Canada eyeing India as major carbon credit seller

Canada is now emerging as a potentially major buyer of Carbon credits from Indian companies which are exempted from emissions cut imposed on industries in developed nations.

Slashing their greenhouse gas output, these companies can sell the resulting carbon credits to Canada which is striving hard to reduce its greenhouse gas emission from 2008.

Though the country has set up a fund with (Canadian) $ 1 billion corpus for encouraging domestic industry to produce carbon credit, it still needs to buy credit from the international market worth (Canadian) $75 million to $ 115 million every year as it needs to reduce emission every year by 270 million tonne between 2008 and 2012.

This was pointed out by Gilles Potvin, a senior program officer from government of Canada's climate change and energy division.

Speaking on the sidelines of a seminar organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and Canadian consulate, Potvin said, "As per the latest information, Government of India has cleared 107 projects which include 62 projects from renewable energy sector, 28 from energy efficiency, six fuel switching projects, three solid waste treatment projects and one project from the processing industry which have the potential to collect carbon credits worth $ 2.6 billion."

Besides this, a Canadian company which wants to set up a project in India which would earn them carbon credits, has registered the project design document (PDD) with department of climate change," he added. Three other companies are already in the process of setting up similar plants in Chile , he said.