Tracking an Enterprise's
Carbon Footprint
Verisae Enterprise Emissions Tracking (EET) solution provides your company the ability to inventory it’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions and your impact on the environment across distributed sites.
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) gas indirect and direct emissions are tracked through Verisae software. It helps you manage your position in critical areas such as energy consumption and fugitive gas emissions, areas in which you can directly reduce your Carbon Footprint.
Understanding Your Carbon Estimates
Calculating your Carbon Footprint is a complex undertaking. The following explains how carbon emissions are calculated. It also provides an overview of how your carbon footprint can be estimated.
An organization, every organization, emits some level of greenhouse gas emissions. Through the use of this Carbon Calculator, the different types of emissions, how they are calculated, and the current methods of tracking will be demonstrated. All though the Carbon Calculator automates the formula and summation of your CO2e emissions, the information presented here is an estimate that will only be as accurate as the data that is entered.
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The Sources of Your GHG Emissions
This graph
describes the impact on three main segments of Greenhouse Gas (GHG)
impact for Multi-Site owners. As
we
deliver Verisae as a service using software and the internet, we
link data related to energy consumption, fugitive gases, and
transportation related data to set baseline for your Enterprise.
Using Verisae you can help your organization reduce it's carbon
footprint.
Aggregation of GHG Emissions Data across Your Company
The gathering and summation of data needed to calculate your total Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) for your organization can be a daunting task unless the information is readily available and easily procured. |
In most cases, the emissions related data may come from many different parts of your organization thus communication and the use of common or integrated systems are paramount to assembling this information with efficiency. In the complete data collection scenario, 22 different pieces of information will be required for each location or emission producing asset across your enterprise. Multiplied by just 100 locations, the tasks related to calculating your Carbon Footprint, on demand by compliance auditors, can be overwhelming.
How the Carbon Footprint is Calculated
The capturing and calculating of your Carbon Footprint starts with good data collected across your entire organization, incorporates Emissions Factors (EF) for the composite gases derived from your emission sources, and takes into account the Global Warming Potential (GWP) for each of your emission sources. In essence, the CO2e emissions calculation starts with data collected for each of your emission sources with a possible conversion from pounds to tons or gallons to tons. Once you have an amount of source emission, the emission factors and global warming potential factors are multiplied to arrive at a total by emission type.
Emission types fall under two general headings, Indirect and Direct Emissions. Within each of these headings, there are a few types of emissions to be collected and calculated as part of the overall carbon footprint. Indirect Emissions are those emissions which occur due to an organization's actions but the actual emissions are produced by sources owned or controlled by another entity. Most commonly, a company's electricity consumption falls into this emission source.
Direct Emissions are those emissions from sources owned or controlled by the organization. Within this general heading, there are the following emission sources; mobile combustion (vehicle emissions), stationary combustion (non-vehicle emissions), manufacturing processes, and fugitive emissions (refrigerant usage).
Your True Carbon Footprint Requires Third Party Verification
The complexity of calculating an organization's true Carbon Footprint cannot be underscored enough. The emissions data to be collected must be from across the organization's entire footprint with supporting documentation to show emission sources. Data verification must be proved on demand to third part auditors when requested. This means that not only will emissions data need to be organized across emission sources but it must also be continually updated and maintained. Many organizations have calculated their carbon footprints at point in time, such as for year-end auditing, but few have automated the entire process to allow for dynamic, close to real-time updates.
Another complexity relates to understanding, obtaining, and implementing the emerging protocols for carbon emissions. Work conducted by some government agencies and The Climate Registry to date documented a protocol for organizations to follow. This document is well over 200 pages long with varied scenarios and alternate methods to calculate carbon emissions based upon numerous factors. The interpretation and implementation of the necessary formulas requires an advanced level of interment knowledge. The General Reporting Protocol, while documenting and communicating very specific information about carbon reporting, it does not draw out the roadmap and make the calculations work without much interpretation to the specifics or your organization. |
