Carbon Capture's Bet on Baseball
1PointFive is aiming to bring carbon capture technology to a broader audience
Until recently, carbon capture technology has lurked on the fringes of sustainability efforts across the world, as technological limitations restricted its use to the industrial sector. More recently, however, massive lobbying and investment by fossil fuel companies and US Congress has pushed carbon capture technology into the mainstream. New technologies are beginning to enter the marketplace, like Direct Air Capture, that remove carbon directly from the atmosphere rather than factory smokestacks. The captured carbon is then liquified and injected deep underground into porous rock where it is permanently stored.
1PointFive is looking to build the largest Direct Air Capture facility ever and establish the United States as a global leader in developing carbon capture technology. Named after the widely-recognized international goal to stay under 1.5°C of global warming, 1PointFive currently has plans to open a facility in West Texas by 2025. The West Texas facility the company calls “Stratos” will capture 500,000 metric tons of carbon per year, equivalent to approximately 10,000 US households’ annual carbon footprint.
While opening the biggest Direct Air Capture facility in the US is notable on its own, the manner in which 1PointFive has publicized its brand and technology is even more fascinating. On March 7th, just one month after Occidental Petroleum and the Houston Astros unveiled a uniform advertisement expanding their partnership, 1PointFive and the Astros announced a three year carbon capture agreement, with the Astros purchasing “carbon dioxide removal credits” to offset the team’s emissions from travel and stadium energy use. Notably, 1PointFive is a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, acting as the carbon capture wing of the oil company.
1PointFive’s press release announcing the partnership notes that the agreement is a first of its kind in the baseball world, and would have been the first in North American sports if the NFL’s Houston Texans hadn’t announced a partnership with 1PointFive a few months earlier. The company’s partnership with the Astros appears be just the beginning of 1PointFive’s entry into the baseball environment, as the blue 1PointFive logo is plastered on the outfield and Jumbotron at the New York Met’s home stadium, Citi Field.
1PointFive’s big push in the baseball space appears to be an astute reading of the baseball market’s openness to carbon capture technology. Over the last several years, MLB teams have been disproportionally publicizing and purchasing carbon credits in comparison with the rest of the major North American sports leagues. The Boston Red Sox announced in 2022 that a portion of every ticket sold would go towards purchasing carbon credits from Aspiration, a company that sells some of the highest-quality carbon credits on the market. Rather than chemically capturing carbon from the air like 1PointFive, companies like Aspiration fund ecosystem projects that capture carbon out of the air, like re-forestation in previously deforested areas.
The teams that have engaged with carbon capture and crediting thus far, the Astros, Mets, and Red Sox, represent 10% of MLB teams; the only other league that has even one team purchasing or publicizing carbon credits is the NFL, with the aforementioned Texans standing alone. The NHL has the Seattle Kraken, who play in Climate Pledge Arena, but all of the zero-carbon commitments the Kraken make only relate to the arena itself, rather than the other operations of the team like air travel. MLB’s three franchises publicizing carbon credits place the league head and shoulders above the other “Big Four” North American sports leagues.
While at first it seems unclear why 1PointFive chose baseball as the company’s preferred advertising avenue, digging below the surface into the emerging advertising strategies of the oil and gas industry sheds light on 1PointFive’s push. An article published by Tisha Schuller and Kelsey Grant of Adamantine Energy titled “Baseball, Apple Pie, and Carbon Credits” outlines how they believe oil companies should engage in “unconventional partnerships” to highlight the industry’s sustainability measures. Adamantine Energy is a consulting firm that helps oil companies with sustainability goals. Schuller, the company’s founder, believes that oil and gas companies are “uniquely positioned for real decarbonization.”
Schuller’s advice to oil companies to engage in “unconventional partnerships” is important when analyzing 1PointFive’s relationships with MLB teams. Shuller mentions that these partnerships will generate controversy, conversations, “broadened perspectives,” and “novel solutions.” By making a push into the MLB advertising sphere, 1PointFive is generating conversations about carbon emissions, carbon credits, and sustainability action in a sector that has not engaged with those topics in a significant way. Borrowing a phrase from Shuller’s article, 1PointFive is staking a claim to the MLB marketplace “before today’s novel ideas become tomorrow’s expectations.”
More than just staking a claim into an untapped advertising arena, 1PointFive is associating itself with a core piece of Americana. The company is hoping that of some of the shine of “America’s Pastime” rubs off on carbon capture. Like the “Baseball, Apple Pie, and Carbon Credits” headline suggests, associating carbon capture and carbon credits with something as “American” as baseball helps normalize those relatively new and technical concepts with a broader audience. 1PointFive is hoping that fans of the Mets and Astros will become familiarized with the company’s carbon capture brand, and more easily accept and understand the widespread use of carbon credits and carbon capture technology.
It remains to be seen whether 1PointFive’s bet will pay off, as the company’s first Direct Air Capture facility is not yet online and the advertising blitz is only a season old. Regardless of whether the move pays off, however, 1PointFive has transformed the landscape for sustainability advertisements in Major League Baseball. By making such a big marketing push, 1PointFive seems to have successfully planted the idea in the minds of MLB advertising executives that engaging with carbon capture technology and purchasing credits can be a great thing for baseball teams. Instigating those conversations in MLB teams’ business offices is a hugely important step for sustainability in baseball, with plenty of other sustainable advertisers undoubtedly waiting in the wings.