Carbon Count platform reduces project costs and garners international interest

The savings have been made by greatly reducing the administrative manpower required to get these projects off the ground.

Reducing the number of soil samples required to accurately predict carbon storage has also brought down costs.

It all began 16 years ago when soil scientist and Carbon Count CEO Philip Mulvey was having a conversation with a colleague who said, "Phil, one day they're going to trade carbon and to trade carbon we've got to sort the maths out".

So began the journey to develop the now patented unequal area stratification algorithm.

This model differs from other statistical analysis in that it accurately measures landscapes based on its parameters, then looks from the rate of error backwards to determine the number of soil samples that are required.

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The next step was to automate the whole process.

Mr Mulvey said the increase in cloud computing as well as data storage and management in the cloud had helped make this possible.

"When the researchers did it, it took up to a week of laptop running time to optimise what was going to be the most optimum between error and amount traded and cost. That was unsatisfactory from a commercial point of view," he said.

"We had to then spend two years programming a system on the cloud that allowed information to be uploaded and run automatically.

"So what took a week we got down to 12 hours at the start of this year and now we've got down to three minutes."

Carbon Count is not aimed at the everyday farmer due to the high degree of accuracy required.

However, Mr Mulvey wants farmers to be aware of how the platform works so they can approach the company or licensed third-parties to set up soil carbon projects.

Licencees of the platform include project managers and carbon trading companies as well as banks and universities.

"To trade carbon you have to legally define accurately the title you are working on and the definitions of the land that's excluded," Mr Mulvey said.

"You can't have even a millimetre of overlap in the registration; so it has a high degree of accuracy.

"To do your exclusions, it has to be accurately mapped onto the GIS (geographic information system) platform to be loaded into the CER (Clean Energy Regulator)."

Carbon Count is able to generate reports, audit paperwork and prepare baseline and interim carbon emissions for each project.

The Clean Energy Regulator's legislative framework for the Emissions Reduction Fund has already been integrated into the platform, further streamlining the process for licencees.

Mr Mulvey said reducing costs of administration, audit and measurement to $10,000 to $20,000 per measurement gives a total saving of up to 70 per cent in some instances.

Interest in Carbon Count has "gone nuts" since its launch and Mr Mulvey said they were now assessing how to manage this sudden growth.

Initially he had been worried they might have missed the boat but soon realised they "had something the market had not seen at all".

"People come in riding a horse, expecting to see a Model T Ford and we present them with a 1990s Ferrari," he said.

COVID-19 restrictions also turned out to be an advantage in that the Carbon Count Beta launch was held online.

"We weren't expecting to do that," Mr Mulvey said.

"Because we did it online people from all kinds of countries heard the launch, which we weren't expecting either.

"So the net effect of that was we had to start rapidly coding for the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Lithuania."

International trading of carbon credits is now in the pipeline, with coding being done to incorporate the Verra and Gold Standard schemes into the platform.

Australian carbon credit units cannot be traded, however ACCU equivalents can be used overseas.

"There's a high regard for the Australian system and the fact it can't be gamed," Mr Mulvey said.

"The measurement of carbon in soil is very prescribed, very accurate, there's a high degree of assurance and auditing behind it and the international market quite like that."

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