One of the most visible responses to anthropogenic climate change is the transition of road vehicles from fossil fuels to alternative fuels. Whether that’s via electric vehicles or hydrogen, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: the days of fossil fuelled vehicles are numbered.
It’s unrealistic and wasteful to expect that this can happen overnight – there will be a transition to alternative fuels, which will take many years to complete. We have a lot of infrastructure built around fossil fuelling road vehicles, and a lot of perfectly serviceable vehicles with many useful miles of driving left in them.
Particularly for commercial vehicles, transitioning a fleet to more sustainable alternatives is still difficult – unlike the private vehicle market, we don’t yet have a good range of available transporters and heavy goods vehicles which run on H2 or batteries.
Reducing our dependance on fossil fuels is the goal. As we transition, we should begin to properly measure the emissions caused by our vehicle fleets, to track our progress towards net-zero. As we track our reduction, we should also offset the emissions we still make during transition. This means we are not waiting for a perfect fossil-fuel free fleet before we make changes – we are accepting there is a transition period, but that we want to get to the goal and make things better in the meantime.
You may have seen that Shell is offering carbon offsetting built in to their GO+ fuel card. Effectively, every time you fill your vehicle and pay with the GO+ card, the calculated emissions associated with the fuel purchased are offset by funding projects that reduce CO2 around the globe.
This is much better than doing nothing at all – while not perfect. We need to move away from fossil fuels, but while we do that – let’s at least fund certified projects which are making a difference.
What better way to build your customer relationship than by saving the planet together ?
Not all fuel card issuers, processors, and fuel retailers have the scale or resources of Shell to make this a reality. But that should not stop you from ensuring your more climate conscious customers miss out on at least compensating for their emissions during the transition to EVs.
Earthchain provides carbon calculation and top quality carbon offsetting with no onboarding fee and no implementation project costs. The barriers to entry are very low.
You connect your fuel card authorisation or accounting system to Earthchain with a few simple steps, with guidance and advice provided by us. We provide secure REST or IFSF interfaces to suit your integration capabilities. We can also score and offset shop goods / non-fuel purchases too.
Every time your cardholder fuels their vehicle, you can give them a CO2 measurement and – if they have opted in to offsetting – a by-the-gram Verified Emissions Reduction powered by Gold Standard – setting the standard for sustainability worldwide.
The low cost of the offset can be met by your cardholder or by you as a fleet card issuer, or a mixture of both – with the relevant proportions of the VER certificate being allocated to the funder on our Carbon Ledger.
What better way to build your customer relationship than by saving the planet together ?
Of course we provide GHG Protocol compliant reports for whoever funds the VER certificates – this enables these measurements and where applicable offsets to be plugged in to CO2 inventories in a standardised way.
If you would like to know more, and explore how we could help you follow Shell’s lead then please contact Dan Graf for a friendly and open discovery call. Support your customers in their journey to sustainable transport and take action !
