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. Its initial approach involved genetically engineering hybrid poplar trees with enhanced photosynthesis, inserting genes from pumpkin and green algae to reduce photorespiration and redirect the energy into growth. In controlled trials, the modified poplars grew 53 per cent more above-ground biomass than unmodified trees, though the company has acknowledged that genetically engineered trees represent only about 5 per cent of its total plantings. The US Department of Agriculture concluded that Living Carbon’s trees did not require regulation as genetically modified organisms and could be commercially planted, a decision that attracted both investment and criticism from environmental groups concerned about the long-term ecological effects of releasing engineered organisms into wild landscapes.
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
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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 approach sits at the intersection of biotechnology and forestry, a combination that appeals to investors but has drawn scrutiny from scientists and environmentalists. The company’s photosynthesis-enhanced poplars performed well in greenhouse trials, but field data on long-term carbon sequestration rates remains limited. Critics, including researchers cited in Nature Biotechnology, have noted that the only scientific study supporting Living Carbon’s claims is the company’s own unpublished white paper, and that no independent research has confirmed whether the engineered trees maintain their growth advantage over full lifecycles measured in decades, not months. The 53 per cent biomass increase was measured in controlled conditions that do not replicate the stresses of abandoned mine sites, where soil contamination, drought, and competition from invasive species are the norm. The genetic engineering component is also a small fraction of Living Carbon’s overall planting programme, which primarily uses conventional native species selected for their suitability to degraded sites.
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 is planting real trees on real land that would otherwise remain barren, and that is worth doing on its own terms. The question is whether it is being done on its own terms, or as a line item in a carbon accounting exercise designed to make the largest energy expansion since industrialisation look greener than it is. The answer, as with most things in the voluntary carbon market, depends on whether you measure the trees that are planted or the data centres that are built.
