August or November target for California-Quebec joint auctions – regulators

Silvia Molteni

28-Mar-2014

California and Quebec are aiming to start joint auctions of emissions allowances in August or November, officials from both schemes said on Thursday, with preparatory work on the platform still ongoing.

The US state and the Canadian province formally linked their carbon markets in January. As part of the agreement, the two programmes accept each other’s compliance instruments and share the transaction registry.

The last step to complete the linkage will be holding joint quarterly auctions of allowances, rather than separately as happens now.

The next auctions in May will remain separate, said Michael Gibbs, assistant executive officer at California regulator Air Resources Board (ARB), on the sidelines of the Navigating the American Carbon World conference in San Francisco. “After May comes August and after August comes November. We are working within that time-frame,” he said.

The target is to start joint sales by the end of the year, Jean-Yves Benoit, director of the carbon market division at the Quebec ministry of Environment, told ICIS, but he would not comment on whether August or November is the most likely start.

“We are working on the systems,” said Gibbs. “We have an existing auction platform that we use, Quebec uses the exact same one, and we are just updating that to handle auctions in two currencies.”

He continued: “There’s a lot of detail, and you don’t want to make a mistake. Given what’s at stake here we have to be 100% absolutely certain that we have it right,” he added.

What remains open is finalising the platform, procedures, and testing the platform with stakeholders, Benoit said, but he would not comment whether testing had already started. Silvia Molteni

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