Greenhouse gas emissions tracking: making it count

Abstract

Climate change and the energy trilemma – affordability, security and sustainability – have become increasingly important concerns that affect all sectors of the economy. As governments tighten regulations in a bid to keep alive a 1.5°C pathway aligned with the Paris Agreement, the focus for many energy companies has been on addressing and complying with environmental policies, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions accounting and reporting. Traditionally, operators have developed tools in Microsoft Excel to perform the calculations to comply with National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) scheme. Due to the flexibility and accessibility of Excel, these have become large, unwieldy, poorly documented and hard to maintain. In this paper, we discuss the benefits of having a Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Energy application aligned with the Production Allocation system in a centralised and structured database. Various implementations across Australia have shown that key factor such as transparency, auditability, data management and validation, as well the intrinsic relationship between production allocation and emissions, make the Production Allocation system the best place to calculate and report GHG emissions and energy.