What are Scope 1 emissions?
Scope 1 emissions are the direct emissions from greenhouse gas sources that a company owns or controls. If the fuel is burned on your site, in your equipment or in your vehicles, the emissions are yours. If the chemistry of your production process releases CO₂, that is yours too.
The three kinds of Scope 1 emissions
Stationary combustion. Fuel burned in fixed equipment — boilers, furnaces, kilns, ovens, generators. For most manufacturers this is diesel, natural gas, LPG, heavy fuel oil, coal or biomass. It is measured from fuel purchase records and stock movements, not estimated from output.
Mobile combustion. Fuel burned in vehicles the company owns or leases — delivery trucks, forklifts, company cars, site machinery. Fuel cards and tank records are the usual source.
Process emissions. CO₂ released by the production chemistry itself, independently of any fuel. Calcining limestone to make clinker or lime releases CO₂ from the mineral. Reducing iron ore with coke releases CO₂ from the carbon in the coke. Primary aluminium smelting releases perfluorocarbons from the anode effect. These emissions do not appear in any fuel bill, and a company that only counts fuel will understate its footprint badly.
Fugitive emissions — refrigerant leaks from chillers and air-conditioning, methane escaping from equipment — are also Scope 1, and are usually small but not always negligible.
How Scope 1 emissions are calculated
Activity data multiplied by an emission factor. Litres of diesel × the factor for diesel. Cubic metres of gas × the factor for that gas. Tonnes of clinker × the calcination factor for your production route.
The activity data has to come from a record someone else could check: an invoice, a meter reading, a production log. A figure typed in from memory is not evidence, and a verifier will treat it as an estimate no matter how accurate it happens to be.
Why Scope 1 emissions matter for CBAM
For the CBAM sectors — cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, hydrogen — direct emissions are usually the largest part of the embedded emissions your EU importer has to declare. They are also the part where installation-level data makes the biggest difference against the Commission's default values, because defaults are set deliberately high.
Two plants making the same product by different routes carry genuinely different numbers. An electric arc furnace and a blast furnace are not comparable, and the declaration has to say which one produced the goods.
What comes next
Scope 1 rarely arrives on its own. The same request usually asks for Scope 2 emissions from purchased energy, and often a subset of Scope 3 emissions. The three together are explained in Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions explained.