BERUs are certified from measured utility data, one building at a time, with a financial additionality score attached. You can see which building reduced its emissions, by how much, and how far your money moved the project.
Almost every credibility problem in the voluntary carbon market comes down to the same thing: the claim is made at a level of resolution where nobody can check it. A project boundary drawn around ten thousand buildings. A counterfactual nobody can test. A reduction estimated from a model rather than observed in the world.
Ontoly was built the other way around. We certify at the individual building. The emissions reduction is calculated from that building's own metered consumption before and after the retrofit, using ASHRAE Guideline 14 Option C and IPMVP methods, and issuance happens only on real post-retrofit data. There is a physical piece of equipment, in a specific building, that used to burn fossil fuel and now doesn't. That is the whole asset — not a bandaid, and not a promise.
An Ontoly Portal account is free. Once you are in, you can browse listed projects — including projects that are listed but not yet validated — and see supply forming before it exists. Most buyers start here, watching the pipeline in the sectors and regions they care about.
For a project that has not been verified yet, you can reserve future credits by uploading a pre-purchase contract through the portal, or by requesting more information from the supplier first. You elect the quantity you want to reserve, up to a ceiling set by the project's projected or previously verified annual volume multiplied by the number of years reserved. Reserved credits are delivered in annual tranches as each monitoring year is verified and issued. Pre-purchase is where your capital does the most work. It arrives while the project is still deciding whether to proceed, which is the moment that determines whether it proceeds at all. The pre-purchase certification fee is set at 50% of the delivery rate and charged once at reservation, with nothing further owed on delivery. If the project does not go ahead, that fee is refunded.
For projects that have already been monitored and received a positive verification statement, you can purchase directly through the portal. These are issued credits: the measurement is complete, the verification statement exists, and the units are serialized in your name. You are buying a delivered tonne, not a forecast of one.
Ontoly charges a flat certification fee of $10 per tonne on delivered credits. The remainder of the price moves to the building owner. Prices are published and identical for every buyer — no volume haggling, no back-channel rate. We charge buyers rather than suppliers on purpose, so that the party paying us is never the party whose project we are certifying.
