Meet Lukas May OBE, Chief Commercial Officer at Isometric, and one of The Carbon Removers’ key partners.
From global trade deals to carbon removal
I’m the Chief Commercial Officer at Isometric. I lead our commercial teams but that also includes policy work, which plays to my background. It sounds like a strange combination, but in carbon markets, policy and the commercial prospects of the industry are inextricably interlinked.
Before this, I spent four years at the UK’s Department for International Trade, leading negotiations for the UK-Japan trade deal and the UK’s accession to CPTPP following Brexit.
Now, I spend a lot of time engaging with governments around the world. Carbon removal is currently unregulated, and we think it’s too important to be left that way.
You wouldn’t leave financial services or healthcare unregulated. We shouldn’t leave carbon removal unregulated. Luckily, that is starting to change.
The EU is furthest ahead with its CRCF framework — the first in the world to legally define carbon removal and regulate the players. That’s an example that Isometric is taking to governments around the world saying, “Look at what’s happening in the EU. We think you should put something similar in place”.
UK government shaping the future on carbon removal
From 2029, companies in the UK ETS will actually be able to buy carbon removal credits instead of just emission allowances. Today, companies in the UK get a certain amount of allowances to emit carbon dioxide and the number of allowances goes down over time. So that’s meant to drive decarbonization. But there is a traded market in these allowances. You can buy allowances from another company who’s decarbonized more quickly.
And so what the UK is saying is, now we have this technology of carbon removal, it’s much more logical that if you want to pollute one ton of CO₂, you should pay someone else to remove one ton of CO₂ permanently from the atmosphere.
And so over time, they’re going to phase out these allowances and phase in carbon removal credits. That’s huge for the carbon removal industry, because it moves us away from relying on companies “doing the right thing” voluntarily, and towards a direct financial incentive to buy carbon removal. That’s the future of this industry in the 2030s.
Solving the trust problem in carbon markets.
The job of a registry is meant to be giving everyone confidence that credits truly represent climate impact. In the past, registries didn’t always do that.
Our role is to set the rules — what some call methodologies, we call protocols. Think of them as recipes for cooking carbon removal.
If a project developer like The Carbon Removers follows the recipe, we check that they’ve followed it, inspect their data, and if everything lines up, we issue credits. Those credits are then hosted on our public registry.
We identified three big failings from registries in the past that we wanted to address:
- Scientific rigor — we’ve hired a team of over 20 scientists to write protocols and ensure developers comply with them.
- Technology — instead of clunky 300-page PDFs, our platform makes all the granular detail accessible and transparent, with APIs that let developers integrate directly. We can issue credits monthly rather than annually, which makes a big difference to developers’ cashflow.
- Incentives — Traditional registries get paid by project developers per credit issued. We work for buyers instead, aligning incentives around quality, not volume.
Partnering on Bio-CCS with The Carbon Removers
Our partnership with The Carbon Removers is founded on a rigorous protocol for Bio CCS We’re excited by their scale-up plans in Scandinavia. It’s still early days so we haven’t issued credits yet, but we really like the team and their ambition.
The first milestone will be Project Greensand Future in Denmark, which aims to capture CO₂ from biomass plants — often from agricultural waste — and transport it to the North Sea to be stored in a decommissioned gas field deep under the seabed.
The first step in the process involves The Carbon Removers producing a Project Design Document (PDD), which is published on our site for public scrutiny. That is followed by a site visit from independent auditors (known as a validation and verification body, or VVB). They check everything on the ground, write a report, which we then review. Only after we have approved the validation of the project can we start issuing credits, based on the verified data of net removals carried out. The partnership between Isometric and The Carbon Removers can contribute to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at scale. That’s what drives us.
It’s rigorous — and that’s the point. The Carbon Removers don’t want to cut corners either. They want to do this properly and get high-quality credits out there, which is exactly what buyers want too.
Turning North Sea geology into climate solutions
The project is also particularly interesting because it is one of the first carbon removal projects making use of North Sea geological storage. The UK made a lot of money from oil and gas in the 80s and 90s, but now the UK is transitioning to a green energy future. So there is a neat symmetry to the UK and other countries using storage sites in the North Sea to reverse some of the damage done from burning fossil fuels.
As a UK registry, it’s always special to work with UK project developers. We can also look ahead to the future where a UK company like The Carbon Removers is taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we’re verifying that process, and then issuing those credits into the UK’s Emissions Trading Scheme, helping Project Greensands in Denmark the country meet its net zero goals. That’s a great success story for the UK’s green economy.