As some conservative-led provinces try to avoid the federal carbon tax, Quebec has quietly passed the $3-billion mark in total revenues from its own approach to pricing pollution.

The province announced Wednesday it raised $215 million at last week's auction of greenhouse gas emission credits, the main currency of its carbon market, which is linked to California's.

In all, around 80.9 million vintage credits were sold at $20.82 each, and around $6 million in future credits were sold at $20.68 each.

On the Quebec side, most of the buying was done by the roughly 150 companies required by provincial law to purchase one credit for every tonne of carbon dioxide they emit.

All the vintage units sold out, as they have for several consecutive auctions, and the cost of each unit continues to rise steadily, impressing observers of the market.

​When Ontario abruptly withdrew from the market last year, there were concerns demand would dry up. Europe's carbon market, for instance, suffered from years of low prices, due to an oversupply of credits.

But the Western Climate Initiative (WCI) — the name of the cap-and-trade system that allows Quebec and California companies to buy and sell emission credits on each other's carbon markets — has avoided similar volatility.

"The market has been really stable," said Jacques Papy, a law professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal who has studied the WCI since its inception.

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Prices are stable both at the quarterly auctions and on the secondary market. That's remarkable, Papy said, given that Ontario's withdrawal violated agreed-upon protocols.

"That was a major shock to the market. But despite that shock, the market remained really stable."

The envy of the Europeans

This stability, in many ways, reflects the maturity of the Quebec-California market, which has been operating since 2014.

Officials in Quebec spent nearly five years studying other carbon markets, consulting stakeholders and fine-tuning regulations before bringing it online.

It was designed to be the central mechanism that would allow the province to meet its 2020 emission target — a 20 per cent reduction below levels in the 1990s.

At the time, cap-and-trade systems were thought to have a big weakness: While governments could cap total emissions output, they were letting market forces decide the price of carbon.

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