Glossary

ClimeCo Expands Project Development Leadership with the Hire of Erika Schiller

ClimeCo Expands Project Development Leadership with the Hire of Erika Schiller

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Nancy Marshall, Vice President, Marketing
484.415.7603 or nmarshall@climeco.com 

ClimeCo Expands Project Development Leadership with the Hire of Erika Schiller


BOYERTOWN, Pennsylvania (March 1, 2022) – ClimeCo announces the expansion of its leadership team with the hire of Erika Schiller as Vice President of Project Development. She will lead the team, spanning new methodology development, consulting, and project management to assist customers, create measurable environmental benefits, and generate environmental credits.

“ClimeCo represents energy-intensive industries that have unique decarbonization challenges,” says William Flederbach, President and CEO of ClimeCo. “We are building our team and leveraging a proven track record of thirteen years to meet our customer’s needs. Erika will expand and support cutting-edge decarbonization strategies by leveraging our finance, design, and build expertise. In 2022 and beyond, investing in low carbon technologies is paramount to achieving our aggressive global climate goals, and I couldn’t be more excited to have Erika leading this practice.” 

Schiller will build on ClimeCo’s strengths in industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) management, nature-based solutions, such as reforestation and composting, and plastics mitigation. Additionally, she’ll look to expand in other industrial spaces like low-carbon cement, renewable natural gas, and carbon capture use and storage (CCUS). She excels in taking customer-focused approaches to business development and growing new business lines.

“ClimeCo was compelling to me because of their market-based approach to tackle environmental challenges,” says Schiller. “I see a strong business case for measuring and delivering GHG reductions, and other benefits for a world focused on how to achieve net-zero this century. ClimeCo is poised for growth, and I’m excited to contribute my expertise to their strong foundation.”

Before joining ClimeCo, Schiller worked in the low-carbon energy industry for ten years, spanning energy storage to renewable fuels and carbon capture use & storage with Chevron. She helped Chevron launch its renewable natural gas business, forming two joint ventures in dairy RNG production. She then moved to their corporate strategy and sustainability team, where she led the commercial strategy for a new CCUS global business line and supported the start-up of their New Energies business unit. 

Schiller earned her Master of Business Administration from Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business, and her Bachelor of Science from Vanderbilt University.

About ClimeCo

ClimeCo is a respected global advisor, transaction facilitator, trader, and developer of environmental commodity market products and related services. We specialize in voluntary carbon, regulated carbon, renewable energy credits, plastics credits, and regional criteria pollutant trading programs.  Complimenting these programs is a team of professionals skilled in providing sustainability program management services, and developing and financing of GHG abatement and mitigation systems.

For more information or to discuss how ClimeCo can drive value for your organization, contact us at 484.415.0501, info@climeco.com, or through our website climeco.com. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter using our handle, @ClimeCo.

Creating Carbon Offsets – It Starts With A Methodology

Creating Carbon Offsets – It Starts With A Methodology

Creating Carbon Offsets – It Starts With A Methodology


by David Priddy, VP of Business Development | February 24, 2021


With the continued push by businesses in recent years to establish more stringent sustainability goals with lower GHG thresholds, there’s been a corresponding rush by corporations, project developers, technology providers, and charitable foundations to implement emission reduction solutions to help meet this growing demand.  This has led to a plethora of innovative ideas and concepts from entities seeking to utilize carbon financing to bring their ideas to life.  As a leader in the carbon emission reduction and sequestration space, ClimeCo will frequently field requests on how to implement these ideas to generate and sell carbon offsets, which incentivizes continued investment in project activities that deliver emission reductions.  But after listening to entities pitch their ideas, the question that I most often hear is:  “Can we create carbon offsets?”  Well, the answer to that question can depend on many factors, but it all starts with an appropriate methodology.


Carbon Offset Methodologies

A carbon offset methodology is a framework document that defines the quantification and parameters that are required to generate carbon offsets throughout the life of a project. It establishes the project’s baseline, identifies qualifying practice changes to reduce carbon, and defines the monitoring requirements necessary to ensure that the reductions are real, quantifiable, verifiable, and additional to what would have happened in the absence of the project.

There are seemingly as many different offset methodologies available today as there are carbon reduction project ideas, but continuous innovation in this space keeps challenging that theory.  Voluntary registries, along with those carbon compliance programs that allow for the use of offsets, generally utilize their own protocols and methodologies.  In the North American voluntary market, we primarily work with three voluntary offset registries:  The Climate Action Reserve (CAR), American Carbon Registry (ACR), and Verra; these three registries offer more than 100 established methodologies.  Most of these existing methodologies can be classified into one of several primary categories, including industrial, agricultural, energy efficiency, waste, transportation, and renewable energy; however, the requirements for a particular methodology are usually written for a specific project activity, such that there is little room for interpretation or variance.  This often results in the need to modify an existing methodology or create a new one to support a proposed project’s activities if those activities do not precisely fit the parameters of an existing methodology.


Methodology Development

To ensure the integrity of carbon offsets, credible methodologies employ best practices based on the ISO 14064 standard, providing guidelines for quantifying, monitoring, reporting, and verifying GHG emissions and reductions.  These standards require that each project conducted under a methodology is calculated in a way that is relevant, complete, consistent, accurate, and transparent, and meets the aforementioned key crediting criteria (real, quantifiable, verifiable, and additional).  Therefore, the development of a new methodology requires a significant amount of input from the scientific community and various stakeholders, including industry groups, NGOs, and the legal and environmental justice communities.  The process can be lengthy and will typically include an individual proponent or group that authors the draft methodology, the formation of a stakeholder working group that provides technical and legal review, and a public comment period.  In our experience, it is quite common for a methodology development effort to take at least 12 months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to complete. 


Lessons Learned

The ClimeCo team has been involved in developing several project methodologies, either as an author/co-author or by serving on a working group.  Our experience ranges from methodologies focused on industrial gases, such as the destruction of ozone-depleting substances (ODS) and the abatement of nitrous oxide (N2O) from Nitric Acid and Adipic Acid production, to avoided methane emissions from organic waste composting and agricultural methane destruction.  We are also working with clients on the development of some new methodologies that hold significant promise.  Through all of this, we have learned that the process is best served by a collaborative and transparent effort between the project proponent and the registry that balances scientific integrity, conservativeness, and financial viability to ensure a robust, practical, and defensible methodology.


The Bottom Line

As companies continue to ratchet down on their GHG commitments, the voluntary carbon market is poised for significant growth.  Buyers in this market have become increasingly savvy; they are demanding more from the offset projects they support, including a sharper focus on those that align with their businesses and produce various co-benefits.  This opens opportunities for creative thinking and project innovation in areas that existing offset methodologies may not serve.  To maximize the potential for success, a project owner/proponent should align themselves with an experienced consultant like ClimeCo to guide them through this process.


About the Author

Dave Priddy is ClimeCo’s Vice President of Business Development.  He has more than 30 years of experience in the environmental management field and is responsible for the firm’s strategic market initiatives and the evaluation of new project opportunities.  David holds a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.