The Guangdong carbon exchange has become the first of China’s seven emissions bourses to release specific regulations for offset trading in a bid to safeguard against “irregular” trading activities.

The rules allow any company covered by one of China’s seven pilot markets to trade CCERs on the Guangdong exchange, as well as institutional and private investors, as long as they are also members of the exchange.

Under the regulations, the exchange is allowed to halt trading if irregular activities are spotted or illegal trading suspected.

On the Guangdong exchange, CCERs will trade four hours a day, from 9.30 to 11.30 in the morning, and from 13.30 to 15.30 in the afternoon.

While all seven exchanges offer trading of CCERs, offset deals are mostly negotiated bilaterally and then reported to the exchange, but prices are not made public.

One notable exception is the Shanghai exchange, which has published daily CCER trading data since last summer, although no accompanying regulations have been made public and there is no information available on which category the traded CCERs belong to.

By Stian Reklev – stian@carbon-pulse.com

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