JP Morgan is betting big on carbon removal and is buying credits from direct air capture developers to offset its environmental footprint, officials at the largest U.S. bank have told The Wall Street Journal.
JP Morgan has committed to invest over $200 million in buying credits for carbon removal and is also helping carbon capture businesses to take off.
“We’re jumping in the pool all in,” JP Morgan’s head of operational sustainability, Brian DiMarino, told the Journal an interview.
“This is us putting our weight and our capital behind something we believe is truly important to bring to market now,” DiMarino added.
Last year, JP Morgan Securities LLC served as sole placement agent for direct air capture (DAC) technology developer Climeworks as it raised $650 million in an equity round.
Last month, JP Morgan and several other companies announced that they had joined Frontier, an advance market commitment to accelerate carbon removal. The new members in Frontier – Autodesk, H&M Group, JP Morgan Chase, and Workday – will commit to purchase a combined $100 million of permanent, high-quality carbon removal over the next eight years, bringing Frontier’s total advance market commitment to over $1 billion.
Commenting on the agreement, DiMarino said last month, “Scaling technological innovation, including around carbon removal, will play a critical role in the transition to a more sustainable future.”
Yet, JP Morgan is also one of the biggest financiers of fossil fuel projects.
For the first time since 2019, JP Morgan Chase dropped from the top spot of the biggest backer of fossil fuels.
JP Morgan is no longer the world’s biggest financier of fossil fuels. Last year Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) became the top bank funding oil and gas, a report by environmental groups showed last month.
Overall, U.S. banks dominated fossil fuel financing, accounting for 28% of all fossil fuel financing in 2022. JP Morgan Chase remains the world’s biggest funder of fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement, while Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are still among the top 5 fossil financiers since 2016.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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