Emission Factors
An emission factor converts an activity (burning fuel, consuming electricity) into a greenhouse gas quantity. AtlasCore provides Australian emission factors from authoritative government sources via a structured API.
What is an emission factor?
An emission factor is a coefficient that relates an activity to its greenhouse gas emissions. For example:
Consuming 1 kWh of electricity from the NSW grid produces 0.69 kg CO2-e
The "CO2-e" (carbon dioxide equivalent) accounts for the global warming potential of all greenhouse gases — CO2, methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) — expressed as a single number.
Australian sources
AtlasCore's emission factors come from the National Greenhouse Accounts (NGA) Factors Workbook, published annually by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW).
| Property | Detail |
|---|---|
| Publisher | DCCEEW |
| Format | Multi-sheet Excel workbook |
| Cadence | Annual (July) |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
| GWP methodology | AR5 (native) |
The NGA workbook is the authoritative source for emission factors under Australia's National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) scheme and AASB S2.
Scope coverage
| Scope | What AtlasCore covers |
|---|---|
| Scope 1 | Stationary energy, transport, and other direct emission factors by category and fuel type |
| Scope 2 | Electricity factors by NEM grid region (NSW1, VIC1, QLD1, SA1, TAS1, SWIS, DKIS, NWIS) |
| Scope 3 | Reference-only factors for electricity, transport fuels, waste, and stationary energy |
Scope 3 factors are provided as reference data for working papers. AtlasCore does not calculate company-level Scope 3 totals or claim full NGA workbook Scope 3 coverage.
GWP basis
Factors are stored in their native NGA basis (AR5 GWP values). You can request AR6-transformed values at read time:
curl "https://api.atlascore.com.au/v1/emission-factors/scope2?grid=NSW1&gwp_basis=AR6"
AR6 transforms are computed at request time from stored constituent gases. The API fails closed when methane classification or constituent gas data is insufficient for a safe recalculation.
How AtlasCore normalises factors
- Ingest — the NGA workbook is parsed sheet by sheet, handling merged cells and multi-level headers
- Normalise — raw rows are mapped to canonical categories, scopes, grids, and units
- Version — each edition becomes a factor set (e.g.
au_nga_2024) with amendment tracking - Serve — API responses include structured provenance: source table, sheet, row number, and data quality grade
Every factor response includes an evidence_hash for audit verification.