How to Decarbonize your Company
A roadmap to making your company carbon neutral
Perhaps it is your client asking you to provide a sustainability plan or roadmap. Perhaps there are many young employees in your company who are demanding more to be done about sustainability. Or perhaps it is just simply you trying to make a better world. Whatever your motives, it is hard to determine what you can do as a company working in the offshore industry to ‘become more sustainable’. Even harder is how you actually going to achieve those goals, or who is going to do this. Where to start?!
We help you by providing an easy how-to-guide to develop your company’s own decarbonization strategy. We have also included templates of roadmaps and stories of companies who have done so in the past, which are free for you to use.
8 Steps to a Carbon Neutral Company
(in a not-too-strict order)
+ Step 1. Find a Hero
Who will be the one transforming you company? It could be you!
It is an absolute necessity to have a person act as the catalyst of change. You need someone with true grit, passion, a sense of curiosity and a steady dose of patience who believes a carbon neutral company is the right thing to do. Without such a dedicated person, it will become very hard for your company to change.
Without such a person, change might come in the form of clients demanding you become carbon neutral, or rules and regulations that will enforce you to do something you do not want. You will become a part of the laggers and complainers, those who do not want to change. And we know that those who are unwilling to change, are most often the losers. Just look at recent history: Kodak and Nokia provide clear examples that change will come. You are the one to choose which side of history to be on.
Finding that special someone who can open the eyes of key persons in the organization is hard. That is where we can provide some help. Not just with this how-to guide. We can connect you with those who have experience from the industry and have done so before. Go to Mr. Communability to get in touch with experts directly.
“Where does change start anyway? You don’t have to be a professor to understand that this is the wrong question. Change can start anywhere.”
+ Step 2. Find a Guide
Who will guide the hero and assist him by providing knowledge, insights and resources?
Every hero needs a guide. Someone to help him or her navigate through treacherous waters and dangerous storms. For the moment we will assume you - the reader - will be the hero of your company.
Your guide needs to be a sponsor high-up in the management team, preferably the highest up. That would be your CEO or an owner in the case of a private business. If you do not have such persons on-board, look for others who have a high amount of authority within the company and are susceptible to your case. Look for the 'consigliere' of the CEO of the owner, someone who can 'convert the management team from within'. This might require a great deal of politics and patience, but you have the moral highground.
In order to convert those in charge, it might help to use the tools we provide on our website to let them see that it is not as hard or costly as they might think. Always be mindfull however that no one can truly be converted from the outside. True belief comes from within when people are intrinsically motivated, check out our story on incentives and how to decarbonize vessels about this.
Once you have garnered support from higher up, and have a Hero to do the dirty work, you are ready to start.
+ Step 3. Determine your footprint
Calculate your carbon footprint and determine financial resources available.
The first thing our Hero needs to do, is to determine the carbon footprint of its company. This is often referred to as "what is material for you". There are plenty of guidelines and calculators online who can help you with this, souch as this one from mailchimp, though none of these are dedicated to companies in the marine and offshore industry.
From our experience, up to 99% of all emissions for a ship-owning company comes from emissions originating from the combustion of fuel on-board the vessels. These are scope I and II emissions, which refer to emissions a company has direct control of. Other emissions, such as travelling from and to the office or vessel and emissions in the supply chain, are called scope III emissions.
Our advice to the Hero is to focus. Choose to allocate your time and resources into decarbonizing your vessels only. This makes it very easy to determine your footprint, as it can easily be determined by multipling your total fuel consumption times the emission factor of your fuel. We are working hard on providing you with this tool, which is expected by the end of 2020. Please contact us in case you like to know more.
+ Step 4. Set the ambition
Do you want to fully remove all emissions and become zero emissions or is carbon neutral enough? Which sustainable dragons does our Hero have to slay?
You want to become carbon neutral. That much is clear. But what exactly does that mean for your company? Is it enough to simply offset carbon emissions and buy credits? Or do you need to inset emissions? Or are you willing to go full zero emissions or even further, negative emissions like Microsoft? Let us briefly look at the possible options for our Hero to work on.
The four options for Carbon Neutrality:
- Offset Emissions
- Inset Emissions
- Zero Emissions
- Carbon Negative
1. Fastest - Leading the charge
You do not have time to wait. You want to be sustainable now.
2. Cheapest - Limited resources, maximum drive
If you do not have a lot of financial resources to fund your sustainable ambitions, you need to be smart about it.
3. Wait - Follow the crowd
You can of course decide that it is all too difficult, lean back and do nothing. As a minimum effort, you could learn the best practices from others, await rules and regulations, and focus on simply complying. In that case, the Hero's journey ends here.
Be aware that this is certainly not the cheapest, nor the least dangerous! Again, history is full of companies who started following instead of leading (Kodak, Nokia). If you decide to simply wait or do nothing, rules and regulations by IMO and nations will catch up and you eventually end up paying more. For example, shore power will most likely be mandatory in Europe by 2030. Are you going to wait for 2029 to convert your vessel, or are you going to do it now while you can still get subsididy on it?
+ Step 5. Determine your strategy
How can you become carbon neutral? Which technologies can be used?
How will the hero slay the carbon-dragon? Which swords does he or she needs to yield and which spells will protect him from harm?
Most companies in the maritime and offshore industry are bound by long-term commitments and assets that have a long period of depreciation. Combined with the fact that for most of these assets, converting to zero-emission technologies is costly if at all possible, this makes become carbon neutral a daunting task.
+ Step 6. Rally the troops
Who is going to help the Hero?
At this point, you (the Hero) has gathered a mandate from your guide, resources, a clear ambition and a strategy to get there. But as with any Hero, you cannot do it alone. You need a team.
Depending on the size of your company, you could make people or resources available to increase the size of the team. It is recommended to never exceed the "soccer-team size" of 12 people, as it is neither helpful nor necessery. What you need to do, is to leverage the good people already employed in your company to start working towards to common ambition. What is meant by this? The hero needs to set up a sustainable community within the company.
Every organization at this point will have people who are willing to invest time and thought into making the company more sustainable. Even with busy agendas and projects, just a few minutes or an hour a week can make all the difference.
+ Step 7. Do it & review it
The first part, just do it, is quite self-explanatory and should speak for itself. To properly review your progress however, you would need a system to determine your progress. We are working on a guideline to set up your own dashboard on sustainability metrics within the company, which should give you a nice overview.
+ Step 8. Learn, improve and share your experience
What best practices and lessons learned can you share on our community?
You will learn along the way that some things work, and some things do not. Sharing your insights might mean acceleration of reaching Paris goals, or connecting to potential future employees. This also means sharing the things that did not work and failed. Why? We learn a lot in failing and this can be shared. Just as the offshore industry shares safety incidents, we should not shy away from sharing sustainability incidents. Or as Bob Ross calls them: "happy little accidents".
At Mr. Sustainability we believe strongly in sharing our experiences and learning from each other. That includes learning from each other's mistakes. That is why we ask you to share your experience in our community, so that we might be able to expand upon your knowledge and apply the lessons you learned to others. Why, you might ask, are you so openly sharing your knowledge?
We believe that there is no commercial advantage in not sharing our lessons. We believe in reciprocity. Everyone in the offshore industry will need to figure out for themselves how to become a sustainable company, how to decarbonize their own special vessels and how to educate their crews. By sharing what works, and what doesn't, we create win-win scenarios and new opportunities for business.
For example, the shore power project in the Calandkanaal by Heerema, Eneco and Port of Rotterdam not only ensured the reduction of almost 15.000 [mT] of carbon emissions annually. It also opened up business cases never thought about by Eneco and Port of Rotterdam, which now seem to lead to millions in investment opportunity.
Share your experiences on our community and you might connect to just the person from the industry you needed to solve your issue, creating whole new kinds of business you never thought possible.
Examples of Sustainable Roadmaps
Learn from other companies with easy to use roadmaps available for copying
References & More Stories
MIT Sloan Management Review - Sustainability Lessons from the Front Lines