While many of us deal with book and claim every day, we often find ourselves in conversations with colleagues or partners who are new to the topic or find themselves daunted by the many nuances, terms, and definitions these systems include. This post can help you in explaining book and claim and its many facets to folks less familiar.
What is ‘Book and Claim’ in a nutshell?
Many heavy transport service providers and customers—like those in the Book and Claim Community—are seeking to reduce their transport emissions. However, since lower-carbon fuels are more expensive today than their traditional counterparts, many transport service providers find it difficult to afford them.
Simultaneously, many corporate transport customers are looking for ways to decrease their indirect (Scope 3) emissions to meet their climate goals. However, because these corporate customers do not typically procure lower-carbon transportation fuels themselves, they need an alternative way to support transport decarbonization to drive towards their climate goals. Book and claim promises a way to link the ambitions of the transport service providers and their customers to cover the price premium and accelerate the lower-carbon transportation market.
In a book and claim system, the environmental attributes are decoupled from the physical fuel and sold separately as certificates (often called environmental attribute certificates (EACs), book and claim units (BCUs), or tokens among other terms). See FAQ for definitions of environmental attributes and EACs.
By offering EACs, the pool of investment into lower-carbon fuels and services is expanded, now including both direct fuel procurers and transport service customers who can purchase certificates and claim the emissions reduction benefits for the certificate’s associated emissions reductions in their emissions inventories. The funds from these certificates aim to close the price premium of lower-carbon fuels and services, increase the demand signal for lower-carbon fuels and services, and directly contribute towards transportation decarbonization.
How does ‘Book and Claim’ work?
Lower-carbon fuel producers and transport service providers first verify environmental attributes in accordance with established certification schemes. Those attributes are then “booked” as EACs in a registry and sold to transportation customers. Once claimed, a certificate is retired so that it cannot be “double counted” or claimed erroneously by an additional certificate buyer. See FAQ for certification schemes, registries, and double counting.
Additionally, when book and claim is combined with long-term purchase agreements, the demand signal becomes even more powerful because guaranteed purchasing of certificates means guaranteed funding streams, allowing fuel and service providers to provide bankability to lenders, securing the financing needed to expand operations and production.
Ultimately, book and claim expands access to transport emissions reductions by broadening the pool of customers able to directly support the production of lower-carbon fuels.
Congratulations! you are now empowered and on your way to explaining book and claim to both logistics experts and non-experts as the powerful transport logistics decarbonization tool it is.