Asia Carbon Exchange (ACX), the world's first CDM-focused exchange is pleased to announce that its first independent auction held last Thursday, August 24th, yielded a record high price for CERs from a Viet Nam project, to-date.

The auction demonstrated a transaction of 230,000 CERs of the total volume of 460,000 CERs or 50% of the total volume, collectively offered from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Viet Nam.

The Vietnamese project, a hydro-power plant will be commissioned in late 2008 and will fully begin to generate CERs from 2009.  The project is currently at the validation stage as far as the CDM project cycle is concerned.  The CERs from the project were transacted between the counter-parties at 6.75 EUR per ton and only 80% of the total volume was offered for sale to mitigate the delivery risk, as has been the practice.

In the previous auction, the transacted highest price for a Vietnamese CDM project was 5.70 EUR.

Vinod Kesava, Chief Operating Officer of the Asia Carbon Group of companies which includes ACX said, "Once again our platform has demonstrated the need for a trading system that allows for price discovery and transparency for the carbon markets to fully appreciate and mature in accordance with the key objectives of the Kyoto Protocol. This is especially relevant for the CER and ERU markets which had evolved without a basis for price with an exception of comparison to the EU allowance spot and futures markets.  ACX is now in the process of listing buyers from Japan and Canada in keeping with their objective of operating a global platform.  In addition, ACX has been approached increasingly by buyers of VERs in the marketplace to achieve their corporate social responsibility (CSR) objectives. ACX intends to use different trading methods including the auction system to bridge this demand and is already in the process of aggregating VERs.

The next CER auction is scheduled to be held in September 2006.

Asia Carbon Group: http://www.asiacarbon.com/news.htm#news0.12