Three companies and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation have teamed up to offer mid-Atlantic natural gas consumers a way to offset the climate impacts of their energy use while reducing truck traffic and also helping the bay.
The effort, dubbed CleanSteps Carbon Offsets, offers offsets to new and renewing natural gas customers of Washington Gas Energy Services. The venture, involving Washington Gas Energy Services, Arkansas-based freight shipping firm J.B. Hunt, and Sterling Planet, a Georgia-based clean energy company.
Under the deal announced this morning (Sept. 13) at the bay foundation's Annapolis headquarters, all WGES residential and small business gas customers automatically get 5 percent offsets when they sign up or renew. But they'll also have the option of purchasing up to 100 percent offsets - something that WGES President Harry Warrent estimates would cost $12 per month for the average residential household.
The carbon offsets are to come from "clean air projects that result in greenhouse gas reductions, as well as other local and regional benefits," according to a news release. Initially, though, the offsets will come via J.B. Hunt. Senior vice president Gary Whicker said the company would switch shipments from tractor-trailers to rail, which he said would reduce the amount of energy consumed and greenhouse gases released for ever ton shipped that way.
As WGES customers get enrolled in the new offset program, the Washington-based energy company and Sterling Planet will contribute to a new Carbon Reduction Fund, which would be managed and used by the bay foundation to plant trees along water ways and help farmers reduce runoff of fertilizer into the bay. Those contributions are expected to grow to $200,000 a year.
Bay Foundation President William C. Baker called the partnership "exciting and innovative" and said it presents a way to help clean up the air and water regionally while also doing something about global climate change. Baker predicted that projects underwritten by the fund should reduce the amount of water-fouling nitrogen getting into the bay by 40-60,000 pounds a year. He had no comparable estimates on carbon reductions, saying "we're going to learn as we go along," but suggested they'd likely be on the order of thousands of tons a year.
(2005 AP photo traffic congestion on Interstate 95 near Aberdeen)