Road transport decarbonisation: the shipper's role

Understanding the problem: carbon requirements in transport tenders

Transport tenders now go well beyond the price per kilometre that used to decide contracts. Procurement and supply chain teams increasingly ask carriers to cut emissions, adopt alternative fuels, and supply accurate carbon data for every haul.

This shift reflects pressure moving up the value chain: shippers themselves must account for the carbon footprint of their operations, including emissions generated by their transport subcontractors. Transport spend has become a direct lever for environmental performance to report on.

On paper, the logic holds: use the purchasing power of large accounts to speed up the sector's energy transition. In practice, these requirements are often set out without clarifying — or enabling — how carriers are supposed to meet them.

What does this mean in practice for carriers?

For a carrier, meeting these new requirements creates very concrete difficulties. Sustainable fuels such as HVO or B100 are generally more expensive than conventional diesel, which weighs directly on margins that are already thin in the sector.

On top of that comes an access problem: finding reliable suppliers able to deliver regular, properly documented volumes takes time and expertise that few carriers can afford to build in-house. Availability varies significantly by region and season, which makes long-term planning difficult.

Finally, many carriers lack visibility into which solutions are actually viable for their fleet: which fuel suits which vehicles, which supplier offers reliable traceability, and what level of emissions reduction is realistically achievable. Without that clarity, meeting a shipper's demand stays difficult, no matter how willing the carrier is.

What can be done to ease the transition?

Road transport decarbonisation cannot rest on carriers alone. Asking for lower emissions without providing access to the means of achieving them simply shifts the constraint without solving it.

Shippers hold a real lever here: they can help carriers access energy solutions rather than simply setting targets. This can mean, for example, connecting carriers with identified, reliable alternative fuel suppliers, or helping them choose the solutions best suited to their fleet.

It also means embedding these criteria directly into transport procurement, upstream of tenders, rather than tacking them on afterwards as an isolated contractual requirement. A shipper that builds its procurement policy around concrete energy partnerships creates the conditions for a realistic transition across its entire carrier panel.

How can Heeding support this approach?

Structured support for carriers

Heeding works with shippers to give concrete support to their transport providers on the energy transition, through dedicated partnerships. In practice, this lets a carrier access solutions such as HVO or B100, with the traceability documents needed, without having to run that search alone.

A diagnostic to target the right solutions

Heeding also offers a Flash Diagnostic, which analyses a fleet and its usage patterns to identify the most relevant transition solutions. This tool helps answer a central question: which fuel, for which vehicles, with what realistic level of emissions reduction.

By embedding a Heeding partnership into their transport procurement policy, shippers turn a contractual requirement into an operational solution shared with their carriers.

Conclusion

Asking carriers to decarbonise their operations is legitimate, but insufficient if that demand isn't matched with the means to act on it. Shippers have a real role to play as accelerators, by easing access to alternative fuels and building these criteria directly into transport procurement.