Washington is launching a first-of-its-kind program to auction off carbon offset credits to preserve the state’s forest land.

“We are creating a blueprint that can be used for public lands across the nation,” Washington Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz said Wednesday at press conference.

Franz oversees the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR), whose duties include managing the state’s trust lands with the mission of producing revenue from property for various programs such as education. The agency routinely auctions off trees on its lands to be harvested for timber.

The new DNR program will set aside 10,000 acres of forests — with trees that began growing prior to 1900 — that have the potential to be harvested. Offset buyers will bid on carbon credits to keep those carbon-absorbing forests intact. This enables the DNR to achieve its mission of producing revenue from its older forests without having to harvest them for timber, Csenka Favorini-Csorba, a senior policy adviser at DNR, said.

This effort comes after state lawmakers last year approved the nation’s second cap-and-trade program, after California. (See Wash. Becomes 2nd State to Adopt Cap-and-trade.)  Washington officials are still working on the details of that program, which is scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, and raise $500 million annually, with most of the money going to transportation projects.

The DNR project will start out as part of the nation’s voluntary offsets market. Once Washington’s cap-and-trade system is up and running, the offset credits could potentially be applied to offset emissions under the program. Participants in the Western Climate Initiative, which includes California’s cap-and-trade, will be able to buy the initial DNR carbon offset credits from the voluntary market. The agency expects the program to generate more than 900,000 carbon offset credits in its first 10 years.

“This is truly the next generation of carbon offsets,” said Caitlin Guthrie, director of forest carbon origination for Finite Carbon, a developer and supplier of forest carbon offsets. Finite Carbon is participating in the project to ensure it represents durable and verifiable carbon sequestration, she said.

“We hope this becomes a model for other states,” Favorini-Csorba told NetZero Insider.

The new program has identified 2,500 acres on DNR trust lands to be set aside this year in Whatcom, King, Thurston and Grays Harbor counties, stretching from northern to southern Puget Sound. Another 7,500 acres are scheduled to be identified next year.

Many details must still be worked out, including when the credits will be auctioned, what the minimum acceptable bids would be and the overall fundraising targets, Favorini-Csorba said. The state plans to auction off 917,000 carbon credits in the first 10 years of the program.

The DNR created a Carbon Sequestration Advisory Group in 2019 as a climate change measure. The agency has also leased some of its lands to wind farms, now capable of generating more than 200 MW of power.