Notes on carbon markets and industrial transition
Planning Notes
What came out of a two-day corridor review with three Gauteng hauliers, and which assumptions did not survive the room.
We spent two days in a boardroom in Germiston with planners from three fleets running the Johannesburg to Durban spine. The brief was simple: agree on a shared baseline for diesel consumption per tonne-kilometre before the next reporting cycle. It did not stay simple for long.
The first hour went to route definitions. One operator counts the N3 leg from the Kempton Park depot, another from the Heidelberg weighbridge, and the third from a consolidation yard outside Harrismith. Same corridor, three different starting points, and a spread of roughly nine percent in reported fuel intensity before anyone touched an emission factor.
Telematics pulls showed the escarpment descent around Van Reenen was doing more work than the flat Free State stretch, which most of the room already suspected. What surprised people was idling time at the Mariannhill off-ramp queue. Two fleets logged it as transit time; the third logged it separately. That single classification choice moved the reported figure by more than the gradient effect.
We also flagged a data-quality problem that keeps coming back: several trucks had fuel-level sensors calibrated on a different tank size after a mid-year swap. The litres looked plausible, so nobody caught it until the monthly totals stopped reconciling with the bowser slips.
The group settled on a short baseline method rather than a full reporting overhaul. Fixed corridor start and end points, idling logged as its own category, and a single emission factor set applied across all three fleets for the next quarter. Nothing clever, but it gives the planners something comparable to argue about next time.
Full method notes and the spreadsheet template will run in the next dispatch. If you run a similar corridor and want to compare notes, the editors are collecting corridor tips through the usual channel.
Three pieces from this month's dispatch, each built around a specific corridor, fleet or reporting problem rather than a general theme.
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