Mercuria CSR Report 2021 - Flipbook - Page 38
Our efforts to aid the continuing development of the energy mix are threefold:
1.
We are continually developing and implementing measures to reduce the direct environmental
impact from our current operations. These measures serve to accurately assess and quantify
the impact of our business on the global environment, helping us to develop focused innovative
solutions to reduce this impact wherever possible.
2.
We are working with industry peers and wider stakeholders to develop and promote future sources of
energy and evolve the distribution infrastructure to support this change. It is already evident that this
collaborative approach will have a fundamental impact on the transformation of the energy sector.
3.
We are also actively supporting investments in several projects which are contributing to the
transition towards renewable sources of power. We are particularly focused on supporting several
ventures which are engaged in efforts that will deploy industrial level, distributed generation
resources (primarily solar), coupled with commercial battery storage systems that can capture
and store energy for resupply to the grid during periods of higher demand.
GHG
EMISSIONS
We continue to improve upon our existing systems for quantifying the emissions related to our
operations. Beginning in 2014, Mercuria had reported Scope 3 emissions that were attributed to the
commodities it brought into or exported from the US market. While this ties to the US EPA’s GHG
reporting mechanisms (particularly in terms of that nation’s imports and exports), it does not provide
the broader picture of our global operations.
Mindful that the issue of climate change is global and without regard to borders, in our 2019 CSR
report, we included our first estimate of the GHG emissions that can be attributed as part of our global
enterprise following the internationally established considerations for Scope 1, 2 and 3 sources. These
estimations provided a good initial overall view of the company’s footprint across our offices, some
assets and marine transportation, still some assumptions were made such as the use of consumption
factors for most of the vessels’ emissions, general office consumption factors, and neglecting other
transportation modes.
With this in mind, we coordinated with our operations’, assets’ and offices’ teams to gather reliable
company-wide data for a more complete estimation of the global GHG emissions. This year we have
also added information about our pipeline, truck and train related information as well as enhanced data
relating to our assets. There are still some areas of improvement, i.e. in the data collection mechanisms
which could be automated or in a communication platform to share results with stakeholders. A
continuous assessment is being undertaken in order to accurately gather information on the company’s
footprint on a yearly assessment, or even shorter basis.
Reporting CO2 equivalent (CO2e) emissions under the GHG Protocol
The emissions of gases contributing to the global warming of the atmosphere are commonly referred
as GHG emissions. The main GHGs that are emitted by human activity have been defined under the
Kyoto Protocol as CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs and SF6. From transport and activities, we mainly
generate CO2 and CH4. Other gas pollutants are generated such as PMs, NOx, SO2, VOCs and HAPs
from the combustion of fuel. In order to classify the GHG emissions, the GHG Protocol which provides a
framework introducing three Scopes of emissions was used.
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