“What's behind the rating”: Why Shell trusts Calyx Global for detailed analysis

Shell is one of the largest retirees in the voluntary carbon market. We spoke with Christina Elvers, Shell’s Strategy Manager for Environmental Products Trading, about how Shell uses Calyx Global’s ratings when making purchase decisions.

“Trusted Advisors”

As a large scale buyer, Shell has an internal due diligence team that evaluates potential carbon credit purchases. When they need additional analysis—whether on emerging topics like super pollutants or trends in the market—they often look to Calyx as “trusted advisors” for a steer.  

“Calyx has deep subject matter experts at hand who do their analyses and think about complex issues deeply,” Christina said.

Going “behind the rating”

A carbon credit rating is much more than just a letter grade—it is a comprehensive assessment  of risk across key dimensions including additionality, over-crediting, permanence, and overlapping claims. Shell uses Calyx’s analysis of where a project is likely to succeed or fall short of its GHG integrity claims as part of its own due diligence process. This saves the team hours of work, for example, by allowing them to quickly move past credits that are unlikely to be additional, and focus on specific attributes of a potential purchase that warrant their deeper investigation. 

“When evaluating carbon credit purchases, we use Calyx for, of course, the rating. But what is more valuable to us is what’s behind the rating – where there are potential risks, or where a project has done a really good job? That means we can triangulate our due diligence in a way that we couldn’t do without their detailed background information”

A better market through independence

Christina identified the importance of ratings as a third-party source of information about the market. 

“I'm hoping that ratings agencies will remain an important pillar of this conversation, contributing to supply-side confidence and demand-side interest.”