The emissions of Sympower are a tiny fraction of the reductions enabled, but they are still very real, and Sympower does not want to ignore them:

“Recognising that every effort matters and the urgency of the climate crisis, we find it essential to calculate our CO2 emissions to become conscious of their main contributors, to help us decrease them over time, and remove the remaining ones.”
- Sympower

From our conversations with Sympower, it was clear that there was no outside pressure from shareholders and clients to become either Climate Neutral or Net Zero. However, there was a strong drive within the company to take action, and this was shared by management.

This is also clearly reflected in the way the company has requested our support. Sympower has not made any big splashes about their activity, but instead asked Klimate to attend Sympower team day to teach everyone interested in carbon removal, and give them a change to ask questions.

This was a great way to engage employees, and make them feel that Sympower is going above and beyond what is expected in terms of sustainability.

- They were not looking to do this for marketing purposes - this was driven by internal passion for taking action on climate change
- They had not yet calculated their emissions, and needed guidance on how to go about it
- They were looking to do it in the right way, focused only on methods that permanently remove their emissions

Step 1 - Finding out how much to remove
At Klimate, we have taken a strong position that we do not calculate companies' CO₂ emissions, as we believe there is a clear conflict of interest (read more here). However, as Sympower did not know their emissions, we started out talking to them about the different options for calculating their emissions.

Step 2 - Selecting removal target and portfolio

From the start, Sympower was clear that they did not want to include short-term carbon removal options like planting trees.

This ruled out all of the portfolios with a relatively low cost per ton. Together with Sympower, we created a portfolio that was relying mainly on Biochar, but also left room for some more frontier solutions like Bio-Oil and Direct Air Capture.

The team at Sympower really bought into The Oxford Offsetting Principles, and wanted to ensure that they sent a strong market signal on top of removing their emissions. This is what the first portfolio looked like:

In the end, they ambitiously decided to move forward with removing all of their emissions from 2020. Here’s what Simon Bushell, The founder and CEO of Sympower had to say at the time:

“I think that there is no one solution to the climate crisis. There is not a single group of people that needs to make a difference, it has to be a collective effort. If all of us come together, we have a good chance of reversing the damage. Collaborations such as the one between Sympower and Klimate are needed. In the end, we are all aiming for the same goal, only with different means.” – Simon Bushell, CEO, Sympower

This was early 2021, and we think it’s likely that Sympower must have been one of the first companies in the world to remove all of their emissions using permanent removal.

Sympower was a small company and had relatively low emissions, which made it more feasible for them than it would for larger companies. However, it is incredibly ambitious, and we are really proud that Sympower chose Klimate to join us on this journey.