The Importance of Fuel Consumption in Carbon Reporting

Within the carbon reporting framework, there are three major groups of carbon emissions costs. The first, called Scope 1, is fuel consumption. This reporting section specifically does not include the emissions for the production of the vehicle, the transport from manufacture to the consumer, not the emissions related to the disposal of the vehicle. Those figures are included elsewhere in the reporting framework.

Car manufacturers have been working on reducing carbon emissions in their cars for decades. Data from the US shows Toyota, for example, have reduced carbon emissions in their cars/sedans from 295 grams per km in 1975 to 157 grams per km in 2023. That’s a reduction of 53% over 48 years.

But even at 157 grams per km that equates to 1,570 tonnes of carbon per annum for a vehicle doing 10,000 km a year. 

Whilst trucks and farm equipment generally are higher emitters, from an overall perspective, cars are the largest overall emitters of carbon from fuel.

So what does that mean for your business?

There are a number of ways to view the information. Firstly, it is important to be able to identify the fuel consumption for each vehicle or piece of equipment. Just because one vehicle uses the greatest quantity of fuel, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the worst offender of carbon emissions. This needs to be cross referenced against the km travelled for each vehicle to determine the emissions per km for each vehicle.

I recently saw reference to an employee saving 30,000 km per year due to working from home rather than having to drive to his workplace every day. 

Another great example is a company who reviewed the delivery routes of their truck drivers and made significant savings in kms travelled and thus fuel consumption and carbon emissions as a result.

Neither of these examples required additional costs to the company. Other options include trading in vehicles to buy newer more efficient vehicles, but that may be a costly option that cannot be undertaken in the short term.

The fact is that without gathering the data to know what your business’ starting point is, you don’t have the information to make the decisions which will improve your carbon emissions footprint.

Now is the time to gather the data and review your current, baseline, position so you can make a difference for the future.

We are proud to advise that this article was written by the team and not produced by AI.