Scope 1, 2 and 3 Emissions: A Guide for Procurement Teams

Why does the emissions number land on procurement, not only facilities?

Because a corporate footprint is often dominated by what the company buys rather than by fuel burned on site, and procurement signs the contracts that decide it. The GHG Protocol Corporate Standard sorts emissions by who controls the emitting source, so every purchase order for fuel, power, equipment or services lands in one of three scopes before facilities ever touches it. Facilities can tune a chiller; procurement chooses the supplier, the fuel, the equipment specification, and whether the contract obliges the supplier to hand over data. If your PO and RFQ templates never ask for quantities and emissions data, rebuilding the number later becomes far harder and more expensive.

What do scope 1, 2 and 3 actually mean?

They are the GHG Protocol's three categories of emissions, split by control and by source. Scope 1 is direct emissions from sources you own or control: diesel generators, gas boilers, your own fleet, refrigerant leaking from your HVAC. Scope 2 is indirect emissions from generating the energy you purchase: grid electricity, and also purchased steam, heat or district cooling. Scope 3 is every other indirect emission in your value chain, organised into 15 categories by the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard; category 1 is purchased goods and services, category 2 is capital goods. All three are measured in CO₂e, covering the greenhouse gases the Protocol requires in an inventory — and scope 1 and scope 2 are reported separately, not added together into a single combined figure.

National programmes such as the Saudi Green Initiative have raised the profile of this data across the Gulf, but treat any specific reporting obligation as something to confirm against the official published source that applies to your entity, not something to assume.

Which of our energy purchases sits in which scope?

Here is the mapping for the purchases a Gulf corporate procurement team handles most often.

Leased assets are the one row that needs a decision rather than a lookup. Under the GHG Protocol, a leased vehicle, generator or building can sit in your scope 1 and 2, or in scope 3 — category 8, upstream leased assets, when you are the lessee, and category 13 when you are the lessor. Two things decide which: the consolidation approach your group reports under (equity share, financial control or operational control), and how the lease itself is treated, because a finance or capital lease and an operating lease do not land in the same place. What to do with that: before classifying any leased asset, ask finance which consolidation approach the group uses and how each lease is booked, write the answer down once, and apply it to every lease in the register so the treatment stays consistent year to year.

On-site solar that you consume yourself produces no combustion emissions, so it lowers purchased kWh and therefore scope 2; manufacturing the panels sits in scope 3 capital goods.

What data should we start capturing on every purchase now?

Quantity, site, period, and whatever the supplier can tell you about the product, captured at the moment of the transaction, because reconstructing it a year later costs far more.

How does supplier selection change the footprint?

Often more than an efficiency project does, because a purchase decision locks in emissions for the life of the asset or the term of the contract. Three levers matter to a buyer. First, equipment specification: a more efficient chiller, generator or pump changes scope 1 and scope 2 every month it runs. Second, supplier data quality: the moment a supplier replaces industry-average factors with its own product data, your category 1 number becomes defensible. Record that as a data improvement, not a reduction, and recalculate your base year if the change is significant. Third, logistics: fewer and fuller deliveries, and closer suppliers, cut upstream transport. Put all three into the RFQ as scored criteria, not as a preference in the cover note.

Location-based or market-based: which scope 2 number do we report?

Both. The GHG Protocol Scope 2 Guidance requires dual reporting: a location-based figure using the average emissions intensity of the grid where your consumption physically happens, and a market-based figure reflecting the contractual instruments you hold, such as a supplier-specific rate, certificates, or a power purchase agreement. In practice you keep one clean kWh-per-site table, apply two factor sets to it, and file the contract evidence with the number. Where your market offers few contractual instruments, follow the hierarchy of contractual instruments set out in the GHG Protocol Scope 2 Guidance rather than assuming the two figures are identical.

What should we do before buying any carbon software?

Get the boundary, the site list and twelve months of quantities into a spreadsheet first, because software cannot fix an undefined boundary. In order: choose your consolidation approach (equity share, financial control or operational control) per the Corporate Standard; freeze the list of sites and legal entities inside the boundary, together with the treatment of every leased asset; pick a base year; collect twelve months of litres and kWh by site; apply published emission factors and record which set and version you used; add the data questions to your RFQ template. Only then evaluate tools, because by that point you know exactly what needs automating.

How ENTEK helps

ENTEK.AI is where this data becomes routine instead of a year-end scramble. Enterprises use the platform to request quotations from verified energy suppliers and to manage orders across every branch in one place, so the quantity, the site and the supplier behind each purchase are recorded as the purchase happens, which is exactly the ledger a scope 1, 2 and 3 inventory needs. When you next ask suppliers for product-level emissions data, you are asking inside a process you already control rather than chasing paperwork after the fact.