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What can you do to help support Heat and Power Limited?
There are two methods by which you can help Heat and Power Limited mitigate climate change;
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What is greenhouse gas offsetting?
Our everyday actions consume energy and produce carbon dioxide emissions, for example driving a car, heating a home or flying. Offsetting is a way of compensating for the emissions produced with an equivalent carbon dioxide saving. Greenhouse Gas offsetting involves calculating your emissions and then donating ‘credits’ from emission reduction projects such as those undertaken by Heat and Power limited. These projects have prevented or removed an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases elsewhere. Due to the fact that greenhouse gases have a long life-span and tend to mix evenly in the atmosphere it doesn’t matter where gases are emitted in the world: the effect on climate change is the same. To make up for unavoidable emissions increases, e.g. heating your home, equivalent emissions reductions can be made elsewhere, meaning that the overall effect is zero.
Will greenhouse gas offsetting solve climate change?
We acknowledge that greenhouse gas offsetting is not a cure for climate change but it can help raise awareness and reduce the impact of our actions. The most appropriate action to take is to reduce emissions. Offsetting is a useful element of what we can all do to address climate change for several reasons: Providing the means to work out the emissions from our own activities helps raise awareness of our impact on climate change. Combined with reducing our emissions, offsetting can be used to address this impact. When done in a robust and responsible way, offsetting leads to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in the area local to the offsetting project. Offsetting projects, such as those undertaken by Heat and Power Limited, provide a mechanism for investment in clean technology in the areas which lack it the most. Such investment can lead to the spread of low-greenhouse gas development across entire regions, further reducing climate change impact.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified a ‘basket’ of six greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. These are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs) and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6). The Kyoto Protocol is a multi-gas abatement strategy, allowing reductions to be made in any of the six major greenhouse gases. Such multi-gas strategies have been shown to be cheaper than a single gas strategy. They are also politically less sensitive as they allow countries to choose their own pathway to an overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction, rather than having limits per gas imposed on them by an external body. This allows flexibility between different countries with different portfolios of GHG emissions. For example, countries with good renewable energy resources such as Scotland promote these resources and thereby reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Other countries may find it more effective to reduce methane emissions by altering waste management or agricultural practices, this is something we feel the Scottish Executive should also be focusing on.
It can be seen from table 1 that on a 100-year timescale, one tonne of methane is 23 times more potent than one tonne of carbon dioxide. This makes methane an attractive option for greenhouse gas emission reductions because smaller reductions are necessary to achieve the same environmental goal. Methane is currently emitted in enough volume to make any reductions significant in terms of the overall GHG picture.
According to National Statistics1 the latest UK population figures were 60,209,500. This means that an average UK citizen is responsible for 10.55 carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per annum of which 8.92 tonnes were carbon dioxide emissions and 0.035 tonnes were methane emissions.
How many credits worth should I donate?
According to the Carbon UK1 report the UK with 1% of the world’s population produces 2.3% of the global carbon dioxide. This needs to be seriously reduced if we are to avoid dangerous climate change. There is increasing agreement that the UK should be aiming to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050 – this is a challenging target.
Just as the majority of carbon emissions come from fossil fuel energy, so the majority of the savings will have to result from action to reduce these. Carbon sequestration by additional forests and carbon savings from increased recycling each make a very small contribution (much less than 1% between them) to offsetting the UK’s carbon emissions.
Therefore if you wish to offset the average UK carbon dioxide emissions then you would donate 8.92 tonnes worth of carbon dioxide emissions.
According the Methane UK2 report, Methane (CH4) is a colourless, odourless, tasteless gas, which is naturally present in the atmosphere and is the main component of the fossil fuel, natural gas. The importance of methane (CH4) is second only to carbon dioxide (CO2) in terms of overall contribution to human-induced climate change. Whilst methane exists in a far lower atmospheric concentration than carbon dioxide, it is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas, deemed responsible for around 20% of post-industrial global warming.1 The relative potency and short atmospheric lifetime of the gas make efforts to reduce methane emissions an attractive climate change policy option. A unit reduction of one tonne of methane is deemed equivalent to a reduction of 23 tonnes of carbon dioxide.3
So far, methane has played a pivotal role in efforts to meet the UK’s greenhouse gas emission reduction target under the Kyoto Protocol, accounting for 30% of the overall greenhouse gas reduction between 1990 and 2002. However, much of this decrease in methane emissions has been serendipitous, being a result of a decline in the UK coal industry and improved landfill cap technologies, rather than a result of targeted policy.
A better rate of methane capture is achieved by purpose-built anaerobic digesters, which operate according to the same principles as those used within the solid waste management process, optimising decomposition of manure for methane production and collection. The IPCC report that anaerobic digesters typically release just 5% of the total methane potential of the waste, most of which comes from further decomposition of the waste residue once it has been removed from the digester.
Therefore if you wish to offset the average UK methane emissions then you would donate 0.035 tonnes worth of methane emissions.
How do you calculate the value of greenhouse gas emission offset?
Anaerobic Digestion technology not only displaces carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels it also reduces the amount of methane lost from manure management, therefore we only take into account these two greenhouse gases for offset. We understand that anaerobic digestion and the spreading of digestate also reduces nitrous oxide emissions but we do not have enough evidence of this to offer an offset facility on nitrous oxides.
We calculate the offset cost for 1 tonne of carbon dioxide emissions to be £7.50 and for one tonne of methane emissions £172.50.
Therefore if you were an average UK citizen who wanted to offset their carbon dioxide emissions for one year then you would donate 8.92 tonnes x £7.50 = £66.90. If you wanted to do the same for your annual methane emissions then you would donate an additional 0.035 x £172.50 = £6.04.
If you wanted to offset all of the greenhouse gas emissions then we would use the overall carbon dioxide equivalent figure of 10.55 tonnes per annum x £7.50 = £79.13.
The choice is entirely yours whether you offset one years emissions, your lifetime of emissions so far or simply make a small donation. Every penny donated will be invested in greenhouse gas abatement technology in the UK.
4. Houghton, J. T.; Ding, Y.; Griggs, D. J.; Noguer, M.; van der Lindin, P. J.; Dai, X.; Maskell, K. and Johnson, C. A., “Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2001.