At a glance
- The sale marks its entry into engineered and nature-based removals built to hold carbon for long periods, though the first contract leaves open how much of that permanence is measured rather than calculated.
- Cowboy Clean Fuels runs a biomass carbon removal and storage pathway in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, injecting agricultural processing residues into depleted coalbed methane reservoirs.
- The design leans on equipment and geology already in place: the basin's coalbed methane network and its inventory of unmineable coal seams, which the company describes as potential capacity for both geological storage and gas production.
Cowboy Clean Fuels has sold its first durable carbon removal credits, a Salesforce-backed purchase through Milkywire scheduled for delivery in 2026 that adds a revenue stream to the Wyoming company's renewable natural gas business. The sale marks its entry into engineered and nature-based removals built to hold carbon for long periods, though the first contract leaves open how much of that permanence is measured rather than calculated.
Cowboy Clean Fuels runs a biomass carbon removal and storage pathway in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, injecting agricultural processing residues into depleted coalbed methane reservoirs. Indigenous microorganisms digest the biomass anaerobically to produce renewable natural gas, while carbon dioxide is absorbed onto underground coal surfaces and stored. The company puts permanence at more than 100 years and quantifies it through a patented BiCRS+RNG methodology developed to ISO 14064-2:2019. Projects are certified under the Absolute Carbon Standard set by Absolute Climate, credits are issued through Evident's C-Capsule registry, and Climate Vault Solutions independently assessed the Triangle Unit project after a multi-phase technical review.
The design leans on equipment and geology already in place: the basin's coalbed methane network and its inventory of unmineable coal seams, which the company describes as potential capacity for both geological storage and gas production. The commercial wager is a removal credit co-produced with a commodity rather than a standalone project that has to finance its own wells and pipelines before it can sell a ton. Ryan Waddington, the chief executive, said the same operations deliver permanent removal alongside carbon-neutral renewable gas, a combination he described as one few suppliers can offer.
The buyer is a repeat participant in early-stage removal: the purchase forms part of Salesforce's pledge to contract $100 million in durable carbon removal by 2030, and that offtake has already anchored Mombak's $150 million Amazon reforestation fund. Corporate contracting has become early demand for pathways with no track record to finance against, and forty million tons of nature-based removals sit behind Symbiosis contracts whose disclosed innovation is how the risk is allocated. Purchase contracts underwrite cash flows and corporate balance sheets stand in where lenders will not; offtake is doing work that project finance once did.
Verification remains the open question. The permanence figure is an output of a methodology the company developed to a published ISO standard and certified under Absolute Climate's standard, and the independent technical review by Climate Vault Solutions covers the Triangle Unit project rather than the wider portfolio. Buyers in this market pay for permanence, and how much of that figure is measured rather than calculated is most of what they are buying. Salesforce's pledge implies more contracts, and the ones that follow will show whether credit buyers are pricing tonnage delivered or tons verified.
Reported by the Transition Finance desk from ESG News. Published . Corrections