Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how
technology from space is empowering a better world, brought to you by
the Satellite Applications Catapult.
I'm your host, Dallas Campbell, and today we'll be delving into
the Carbon Accounting Project.
I'm joined by Russ Hall, he's the lead for Reduction of Industrial Emissions and
Net Zero at the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and Amy Peace, Innovation Lead
for Circular Economy at Innovate UK.
Carbon Accounting is the monitoring and measuring of any emissions produced by
an organisation, whether that be on site, due to commuting or business travel,
or through supply chain processes.
The Carbon Accounting Project is focusing on the manufacturing industry with a
goal to streamline the overly complex landscape of tools, methods and regulation
of carbon accounting, positioning the UK as the place for green manufacturing.
Hello, hello, welcome to the show.
Maybe we could start a little, because I always find people's grand titles
hide all kinds of interesting things.
So maybe you could, in your own words, you could just explain
a little bit about what you do.
Amy Peace: So essentially kind of our role is there to be the
technical leads on certain subjects for aligning government innovation
funding to business led innovation.
So my role is a bit of, sort of working out what sort of programs we should
actually fund, what topics are relevant, but then the interesting bit is actually
getting a little eye in on some of the projects that we do fund, seeing what
learning's coming out of it, so we can affect what other programs we decide to
put money towards or just seeing where there are connections between different
projects that really need to line up.
So on a good day, it's like having your own personal TED Talk, hearing so many
different topics, obviously circular economy does cover all different sectors.
Dallas Campbell: How do you mean it's a bit like having
your own personal TED Talk?
Like you're not doing the TED talk.
Amy Peace: I mean, no, I mean, you are listening to people at the cutting
edge of innovation and you know, one minute you're hearing about the battery
recycling, the next minute about satellite technology, then you're on to things
in sort of the textiles world and you can all have little bits of interest
in it, but just some of the deep depths that you get kind of out of them is...
Dallas Campbell: That's nice.
Every day is a learning day for you, every day is a school day.
Amy Peace: I mean, they're the good days, you know, the bad days, more of...
Dallas Campbell: us about...
Amy Peace: Public sector bureaucracy, but you know.
Dallas Campbell: And Russ, Russ Hall, you're at the High Value
Manufacturing Catapult, lead for reduction of industrial emissions,
that's fairly self explanatory, is it?
Or is there more to it than that?
Russ Hall: So I have two roles.
One is for the High Value Manufacturing Catapult as a whole, which is the
lead for the reduction of industrial emissions and I'm the lead for Sustainable
Manufacturing and Circular Economy at Warwick Manufacturing Group, which is
a, one of the centres that makes up the High Value Manufacturing Catapult.
My role really is to help industry understand why reducing its carbon
emissions is important, but also to help them understand how they can do
that and how they can measure those reductions year on year to show that
they are making the improvements that they need to do for the UK to meet
its legal obligation for net zero.
Dallas Campbell: There we go.
You both sound really optimistic.
I mean, the race to net zero or getting to net zero, I mean, just on
a general question before we start, I'm interested in how optimistic you
are or are things going to plan or do we need a big kind of boost in this?
I'm sort of curious from where you're sitting.
Amy Peace: I mean, from my perspective, I see lots of things
that could really help us get there.
The barrier does seem to be not necessarily on the technology side.
But the people and societal side, implementing these...
Dallas Campbell: People are messy, this is the problem, people
are so messy and difficult and
Amy Peace: Exactly, and just assuming that, well, we've got the right things,
surely logic will prevail and we'll end up with the right things in the right
place and I think the fact that, looking at some of these things 20 plus years
ago, when I sort of started my career and we're still kind of, don't feel like
we've moved the curve enough yet and it is going to take proper industrial
revolution scale change to get us there and we've gone from being able to do this
nice and gently, to looking at the curve for where our carbon emissions need to go
and it's an absolute cliff face precipice.
So it's nice to have technologies and things there, but just to get that kick
that we need to get us down that cliff...
Dallas Campbell: That cliff face is...
Amy Peace: ...makes me nervous.
Dallas Campbell: Do you mean when you say the cliff face, that sort of time
period, Oh, we can take our time, we've got loads of time to do this,
nice curve downwards has now turned into a cliff face because the...
Amy Peace: Because we've used up our budget.
There's a limited amount of carbon we could put in the atmosphere and every year
we'll put it in more and more and it's not just about putting in less and less.
It's like absolutely putting the brakes on.
Russ Hall: It's with reference to the one and a half degree limit.
That's the amount of carbon that we can put into the atmosphere in order
to limit the climate's temperature increase to one and a half degrees
on top of, the original benchmark.
Is it a cliff face?
It is if we're not careful, and if we don't act now.
So we need to do things faster in order to make sure that we don't put so much
carbon under that one and a half degree limit is breached, because once it is
breached, there may be no coming back.
So in reference to manufacturing, what manufacturing needs to do, it needs to
reduce the amount of carbon emissions from manufacturing either in its supply
chains or directly on site and it needs to do it as quickly as it possibly can.
If we wait, then there is a danger that we go past that cliff face.
We step off the edge and we fall into a climate change abyss
and that would be bad, right?
Be bad for everyone.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
Russ Hall: So we need to act.
We need to do it now and the technologies that we've been discussing as part of
this podcast are some of the things that will help us to get there.
When we talk about the carbon cliff face, we're really only talking about emissions
and emissions reduction, net zero, is a small part of overall sustainability.
So if we look at sustainability, it's really supported in basic terms by
three pillars and they are, there's a social pillar, there's an economic
pillar, and there's an environmental pillar and net zero falls into a piece
of the environmental pillar and why is that important is a good question.
So if you look at something like E-waste, if we start to recycle more tech, whether
that could be electric motors, it could be laptops, could be mobile phones,
could be generators from wind turbines, anything would fall into that category.
What do we do by moving those sorts of things forwards?
We get a social benefit to it because to do all of those things
will bring jobs and it will bring investments and it will bring growth.
We get an environmental benefit, which is obvious because we're recycling.
So what we're not doing is digging things out of the ground, that's one example
and then obviously we get an economic benefit because if we are generating
new businesses we're giving people new work, we are bringing new investment,
then obviously we get an economic growth.
So the way I always try to put this across is that sustainability is
the lever to give us the economic investment we need in order to make
society better in every possible way.
Dallas Campbell: Right.
Russ Hall: There is a really good example that is being created by Coventry City
Council at the moment and that example is a tech recycling project and what
that will look to do is to take laptops from people like the NHS, the big
corporate businesses around the Coventry area and it will look to recycle those
laptops, not in a physical recycling, so it's not going to crush them and
then extract the material from them.
It's going to take them in, clean them, make them secure, make sure
there's absolutely no data in there.
There's no loss of information, no one's going to lose, you know, the
trust barriers aren't going to be broken, but then it's going to put them
back out into the community for free.
So there's obviously, there's an environmental solution being done there
because we're not crushing those laptops up and putting them into landfill.
But it really does answer a very big social need under
the sustainability banner.
Nine percent of Coventry doesn't have access to the internet, twenty seven
percent of Coventry's only got access to the internet through mobile devices.
So that's things like your mobile phone and you think about how limited that
is, it's actually really hard to do your gas bill through your mobile phone.
It's a lot easier if you've got a laptop.
So if we can get that out, get those laptops out into society for free, we
have got an environmental benefit that comes immediately from the reconditioning
of those laptops and we've got a social need that's being sorted and
at the same time, what we're doing is generating a new business for Coventry.
There will be new jobs associated with that, albeit it's not going
to employ thousands of people.
It may only employ four or five, but there are four or five
jobs that didn't exist before.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
Russ Hall: So that's sustainability in practice, that's what it's about and
in relation to the Carbon Accounting Programme, we can then measure the
emissions improvement that come from recycling those laptops, as opposed
to making new ones and what we'll see is there'll be an emissions
reduction to an improvement for the environment that can be measured.
Dallas Campbell: Okay, the term net zero, I actually think is not the
best term because I actually think people get confused about the net bit.
It is a kind of odd term really, what do we mean by net zero?
Amy Peace: Yeah and in different contexts, it means different things,
you know, in some bits of society, it's acceptable to go, well, we'll
just offset the emissions we can't deal with and we'll have all these strange
accounting details where we'll kind of just make those emissions disappear.
But in others, it's actually, no we need to not just look at reducing what we're
doing, but actually we've also got to develop the technologies that will reduce
CO2 that's already in the atmosphere.
So whether that's sort of direct air capture or some of
the regenerative stuff, yeah.
Dallas Campbell: Presumably on our getting to net zero involves
removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Even if you just turn the tap off, it's still not going to be enough.
We actually need to get rid of it.
Russ Hall: Yes, we will.
On one end, we can reduce the emissions coming from processes,
coming from the things that we do, whether that's domestically or
industrially, we can reduce those emissions, but we'll never get to a
point where those emissions are zero.
So, we'll always be adding something to the atmosphere.
So, for us to achieve net zero, we must be capturing carbon,
either from the atmosphere or from industrial processes, in order to
bring us to the net zero point.
So, we can take away from above, but we must also capture whatever's left
in order to get to that zero baseline mark and that is really important, that
it's not ignored and it's something that things like satellite technology
will be able to measure, because we'll be able to see where carbon capture
is working and where it's not, using the technology that's been developed
by places like the Sat Apps Catapult.
And that stuff is actually really important because one of the things we
have with manufacturers is that they are starting to realise that net zero for
them, for their business is impossible.
So that means they disengage with it.
So what we need them to do is to just work on getting their emissions to be as
small as they can possibly get them and then let technology sort the rest out.
And that's where we need to be.
If we can do that, we can win this war.
But it's a hearts and minds thing.
So we have to keep people involved as we're going and that is actually hard.
Dallas Campbell: I really want to talk about this idea of carbon accounting.
People may have heard of carbon trading and all sorts of things that
have happened, but carbon accounting from where you're sitting means what?
Amy Peace: From my perspective, it is literally knowing how much carbon's
gone into making stuff, because often we look at how do we decarbonise and a
lot of people think, oh well I've got my solar panels, I've got this, and
they just think about that kind of I have reduced my electricity use, I've
gone from a internal combustion engine car to an EV or something, therefore,
I'm kind of doing my bit and then they forget about all that, well, what
are we using most of the energy for?
And a lot of it is in making stuff.
But until you actually know how much stuff Energy has gone into making that
stuff, you don't really have a sense of, well, what benefit do we have
from using product A or product B?
This one's got less stuff in than that one or different types of stuff in this
one and so it becomes this sort of very interesting sort of discussion, how
initially when you engage in people on carbon, you start getting this discussion
about the different scopes there are.
Scope one is literally just what carbon emissions are coming from your site.
If you've got a gas boiler, you can see exactly how much carbon
will be sort of coming back.
Dallas Campbell: And are we talking about companies would do carbon accounting.
Is that the idea?
Right.
Amy Peace: Yeah, it is.
I mean, you can do carbon accounting for your household if you wanted to, or sort
of a much broader organisation, but in general, in this context, I think we're
talking about companies, but then you kind of get onto the scope two, which is kind
of, well, you're buying in electricity.
So what's being used to generate that electricity?
Is it coming from renewable sources or is it coming from still
gas or even coal in some places?
So that then adds an extra sort of burden on, of carbon,
which you're responsible for.
But then we get into the complicated bit of what we call scope three emissions.
So these are all the stuff, whether it be actual physical resources
or services that are also needed to make your business work.
How much energy, and thus carbon, are they requiring?
So all your kind of raw materials have taken energy to produce.
You don't just get them coming in the door and like magic, we're
going to do something with them.
They have taken a lot of effort to get there.
So in the circularity space, you know, some of the examples we talk about, if
you're going to have to dig this resource out of the ground, use some really big,
heavy mining machinery, you might expect that to have a higher carbon footprint
than if you were to get some recycled material or not to have to start from
scratch because you're not having to repeat all that sort of front end stuff.
So to be able to sort of knowing what's the journey that that material has
taken, we can then account for it and say, simplistically, therefore this
product has taken this amount of carbon.
So you can either do it on a product basis, so do it sort of per thing
that comes out of your factory, or you can do it as an organisation
basis and say, our organisation has a totality has that sort of footprint.
Dallas Campbell: And so basically, so all these numbers get totted up over all
these different areas and it spits out a number and do you get like a score?
Is that, I mean, if I'm a big company, am I producing with my carbon accounting?
Amy Peace: Yeah, this is where it gets more complicated because
carbon accounting means different things to different people.
So if you're kind of a government, maybe looking top down, you will
might want to know where's all the carbon coming from in our economy.
So where are hotspots that have the industries to target or the particular
things to kind of know that makes up our whole sort of territorial emissions so
that if we're making those big global obligations to various climate treaties,
we've got a good sense of are we pulling the levers in the right place to know that
we're going to reduce carbon emissions.
But then if you're kind of one of these big multinational companies that
wants to make environmental claims about its products, you want to think
on a very different perspective.
You actually do kind of almost like a bottom up calculation of exactly what's
gone into this particular product and the decisions you've made along the way
and you do those calculations in two different ways, which means again, you
could end up with different numbers for your carbon accounting, because it's
always this kind of proxy of how do you allocate the carbon emissions to
the thing that you're talking about?
So we would love it to be one simple number that meant the same to everybody,
but it's not quite that simple.
Dallas Campbell: And do these companies, are they doing it
for some altruistic reasons?
Russ Hall: So the companies will do it for all sorts of different reasons.
It could be altruistic.
So if you're a small business, there's no real legislation that means you have to
do your carbon accounting at the moment.
So they do it because, hey, it's the right thing to do and if I'm measuring it, it's
something I can show off about perhaps, or it's something I can then show year on
year, I'm actually reducing my emissions.
Big companies have to do it, it's law.
So there are things they have to report to where they, you know, they've got to show
what their emissions are and they've gotta calculate them and for the big companies
it is a really difficult problem.
Like everything, Amy's description of it then was absolutely brilliant.
What I'm gonna add to is just to show how complex it is, so let's say you
were in the UK and you were to make an airframe for something really big.
Well, something like a Boeing 787, 2.3 million components sourced from
13 different regions of the world.
Every bit of that world has got a different energy grid, a
different way of making something.
So you've got an incredibly complicated supply chain, and yet you have to account
for, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, what the carbon is in that product when
it leaves and it is very difficult.
Dallas Campbell: It's almost as if you need some kind of standardisation
to make it all come together.
Let's talk about the carbon accounting projects and what that is and how
that's aiming to try and, from what I understand, it's trying to simplify
things, make things a bit easier, a bit more standarsised, I suppose.
Russ Hall: Yeah, so the Carbon Accounting Programme has aimed to
produce a standardised framework for UK manufacturers to use to do their carbon
accounting by taking into account thing like, what sort of user type they are.
So whether they are a big company, a small company, a high emitter, small emitter,
what sorts of legislation they already had to report to and then it's sort of based
on stuff that's already out there, things like the audience would have heard, I
think, about the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and tries to take into account all of the
legislation that's currently out there.
It just, it tries to come out with a standardised way of producing a number
you can then use for your reporting.
Dallas Campbell: Can I just say this is the High Value Manufacturing Catapult.
This is your catapult.
Russ Hall: This is the High Value Manufacturing Casper in association
with Satellite Applications Catapult, Energy Systems Catapult, Connected Places
Catapult, and the Digital Catapult.
So it's, we are, it's a true cross catapult project.
Dallas Campbell: I suppose what I want to know is how's it going?
are you succeeding?
are you having kind of eureka moments where everything's going to
be much easier and less complex and
Russ Hall: Some days yes and some days, no.
I think if I were to criticise myself, I would say that in my head, I oversimplify
it and then I'm brought back to reality by the people who I work with, who are
true technical experts in the space who point out to me that my wonderfully
simplified ideas can't be happened.
How is it going?
I would say, I think personally pretty well, but I mean, Amy is
from the sponsoring area, so she read better to comment, I don't...
Dallas Campbell: How do companies like it?
You know, you've got this project that's just meant to make things
easier, companies like things when they're easy and less, less faff.
Russ Hall: From the interactions with the companies that we've had and
with people in our advisory board, they love the idea of it for sure.
Are we going to, at the end of the project, be able to present the one
answer that solves the whole problem?
I don't believe that, but we will have gone a long way to showing to
just where we could get to, I think.
Dallas Campbell: Let's talk a little bit, cause this is a space podcast, let's talk
a little bit about how satellite data and what we do in orbit can help companies
with this and, your project in particular.
Amy Peace: I think this has been quite an interesting one of just, I mean,
with the whole project, it's been saying, where are the barriers in this?
What's stopping it being simple?
So for some kind of small businesses, some of the barriers might be we
just, we don't even know about the topic, we don't really understand
what this is, where do we start?
And what's a kind of really simplistic way to get started?
For some of the bigger companies, or even for some of the sort of
government level, so like they've got quite different questions, like how
do we trust the data that we've got?
We've already got systems there, but we might not really have that
assurance that we've covered everything.
So this is where kind of Sat Apps comes in and it's sort of an interesting
space because a lot of things sort of the new technologies on sort of
visualisation and sort of looking for literal hot spots on the earth, can
provide really interesting information about what's happening on the ground.
So every now and again we get interesting news stories about we've detected
massive methane plumes coming out of some gas pipeline somewhere and you
know, they're the ones that kind of hit the news on, perhaps we should
take note of that, you know, the oil and gas industry might have a slightly
bigger footprint than we suspect.
But also there's the, stuff from just general industry, you might have a sort
of big, steel industry in one country and it might give you some data about
how much they're operating and things.
But actually, can you be sure that's actually true data?
is the plant really off for sort of six months in the year or something?
So, this is that interesting sort of balance of when are things operating?
When is things particularly hot, particularly cold?
All the things which you can see from space.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
I mean, is the idea, you know, obviously getting satellite data
in real time, so you could real time, monitor your steel plant.
Russ Hall: I mean, in principle, that s probably possible.
It's a great way of verifying exactly what Amy's just said.
So if somebody is buying 30, 000 tons of steel from a steel plant in Korea, and
that plant in Korea makes a declaration to say, there's this much embodied carbon.
Well, if you've monitored its emissions through a year, you will
know what its emissions are and you could proportionate to it.
Is it that simple?
No.
But in theory, you can do it.
You have to understand the layout of, in the case of a steel plant, you'd
have to understand the layout of the steel plant to understand what emissions
were associated with which bits of it.
But the principle of being able to look at those emissions from space to
see where the energy is being used, where the emissions have come from,
and then proportioning it out should be possible and it is a neat way of seeing
whether people are telling the truth.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah, well, presumably it's not just neat.
Presumably it's absolutely vital because if you can't quantify emissions, if
you can't actually quantify all this and actually understand it, then
you're never going to get to net zero.
Presumably the more information we have is the key to this.
Amy Peace: Yeah, and it's that difference between, again, that top
down understanding of where are all the emissions coming from, have we actually
accounted for everything and the bottom up proactive declarers of information, kind
of, that's coming from that product level.
I mean, another example on the Sat Apps one is obviously for, like, land
use change, where we've seen, sort of things, quite high publicity kind of
on deforestation and you get some great sort of time sort of stamp series maps
of looking at what's happened like the Amazon over the years and where again
companies may have declared certain sort of operations but actually then looking
at the realistic, well this is actually...
Dallas Campbell: That's, so if you make a claim, you have to back it up.
You have to...
Amy Peace: Yeah and I think this brings in sort of an interesting side on kind
of that regulated point of view, because there are those sort of challenges, I
think to this on, you know, how much would you expect individual companies
to chase the supply chain and actually say, you told us this, and it's actually
not that, versus should it be done by someone who's more independent?
When you are actually doing that, looking at somebody else's
operations, it does bring in some slight uncertainty on kind of how
much could an individual company do.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah, that's interesting, and is the idea once you've got all
this data, once you've got all the satellite data, presumably then needs
to be agreed upon, there needs to be kind of regulatory frameworks to
make sure that it's used properly and understood properly and all that data
really doing the job it's meant to do.
Russ Hall: Yeah and that goes for the rest of carbon accounting as well.
You need to make sure that it's used responsibly, that the
information's used in the right way.
One of the difficulties with, well not difficulties, but there is a data risk
with anything to do with carbon accounting that if somebody has got the emissions
that are embedded with a product and they've got the list of materials that
go in the product and a data sheet, then a clever person could work backwards
as to how that product was made.
So, it's kind of, because it's embedded in everything and it unlocks
everything, but it does present some challenges along the way.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm interested in, you know,
if you're a company and as we've established, it's very difficult and
your job is to try and streamline everything, make it much, much easier.
Is there a kind of rubber, like a kind of seal of approval that one would get
a kind of Catapult seal of approval?
Yes, this has been done right, that companies aim towards that would
be standardised, so everyone has the same, you know, the same stamp.
Russ Hall: No, it's not for us to do that.
Our job is to provide the framework, the stamp of approval, I guess
we could say, well, yes, you've used our framework, that's nice.
But I don't think it's for us to give a stamp of approval of what that is.
Our job is to look at the research, look at the data, find the streamlined way of
doing it and show the most efficient way for a business to get to do their carbon
accounting and to provide a way where we are comparing apples with apples.
So at the moment people can do their carbon accounting in different ways.
So if I'm comparing automotive company a, with automotive company
B, do I know that I can compare the embodied emissions figures for
on a per vehicle to vehicle basis?
No, I don't know that at the moment and I've got firsthand
evidence of that from automotive manufacturers admitting it to me.
This is trying to solve that problem.
She's trying to find a way that we know that we can compare this Apple
with this Apple quite literally.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah, let's talk about the carbon regulator.
Russ, do you want to tell us a little bit about the carbon regulator?
What it is and who created it and why it exists?
Russ Hall: It doesn't exist, that's the thing.
So it doesn't exist now and the people, the catapult that's done the bulk of the
work to look at what a carbon regulator is, it's the Energy Systems Catapult and
they've done some great work to point out the need for, what has been termed
a carbon regulator, which would be an independent body sat within UK government
ideally, that was responsible for the monitoring, reporting and verification
of businesses carbon accounting.
So they would be sort of the arbiters of what people have reported to say
whether it's accurate or not and also the provider of the basis data.
So a carbon regulator would be, I guess, much like a financial regulator
in that it provides a structure and framework for other people to follow
and then an audit, it is an audit trail.
Is there a rubber stamp at the end for everybody, every year?
No, cause it's, it would be quite akin to doing your financial accounting.
So you do it in the right way, so it is then approved, it's done through
an approved process and there would, I don't know, we would have to look
at what the future would hold, but you would then probably have things like
spot checks to make sure people have done it right, of different sectors
at different times, it's probably the route you would go down in the future.
That we haven't got to, what we've done is we've outlined what the
carbon regulator would do and how it could come into existence versus
other regulators that already exist.
Dallas Campbell: And so where are you with this at the moment?
What kind of timeframe are we in?
How's it coming along?
Is it ready to rock?
Russ Hall: So the proposal is there, the reports are written.
they are there to be adopted and we are talking with both Defra and the
department for Energy Security Net Zero about how they could be adopted.
But ultimately, the decision isn't ours, the decision is theirs.
Dallas Campbell: Right.
Amy, are you involved in this as well?
Do you get, are you...
Amy Peace: Well, just the oversight thing, but I think the interesting case here is
just how it would work when you kind of consider the UK is not in isolation in
space and prior to joining Innovate, I was working on a lot of EU programs and sort
of knowing what's going on there of the biggest sort of international, Markets on
things like, carbon border tax adjustment.
So as it's, you know, working out if something were to enter the country,
you're not being undermined if you're going to extra efforts to do low
carbon manufacturing here and then somebody just uses coal power and make
something really cheaply elsewhere.
You, kind of, essentially importing carbon into your country.
So how would you use a regulator as part of that, has to be something
that works internationally and not just be for the UK.
So it's been quite interesting just sort of checking that sort of engagement's
happening and it's been good to see kind of, there's a whole extra report on how
into that sort of international space.
Russ Hall: If we were to put a carbon regulator in place, the
UK would be the first to do it.
Dallas Campbell: Has no, there's no other countries.
I'm amazed that no other countries kind of have it or have done.
There must, be other countries who are doing similar things.
Russ Hall: We can't be alone in thinking about this, that's for sure.
The EU has done an awful lot of work towards streamlining emissions,
reporting this as the US, but the idea of an independent body looking at
this, as far as we can tell from, as far as the guys at energy systems can
tell, It just hasn't been done yet.
It doesn't mean it's not going to be.
Amy Peace: There is emissions trading schemes.
So those are the ones where there is a lot of sort of regulation on that.
So I think it's the Environment Agency deals with that within the UK and then
there's sort of EU platforms for that.
So that's where big industry does have to report its carbon emissions and
that is a level of sort of verifying that on an annual basis, just to check
that what they're emitting actually matches up to the truth, because that's
where you can say, well, if I decide to sort of turn off a plant or turn down
operations, I can actually trade that sort of carbon benefit with someone else.
So that's kind of where it is happening, but that's that where we go back to
those kind of scope one emissions, that stuff that's happening on your
sites, that element has got that.
What we're talking about is more that scope three, the supply
chain, the stuff that's coming in.
Dallas Campbell: And presumably there is a big role for space data as well
in the carbon regulator as a thing.
Amy Peace: Well, potentially, and again, I don't necessarily see this as being kind
of every company would need to engage with satellite data and every sort of little
bit of data you're coming through and go, well, let's check that with Sat Apps.
I think it's interesting to see what granularity you
can actually get on a site.
So is it just basically saying roughly, Oh, well, they said that plant was
operating and it wasn't, and you know, those sorts of sort of binary answers,
or like, oh, we thought that pipeline was switched off and, but there's a
big methane plume there and in that sort of situation, it might be more
for just doing those sort of high level assessments of, have we missed
something, or is there a big hotspot we're not aware of, or is this particular
actor, you know, doing what they said they're going to do because enough
people have raised concern about them.
Russ Hall: What it is, I think at a high level, it gives you a way of looking at
for the bulk material flows around the world where people are making claims
that their emissions at a regional or national level are being decreased here
as a way of potentially checking that.
I'm not saying that is politically easy, it politically could lead to,
of course, a lot of difficulty, I imagine, but here is a way of doing it.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
Give us just a sort of round off.
I'm interested in, well, you know, in the work that you're doing
and how important space as an industry now is for what you do.
Like, could you do what you do without satellite data anymore?
I'm just trying to get a sense of kind of how important it is in all of this.
Amy Peace: It's difficult to say really because, you know, the day to day
individual companies can essentially do carbon accounting for their factory
boundaries without having to worry about having a satellite looking at their
plant and verifying what they're doing.
But it's that challenge of getting to net zero where this becomes interesting,
because if you're just asking each individual company what they do and
what they're aware of and what they can see, you'll get a piece of the picture.
But it's that way of saying, when you look top down, you're always going
to miss some bits of stuff that's not reported or incorrectly reported
and because net zero is that absolute kind of, we've got to get to zero and
beyond to take other emissions away.
We can't just say that 20, 30, 40, however many percent of the emissions, we're just
going to assume someone has taken care of and we're not going to worry about.
We need to look well everywhere and check.
So yeah, it's interesting how we miss some really big things.
Russ Hall: The verification part, I completely agree.
I think in the future it's going to become more and more important.
We're going to have to look and see what's really happening as opposed
to trusting what's being said.
Dallas Campbell: Yeah, that seems to be the message I, as people who work in
the sector, I sensed at the beginning when we started, you're optimistic.
Is that fair?
Amy's pulling a face.
Amy Peace: Yeah.
Dallas Campbell: Is there more that we could be doing?
Is there more...
Amy Peace: I really want to be optimistic.
I mean, it's one of those ones where, you know, when you look at the kind of
the rates of some uptakes of technologies and ideas, you know, and you see those
curves for like, say, solar panel technology and every year they get the
estimates wrong of how much more solar we could possibly do and it just keeps
going up at that ridiculous exponential curve and everyone keeps saying
it's going to flatten off this year.
No, maybe this year it'll flatten off.
Dallas Campbell: It never seems to flatten off.
It may get less steep, but we're still going in the wrong direction.
Amy Peace: Yeah, yeah.
So, I think there are some technologies and some ideas that just get such momentum
that it just becomes the normal thing to do and it actually just, and once it
kind of makes financial sense to do it, either because you have to, to operate.
Dallas Campbell: We have to make it work with the way humans work,
otherwise it won't work and humans work by, with money and stuff.
Russ Hall: And when you, if you come back to, you know, what I said
earlier about meeting people where they are, if we go to a, as, HVMC or
WMG, if we go to a business and say, we can help make you more sustainable.
Typically that won't open the door, but if we go to a business and
say, we can help you save money, that usually will open the door.
Now, what is nice is that typically the two go hand in hand.
So if we're saving a business money, we're speeding up its productivity.
We're saving energy.
then we're reducing its emissions.
So the two things are the same, the message is there and that's what I mean
about sustainability being a lever for UK manufacturing to make it more than it is.
That's the thing that unlocks it, regardless of what the industry is.
Sustainability is actually the key to making a better manufacturing
sector in every sense, it has to be.
Dallas Campbell: I'm quite optimistic because you two are involved and
I think you're both brilliant.
I think, I think both of you speak so, so, so eloquently you're so
clued into actually what's going on.
I think it's good.
Russ Hall: You can't work in sustainability every day, like Amy
and I do, if you're not optimistic and you don't have hope because
otherwise you just go in such a dark place, you'd never leave it, you know?
Amy Peace: You have to be.
Russ Hall: Yeah and I don't know about Amy, but I'm going to, I'm
not gonna speak on your behalf, but hopefully you'll agree.
I, believe in human beings that we will ultimately do the right thing.
So we will get there, we will get there.
But we have to, just, as you've just said, we have to make it work for them.
Amy Peace: Yeah, and I think it's interesting, some of the sort of
periphery organisations to business, things like insurance and risk, they're
the ones which actually seem to be ahead of the game on this because, you
know, it's the bread and butter risk and climate, carbon, it's all part of that.
So whether you see climate has been a risk because of adaptation, you might
have some sort of sea level based plants that are getting flooded a lot more
or similar, or whether you're actually saying, well, we're going to be regulated
out of operation because carbon is going to have a price to it in a lot more
sort of places or crossing borders.
You then realise that if you don't take this seriously, then that
is a major risk to your business.
So I think that element of doing business, insurance, is probably the
one that's going to be, for those who aren't proactively doing this,
the enthusiasts, it's probably going to be the biggest stick to actually
make the others take note and that's my optimism, that insurers will...
Russ Hall: I, I had a, did a really interesting talk to NatWest senior
leadership team, in February and the message that I took was, sustainability
is great for business because if we are helping businesses to be more
productive in a more sustainable way, odds are they'll have more
operating money floating around.
They've got more operating money floating around, that means that you
can give them bigger loans and all of a sudden everything clicks and you
start to see how it all comes together and the insurers, the banks, as Amy's
just said, they are ahead of this, they know where it is because they
see the risks and they're worried.
So let's just provide the answers.
Let's provide the ways of measuring what we've done, sharing the
solutions that will all come together.
Dallas Campbell: And then the ball will start rolling and we'll all be fine.
Maybe.
Thank you so much, Amy and Russ.
It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
Thank you.
Amy Peace: Thanks, Dallas!
Russ Hall: Thank you.
Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes of In-Orbit, don't forget to be sure to
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And to find out more about how space is empowering industries in between episodes,
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