TL;DR
Octopus Energy Generation has committed $500 million to Living Carbon, a biotech startup that plants trees on degraded land to remove CO₂, aiming to remove 50 million tonnes over 40 years. Google, Meta, and McKinsey have separately purchased 131,240 tonnes of carbon credits from Living Carbon’s Appalachian projects through the Symbiosis Coalition. The deal highlights a tension: the tech companies buying these credits are the same ones whose AI data centres are driving the fastest growth in global electricity consumption.
Octopus Energy Generation has committed $500 million to Living Carbon, a San Francisco biotech company that plants trees on degraded land to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The deal, announced on 30 April, will fund reforestation projects across North America with the goal of removing up to 50 million tonnes of CO₂‚‚ over 40 years. Octopus has also invested $13 million directly in Living Carbon’s carbon business.
Separately, Google, Meta, and McKinsey, all members of the Symbiosis Coalition, have signed agreements to purchase 131,240 tonnes of carbon removal over ten years from Living Carbon’s Appalachian reforestation projects, which plant native hardwood and pine on former mine sites and degraded agricultural land. The headline is a $500 million bet on planting trees.
The subtext is that the technology companies buying these carbon credits are the same ones whose data centres now generate as many carbon emissions as the global airline industry, and whose AI infrastructure buildouts are pushing that figure higher every quarter.
The company
Living Carbon was founded in 2019 by Maddie Hall and Patrick Mellor as a public benefit company focused on restoring land that would not recover on its own. The startup works exclusively on degraded sites: abandoned coal mines, exhausted farmland, and areas stripped of topsoil by decades of industrial use. The company explored early proof-of-concept biotech work, including genetically engineering hybrid poplar trees with enhanced photosynthesis by inserting genes from pumpkin and green algae. In controlled trials, the modified poplars grew 53 per cent more above-ground biomass than unmodified trees.
But that line of research is no longer part of Living Carbon’s projects. The company’s carbon removal work now uses exclusively native, naturally occurring tree species selected for their suitability to the degraded sites where they are planted. The US Department of Agriculture had concluded that Living Carbon’s engineered trees did not require regulation as genetically modified organisms, a decision that attracted both investment and criticism, but the question is now moot for the company’s current operations.
The company raised $21 million in a Series A round backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Temasek, Toyota, and Felicis Ventures, and has since expanded its operations to planting millions of trees annually. The Octopus deal represents a step change in scale. Five hundred million dollars is not venture capital. It is project finance, the kind of long-duration commitment typically associated with energy infrastructure, applied to forestry.
Octopus Energy Generation, the investment arm of the British energy company Octopus Energy, manages approximately £8 billion in renewable energy assets across wind, solar, and energy storage. Its entry into nature-based carbon removal signals that institutional capital is beginning to treat reforestation projects with the same financial discipline it applies to solar farms and offshore wind: long payback periods, predictable cash flows from credit sales, and returns tied to regulatory and corporate demand for verified carbon removal.
The buyers
The corporate buyers of Living Carbon’s credits are members of the Symbiosis Coalition, an advance market commitment for nature-based carbon removal formed in 2024 by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce. The coalition has since expanded to include McKinsey, Bain, and REI, and its members have collectively pledged to purchase up to 20 million tonnes of nature-based carbon removal credits by 2030. After reviewing 185 projects across more than 40 countries, the coalition selected Living Carbon’s Appalachian reforestation as one of its funded projects. Google, Meta, and McKinsey have contracted for 131,240 tonnes of removal over a decade, to be generated by planting native species on former mine lands in a region that has been economically and ecologically devastated by the decline of coal.
The irony of the buyer list is difficult to ignore. Google’s AI operations alone could soon consume as much electricity as Ireland, according to a study cited by researchers at VU Amsterdam. Meta has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $145 billion, nearly all of it directed at AI data centres whose power demands require nuclear plants, space-based solar projects, and wind farms to satisfy.
McKinsey, which advises the world’s largest corporations on strategy and operations, has itself estimated that carbon dioxide removal will require $6 trillion to $16 trillion in cumulative investment to deliver net-zero emissions by 2050. These are not companies that are unaware of the problem. They are companies that are simultaneously creating the problem and purchasing partial solutions to it, buying 131,240 tonnes of carbon removal from trees while their data centres emit orders of magnitude more than that annually. Google has pledged not to build custom AI for fossil fuel extraction, but the pledge does not address the emissions generated by the AI infrastructure itself.
The science
Living Carbon’s current approach is native-species reforestation on degraded land, a practice with established science but complex carbon accounting.
The company’s earlier biotech work on photosynthesis-enhanced poplars attracted scrutiny from scientists and environmentalists: critics, including researchers cited in Nature Biotechnology, noted that the only study supporting the growth claims was the company’s own unpublished white paper, and that no independent research confirmed whether engineered trees maintained their advantage over full lifecycles. Living Carbon has since moved away from that line of work.
Its carbon removal projects now plant native hardwoods and pines on former mine sites and exhausted agricultural land, relying on conventional forestry science rather than genetic modification. The scientific questions that remain are the ones that apply to all nature-based carbon removal at scale: whether the trees survive, how fast they grow on contaminated soil, and whether the carbon they absorb stays sequestered over decades in landscapes subject to drought, fire, disease, and competition from invasive species.
The carbon accounting is similarly complex. Nature-based carbon removal credits are measured in tonnes of CO₂‚ that trees are expected to absorb over their lifetimes, but those estimates depend on assumptions about tree survival rates, growth trajectories, fire risk, disease, and the permanence of the land-use change. A new wave of climate tech startups is working on engineered carbon removal methods, from biochar to enhanced weathering to direct air capture, that offer more measurable and potentially more permanent sequestration.
Biochar credits cost approximately $176 per tonne, while direct air capture costs $600 to $1,000 per tonne. New platforms for transparent carbon credit pricing are emerging to address the quality and verification challenges that have plagued the voluntary carbon market. Living Carbon’s nature-based approach is cheaper than engineered alternatives, but the scientific case for its long-term effectiveness rests on assumptions that have not yet been tested at the scale Octopus is now funding.
The tension
The $500 million commitment from Octopus and the corporate purchases from Symbiosis members represent a meaningful acceleration of nature-based carbon removal as an investment category. The 130 million acres of degraded land in the United States that could theoretically be reforested, an area larger than California, represents a genuine opportunity to restore ecosystems while removing carbon at scale.
Living Carbon’s focus on former mine sites adds an economic justice dimension: the communities that bore the environmental costs of coal extraction may benefit from the reforestation projects funded by technology companies that are, in a sense, the coal industry’s successor as the largest industrial consumers of electricity.
But the tension at the core of this story remains unresolved. The International Energy Agency projects that data centre energy consumption will nearly double by the end of 2026, and could reach 3 per cent of global electricity by 2030. The companies purchasing Living Carbon’s carbon credits are the primary drivers of that growth. Fifty million tonnes of CO₂‚ removal over 40 years is a significant number. It is also a fraction of what Google, Meta, and Microsoft will emit through their AI operations over the same period if current growth rates hold.
The Symbiosis Coalition’s 20-million-tonne commitment by 2030 is ambitious by the standards of voluntary carbon markets. By the standards of the emissions its members are generating, it is a rounding error. Living Carbon does not position its work as a substitute for emissions reductions.
The company describes carbon removal as one piece of a broader decarbonisation toolkit that must include direct emissions cuts alongside high-quality removal. That framing is correct. The question is whether its corporate buyers share it, or whether the credits function primarily as an accounting mechanism that permits continued emissions growth.
Living Carbon is planting real trees on real land that would otherwise remain barren, and that is worth doing on its own terms. Whether the companies purchasing its credits are also doing the harder work of reducing the emissions that make the credits necessary is a question that the trees cannot answer.
