About the Simulator

What it is

Most introductions to carbon pricing are slide decks: a cap here, an allowance there, a supply-and-demand curve that clears at a tidy equilibrium. PromETS takes the opposite approach. It drops you into a live market with a real firm to run, a compliance obligation to meet, and a price that moves because of what you and everyone else decide to do. You learn the mechanics the way traders and regulators actually learn them: by living with the consequences.

Most carbon-market simulators are closed. They tend to run as facilitator-led workshops or sit behind institutional access, so if you want to see how an emissions market actually behaves, you usually cannot just open one and try it yourself. PromETS exists to remove that barrier. It runs in a browser, anyone can start a game, and the mechanics are visible rather than hidden, so you learn the market by trading in it.

Why is it called Prometheus?

In Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to people. Something that had been kept on Olympus became something anyone could use.

Carbon market simulators have mostly been kept behind closed doors in the same way. This project takes that knowledge and puts it in anyone’s browser, for free. That is the idea behind the name.

The short form, PromETS, keeps the myth and adds what the simulator is about: an emissions trading system, or ETS. PromETS is the name used everywhere on the site.

Who it’s for

PromETS is built for the people who design, study, and work inside carbon markets: policy professionals and regulators who want to feel how a design choice plays out, students and researchers learning market mechanics, and trainers running workshops who need something more visceral than a lecture. No setup, no spreadsheets, just a game and a market.

What makes it real

The realism isn’t cosmetic. Under the surface, PromETS runs market and policy machinery that mirrors how live systems work:

• A continuous double-auction market with price-time-priority matching: your orders meet real counterparties’ orders, and the clearing price is genuinely discovered, not scripted.
• Real India CCTS sector data: production baselines, emissions intensities, and abatement options grounded in the actual Carbon Credit Trading Scheme sectors. This is the most fully calibrated dataset in the simulator; the market mechanics themselves apply to any intensity-based system.
• Multiple allocation methodologies (benchmarking, grandparenting, and hybrid approaches) so you can see how the giveaway shapes behaviour.
• Heterogeneous firms with different abatement-cost curves and starting capital, recreating the segmentation real markets show: some firms abate, others trade.
• A genuine abate-versus-trade decision at every turn, the heart of why emissions trading works at all.

The teaching mission

The whole point is simple: you understand a carbon market best by trading in one. Everything else (the data, the matching engine, the policy levers) exists to make that first-hand understanding possible.

Step onto the floor and the abstractions fall away: carbon pricing stops being a diagram and starts being a decision you have to make. Underneath every flickering price sits a real order book, matching your bids and asks against the rest of the market in real time. Buying an allowance or abating a tonne becomes an honest cost comparison, weighed in your firm’s own cash and compliance position. Here the lessons stick precisely because you feel them: in profit, in penalties, in your standing against rivals. And it doesn’t matter whether you arrive as a regulator, an analyst, or a curious newcomer: the market judges every strategy on the same terms. Mastery, in the end, comes not from memorising the theory but from trading your way through it.

Curious to bring it to a classroom or workshop? Head to the page for instructors, or just get in touch.

If you’d like a demonstration, or help understanding how PromETS works, email hipromets@gmail.com. Curious who’s behind it? Read who built PromETS.