Small operators put at risk with carbon reporting

At the recently held SMMT’s automotive summit delegates to the conference were told that due to growing pressure from major customers on hauliers to report carbon emissions could have a detrimental effect on small operators.

According to the Road Haulage Association’s (RHA) director of policy, Jack Semple, who was addressing the session, small operators who do not have the means of reporting carbon emissions are being put at an unfair disadvantage. According to Mr. Semple larger operators could see carbon reporting as a means of obtaining an advantage over smaller operators. The RHA director of policy called on the UK Government to set a uniform system for measuring carbon emissions.

Semple said: "Some large companies see a commercial benefit because they are better geared up than smaller companies. But there is no appetite in haulage for government involvement in carbon reporting."

With fuel duty at 56p/litre this meant that commercial vehicle carbon emissions were priced at £220 a tonne. This, Mr. Semple said was twenty times the current price of emissions in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. "Fuel represents 35% of the cost of running a truck, so there is already a very strong incentive to optimise the use of fuel," he said. "Do we also want to hamstring the hire and reward sector with carbon reporting?"

The transport industry will under the Climate Change Act be required to develop a system for reporting carbon emissions by 2012. To achieve this goal a number of stumbling blocks need to be addressed and overcome. One of the obstacles will be how will they allocate emissions to the goods carried rather than the vehicle mileage.

"The supermarkets are asking transport companies to report carbon emissions from vehicle use," said Semple. "The customer knows what is on a lorry, but the operator doesn’t. Do we need the exact MPG for each trip? How do we allocate emissions if the vehicle is multi-user?"

Martin Flach, product director at Iveco and a member of the SMMT’s heavy CV technical committee, launched the committee’s HGV ultra-low-carbon (ULC) strategy. Produced with the RHA and FTA, the strategy calls for four measures to encourage CV operators to invest in low-carbon technology; such as government incentives to stimulate the purchase of ULC vehicles; a measure of "well-to-wheel" emissions; proven whole lifecycle benefits of green technology; and an assessment of policy options such as carbon taxes, carbon trading and road-user charging. Flach said that currently the costs are too high and need to be examined by government with an incentive scheme put in place (for ULC vehicles). The lack of a consistent and uniform system for measuring well-to-wheel carbon emissions was evident as tailpipe CO2 emissions were the same for a truck running on conventional diesel and biodiesel, even though the carbon impact was significantly different. Government intervention in reducing the size of a vehicle people could drive on a car licence from 7.5 tonnes to 3.5 tonnes had led to an inordinate number of vans on the road. This distortion had resulted in only a quarter of the number of 7.5 tonners on the roads compared to twenty years ago.

“The stringent requirements for NOx and particulate emissions under Euro regulations had achieved a reduction in fuel consumption and that if the move from Euro-5 to Euro-6 could be made with no drop in fuel efficiency then that would be a great achievement” concluded Mr. Flach.

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