Average Age of Retired Carbon Credits

At AlliedOffsets we have recently added a view showing the average age of credits retired.

We define the average age of credits as the time period between the issuance date of a credit, and its retirement.

We have data on the age of credits retired between 2008 and 2022. The average age of the credits retired between this time period ranges from 2 to 8 years and the age of the credits steadily increases between 2008 and 2022.

The biggest registries which make up this dataset are the ACR, CAR, GSR and the VCS.

For GSR and VCS, the age of credits gets higher throughout the years. On the contrary, the ACR’s age of credits rises and then decreases from 8 to 5 years between 2018 and 2022. CAR also shows a decline over the past three years.

As more companies are looking to offset their emissions, they do not always have options around buying credits of recent vintage, so they are having to rely on older vintages to meet their goals. COVID has also not helped things, as registries are backed up with issuance requests, meaning projects are delayed in getting credits for more recent vintages.

For more information on the age of credits, please reach out to hello@alliedoffsets.com. You can also view a demo of our demo dashboard here.