Jim Gudjonson, manager, Sustainability Innovation at BCLC, believes that being a climate leader starts with prioritizing work inside of your organization first – including the ways in which office space is heated and lit.
“Since August 2023, we’ve been purchasing renewable natural gas to heat our Kamloops office,” said Gudjonson. “And the Facilities team is continuing work on installing LED lighting across all common areas.”
Driving this work is BCLC’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework, which teams across BCLC are working to embed across the organization’s operations.
One part of this framework is to reduce its Scope 1 and 2 green house gas (GHG) emissions – which are tied to the energy that an organization uses to heat and cool and operate its buildings. Scope 1 emissions are associated with the sources that are controlled or owned by an organization (e.g. natural gas), and Scope 2 emissions are associated with the energy sources purchased by an organization (e.g. electricity).
“We’re striving to reach 50 percent reduction in absolute Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 2026 and 100 percent by 2030, compared to a 2019 baseline year,” said Gudjonson. “BCLC recently began purchasing renewable natural gas for its Kamloops headquarters, supporting BCLC’s overall goal to significantly reduce emission.”
Already Jim and the teams across BCLC have seen impacts of this switch.
“Since transitioning to using renewable natural gas for our natural gas boilers, our Scope 1 emissions have decreased by 32 percent* in 2023 compared to our 2019 base year**. We’re also continuing progress on initiatives for reducing out Scope 2 emissions – which includes planning on a low carbon Electrification (LCE) solution for heating and cooling the renovated Kamloops facility and the ongoing transition to LED lighting.”
In 2024, BCLC reduced its natural gas usage by 11 percent compared to 2023. This decrease in consumption and the continued purchase of renewable natural gas for the Kamloops office, resulted in an 86 percent reduction in direct GHG emissions from fuel combustion compared to 2023 ***.
A key component of this work is education – making sure leaders and employees understand what goes into achieving these goals.
“It’s important to know what ‘renewable’ natural gas is, and the different ways it’s produced compared to conventional natural gas,” said Jim. “Renewable is derived from ‘biogas’, which is generated through the decomposition of organic waste from landfills, agricultural byproducts, and wastewater treatment facilities. It is important because biogas, which is methane and up to 36 times more potent than greenhouse gas compared to carbon dioxide, is captured and turned into clean energy. The biogas is captured and then purified to produce renewable natural gas.”
While acquiring renewable natural gas is one part of implementing the ESG framework, BCLC has also made progress in other areas, including an 11 percent reduction in fleet related emissions in 2024 compared to 2023, despite the fleet vehicles travelling 12 percent more kilometers****.
“While we’re proud of the progress we’ve made for BCLC, we still need to keep the momentum going to reach Net Zero by 2030 (scope 1,2). There are other ways that we can make our operations more sustainable and we’re ready to continue doing the work to get there.”
*32% of reduction by comparing 2023 and 2019. Prism only validated BCLC’s 2023 Scope 1 emissions, i.e., 559 tCO2e. 2019 base year’s emissions (823.8 tCO2e) was not part of Prism’s scope of work. According to B.C. Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions’ 2024 B.C. Best Practices Methodology for Quantifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions, public sector organizations (PSOs) may exclude the CO2 portion of biogenic emissions from their total emissions for the purpose of tracking progress towards their emission reduction targets. As such, all GHG emissions reduction percentages presented in this article exclude the CO2 portion of biogenic emissions
** For GHG emissions performance data, the reporting period is in calendar year.
*** Please refer to BCLC Climate Change Report.
**** Please refer to BCLC Climate Change Report.
