Posts Tagged ‘carbon’
While there are some great professional tools for planning and analysing carbon abatement projects, most organisations still seem to use Microsoft Excel. Excel is not a bad tool for abatement planning, but its not always clear the best way to use it.
I was assisting a client to develop their greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan last week and a specific question came up regarding how to chart a Marginal Abatement Cost Curve in Excel, like the one shown below.
A Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) is the classic way to present a portfolio of abatement options. The MACC plots abatement potential (X-axis) against the marginal abatement cost (Y-axis). The marginal abatement cost represents the dollar cost to abate one tonne of greenhouse gas emissions (that is, abatement potential divided by economic cost). There are quite a few good descriptions and examples of MACCs out there. One good recent report is Climate Work’s Low Carbon Growth Plan for Australia.
Once you have calculated the economic cost and abatement potential of each option, actually charting the cost curve is pretty simple. The trick is arranging the data so you can use the the standard Column chart type. This means you need to provide a value (the marginal abatement cost) for each tonne of carbon based on each projects abatement potential and with the projects ordered from least-cost to most-cost. This is illustrated below.
So, in the example above, Project A can abate up to 60 tonnes of carbon at a cost of -$90.50 per tonne (i.e. there is net economic benefit); Project B is the next best option and can abate up to a further 40 tonnes of carbon at a cost of -$5.00 per tonne; and so on.
Often you will have a separate Excel worksheet for each project and it can be a bit of work getting the data out of these individual worksheets into this arrangement so it is easy to chart. You can use macros, conditional sum formulae, or just copy the values manually.
When you get to actually creating the chart, use the standard Column chart type and format the data series so that there is no separation and no gap between the data points. If you like, you can download a very simple Sample-MACC-Chart to see what I mean.
In a media statement released today, the WA State Government announced that the Forest Products Commission (FPC) will close down its carbon division.
The decision, announced by the Forestry Minister, Terry Redman, will doubtless be well received by the other main players in Australia’s developing forest carbon sector. Companies like Carbon Conscious , CO2 Australia and Rewards Group have been arguing for a while now, and with some justification, that a State Goverment owned entity should not be competing against the private sector in the carbon space.
FPC had previously completed deals with Synergy (5000 hectares) and BP but uncertainty over a start date for emissions trading had already forced an organisation restructure late last year.
The immediate future of existing contracts is not made clear in the statement, however FPC “will be exploring ways it can transfer this work to the private sector” according to Minister Redman.
