Notes on carbon markets and industrial transition
Follow-up insight
14 March 2025 · Method notes · 6 min read
The first pass through a fleet's carbon numbers usually looks tidy. Diesel litres come off the fuel cards, tonne-kilometres come off the load sheets, and the two get multiplied by a factor someone downloaded two years ago. It holds together until a second reader asks which factor, applied to which leg, on which corridor.
That question is what changed things for a mid-size Gauteng haulier we followed through a re-review in February. Nothing dramatic happened to the fleet. What changed was the boundary. The original review counted the Johannesburg–Durban run as a single line. The second pass split it: the N3 climb out of the Highveld, the long plateau stretch, and the escarpment descent into KwaZulu-Natal each carry different fuel behaviour, and averaging them hid a gap of roughly a fifth on the uphill leg.
Three things surfaced once the corridor was broken into segments. Empty return legs on the container side were being reported at the loaded factor. Idling at the inland depots near Alberton was excluded entirely because it sat outside the trip record. And the telematics feed had a two-week gap in January that nobody had flagged, so the monthly average quietly leaned on the weeks that did report.
None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary friction between a reporting spreadsheet and a working fleet. The useful part is that the corrections were cheap: a segment table, a depot idling column, and a short note on the telematics gap so the next reader knows what they are looking at.
The follow-up review did not produce a better headline number. It produced a number that survives a second reader, which is the only version worth sending to a sustainability officer or an external reviewer.
Three recent pieces from the working file: a planning session on the N3 leg split, the first week of a telematics rollout, and what a reporting group changed once the initial review was done.
Planning
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Field notes
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Follow-up
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