The past two weeks on Climex have seen a variety of new activity on the exchange.

On 30 September Emission Reduction Units (ERUs) were traded on Climex in the first-ever cleared spot transaction. The trade was cleared by APX ENDEX, the central counterparty of the Climex exchange.

1,000 tonnes of ERUs changed hands at a price of €11.95. Vertis Environmental Finance was the seller in this transaction and STX Services was the buyer.

Meanwhile, the exchange is to launch a new auction concept - a call option auction for VERs. During this, sellers are invited to offer their VCS VERs to Climex buyers who are looking for an option to buy 180,000 VCS VERs in 2010.

The buyer will pay a fixed fee of €0.50 for the call option. The price of the VCUs will be variable and will start at a maximum of €3.00.

"It is interesting to be able to auction a call option," says Sascha Bloemhoff, commercial director of Climex. "To many VER buyers the number of VERs required for offsetting purposes in a certain year is not exactly known. If this auction is successful, we would be able to offer buyers a new and accessible instrument to purchase their future VERs."

Last week, during the first Gold Standard VER auction, which is part of a sequence on the Climex Auction Platform, Gold Standard VERs were sold at a price of €8.00 on 24 September. Climex's Bloemhoff explains that the advantage of Climex offering regular auctions in this space is that buyers do not have to spend a lot of time shopping around to acquire Gold Standard VERs, finding out if they are quoted at the right price, negotiating the deal and closing the VERPA.

MP