Notes on carbon markets and industrial transition
Field note, week one
Seven days of running a reporting routine on real diesel litres, before anyone signs off on a method.
The first week of any emissions reporting routine is mostly about finding out what the fleet actually does, not what the spreadsheet assumed. We spent it with a small Gauteng haulier running six rigs between the depot and the N3, pulling fuel slips, telematics exports and dispatch sheets into one place for the first time.
Three things surfaced quickly. The fuel slips and the telematics logs disagreed on idling time by roughly nine percent, which is enough to move a monthly figure. Two vehicles had been logged under the wrong route code for months, so their tonne-kilometre totals were quietly inflated. And the driver who consistently burned the least diesel was not the one the depot manager expected.
We started with a full per-trip template and abandoned it by Wednesday. Six columns were never filled in, and the dispatcher was reconstructing them from memory a day later. The version that survived the week was shorter: date, vehicle, route code, litres, loaded or empty, and a single note field. Everything else came from the telematics pull.
Emission factors were the other sticking point. The default factor set the operator had been using did not match the fuel grade actually delivered, and nobody could say who had chosen it. We flagged it for review rather than changing it mid-week, because a silent switch would have broken the month-on-month comparison.
Cleaner data costs time. The depot supervisor spent about forty minutes a day on reconciliation in week one, and that is not sustainable without either a tool or a person whose job it is. The realistic options are to accept a coarser weekly figure or to automate the fuel-slip capture. Both are defensible. Pretending the manual version scales is not.
By Friday the numbers were still rough, but they were traceable. Every litre could be pointed back to a slip, and every route code to a dispatch entry. That is a better starting point than a polished figure with no paper trail behind it.
Related reading
From the desk
Three pieces currently in the pipeline. Each one is tied to a specific corridor, fleet or reporting problem we have been working through with readers.
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