four things to know about carbon footprinting

Did you know that everything and everyone has a carbon footprint? Events, places, services, products and organizations all have a carbon footprint.

The science of a carbon footprint is complex. Similar to actual footprints that can reveal information about their source, carbon footprints also provide valuable data, but related to emissions. To help understand what can influence a carbon footprint, it’s important to first know the role of carbon footprinting. Here’s our list of four things to know about carbon footprinting.

Knowing how much and what kind of emissions are caused by products and services throughout their life cycle can help us make informed decisions about the products we buy, services we use and items we consume.

When you hear the term carbon footprinting, this is referring to the tracking and reporting of the CO₂ emissions associated with a product or service’s life cycle from beginning to end-use. The idea is similar to creating a nutrition label, but instead of identifying calories, with carbon footprinting, we can see the greenhouse gas emissions generated by a specific product, service or activity.

Many across the global community are investing in and developing ways to better understand carbon footprints. Chevron is also working to build that understanding and make the carbon footprint of our global supply chains more transparent. Recently, with partners, we developed a new carbon footprinting methodology for delivered liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargoes, which is one of the first published carbon footprinting methodologies in the industry.

As we transition to a lower carbon future, transparency is as important as ever. This standardized, data-driven LNG carbon footprinting methodology is part of a larger effort to work on tracking our carbon footprint across our supply chain.

Most published outlooks conclude that oil and gas will remain an important part of the energy system for years to come. While work is being done to help decarbonize this sector, continued progress will take both partnership and continued investment.

Reducing the carbon emissions of products and activities that use oil and gas will help to shrink the size of our carbon footprint. However, to see the level of change we all want will take global collaboration. Chevron is partnering with a variety of organizations on decarbonization efforts, such as committing $100 million to the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) Climate Investments fund. This fund invests in solutions to decarbonize oil and gas, industrials, commercial transport, and buildings.

Reducing the world’s carbon footprint is a global priority. It’s important to us too. We support well-designed mandatory climate-related reporting with relevant data at a product level basis. We also support other climate policies like a price on carbon, which incentivize lower carbon footprints.

No one company or industry can make the wide-ranging changes needed to meet the net zero ambitions of the Paris Agreement. Balanced and measured climate policy and standardized, comparable emissions reporting have a role to play by involving all sectors to maximize efficient and cost-effective reductions while allocating costs equitably, gradually and predictably.