As part of Gunvor’s commitment to understanding and addressing the carbon impact and environmental risks associated with its physical trading activities, the company has been working with CarbonChain to calculate the GHG emissions for its entire LNG trade portfolio for 2020 and 2021. It was critical for this data to cover every stage of the supply chain—including source, production, transport, and combustion—to provide comprehensive insight into Gunvor’s carbon hotspots and opportunities for improvement.

After gathering and exporting Gunvor’s raw supply chain data, within three months CarbonChain produced a comprehensive supply chain carbon footprint, carbon intensity calculations for Gunvor’s LNG portfolio, and trade-by-trade and asset-level analyses.

Unlike broad-based estimates, Gunvor’s reports contain accurate and verifiable data based on CarbonChain’s independent and auditable methodology and bottom-up emissions database.

Key Results

In 2020, 94 trades were assessed (covering 6.80 million tonnes of LNG), and 122 in 2021 (covering 8.02 million tonnes). The emissions are broken down according to source, assets, and destination countries, with temporal analyses (quarterly and annual). Results include:

  • The total emissions for Gunvor’s LNG trades in 2020 was 24.25 million tCO2e*, compared with 30.88 million tCO2e in 2021.
  • The average carbon intensity of a trade in 2020 was 3.57 tCO2e per tonne of LNG, and 3.74 in 2021.
  • The downstream supply chain (including liquefaction, regasification and combustion) represents the vast majority of total emissions: 87% in 2020, and 86% in 2021.
  • In 2021, Equatorial Guinea was the most carbon intensive source country (4.17 tCO2e/t compared with 3.34 CO2e/t for Nigeria, the least carbon intensive source country).
  • In 2021, 52% of midstream emissions where United States is the source country were pipeline emissions; whereas 93% of midstream emissions where Qatar is the source country are shipping emissions.
  • 87% of vessels (by the quantity of carried commodity) were aligned with the Sea Cargo Charter in 2020, compared with 77% in 2021.
  • The breakdown of average trade carbon intensity per end customer in 2021 shows variation between 4.2 tCO2e/tLNG and 3.37 tCO2e/tLNG.

All greenhouse gas emissions represented as tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (tCO2e).

Ongoing accounting of Gunvor’s LNG trade emissions allows Gunvor to pinpoint legislative, reputational, and financial risk, measure progress and identify reduction opportunities. Given the notorious difficulty of obtaining emissions information for natural gas supply chains, it’s likely that Gunvor is one of the first commodity traders to have mapped out its LNG carbon footprint, risks, and opportunities at this level of granularity and accuracy.

LNG – Summary – 2021

110

Total number of assessed trades

8.25M

Quantity of traded commodity (tonne)

30.88M

Total emissions of assessed trades (tCO2e)

3.74

Average carbon intensity of a trade (tCO2e7t)

Profile of trade supply chain emissions

Average carbon intensity by source country [tCO2e/t]