Entitlement vs. Assertion: Why your green claims need Book & Claim

Why clients question Book & Claim in the first place

Any credible Book & Claim system requires emission calculations at some point. At the latest when it comes to allocating an attribute to a transportation service, that service must have been calculated previously.

Clients often ask why they should use a Book & Claim system in the first place to generate Low Emission Transportation Services (LETS). Why calculate with diesel values first and then allocate Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO) attributes instead of just defining the HVO values in the calculation to begin with? At face value, it seems so much easier.

Two meanings of “claim”: entitlement vs. assertion

But the term claim has two meanings that are relevant for chain of custody models:

1.        Claim – as in (legal) entitlement: Only you have ownership and rights to a set of characteristics such as emission reductions.

The first meaning is often intuitively understood by clients: “I sell emission reductions to my customer, so they have an entitlement to use those reductions."

2.        Claim – as in assertion: You state something, such as the fact that a transport was conducted using the attributes of a low emission solution.

In other words: If you can't prove the low-emission fuel actually entered the specific fuel tank of that specific truck, your green assertion falls apart. The second meaning is overlooked, even though it is equally relevant. Chain of custody systems, such as Book & Claim, exist with the purpose to monitor and control inputs (such as HVO) and outputs (such as LETS) through a supply chain.

The goal is to ensure the reliability of a statement regarding the attributes of those in- and outputs, so that whoever gains the (legal) entitlement to a product or service can be sure that she or he gets what he pays for.

Why calculating transport “as HVO” implies physical separation (and heavy proof)

With that knowledge in mind, let's get back to the question at hand: Why not directly calculate a transportation with HVO attributes? Because by doing that and reporting the subsequent values, you assert that only HVO was used for the tour, which you must be able to prove. Probably, without knowing it, you'd opt for a physical separation chain of custody, which does exactly what it sounds like. A solution like HVO must be strictly separated from other fuels and solutions throughout production, storage, and usage. Finally, a direct, traceable link between the solution and the vehicle that consumes it must be made.
Only this way can the party who you report to be sure that the lower emissions are credible so that they can safely claim that value for their inventory.

The effort to achieve the physical separation is enormously high. Since onboard systems currently can't tell what fuel is utilized, you'd have to match event data from fuel cards to a truck's telematics system to ensure that HVO was truly used. Depending on the scope of the transportation, you'd need to match that to the transport management system to prove that the truck that used HVO conducted the tour you assert HVO for. At last, you need to bring the fuel statements into the mix to account for the specific attributes of the HVO that was used. And dare it happens that the driver of the truck fuels with diesel instead of HVO.

Book & Claim: credible LETS with less operational friction

So, while all that is possible and viable, the juice is usually not worth the squeeze. Not while you can deploy a credit mass balance or Book & Claim system that achieves the same result (HVO transportation) with less effort.

You simply gather all fuel statements or buy environmental attributes, book them to your pool, and finally allocate them to transportation activity that was modeled with diesel values. The atmosphere doesn't care if the HVO was used in Berlin or Turin, and neither should you.

In all fairness however, the physical separation, and proving it, is far easier for BEVs, given a vehicle consistently uses the same charging infrastructure.

Of course, systems like Book & Claim have additional benefits like overcoming deployment hurdles, faster scaling of solutions and refinancing the transition to a low carbon transportation. But those are often talked about.

The credibility added to a green claim by using a Book & Claim system is often underutilized. Especially in a time when companies resort to greenhushing in fear of greenwashing allegations, a strong (and easy to deploy) chain of custody model can be a mighty instrument to be bold and certain about your sustainability efforts.