Part 1: Introduction

1.1 PURPOSE & INTENDED AUDIENCE
1.2 MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
1.3 A USER’S GUIDE

1.1 Purpose & Intended Audience

The purpose of this guide is to help MAC member companies to inventory, monitor and report on their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). More specifically, this manual provides operations staff in the Canadian mining industry with detailed guidance, instructions and work sheets to:

• identify sources of greenhouse gas emissions;
• prepare an inventory of GHG emissions;
• collect data that will be required in the future to calculate carbon sequestration;
• project future levels of GHG emissions;
• determine project-specific emission reductions; and
• report results to interested stakeholders through internal reporting, submission of annual GHG emissions information to MAC, and annual progress reports to the Voluntary Challenge and Registry (VCR).

This guide is accompanied by a companion document, Strategic Planning and Action on Climate Change: A Guide for Canadian Mining Companies, which assists senior executives, directors and managers to develop a strategic corporate response to the risks and opportunities associated with climate change.

This manual can be used in conjunction with the Energy Efficiency Planning Guide (MAC, November 1997) to provide more detailed guidance on inventorying, projecting and measuring reductions associated with energy reduction measures and projects. The Planning Guide complements this manual by providing MAC member companies with a management framework for planning and implementing an energy efficiency plan.
This guide provides mining companies with direction and a common template for the inventorying & measuring aspects of VCR reporting. For guidance on all other aspects of VCR reporting, please see the 1999 VCR Registration Guide.

1.2 Management Framework for Greenhouse Gas Emissions

To effectively manage GHG emissions, an organization requires four key pieces of information:

1. A base year inventory of GHG emissions and subsequent annual inventories;
2. Projections of future GHG emission levels;
3. An estimate of potential GHG emission increases or reductions associated with specific projects; and
4. A GHG account statement.

This manual addresses the first two pieces in detail, and provides general direction for estimating the emission changes associated with specific projects.

The GHG emission account statement is discussed in detail in the companion document, Strategic Planning and Action on Climate Change (Section 5.1.1.c). This statement combines elements of the other three pieces of data to provide a tool that can be used to assess progress against voluntary or regulated GHG emission reduction control targets. Such account statements can be prepared at the facility, divisional, or corporate level.

The GHG management system – including monitoring and reporting of GHG emissions – should be integrated with existing management systems, including the environmental management system (EMS), and production and financial management systems. This type of integration often reduces duplication of effort, and enables management to consider GHG emissions data alongside financial data, production data, and data related to other environmental aspects.

The methodologies described within this guide should also be used to collect the energy- and emissions-related data your company reports through other mechanisms, such as the Annual Census of Mines (administered by Natural Resources Canada) and the Industrial Consumption of Energy (ICE) survey (administered by Statistics Canada). Since governments use the data reported within these surveys to develop energy and climate change related policy, it is very important that the data that are reported in these surveys are accurate so that government policy decisions are based on real data.

1.3 A User’s Guide

Each section of this Guide provides users with guidance, instruction, and worksheets to use in development and reporting of a GHG inventory. While certain sections may be primarily of interest to companies without an existing GHG inventory and management program (such as Section 2.2 which provides a GHG inventory template), other sections will be of broader interest to MAC members (such as sections 3.0 on sequestration, 4.0 on projections, 5.0 on determining project-specific reductions, and 6.2 on reporting to MAC).

Part 2 identifies issues that should be resolved prior to initiating work on a GHG inventory, addressing such issues as inventory boundaries, available data sources, and level of data disaggregation. It then provides a detailed worksheet with specific instructions for use by companies without existing GHG measurement systems in place to assist them in completing their GHG inventory. By completing this worksheet, a company can calculate its total direct GHG emissions and its total indirect GHG emissions from electricity and steam use, and present this information in terms of absolute emissions and emissions per unit of production or throughput.

Part 3 provides a data collection worksheet to record information related to land management activities, such as creation of GHG sinks through afforestation, reforestation, or forest management activities, or destruction of sinks through deforestation. This worksheet collects basic data so that sequestration-related CO2 reductions and emissions can be calculated once the international rules and methodologies are confirmed.

Guidance on projecting future GHG emission levels is provided in Part 4. This section describes the steps to be completed to prepare GHG emission projections under both a “business as usual” scenario, and a “with GHG reduction measures” scenario.

Part 5 provides general guidance on how to calculate emission changes associated with specific projects and measures.

Part 6 provides a summary template report to be completed and submitted to MAC on an annual basis. All MAC member companies should complete this template in order to enable MAC to report on a sector basis. This part also provides a summary of VCR Gold level reporting requirements and identifies how the data and information generated through use of this workbook and guidance manual meet certain of the VCR requirements.

Part 7 provides the raw data that are used in the worksheets, including unit conversion tables, the Global Warming Potentials of different greenhouse gases, and emissions factors. MAC will review these factors with Environment Canada on an annual basis and will provide revisions to this section of the Guide when required.

The Guide concludes in Part 8 with a list of resources to provide users with more detailed guidance, where required.