Our responsibilities in the fight against climate change

“Climate change is a reality. It is mainly caused by the rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. This can be attributed to human activity, specifically to the use of fossil fuels. Énergir fully recognizes this threat,”, says Sophie Brochu in the preamble to the sustainability report published earlier this year.

If energy sector companies are part of the problem, they also need to be part of the solution. We are offering solutions for consuming better and consuming less. Encouraging energy efficiency, decreasing our dependence on petroleum products, promoting renewable natural gas and developing renewable energies are all solutions that help reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

It is important to note that using natural gas instead of diesel, oil and coal, reduces GHG emissions by about 25%, 32% and 42% respectively. That’s why a greater use of natural gas instead of petroleum products over the next few years would be a sensible step in our transition to the decarbonization of the economy.

Énergir plays a major role in reaching Québec’s ambitious GHG objective to combat climate change. We estimate that by maximizing our efforts we can help reduce Québec’s GHG by 2.8 million tonnes by 2030. . This forecast represents a significant contribution to the total GHG reduction needed to achieve the government’s target for 2030.

Measuring our emissions to better reduce them

As for emissions generated by our activities, the evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions at Énergir is overseen by an Environmental Management System (EMS) procedure that establishes an annual emissions inventory, to meet legal requirements.

As such, total emissions for the 2014 calendar year represented 48,848 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, which means that total emissions were reduced by 30.2% compared with the 1990 levels, which exceeded 70,000 tonnes. This is a significant achievement which even exceeds the 20% objective initially targeted by our Environmental Policy.

The emissions recorded come from various sources, such as emissions attributable to combustion at gas network delivery stations and the LSR plant, purges and torches, fugitive leaks, damage by third parties, combustion related to vehicle fleets and buildings, as well as electricity consumption.

Emission reduction projects

After several years of implementing GHG emission reduction projects, we have come to the realization that each additional project is more complex to put into operation. An internal multi-disciplinary team was created in 2015 to develop an approach that will allow us to set objectives that take this context into account and define new reduction projects in the short, medium and long term.

Brainstorming meetings were organized to document ideas for projects that would enable Énergir to reduce emissions from now till the 2030 deadline.

The second step consists of exploring the feasibility of ideas to assess the impacts, including costs, avoided GHG emissions and the new procedures that would result from their implementation.

For more details on GHG emissions related to our operations, please consult our 2015 Sustainability Report, available online on our website.