News
Annual evaluation of CO2 footprint 2019
Everyone knows by now that climate change is the biggest environmental challenge facing the world today. In 2019, Herbosch-Kiere produced a total of 6,495 tons of CO2 emissions.
In the meantime, we have spent the past 8 years trying to reduce our CO2 emissions and we plan to keep on doing that for years to come. When calculating our footprint, we took account of scope 1 (88.1%) from the CO2 performance ladder, direct emissions due to own fuel consumption and scope 2 (11.9%), indirect emissions due to electricity consumption.
2017 was taken as a reference year for the 2019 calculations. The necessary efforts are being made to constantly reduce our CO2 emissions by 0.5% in the next few years.
Our emissions vary greatly from year to year due to our vessels Atlantis and Albatros. Along with the use of heating oil at our shipyards, the vessels remain the two largest sources of the emissions we produce. The Atlantis accounts for a large proportion of the consumption during 2019 as it was used for projects in the Eastern Scheldt and then in La Réunion.
The fuel consumption at the yards is in line with previous years. We need electricity at our yards which means that generators are often used.
We have already carried out various actions in order to reduce our CO2 emissions. For instance, our HUB in Ghent was put into operation, an old drilling machine from our Foundations department was replaced with a new one, CNG-powered vans were purchased, a wind turbine was installed on the Beaver, etc.
In addition, at the end of 2019 the old oil-fired system in the warehouse was replaced with a gas-fired installation. Herbosch-Kiere has set the objective for 2020 of only purchasing green electricity (produced in Belgium).
We will also continue to look for changes that can make a difference. The reduction of CO2 emissions is an ongoing process!