Alt Carbon makes Asia’s largest verified Enhanced Weathering credit issuance to Japanese shipping giant Mitsui O.S.K. Lines

Alt Carbon, a deeptech startup building Planetary Intelligence, recently announced Asia’s largest issuance of verified Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) credits via the Enhanced Rock Weathering pathway, to be delivered to Japanese shipping giant Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Ltd. (MOL Group). This is within 8 months of signing a multi-year deal to permanently remove 10,000 tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

Alt Carbon’s first verified CDR credits will be delivered from its Darjeeling Revival Project (Alt x MOL) —  an ambitious initiative to revive Darjeeling’s heritage tea estates and neighboring agricultural networks including rice paddies, by making it a hub for removing CO₂ at scale. 

Alt Carbon uses a novel carbon removal method called Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW), which involves sourcing waste basalt rock and spreading it across agricultural farmlands. The basalt reacts with carbon dioxide dissolved in rainwater; permanently storing the carbon dioxide as stable bicarbonate ions. Over time, these ions travel through river networks to the ocean, where they eventually reside as calcium carbonate (CaCO₃), in the form of corals & seashells for over 10,000 years. The Darjeeling Revival Project further adapts agriculture to climate impact by boosting soil health, balancing pH, and improving crop yields for farmers.

The milestone catalyses India’s role in the Voluntary Carbon Markets. By innovating a new pathway for engineered Carbon Removal in the Darjeeling region, Alt Carbon has successfully shown proof of CO₂ being permanently and durably removed. The data and calculations behind each credit are publicly available on the Isometric Registry, providing a permanent audit trail for every credit issued and allowing all underlying information to be independently reviewed and scrutinized. Alt’s first issuance is to the Japanese shipping giant MOL Group — a pioneer leading decarbonisation efforts in the global shipping sector.

“We’re thrilled with the first CDR issuance from Alt Carbon in just 8 months of signing our offtake agreement. This issuance underscores Alt Carbon’s operational rigour in delivering a novel, and geologically permanent carbon removal pathway such as ERW in such a quick turnaround. We’re determined to achieve net-zero GHG emissions by 2050 while assuring sustainable development for people, society, and the Earth. This first generation of CDR improves our confidence in subsequent deliveries by Alt Carbon,” said Daisuke Fujihashi, General Manager, Carbon Solution Development Unit of MOL.

MOL Group's partnership with Alt Carbon aligns with its BLUE ACTION 2035 agenda, which positions the environment as one of its three core strategies. The Darjeeling Revival Project offers a long-term collaboration with MOL in their mission to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions group-wide by 2050, with an intermediate target of reducing GHG emissions intensity by approximately 45% by 2035 (versus 2019). 

“India needs $1 trillion of climate finance by 2030 to adapt our soil, rivers, and cities to climate impact. Globally, we need to remove 10 billion tons of CO₂ every year by 2050. We’re nowhere close to these targets. While the world is debating carbon markets at COP, we are proving it at scale here in India. Enhanced Rock Weathering is among the most complex MRV challenges in climate science. Accurate quantification of CO₂ removal demands extremely high-resolution field data, painstaking soil-sample collection, rigorous geochemical analysis, and airtight separation of natural vs. enhanced weathering signals. This first issuance will further our mission to build the underlying scientific and data infrastructure, enabling gigaton scale carbon removal in South Asia. This is the Manhattan Project of our generation,” said Shrey Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO of Alt Carbon. 

For its first credit issuance, Alt Carbon implemented a fully timestamped and geotagged workflow through their planetary tech stack (Feluda) integrating on-ground field monitoring, distributed weather-station networks, ocean-modelling for downstream alkalinity losses, and large-scale soil, porewater, and river chemistry datasets for quantifying and validating carbon removal. This scientific architecture is further strengthened through academic collaborations with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore and Ashoka University.

“We’re pleased to issue Alt Carbon’s first verified Enhanced Weathering credits, and Isometric’s first for a carbon removal project in Asia. This milestone marks an important step forward for Enhanced Weathering, demonstrating both its potential as a scalable climate solution and the growing demand for high-quality carbon removal,” said Eamon Jubbawy, Founder and CEO of Isometric. 

Alt Carbon’s Darjeeling Revival Project is supported by early buyers like Frontier, a Stripe-led Advanced Market Commitment founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability. Members have committed to purchase over $1 billion of carbon removal tons by 2030. Our buyers also include the South Pole & Mitsubishi Corporation-led NextGen CDR buyers coalition, John Good Group, and marketplaces like CUR8, CEEZER and Watershed.

Alt Carbon is leveraging the growing voluntary carbon market, where there is strong demand for CDR credits from international companies. This is driven by sector specific regulations like CORSIA, legal mandates in countries like Japan, Singapore, & Switzerland, and stricter investor pressure across geographies . In the past 3 years, the CDR market alone has grown from $300m to over $10B in transacted volumes, a whopping 33x increase. Leading carbon removal registries show that the number of buyers has also steadily increased from about 400 to over 600 corporate buyers in just the last 12 months. McKinsey estimates the global carbon removal market could scale to between $300 billion and $400 billion a year by 2030, underscoring how quickly demand for high-quality CDR is accelerating.