The Market’s Second Page

Everyone knows the biggest names in the carbon market. This issue is about the second page: the buyers that arrived, the buyers that went quiet, and the shifts underneath the totals.

All comparisons are January–September 2026 against the same months of 2025.

Five buyers nobody had on their list a year ago

None of these five retired a single credit from 2015 through 2025. So far in 2026:

• Traxys Africa Trading, a commodities trader: 400,000 credits from South African grassland projects.

• UNO Corp. Colombia: 312,900, from Colombian forest-protection and hydropower projects.

• Japan Airlines: 280,100.

• Fondazione Milano Cortina, organizer of the 2026 Winter Olympics: 170,093, from projects in China, Denmark, Italy, and Uzbekistan.

• Mountain Valley Pipeline: 114,648 credits from HFC refrigerant projects.

New buyers have no incumbent supplier.

The airlines have landed

Singapore Airlines retired 1,119 carbon credits in all of 2025 and 494,196 so far this year. Japan Airlines went from zero to 280,100. Scoot, Singapore’s budget carrier, bought 55,804 under its own name for the first time. Nearly nine in ten of those credits came from cookstove and energy-efficiency projects.

Asia’s largest carriers are now cookstove and energy-efficiency buyers.

33 big buyers have gone quiet

33 of 92

organizations that retired more than 150,000 credits in 2025 and have retired nothing so far in 2026

Among them: TASC SA (3.56M credits last year), Banco Votorantim (3.44M), ZIPAIR Tokyo, EnergyAustralia, Samsung Electronics, and JPMorgan Chase. It is not a year-end pattern. 32 of the 33 had already bought by this point in 2025.

Last year’s buyers are not this year’s. The Buyers Module™ shows the gap.

Battery makers buy manure

Credits from agriculture projects, mostly farm methane, rose more than 60% this year, to about 2.6M, and all 15 of the largest buyers chose livestock-methane projects in China. Nine companies in the CATL group, the electric-vehicle battery maker, took more than 625,000 of them, nearly a quarter of the category. Other buyers include a PetroChina Kunlun Gas unit, Lindblad Expeditions, and the operator of Milan’s Malpensa Airport.

One buyer group took a quarter of a category. Names, not totals.

The map moved—three countries up, three down

Every retired credit traces back to a project in a specific country. Credits retired January–September 2026, grouped by the project’s country, against the same months of 2025:

Country

Retired, Jan–Sep 2026

vs. 2025

Argentina

868K

+225%

Mexico

2.48M

+98%

Zambia

4.64M

+88%

Indonesia

2.10M

−72%

Brazil

6.44M

−48%

China

9.77M

−35%

India remains the largest source of retired credits, at 22.0M, down 2%. On registries, Verra’s share of retired credits rose from 51% to 55%, Gold Standard slipped to 15%, and the UN’s CDM fell from 11% to 4%.

CleverIQ™ shows who is still buying from any country in this table.

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