A quick post today to point you in the direction of some of the most useful resources available to us as we decarbonise.
Governmental Agencies
The first is the International Energy Agency or IEA at www.iea.org. While it is hard to see what they have from their homepage, it is worth doing some “combination searches” on google, such as “IEA emissions data“, and you will find their database, or you could search for “IEA hydrogen report” and find their latest review.
The IEA does a great job of collating projects, for example, if you search for “EIA global CCS projects” you will find their excellent and frequently updated database.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has its Climate Change “Conference of the Parties” the so-called “COP” meetings, most famously the 2015 COP21 which resulted in The Paris Agreement. Many of the resources for these meetings are available from the website.
For even deeper analysis, we now turn to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC. The main aim of this organisation is to synthesize all the worlds research on climate change mainly for the benefit of governments and – for us! They publish a set of reports every 6 or 7 years, and the 6th report is just being finalised as we speak. They helpfully produce a summary of the summary, called the synthesis report, which can already be read here.
This report usually gives the best and latest consensus data on trajectories and the expected effects of continued emissions at different levels. It forms a core of the motivation behind climate actions and if you are still trying to convince stakeholders of the importance of decarbonising this is a useful resource.
Next on the list we have various departments of the US government that provide great resources – from NASA, to NOAA (which hosts climate.gov) to the Department of Energy (DOE) at energy.gov. Between them they have invested a lot of effort in studying the climate, but more relevantly, are funding research in decarbonising technologies. The DOE’s excellent Industrial Decarbonising Roadmap is here.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) “Industrial Decarbonization Roadmap” identifies four key pathways to reduce industrial emissions through innovation in American manufacturing. The roadmap presents an agenda for government, industry, and other stakeholder to work together to accelerate emissions reductions and position the U.S. industrial sector as a global leader in innovation.”
Meanwhile, the European Union also has a range of agencies producing and collating a lot of useful research and advice.
The European Environment Agency has, with the European Commission (EC), developed a plan called the Environment Action Programme (EAP) which can be tracked here. The EC also has Energy Policy Resources here.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) produces a useful annual climate survey – this is useful to aid the understanding of business confidence but also the general economic mood of the public, for example, the relative importance of climate actions vs other priorities such as security or the economy.
Just like with the IEA, it can be somewhat difficult to navigate the websites directly to know what’s there, so I tend to just remember the names of the agencies and the programmes and them do direct google combination searches. For example, if you search for “Latest EAP Report” you will find it here (though EAP also means other things so it was not first up!)
Associations & Institutions.
More and more organisations are emerging to help us decarbonise and this list is therefore certainly incomplete and will be obsolete quickly, but these are the organisations I find useful today.
First a couple of membership-based organisations I think are doing something great:
- decarb connect
- Club CO2 (France focussed)
The idea of these is as meeting places for members to exchange on decarbonisation topics, to help develop common standards and to find synergies, such as circularity or shared production.
There are countless other for-profit (and not-for-profit) companies and organisations in this space, as well as industry-specific trade organisations that are working on collective strategy but they are too numerous to mention in full – I give special mention to a couple:
The latter provides a lot of research and data, much of which is available here.
Data Aggregators & Vendors
The last category or resources to be aware of are the purpose-build data vendors. These are usually service providers who are collecting and sharing (for a fee, usually, but not always) data that will be key to the energy transition.
Examples include:
- aggregators of electricity and energy data – we will see more and more trading of green electrons – today the electrons are all mixed and and re-divided virtually but this will soon be outlawed, making the tracking of every MWh crucial. This will often be done by blockchain technology providers – though some, like Powerledger will focus on energy forecasting and trading.
- aggregators or carbon credits and offsets – companies that will help you trade (and quality check) credits and offsets. Examples include Trove Research, Carbonx, CTX and BeZero. You can also track all the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits trades at CDR.fyi
- tracking of material flows through supply chains – providing traceability of what you buy and allowing you to track what you sell is a growing opportunity, examples include TraceX and greenmining
- aggregators of waste streams – this is still pretty niche, but growing steadily – agencies are working to create markets for wastes and a new circular economy, examples I have come across include polytopoly, neo-eco or mobius-réemploi.
These companies are filling important gaps, doing a focussed job that is perhaps too “non-core” for most of us to do ourselves, but will start to give us the info we need, from the prices of green electrons, to scope 3 emissions data to sources of circular materials.
Similarly, there are also many software vendors proposing tools to help you collect and report our emissions and generate recognised “product passports”. I think these vendors will eventually try to monetise the data they collect from us.
That is all for now, this is already too much to read, but still only the tip of the iceberg.
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