Around 90 global industry leaders have called on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to ensure its upcoming Actions and Market Instruments standard properly recognises the climate benefits of renewable gaseous fuels, including biomethane and biogas.
The call, coordinated by the Let Green Gas Count campaign, was timed to coincide with London Climate Action Week. Campaign coordinators include the World Biogas Association, the Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association, the European Biogas Association, the American Biogas Council, Eurogas, the Coalition for Renewable Natural Gas, the Electric Natural Gas Coalition and Molecule Group. The 81 signatories to the joint letter include BP, Shell, Veolia, Volvo, Cadent, Centrica, Kinder Morgan, Pernod Ricard, Tokyo Gas, Osaka Gas Daigas, Waga Energy and the Scotch Whisky Association.
The GHG Protocol is the world's most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standard, with 97% of S&P 500 companies reporting in accordance with it. Industry leaders say the current framework offers no guidance on market-based instruments, which they argue is slowing decarbonisation investment in hard-to-abate and hard-to-electrify sectors.
The joint letter sets out three specific asks. First, signatories call on the GHG Protocol to uphold recognition of contractual purchases and provide clarity on how varying chain-of-custody models fit within physical and market-based inventories. The AMI White Paper indicates the protocol will recognise contractual purchases across scopes 1, 2 and 3, which the campaign welcomes as progress, but says further detail is needed.
Second, the letter urges the protocol to set quality criteria that are sufficiently high-level to encompass established practices across existing regulatory and voluntary programmes, warning that overly restrictive criteria could render the standard unusable for certain sectors.
Third, signatories call for an impact statement that enables transparent life cycle assessment-based reporting, allowing companies to reflect the upstream climate and environmental benefits of renewable gaseous fuels. LCA is already widely used across regulatory and voluntary programmes to verify that sustainable fuels reduce emissions compared to fossil fuel counterparts.
The campaign warns that a misaligned standard risks undermining investment in renewable gas technologies at a critical moment, and that the window to get the framework right is narrow. The GHG Protocol is currently completing Phase 1 of the AMI process.
Industry leaders urge GHG Protocol to recognise renewable gaseous fuels in new standard
