Xpansiv, the leading market infrastructure provider for the global energy transition, on June 6 announced the launch of the Transport Emission Reduction Certificate (TERC), a voluntary renewable fuel certificate representing the greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction from the use of renewable biofuels. The TERC brings transparency and a standardized reporting process to the production of liquid biofuels and leverages Xpansiv’s registry infrastructure to deploy innovative, third-party solutions.

Developed in conjunction with Eco-Energy LLC, the TERC is a tradable digital certificate representing the full life cycle GHG emissions of biofuel production and usage. Qualified producers of low carbon fuels will be issued TERCs.

Consumers of carbon-intensive fuels can acquire TERCs for voluntary GHG offsetting purposes and Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions mitigation. Widespread adoption of TERCs is expected to drive down the overall carbon intensity of fuels across the U.S.

“TERCs bring together fuel producers who are motivated to lower the GHG emissions of their product with companies that have a significant GHG footprint in transportation,” says Brian Simpson, the Chief Marketing Officer of Eco-Energy.   “An investment in TERCs is an investment into emission reduction of the fuels that power their fleets every day, and validate their commitment to sustainability across their supply chain.”

TERCs are built on the Digital Fuels Program that Xpansiv developed to support the creation, issuance, registration, management, trading, and retirement of digital certificates that include the environmental attributes of fuels. The program includes a network of energy producers, data refineries, monitoring networks, lifecycle assessments, standards and certification organizations, and downstream market participants—all operating under a governance framework that specifies data quality and management protocols, as well as full lifecycle requirements for these new digital assets.

“The next step on the path to a low-carbon future is through voluntary action within the fuels sector, beginning with reducing GHG intensity,” said Joe Varnas, president, Registry and Energy Solutions, Xpansiv. “The TERC program is designed to accelerate this trend by providing a robust governance framework and registry platform that enables producers, and independent certifiers to create transactable certificates that capture the environmental impact of qualifying fuel shipments purchased by wholesale consumers. This holds the potential to lower emissions across the entire fuels sector.”

The transportation sector accounts for the largest percentage of GHG emissions in the United States and faces particularly challenging and capital-intensive hurdles to abatement. A combination of policy, technological, and behavioral changes will be necessary to shift the sector toward low-carbon alternatives. The TERC program is uniquely positioned to bring rapid decarbonization to a fuel that makes up about 10 percent of blended gasoline used in the U.S. today.

Additionally, the TERC program will benefit the economies of rural communities where feedstocks grow, and biofuel is produced.

“There’s a desire in the ethanol industry to invest in carbon reducing technologies in the production process, but they are expensive to implement,” says Timothy Winters, CEO of Western New York Energy, whose production facility in Medina, New York, will be one of the first to participate in the creation of TERCs for the program. “The TERC program will make the financial cost of implementing carbon reducing strategies more feasible for ethanol producers.”