Global Deal To Cut Oil & Coal

The world faces a surge in energy costs, as well as in planet-warming carbon emissions, unless it can swiftly agree a climate change deal. This from a surprising source – the International Energy Agency. IEA also says that for global warming to be restrained to a two degree temperature increase, coal use must decline.

Two reports on the release of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook released this past week.

Muriel Boselli and Barbara Lewis in Reuters World Environment News (11 November 2009):

 

PARIS/LONDON – The world faces a surge in energy costs, as well as in planet-warming carbon emissions, unless it can swiftly agree a climate change deal, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.

 

Arguing strongly for a global deal at the U.N. Climate Change summit in Copenhagen in December, the IEA said use of fossil fuels would increase quickly if policies remained unchanged.

 

Without an international agreement on climate change, the ratio of energy spending to gross domestic product for the largest consumer countries would double by 2030.

 

The world would have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delayed implementing a deal on global warming, the IEA said in its annual World Energy Outlook.

 

“As the leading source of greenhouse-gas emissions, energy is at the heart of the problem and so must be integral to the solution. The time to act has arrived,” it said.

 

IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol told Reuters in an interview the world needed to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere at 450 ppm of CO2 equivalent.

 

“The world needs to go to the 450 part per million (ppm) target, not only because of climate change but because of growing problems within our energy system and its possible implications again on the economy,” Birol said.

 

Global energy demand would rise by an average of 2.5 percent per year over the next five years if governments made no changes to their existing policies and measures.

 

FOSSIL FUEL DOMINANCE

 

Under these circumstances, which the IEA called its reference scenario, world primary energy demand would rise by an average of 1.5 percent per year over the next two decades.

 

Oil demand, excluding biofuels, would increase by 1 percent per year to 105 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2030 from 85 million bpd in 2008. This was a slight decrease in its demand forecast, reflecting the impact of the global economic downturn.

 

Last year the agency, which advises 28 industrialized nations, forecast oil use would reach 106 million bpd by 2030.

 

But the IEA stressed the trend toward heavier use of hydrocarbons would be unabated without a climate change deal.

 

“Fossil fuels remain the dominant sources of primary energy worldwide in the reference scenario, accounting for more than three-quarters of the overall increase in energy use,” it said.

 

A key driver of energy demand would be inexorable growth in power generation, it said, forecasting in its reference scenario world electricity demand would grow 2.5 percent a year to 2030.

 

Stressing the need to move away from dependence on fossil fuels, Birol said that without a climate change deal, the European Union’s annual energy bill would more than double to $500 billion by 2030, up from $160 billion in the last 30 years.

 

Oil prices soared to a record of nearly $150 a barrel in July last year. They then collapsed to less than $33 last December, but have since recovered to around $80.

 

The price collapse, combined with the credit crisis, choked off investment and the Paris-based IEA has warned the oil market could surge back, damaging still fragile economic growth.

 

Birol said the oil price was likely to reach $100 per barrel by 2015 and $190 by 2030: “This means that if we don’t do anything to our energy system, we will be in difficulty.”

 

Bank of Ireland analyst Paul Harris said the IEA had taken a “rather cautious approach” in the report.

 

“There’s an emerging consensus that the demand and supply balance is really going to start to tighten by 2015 which should sound the death knell for cheap oil.”

 

Source: www.planetark.org

 

 

Cathy Alexander in Sydney Morning Herald (12 November 2009):

 

One of the world’s top energy experts says that despite climate change, there is a strong future for the backbone of the Australian economy – coal.

 

Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), gave an upbeat assessment of the prospects for new technologies to make coal more climate-friendly.

 

He said Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) – which captures the carbon emissions from burning coal and buries those emissions underground – was “advancing”.

 

“I think now the momentum is there … it’s moving,” Mr Tanaka told AAP at a media event in Copenhagen.

 

“Technological innovation is happening, the cost is coming much lower, so, I think, the future is there.

 

“We still think that coal has a long-term future, because technology is coming.”

 

CCS is not yet available on a commercial scale, and critics say it won’t work.

 

Australia is the world’s largest coal exporter, and coal is one of the nation’s biggest earners, reaping tens of billions of dollars a year. The economy is built on cheap coal-fired electricity.

 

But coal is one of the dirtiest ways of producing energy, and some environmentalists believe it should no longer be used.

 

The IEA, which is an energy advisory body for rich countries like Australia, says that for global warming to be restrained to a two degree temperature increase, coal use must decline.

 

But it would still be used.

 

Mr Tanaka said the technology to capture carbon emissions was already quite good – using chemicals or algae for example – but more work was needed on carbon storage.

 

The public was concerned about emissions leaking back into the atmosphere, he said.

 

More work was also needed on the legal framework behind CCS, and on how to transfer the technology to major emerging economies like China and India.

 

Installing CCS technology, if and when it becomes commercially available, would cost more than running a conventional coal-fired power station.

 

Mr Tanaka said that for CCS to become commercially viable, a carbon price – the cost of pollution to be levied under an emissions trading schemes (ETS) – of $US50 ($A53.79) a tonne was needed by 2020.

 

That would need to rise to $US110 ($A118.34) towards 2030.

 

There was growing awareness among governments of the importance of the carbon price to CCS, Mr Tanaka said.

 

He praised the Australian-led Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, which aims to accelerate the deployment of CCS.

 

The institute was launched this year and receives $A100 million a year from the government.

 

Source: www.news.smh.com.au