A Guide to Scope 1 Emissions
Understanding Scope 1 Emissions
What are ‘Scope 1 Emissions’?
Scope 1 emissions are emissions that come directly from things that are owned or controlled by your company. This can include emissions from the combustion of fuel in company-owned vehicles and equipment, as well as any direct chemical releases (such as refrigerant leaks).
You are being asked about the total volume of direct emissions your company is responsible for generating across 4 key categories:
- Mobile Combustion (think vehicles) 🚌 ⛽️
- Stationary Combustion (think equipment, like gas cookers) ⚙️
- Fugitive Emissions (think refrigeration leaks or air conditioning units) ❄️
- Process or Chemical Emissions (for those in industries where this is relevant, like refining or cement production) ☢️
How do you calculate Scope 1 Emissions so you can answer the question?
Good news, it’s pretty easy!
Here’s a table with the information you need for each category. For most businesses you need fuel and gas usage. You can put this data into Sumday and get the answer to your total scope 1 emissions.
If you don’t own any vehicles, fridges, gas equipment or chemical processing equipment - there’s a good chance you don’t have any scope 1 emissions.
Category | Data | Data Sources |
Mobile Combustion | A list of transport assets that consume fuel e.g. cars, buses, trains, ships
The amount of fuel used in the period | Fuel purchase receipts / Fuel cards / Mileage Records
Fleet Records |
Stationary Combustion | A list of non-moving assets that consume fuel e.g. LPG Cookers in commercial kitchens, furnaces, boilers
The amount of fuel used in the period | Fuel purchase receipts / Fuel cards
Fuel Management Records |
Fugitive Emissions | A list of assets that uses refrigerants e.g. fridges, air conditioners
The type of refrigerant or fire suppressant used and total refrigerant charge for the period | Asset models
Service records
Equipment user manual |
Process or Chemical Emissions | This one is very industry specific, some examples are: Amount of CO2 from the fermentation process, CO2 from the calcination process for cement production | Tracking systems |
Calculating Scope 1 Emissions in Sumday?
- Go to Assessments in the left hand menu.
- Go to Accounting
- Go to Scope 1
- Click into each category that’s relevant for your business. If you’re just using fuel for cars, it will just be mobile consumption.
- Click add item and (you can start with 1 or add 20 if you have a lot of vehicles for example)
- Give your asset a name, select the fuel type, location and copy past the consumption in (you can do this in bulk by clicking export, populating the excel template and copy pasting the data into the table)
- Go to Dashboards and take the total number of Scope 1 emissions.
Benefits of understanding Scope 1 Emissions
✅ Meet Stakeholder expectations and respond with confidence!
✅ Identify the assets contributing the most to your scope 1 emissions
✅ Build a compelling business case for reducing emissions (and potentially $) using this data as a key input
Reducing Scope 1 Emissions 📉
Quick Tips 💡
✅ Prepare a business case to replace assets consuming fuel
✅ Switch from gas to renewable electricity
✅ Consider operational changes to use vehicles and equipment less where possible
You have access to:
- An excel template for preparing a business case for reducing scope 1 emissions
- A tutorial on how to use that template
- An shiny example presentation to explain the business case to your own stakeholders
- Support from the help desk on how to prepare this case, just reach out here.
Simply go to the Academy and click on Business Case Templates to find it.
The 101 💡
A further breakdown on scope 1 emissions.
What do ‘direct emissions’ look like?
Scope 1 includes direct emissions from sources owned or operated by the company, but what exactly does this look like? The GHG Protocol guidelines have categorised Scope 1 emissions into four main categories:
Mobile Combustion
Mobile combustion refers to the burning of fuels in the transportation of mobile (moving) devices such as cars, trucks, buses, trains, airplanes, ships, etc. Essentially, anything that moves due to the burning of fuels needs to be accounted for in mobile combustion emissions as long as the assets are owned or controlled by the business.
Some common mobile sources are shown in the table below:
Stationary Combustion
Stationary Combustion involves the combustion of fuels that produce emissions including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Stationary combustion is not to be confused with mobile combustion, which involves combustion from assets that move – instead, as the name implies, this is combustion of fuels for non-moving, stationary objects.
Fugitive Emissions
These are emissions from the intentional or unintentional release of GHGs from equipment and processes, such as leaks from fridges, air conditioning units, coal mines, vents etc. Many people are surprised, but if you think about refrigerants that are used in fridges to keep them cool, overtime as the refrigerant cycles through transitioning between liquid to gas and back again, some of that gas will leak and result in GHGs being released into the atmosphere unintentionally.
Process or Chemical Emissions
These emissions occur during the chemical transformation of raw materials, such as in cement production, aluminium production etc. Not all businesses will have process or chemical emissions, these emissions are typically only relevant to specific industry sectors such as oil and gas, aluminium, and cement.
Learn More - For Accountants, Finance and Sustainability Teams
Standards Guidance 📑
- Appendix D (page 94) for common emission sources across industry sectors.
- Pages 25 and 27
Read the GHG Protocol’s Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard:
Course Modules 🎓
🌱 Introduction to Carbon Accounting Course: Chapter 4 & 6-8
🧐 Carbon Accounting for Business Course: Chapter 2-4
Check out the Sumday Academy courses for learning modules on Scope 1 emissions:
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