The notable / relevant-to-us points (quotes from) this article are:

• Before the annual emissions and tonne-kilometre data reports can be submitted they must first be audited by an independent and approved verification body.
• However, the process and regulation of appointing verifiers specifically for the Aviation EU ETS is far from uniform across Europe and has the potential to lead to a situation of too few approved verifiers handling the audits of too many of the 4,000-odd operators in a short space of time.
• The verifiers themselves must first be accredited by the relevant accreditation body in the EU state they are seeking to operate before they can be approved by the respective Competent Authority (CA).

By the way, Malaysia Airline reports to the UK state.

• .. Although there are lists of verifiers released by each body, they may only be accredited to perform fixed installation EU ETS audits and not Aviation EU ETS audits.

And most relevant / impacting to our operations is this point:

• The CAs of France, Germany and the UK have yet to publish lists of aviation-specific accredited verifiers and it is therefore up to aircraft operators to select and check the status of potential verification bodies. Many of the bigger airlines will have already started, or even completed, a tendering process and are likely to choose the larger, international auditing companies.

Malaysia Airlines will be starting its own request for quotations too, this month, for this verification process. While we may be “working in the dark” in that there is still no list of definite approved verifiers, we will have to carefully look into the profiles of the potential verifiers we are considering.

We are, of course, no exception. We report to the UK’s Environment Agency for the EU ETS compliance.

With the objective of managing the consumption and cost of fuel use, we already had a system in place that tracks fuel consumption from an accounting standpoint. Meeting the EU ETS’ requirement of monitoring carbon emission involved the task of extending this functionality and fine tuning the fuel data collection to focus only on the specific relevant routes on the network, the aircrafts used, and the passenger and cargo loads of these flights. Processes of how these measurements were collected and the integrity and accuracy of its data were also shared with the UK agency. This involved revisiting the processes that were already in place that support the fuel management system, converting these into the appropriate units and re-documenting these for complying with ETS’ requirements.

More info on our ETS-related activities and compliance over time

The debate over this legislation has been taken so seriously that the opposition party, the Liberal Party, has even had a change in leadership- just today a new leader has already been appointed.

China and India have also announced that they will be attending this month’s Copenhagen talks. Hopefully there will be an agreement in the outcome of this much anticipated event.

In choosing my words carefully, it is “good” to see this issue being taken so seriously by a government. I will continue watching keenly the developments on this front.

For continuous updates on the Australian government’s development on the ETS, one of the sources I follow is Sky News’ twitter updates.

John Low
MAS Environment department