SMART Plus Tool - Legacy Notes
Questions? Contact Andrew Meluch at meluch.andrew@epa.gov

**NOTE: If prompted to unlock/unprotect a template, use the password Beijing2017

Background:
The SMART Plus Tool was developed by U.S. EPA in support of the Global Methane Initiative (GMI) and with funding from the U.S. Department of State's Transparency Accelerator Program. It is based on an oil and gas sector GHG inventory tool developed in 2017 by Kong Chiu at EPA in collaboration with a GMI technical assistance project in China. The tool was later updated beginning in 2022 with technical input and direction from Sarah Menassian, Denise Mulholland, and Andrew Meluch. GMI collaborated with Indonesia (the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources [MEMR] as well as state-owned company Pertamina) to pilot the tool in early 2023, providing technical feedback. MEMR later provided generic national-level O&G sector activity data to test an updated version of the tool but this project stalled in late 2023. SMART Plus was peer reviewed by an external panel of experts in early 2024 and again in December 2024 following a round of additional technical updates. In January 2025, SMART Plus was released to the public on GMI's website. This release included all three components of the tool: Version 1.0 of the "Facility" template as well as its accompanying technical documentation and user manual, and beta versions of the "IPCC" template and the "Facility-DB" database application. The team decided to label the "IPCC" template and the database application as beta because these tool components were not included in the second peer review.

The intended audience for the tool is national O&G GHG inventory compilers in developing countries who submit GHG inventories via the IPCC Software and the UNFCCC Common Reporting Tables (CRT). The SMART Plus Tool is compatible with the Software and CRT.

A note about the term "Technical Documentation." The team originally decided to create a separate document describing the technical development of the "Facility" template complete with appendices of equations. This documentation would be separate from a typical user manual. After developing both documents separately for the purposes of peer review, the team considered combining them but did not proceed with this update.

For additional context, please visit https://globalmethane.org/smartplus/.

EPA, under the auspices of GMI, envisioned several updates to the SMART Plus Tool components, including the following:
- Developing similar technical documentation for the "IPCC" template, including equations for calculating emissions
- Developing a user manual for the "IPCC" template in MS Word (currently the only user guidance exists within a worksheet of the template itself)
- Combining user manuals and technical documentation for all three tool components into one comprehensive document
- Creating an identical "IPCC" template using default emission factors from the 2006 IPCC Guidelines (the current "IPCC" template incorporates default emission factors from the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 Guidelines)
- Drafting supplementary documentation about the background and context of the Paris Agreement, IPCC Guidelines, and UNFCCC CRT
- Duplicating the "Facility" and "IPCC" templates and translating into French, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, and other languages
- Upgrading/integrating the tool components into a web-based software type of tool compatible with the IPCC Software and UNFCCC CRT
- Developing training and capacity building materials such as presentations and webinars 


EPA contracting support for the SMART Plus Tool was provided by Research Triangle Institute, Tetra Tech, and Clearstone Engineering.