Two people on opposite sides of a deal that fell apart.
Why Westford exists, and why it's named for a town outside Boston that has nothing to do with carbon.
Fourteen years of project finance. Six years building MRV methodologies.
Halden Marsh spent fourteen years structuring project finance for transit and renewable infrastructure — the unglamorous debt that actually gets things built. Selin Draper spent six of those years designing measurement and monitoring methodologies for a boutique environmental engineering consultancy, work that fed into registries like Verra and Puro.earth without her ever quite knowing in advance which one would end up approving it.
The plant that took a year longer than planned.
They met in 2019, on opposite sides of the same negotiation — Halden representing a consortium trying to finance one of the country's first direct air capture pilot plants, Selin representing the firm brought in to determine whether the plant's projected removal could actually survive third-party verification under the methodologies available at the time.
The plant got built, eventually, a year late and with a financing structure neither side had walked in with. The dispute was never really about the chemistry, which worked fine. It was that nobody on either side of the table had a job description covering both problems at once: making a removal project financeable, and making its removal claims defensible under the same scrutiny an accredited auditor would actually apply months later. Halden and Selin kept talking after the deal restructured itself twice, mostly because neither of them thought the delay was really about the plant.
Two clients, and a name that had nothing to do with any of it.
They founded Westford in 2020, named for the town outside Boston where Halden grew up, with two clients and a shared conviction that a removal credit is only worth what its verification can survive. Nobody has ever asked us to change the name to something more on-theme. We wouldn't.
Four things that haven't changed since 2020.
We won't structure a deal around a baseline we can't defend to an auditor.
If the counterfactual doesn't hold up under questioning, the deal doesn't hold up either.
A client's credit portfolio is not our trading desk's opportunity.
We manage offtake and portfolio strategy on mandate, not on our own account.
Methodology risk gets modeled, not hidden in a footnote.
Registries revise methodologies more often than clients expect. We say so before a client learns it the expensive way.
If verification is going to fail, we say so first.
Before the client's auditor finds it. Before the registry does. That order matters.
Meet the people who hold to this today: the team, or see what an engagement with us actually looks like on the Ledger.