The hardest question in carbon, answered in the open.
If you want to find out whether a carbon credit is serious, do not ask about its co-benefits or its branding. Ask one question: would the abatement have happened anyway? This is additionality, and it is where carbon credibility lives or dies. A credit that finances something that would have occurred without it is not an environmental asset. It is a paper transfer with a green label. Most of the carbon market’s public failures, when you trace them back, are failures of additionality dressed up as something else.
So rather than route around the question, we want to answer it in the open — including the parts that are uncomfortable, because a claim you can only defend by staying vague is not a claim an institution should buy.
Here is the mechanism, stated plainly. The abatement behind an LMCX Carbon Avoidance Token comes from permanently plugging a leaking well, which prevents the methane that well would otherwise have emitted. The additionality question is therefore specific: would that well have been plugged, on that timeline, without carbon finance? Our answer rests on a financial test, and we show the arithmetic rather than assert the conclusion.
We apply the UNFCCC’s Tool 01 financial-additionality methodology. For our Christopher Unit #1 reference project, the plug-and-abandonment program carries a net present value of roughly negative $1.66 million without carbon revenue. In plain terms: absent carbon finance, plugging this well destroys value, which is precisely why wells like it are so often left leaking rather than retired. The carbon revenue required to bring that program from negative NPV to break-even is a defined threshold — 55,392 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent at the reference price. The verified issuance from the project exceeds that threshold, which is what allows carbon finance to change the decision. The abatement is uneconomic on its own and becomes economic only because the credit exists. That is the definition of financial additionality, and it is documented so a diligence team can reproduce it rather than believe it.
Now the honest complications, because an additionality claim that hides its weak points is not worth much.
First, these are not ownerless orphan wells with no responsible party — a category the market sometimes treats as automatically additional. There is an operator and a working interest behind the reference assets. We think that makes the financial test more important, not less: precisely because a solvent party could in principle plug the well, the question of whether it was economic to do so without carbon is the crux, and that is the test we run and evidence. We would rather you scrutinize the economics than accept a halo we have not earned.
Second, additionality is not permanent, and we do not pretend it is. As methane regulation tightens — emissions fees, direct rules, publicly funded plugging — the set of wells whose abatement genuinely depends on carbon finance will shrink. That is good for the atmosphere and it is a discipline on us. It means each project must demonstrate additionality against the regulatory reality at its vintage, not once at inception and never again. Our issuance is gated vintage by vintage for exactly this reason: the test is re-run, not grandfathered.
Third, additionality interacts with baseline. Establishing that the plugging was additional is necessary but not sufficient; you also have to establish how much methane was avoided, over what period, which is a forward estimate with real uncertainty and no single market-blessed method. We address baseline conservatively — direct measurement of the leak rather than a coefficient, a 100-year GWP basis rather than the credit-inflating 20-year figure — and we treat the crediting period and quantification method as things to be evidenced and independently verified, not chosen for maximum yield.
We lay all of this out not because it is flattering but because it is the actual state of the question, and because the buyers we are built for will find these seams whether we name them or not. An issuer who surfaces the hard parts of their own additionality case is telling you something an issuer who only shows the strong parts cannot: that the case was built to be examined.
The uncomfortable truth of this market is that additionality can never be proven with the certainty of a measurement. It is a counterfactual — a statement about a world that did not occur. What you can do is make the reasoning explicit, ground it in a recognized methodology, show the numbers, gate it to the regulatory reality, and submit it to independent verification. That converts additionality from a marketing adjective into an auditable argument. It does not make the argument unassailable. It makes it interrogable — which is the most any honest issuer can offer and, we would argue, exactly what a serious buyer should demand.
Ask us whether the abatement would have happened anyway. We have built the answer to withstand the question.