Book & Claim, Mass Balancing, and Direct Fueling don’t represent a strict hierarchical relationship. Instead, they are better understood as complementary building blocks or attribution systems – each with its own trade-offs and applications. Learn more about the differences.
In our understanding, the sustainable fuel attribution methods Book & Claim, Mass Balancing, and Direct Fueling are not strictly MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive). These attribution methods are used to manage and verify the application of sustainable fuels or energy carriers. An overview of our differentiation:
Book & Claim
• What it is: sustainability attributes (defining a green-house gas (GHG) reduction) are decoupled from physical activity. A company buys a certificate (“claim”) that supports sustainable interventions elsewhere. This can be equivalent to mass-balancing and requires a clear and dedicated proof for additionality of the interventions, once it is applied to setups, where the beneficiary is not anymore directly linked to the supply chain where the intervention takes place.
• Nature: no physical link needs to exist. It’s a certificate-based system, used for scaling the market due to its high flexibility. It is currently debated whether a proof for additionality is sufficient or whether a direct link of the sustainable intervention to the supply chain of the beneficiary is required to create enough differentiation to an offsetting mechanism.
• Use case: additionality-passing sustainable fuel amounts that get into the transport system without being part of anyone’s obligations, or mandatory quotas are very rare to find in road transportation due to its fragmented distribution system. These types of interventions are mainly seen in air and sea freight, where a proof-of-sustainability transmission tied to the documented additionality is easier to obtain. (....)