Brazil
Staff Writer | November 14, 2022 | 

Vale and other major corporations have pledged to restore and conserve 4.0 million ha of forests in Brazil. Credit: Vale S.A.

Vale SA (NYSE: VALE) and a number of other large Brazilian companies are creating a new company focused entirely on the restoration, conservation, and preservation of forests in Brazil. Joining Vale are Itaú Unibanco, Marfrig, Rabobank, Santander and Suzano.


The company is initially to be called Biomas. Over the next 20 years, the new enterprise will restore and protect 4.0 million ha of native forests in some of Brazil’s most valuable ecosystems, including the Amazon, Atlantic Forest and Carrado biomes.

Two million degraded hectares will be restored with the planting of two million native trees. Another 2.0 million hectares of existing trees will be preserved. The project is expected to stimulate regional development and strengthen local communities through their involvement in the value chain.

Each partner will initially commit $5 million to support early Biomas activities. The company is underpinned by a sustainable operation and a financially sustainable business model. Each project will be based on the commercialization of carbon credits.

The first stage of the project will consist of identifying areas, creating nurseries for native species, engaging with communities, advocating for public land concessions, and working on carbon credits certification. After successful pilot projects, Biomas will begin rolling out projects on a vast scale in 2025. Efforts will continue until it reaches the 4.0 million ha goal.

The alliance launched at COP27, held earlier this month and sponsored by United Nations Climate Change, is expected to remove the equivalent of 900 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. It will also provide habitat for more than 4,000 species of animals and plants.

ECOCIDE

Tesla-backed nickel miner cuts output after waste dam leak

Bloomberg News | November 14, 2022

Construction of a tailings storage area Goro Nickel Mine, Kwe West Bassin, New Caledonia – Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The troubled Goro nickel mine — one of the world’s largest deposits, which is part-owned by Trafigura Group and backed by Tesla Inc. — has been forced to reduce production to address a leak from its tailings dam.


Goro, which is located in the South Pacific territory of New Caledonia, reported a “limited release of salt-laden liquid” after heavy rains in August, a spokesperson for owner Prony Resources said by email. Corrective measures required by local authorities mean that nickel output will be reduced in the fourth quarter, the company said.

The cuts at Goro are the latest example of global nickel mines disappointing at a time when the outlook for demand is soaring for use in electric-vehicle batteries. Production is booming in top supplier Indonesia, but there have been a slew of cuts or misses elsewhere, including by Eramet SA, which recently lowered its annual production target in New Caledonia, while Solway Investment Group shuttered a ferronickel plant in Ukraine due to power outages after Russian air strikes.

“The corrective measures required by the South Province mean that Prony Resources New Caledonia’s nickel production will be reduced in the fourth quarter,” the company said. “The minimum quantities required by our customer contracts will be met and we expect to be at full capacity again shortly.”

It declined to give more details or comment on when production would return to normal.

Goro was previously owned by Brazilian miner Vale SA, which sold the asset last year to Prony — a consortium made up of employees, commodities trader Trafigura, Agio Global, and the New Caledonian government. The group announced an agreement at the time with Tesla to support the operation through a “technical and industrial partnership.”

Operational woes

Under Vale’s ownership, Goro was beset by operational woes and cost overruns — becoming a byword for the mining industry’s inability to deliver projects on time and on budget — and the deal with Prony only materialized after years of trying to find a buyer.

Mine tailings dams have also drawn increased international scrutiny after a collapse at one of Vale’s iron ore mines at Brumadinho in Brazil in 2019 killed 270 people, in one of the most deadly mining accidents in modern history.

At Goro, Prony said it has increased monitoring of the dam and hasn’t found any significant changes that could affect its stability.

The company was required to lower the water levels in the dam and ordered to take immediate corrective measures because of environmental concerns, the South Province, the local authority, said in an Oct. 14 statement.

The situation is still being analyzed, Mandy Brizard, a spokesperson for the province, said this week.

In its annual report last year, Trafigura said that priorities for the mine in 2022 “include progressing with a tailings drystacking project to reduce tailings storage risk and protect the environment,” which it said would increase production to at least 35,000 tons a year.

New Caledonia’s output of nickel hydroxide cake, or NHC, of which Prony is the key producer, rose 41% in the first nine months of 2022 from the same period a year earlier to 19,662 tons of nickel content, according to a report from the government.

(By Mathieu Dion and Jack Farchy, with assistance from Mark Burton)

ECOCIDE

Uranium mining in Egypt is expanding despite water contamination, satellite images show
Bloomberg News | November 15, 2022 | 

The Allouga mine is located in a remote and arid area with no major population centres nearby. (Stock image by lotus_studio.)

Egypt’s Allouga uranium mine has been expanding despite evidence that its radioactive runoff is contaminating scarce water resources, according to satellite images captured last month for Bloomberg by Planet Labs PBC.


The uranium mine, located less than 150 kilometers (93 miles) from the ongoing United Nations COP27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, underscores the difficult tradeoffs involved in producing minerals used in zero-emission energy sources such as nuclear power plants.


A peer reviewed study published by Environmental Health Sciences earlier this year sampled uranium levels near Allouga as much as six times the concentration normally found in nature. Egypt’s Nuclear Materials Authority, which owns and operates the site, acknowledged as far back as 2018 that drinking water wells in the area contained “greater concentrations of uranium than acceptable limits.”

“People who are exposed to that level of radiation for a lifetime would have an elevated cancer risk,” wrote the Cairo-based scientists from Ain Shams University who carried out the research, which was published in April. “Available water resources in the study area are considered unsafe for human consumption and irrigation.”


Satellite imagery of Allouga shows how successive waves of excavation and rubble have changed the landscape of the red, craggy hill tops that surround the site over nearly two decades. Ore crushers, processing plants, sulphuric acid tanks and waste repositories appear operational, according to Robert Kelley, a former safeguards director at the International Atomic Energy Agency, who reviewed the photographs. Allison Puccioni, a nuclear non-proliferation imagery analyst at Stanford University, also confirmed activity at the site.

Egypt is estimated by the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency to have less than 0.01% of the Earth’s identifiable uranium reserves — not enough to produce commercial quantities it can profitably export. Egypt also doesn’t currently possess the infrastructure to process the ore into fuel for its own future power reactor, which is under construction and will be supplied by Russia.

The small quantities excavated from Allouga could technically be tapped to eventually supply a military program, according to Kelley, a former nuclear-weapons engineer in the US Department of Energy. Egypt is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its IAEA envoy, Mohammed ElMolla, dismissed any suggestion it might seek nuclear arms. He said nuclear energy and uranium mining were part of efforts to diversify the country’s energy mix and bolster its economy.

Whatever its purpose, the excavation continues and waste has been dumped on the hillsides.

“A large quantity of mine tailings in the form of slurry waste are placed in small piles adjacent to the mine without engineered barriers,” the researchers wrote. “During the processing, no safety measures were taken to assure the isolation of the tailings from the environment. The major threat of these tailings is the leaching of contaminants (e.g. radionuclides and heavy metals) into groundwater which is considered the main source of drinking water in the area.”

While it warns that the activity needs to bear in mind the impact on local water resources, the study does not present any evidence or make any suggestion that people have been made ill.

The Allouga mine is located in a remote and arid area with no major population centers, mitigating its human impact. The satellite images nevertheless show some small communities, as well as irrigated fields, nearby.

Those most likely to be affected from radioactive effluent leaching into groundwater are local Bedouins, who count among the most vulnerable of the 100,000 people living in the South Sinai Governate, Egypt’s least-populated administrative region. It is the “indigenous community who are principally affected by the mining operation,” according to the Environmental Health Science research.

For the latest study, the authors collected 47 water and soil samples from four wadis — dry valleys that turn into streams after rain — surrounding the Allouga mine and covering an area of some 250 square km.

Egypt’s Central Laboratory for Environmental Quality Monitoring, which analyzed the samples, found most contained uranium concentrations higher than the average two parts per million found in nature. Nineteen of 30 stream sediment samples registered higher-than-normal uranium traces while “all samples’’ of groundwater did, according to the report.

(By Jonathan Tirone, with assistance from Patricia Suzara)

KILLER MINE

Newcrest resumes operations at Brucejack mine
Cecilia Jamasmie | November 16, 2022 

Brucejack gold-silver mine is located about 940 km north of Vancouver, B.C. (Image courtesy of Newcrest Mining.)

Newcrest Mining (ASX, TSX, PNGX: NCM) said on Wednesday it had resumed operations at its Brucejack gold-silver mine in Canada, which had been shut since late October following the death of a worker.


Australia’s largest gold producer said that during the three-and-a-half weeks Brucejack was suspended, it reviewed the operation to identify major hazards and corresponding critical controls to prevent fatalities and life-changing injuries.

“The devastating incident at Brucejack is a stark reminder that safety must always be our number one priority as a business,” chief executive Sandeep Biswas said in the statement.

The latest accident was the third workplace death at the northern British Columbia operation since it opened in 2018. In the two previous cases, either the mine or its contractors were disciplined for failing to ensure workers received adequate safety training.

Newcrest added Brucejack to its portfolio earlier this year, following the acquisition of Pretium Resources.

The mine began commercial production in July 2017 and is one of the world’s highest-grade operating gold mines.

The asset spans 1,200 square kilometres in the heart of British Columbia’s Golden Triangle, which has a 100-year mining history and also hosts the Red Chris, Eskay Creek and Snip mines.

21ST CENTURY ALCHEMY

Scientists learn what it takes to develop gold-based meta-materials

Staff Writer | November 16, 2022 

Gold particles. (Reference image from Public Domain Pictures.)

A team of researchers from Finland, Singapore and Saudi Arabia has achieved the first insights into engineering crystal growth by atomically precise metal nanoclusters.


In detail, the group synthesized metal clusters consisting of 25 gold atoms, one nanometer in diameter. These clusters are soluble in water due to the ligand molecules that protect the gold. This cluster material is known to self-assemble into well-defined close-packed single crystals when the water solvent is evaporated.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry, the scientists explain that ordinary solid matter consists of atoms organized in a crystal lattice. The chemical character of the atoms and lattice symmetry define the properties of the matter, for instance, whether it is a metal, a semiconductor or an electric insulator. The lattice symmetry may be changed by ambient conditions such as temperature or high pressure, which can induce structural transitions and transform even an electric insulator into an electric conductor, that is, a metal.

Larger identical entities such as nanoparticles or atomically precise metal nanoclusters can also organize into a crystal lattice, to form so-called meta-materials. However, until now, information on how to engineer the growth of such materials from their building blocks has been scarce since crystal growth is a typical self-assembling process.

This is where the research team comes in.

Led by Qiaofeng Yao, the team found a novel concept to regulate crystal growth by adding tetra-alkyl-ammonium molecular ions in the solvent. These ions affect the surface chemistry of the gold clusters, and their size and concentration were observed to have an impact on the size, shape, and morphology of the formed crystals.

Remarkably, high-resolution electron microscopy images of some of the crystals revealed that they consist of polymeric chains of clusters with four-gold-atom interparticle links.

According to the researchers, the demonstrated surface chemistry opens now new ways to engineer metal cluster-based meta-materials for investigations of their electronic and optical properties.

Charts: How much will coal’s transition cost?

MINING.COM Staff Writer | November 17, 2022 | 

Coal. Stock image.

The world needs to invest $380 billion per year in clean energy until 2030 to transition away from coal, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).


The amount is around 20% of all clean energy spending in the IEA Announced Pledges Scenario (APS), which assumes that all climate commitments made by governments around the world will be met in full and on time.

“$380 billion to transition away from coal isn’t much. It’s less than the GDP of Austria. It’s 0.4% of global GDP,” Peter Zeniewski, an Energy analyst for the IEA World Energy Outlook, wrote in a tweet.

Until 2030, around $250 billion, about 70% of global investment in the coal transition, will need to be spent in the power sector to replace the use of unabated coal with low emissions sources, primarily wind and solar PV

.

Source: IEA

While coal is still the largest source of electricity generation, accounting for 36% of the world total, it is also the largest emitter of energy-related global carbon dioxide (CO2) – 15 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2021.

According to the report, the buck of the investment needs to go into emerging markets and developing economies, where coal emissions are highly concentrated.

Source: IEA

This week, US President Joe Biden and Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced a $20 billion package to help the coal-dependent country shift to renewable energy and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

The deal put forward by the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), which includes the US, Japan, Canada, the UK, and several European countries in the EU and Norway, follows an agreement reached last year in which the United States and Europe pledged to give South Africa $8.5 billion in grants and loans in return for it retiring coal plants, switching to renewable energy, and re-training its workforce.

Similar arrangements are also being discussed with Vietnam, Senegal, and India.

Phasing out coal is essential to achieve the Paris Agreement, which limits global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels.

“The coal transition is affordable, and the challenges aren’t insurmountable. And if we operate the world’s coal assets as they have been in the past, we’ll sail past the 1.5° budget. That will cost the world much more… not just in dollars,” Zeniewski said.

Coal miners pay highest US dividends as prices soar to records

Bloomberg News | November 16, 2022 |

An open pit coal mine. Credit: AdobeStock

Coal is paying off for investors.


Miners of the fossil fuel are raking in cash and paying out hefty dividends, with shares surging as the global energy crisis boosts coal prices to record highs. US coal producers are projected to offer an average return of about 6% to investors over the next year, more than any other industry. That’s led by Arch Resources Inc., which is about to distribute a substantial $10.75-a-share payout.

It’s a notable turnaround for an industry that experienced waves of bankruptcies in recent years as power producers shift away from the dirtiest fossil fuel. The resurgence comes as Russia’s war in Ukraine roils energy markets, and underscores that the market for coal remains robust even as environmentalists, progressive politicians and many corporations push to abandon the fuel to fight climate change.

Still, coal’s long-term prospects remain bleak, which is why miners enjoying record profits are returning cash to shareholders instead of spending on new projects.

“The name of the game in coal right now is capital returns,” Lucas Pipes, an analyst with B Riley Securities, said in an interview.

Arch’s payout follows a $6-a-share quarterly dividend announced in July and an $8.11 one declared in April. The dividend yield of the second-biggest US coal miner is expected to reach 25% over the next year, the highest on the Russell 2000 Index. Since the company has explicitly pledged to hand half of its cash flow back to shareholders, investors can expect healthy returns for the next several quarters or more, said Andrew Blumenfeld, director of data analytics at McCloskey by Opis.

Other US miners show similar promise, including Alliance Resource Partners LP’s projected 12-month dividend yield of 9.5% and the projected 4.2% yield of Ramaco Resources Inc. Alpha Metallurgical Resources Inc. just raised its regular dividend and announced a special payout of $5 a share.

Coal miners are in a unique position, Blumenfeld said. The market is healthy, for now, as utilities clamor to secure enough fuel to keep the lights on. But the world is inexorably shifting to cleaner sources of power and demand for coal is expected to gradually decline during the next few decades. There’s little reason to spend money on mines to boost output, but offering beefy payouts will make stocks appealing to investors and drive up share prices.

“They’re saying ‘we believe the best place for this cash is back with our investors’,” Blumenfeld said.

(By Will Wade)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Ex-Tesla Australia boss admits to insider trading
Bloomberg News | November 16, 2022 |  

Stock image.

The former head of Tesla Inc.’s Australian operations, Kurt Schlosser, admitted to insider trading after learning that the US electric carmaker had struck a supply deal with a publicly traded lithium producer, Australia’s securities regulator said.


Schlosser bought 86,478 shares in Piedmont Lithium Ltd. on Sept. 16., 2020 after becoming aware that Tesla had reached an agreement with the mining company, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission said Wednesday. After the information was made public, Schlosser sold his Piedmont shares for a profit of A$28,883.53 ($19,500), ASIC said.

Schlosser also told a friend about the deal before it was announced, knowing that the individual would probably buy Piedmont stock, according to ASIC. Schlosser pleaded guilty at a Sydney court on Nov. 15 to two counts of insider trading, the regulator said.

Schlosser is yet to be sentenced. An insider-trading offense carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, ASIC said.

(By Angus Whitley)

URANIUM

UEC expands licensed capacity at Hobson plant; nears initial production in Texas

Staff Writer | November 17, 2022

Drilling in South Texas. Credit: UEC

Uranium Energy (NYSE American: UEC) announced Thursday that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has approved its submission for a renewed and expanded radioactive material licence (RML) for the Hobson central processing plant.


The Hobson plant serves as the anchor of UEC’s hub-and-spoke in-situ recovery (ISR) production platform in South Texas, and will be used to process uranium loaded resin recovered from multiple satellite projects including Palangana and Burke Hollow.

The amended RML from the TCEQ would increase Hobson’s licensed production capacity by four-fold to 4 million pounds of U3O8 annually, distinguishing the plant as having the largest licensed capacity in Texas and the second largest in the US.

“We continue to execute on our strategy of growing UEC’s leadership as a pure-play, un-hedged uranium supplier in politically stable jurisdictions. Today’s achievement increases and advances our production capabilities in South Texas as we work towards the company’s return to production,” UEC CEO Amir Adnani said in a media statement.

South Texas is one of two production-ready ISR hub and spoke platforms held by UEC, the other being Wyoming. Together, the two platforms contain 12 satellite projects, seven of which are fully licensed, with over 71 million lb. of measured and indicated resources and 17 million lb. of inferred resources in place.

According to the August 2022 S-K 1300 technical report, the South Texas projects are estimated to contain a combined measured and indicated resource of 9.12 million lb. (4.74 million tonnes grading 0.10% U3O8) and 9.92 million lb. inferred (5.47 million tonnes grading 0.12% U3O8).

Of the three South Texas properties explored by UEC, the most recent drilling was done at Burke Hollow from 2019-2021, where the company has completed baseline sampling at the first production area and successfully conducted the production area pump test. This brings UEC one step closer to initiating production at Burke Hollow, which it describes as the newest and largest ISR wellfield being developed in the US.

In a separate announcement, UEC has also completed its acquisition of the Roughrider project in Saskatchewan from a subsidiary of Rio Tinto. In the press release, Adnani said that the Roughrider project “will anchor our Canadian high-grade conventional business and allow us to unlock value from the portfolio recently acquired from UEX.”

The development-stage Roughrider project has a non-current, historic resource of 58 million lb. at an average grade of 4.73% U3O8 in the eastern Athabasca Basin region, where 10% of global uranium production was sourced in 2021.

As previously announced in October, total consideration paid for the uranium development asset is C$150 million ($112.5m).

GREENWASHING

How the 2022 World Cup rebuilt a market for dodgy carbon credits
Bloomberg News | November 17, 2022

World Cup organizers have pledged to erase the event’s negative environmental impact. Credit: Adobe Stock

For almost a decade, the small, gas-rich country of Qatar has been one giant construction site. In preparation to host the FIFA World Cup this November, it’s built seven stadiums, new roads and dozens of hotels. Between the emissions generated by the new construction plus air travel to transport players and fans, the 2022 tournament is shaping up to be the most carbon-intensive on record.


World Cup organizers have pledged to erase the event’s negative environmental impact. They plan to make the event “carbon neutral” by buying offsets — paying, in theory, for carbon to be removed or reduced from the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere else.

In practice, the plan is deeply flawed. Qatar and FIFA not only aren’t mitigating the environmental impact of the event, they may be inadvertently magnifying it. Specifically, they’ve said they want to buy some 1.8 million offsets from the Doha-based Global Carbon Council, bolstering a new, local organization that signs off on the kinds of projects that fail to meet minimum standards anywhere else in the world.

GCC is certifying credits that “will make no difference whatsoever to global emissions,” said Gilles Dufrasne, a policy lead at the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch and an expert advisor to the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. “What GCC is offering here is at best ignorant, and at worst an obvious attempt to create more supply of low quality, low cost credits with an illusion of credibility.”

The problem, Dufrasne says, is that the projects that GCC approves can be tied to renewable energy developments in middle-income countries like India, Turkey and Serbia. In the past, a solar, wind or hydroelectric plant could generate carbon credits on the basis that the additional revenue motivated developers to take steps to replace fossil fuel energy. Without the credits, the renewable energy projects wouldn’t get built.

That’s no longer the case in most countries. From 2010 to 2021, the cost of renewable power fell by almost 90%. Solar and wind power are in high demand. Where developers don’t need an added incentive to build them, they shouldn’t generate credits that grant others license to pump new emissions into the atmosphere through, say, massive construction projects or air travel.

With a few, limited exceptions, Dufrasne says, “issuing carbon credits to large renewable energy projects in 2022 goes against fundamental integrity rules of carbon markets.”

That’s why Verra and Gold Standard, the world’s two biggest certifiers of carbon offset projects, have refused grid-connected renewable energy projects in all but the poorest countries since 2019. “ We came to the conclusion that only those in least-developed countries were still additional,” said David Antonioli, chief executive at Verra. The verification body introduced the ban to “make sure carbon finance was driven to where it is needed most,” he said.

The Science Based Targets initiative goes further, saying that companies should only buy offsets from projects that actively remove carbon from the atmosphere — a definition that excludes renewable energy projects.

GCC, though, strongly disagrees. Chief Operating Officer Kishor Rajhansa says it assesses each project individually, and renewable energy can be a legitimate source of offsets. “Renewable energy is the single biggest climate mitigation activity to reach a net-zero world,” he said.

“We disagree on principle with the decision taken by Verra and Gold Standard to make a blanket decision on all the projects from the developed world,” Rajhansa said. “We want to give every project owner a chance to demonstrate additionality.”

Operational since 2019, GCC had until recently certified just a few projects. But the publicity from the World Cup — along with a tightening of standards elsewhere — has lifted its business prospects significantly. The commitment from FIFA and the Supreme Committee to host a carbon neutral tournament and their ambition to source credits from the region gave the GCC plan impetus, Rajhansa said.

Now there are almost 600 projects waiting for GCC approval, submitted by project developers or middlemen with nowhere else to turn. Indian energy company Emergent Ventures has submitted a handful of grid-connected solar projects to GCC for certification. “It’s the only working standard allowing registration of renewable energy power projects,” Emergent Ventures director Atul Sanghal said. “This is the main reason to go for GCC registration.”

GCC may generate up to 400 million credits over the next decade, said Rajhansa. At today’s prices, that would be worth around $1 billion. Almost all are renewable energy projects and rely either on GCC’s own methodology or that produced by the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism, a scheme established in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol that’s now considered outdated and is “de facto dead,” according to Dufrasne.

Carbon offsets can be bought and sold with little oversight. The United Nations and other global bodies are working on universal standards, and regulators are increasingly interested in the exchanges that have cropped up to connect buyers and sellers.

So far, the World Cup organizers have been the sole purchasers of credits verified by GCC, which charges to verify offset projects and is owned by the Qatari government. However, all approved and submitted projects are marked by GCC as “CORSIA eligible,” meaning they could be used by airlines to meet their offsetting obligations under the scheme going by the same name.

In response to questions this month, FIFA said all of the event organizers — FIFA, the Supreme Committee and its Qatar 2022 committee — will decide independently whether and where to buy offsets. FIFA now says it will not be purchasing offsets verified by GCC.

The Supreme Committee said it supported the formation of the GCC in 2016 to contribute to regional climate action, but GCC is now operating as an independent organization. “Sustainability has defined all our planning and operations,” the Committee added, which include a new solar power plant, tree nursery, green spaces and electric buses.

The emergence of GCC has spurred new calls for global regulation of the voluntary carbon market, establishing a common, high standard for the credits that can be credibly claimed to offset emissions. Even if GCC tightened its standards in line with other bodies, there’s nothing to stop another organization from popping up to verify renewable energy credits, and as long as the offsets are “verified,” companies will buy them and apply them to net zero goals.

“Without much stricter rules and oversight, the [market] will not play a significant role in reaching the Paris Agreement goals; on the contrary, it could end up facilitating more emissions,” said Juerg Fuessler, managing partner at INFRAS, a sustainability consultancy, and former member of a UN expert panel on carbon crediting methodologies.

Buyers of poor quality credits “divert resources and attention from necessary real and additional mitigation activities,” Fuessler said, and fail to move the needle on meaningful emissions reductions.

(By Natasha White and Verity Ratcliffe, with assistance from Demetrios Pogkas)