A selection of world leaders, celebrities and others gather in New York today for Ban Ki Moon’s Climate Summit 2014 – an event intended to spur on action leading to next year’s COP21 negotiations in Paris. The hope for next year’s conference is that a globally binding agreement will be reached to reduce CO2 emissions.
If today’s summit and the negotiations toward an agreement in Paris next year are to be a success, it’s critical that participants recognise that an effective and sustainable climate response needs to integrate environmental imperatives with energy security and economic ones, including poverty alleviation.
Alongside last year’s annual climate meeting in Warsaw, the World Coal Association joined with the Polish Government to host the International Coal and Climate Summit, an event designed to demonstrate how global energy needs and climate ambitions can be addressed as integrated priorities. The event received almost universal criticism from the environmental community, yet they missed a key point. Coal has been the fastest growing fossil fuel for decades and its share of global primary energy consumption in 2013 reached 30.1% – the highest since 1970. Under the IEA’s New Policies Scenario (which accounts for all currently announced climate policies) coal demand is expected to grow from 3800 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe) today to almost 4500 mtoe in 2035.
With coal consumption in Southeast Asia projected to grow at 4.8% a year to 2035 and millions of people looking to coal to combat energy poverty and address energy security concerns, it is clear that those looking to phase out coal are simply ignoring reality. Figures like that put to bed those who predict doom for the coal industry.
When the world needs more energy and is turning to coal to meet that need then anyone interested in reducing CO2 emissions in an affordable way needs to look toward cleaner coal technologies as part of the solution. That’s why as part of last year’s summit we launched the Warsaw Communique which called on the international community to support deployment of high efficiency low emission coal-fired power plants.
A global initiative to raise the average efficiency of the world’s coal fleet from its current 33% to 40% (which can easily be achieved with off-the-shelf technology) would save 2 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions. That’s the equivalent of –
- Running the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme for 53 years at its current rate
- Running the Kyoto Protocol three times over, or
- Multiplying the world’s current solar power capacity by 195 times.
With that sort of impact on emissions, how could you not support improving the efficiency of the global coal fleet?
Critically, high efficiency plants are an important first step towards deployment of carbon capture and storage technology (CCS). Many in the environmental community argue that CCS is a pipe-dream. That argument will be dealt a blow next week when Canada’s SaskPower launches its full-scale, commercially operated CCS plant, the first of its type in the world. The plant’s operators are sharing their experiences to help drive future deployment of CCS and achieve cost reductions in the technology by as much as 30%.
The ideological opposition to coal and CCS creates a significant economic and environmental risk. Analysis of the recent IPCC reports shows that trying to achieve the 2°C target without CCS could make climate action as much as 140% more expensive or worse make it impossible to achieve the 2°C target.
I doubt today we will hear too much about the role cleaner coal technologies can play in achieving global climate ambitions. I also doubt we will hear much about how we can meet the needs of the 1.3 billion people who lack access to modern energy. Perhaps if there was a greater recognition about the realities of the world’s energy system and the technologies available to build an affordable, low emissions energy future, there might be a greater chance that today’s summit and Paris 2015 would actually lead to real progress.
