Greenhouse Gas Emissions Management

Corporations are increasingly interested in understanding their greenhouse gas emissions and reporting these results to their stakeholders. There are two primary drivers prompting this increased interest: the desire to better manage emissions, and the need to provide increased information on environmental performance.

Due to continually evolving accounting and reporting standards, however, greenhouse gas emissions reporting presents a challenge to organizations. With few exceptions, greenhouse gas emissions are largely unregulated and reporting to government agencies is not required. Consequently, corporations must confront several questions:

• Which greenhouse gases and emissions sources should be included in our emissions inventories?
• How should the emissions be quantified?
• How can we account for sources that we may only partially be responsible for?
• How can emissions be tracked over time within our changing organization?

Members of Battelle’s Environmental Management Practice have successfully addressed these issues for several key clients. For ChevronTexaco, they recommended procedures for corporate emissions data collection and, together with ChevronTexaco’s guidance, contributed to the development of a computerized greenhouse gas and energy inventory system that is now being used worldwide by the company. This system:

• Estimates emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide for all major petroleum industry operations, including emissions associated with purchased energy;
• Tracks energy consumption of company operations;
• Reports emissions on both an absolute and per unit output basis;
• Allows the reporting of emissions on a total, equity share, and operated basis;
• Is based on easy-to-use Excel interface;
• Uses menu-driven configuration of emissions sources;
• Allows monthly data input into spreadsheet by business units;
• Accepts wide range user-selected measurement units;
• Maintains audit trail for input data;
• Conducts internal checks for data completeness; and
• Provides for automated signoff and submission of business unit data to corporate headquarters via e-mail.

The benefits of such a system are numerous. They include the use of consistent estimation methods throughout the organization and the facility to set emission reduction targets against a reliable baseline, the ability to report emissions along a range of dimensions, and the facilitation of third party emissions verification. A direct demonstration of this capability can be arranged with ChevronTexaco.

For more information on Battelle’s corporate greenhouse gas emissions inventory work, contact Mr. Christopher Loreti at (781) 895-4883, loretic@battelle.org, or Dr. Bernhard Metzger at (781) 895-4886, metzgerb@battelle.org.