Group Releases Progress Report Ahead of Clean Energy Ministerial Meeting
Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
04/27/12
The International Energy Agency said this week that nations are falling behind on clean energy investments—particularly in developing large-scale carbon capture and storage projects—at a time when minimizing the future effects of climate change is critical. The Paris-based energy reseach organization said in a new report released this week that the window for investing in technologies that will help limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius—the target IEA said will limit the effects felt by global warming—by the end of the century is rapidly closing and that “urgent” actions are needed in order to change course.
The report examines progress on 11 low-carbon technologies that have previously been flagged as necessary for decarbonizing the world’s energy and transport systems. The Agency concludes that the world is on track to meet only one of those development goals for the year 2020, in the advancement of renewable technologies like onshore wind and solar photo-voltaic technologies. IEA warns that under current policies, energy use and CO2 emissions will increase by one-third by 2020 and double by 2050, putting the world on track to a 6 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures by the end of the century. The report says that the technologies with the “greatest potential” for energy and carbon dioxide emissions savings are making the slowest progress.
CCS Development ‘Woefully Off Pace’
In particular, the report highlights “painfully slow” progress on CCS R&D and large-scale projects. IEA previously called for 38 large-scale projects to be in operation in the power sector and 82 in the industrial sector by 2020 in order to stay at or below the 2 degree Celsius goal. Citing Global CCS Institute figures, the Agency says there are currently no large-scale power sector projects in operation and only four in place in the industrial sector, concluding that development is “woefully off pace.” “Clearly, a challenging road lies ahead for deploying CCS in the near term… At minimum, an additional 110 planned projects must successfully be brought online by 2020 to get back on track to meet the [2 degree Celsius] objective,” the report says. “This is an incredibly ambitious target based on current deployment rates.”
The progress report mirrors conclusions made in IEA’s most recent “World Energy Outlook.” Released last fall, it estimated that CCS would have a large role in helping mitigate the world’s future CO2 emissions. Under its most ambitious future policy scenarios, it projected that CCS could account for roughly 18 percent of the world’s saved emissions. However, even in those scenarios IEA said that CCS will likely only start playing a sizable role towards CO2 emissions mitigation starting in the late 2020s.
Public Funding for CCS ‘Inadequate’
The progress report released this week continues to underscore the need for CCS commercialization as soon as possible, but also says that many barriers remain. “CCS remains critical to reducing CO2 emissions from the power and industry sectors, but fundamental challenges must be addressed if this technology is to meet its potential,” the report says. “Public funding for demonstration projects remains inadequate compared with the level of ambition associated with CCS; large-scale integrated projects are coming on line far too slowly; beyond demonstration projects, incentives to develop CCS projects are lacking; and too little attention has so far been given to CCS applications in industries other than the power sector, such as iron and steel, cement manufacturing, refining or biofuel production.”
In order to spur more growth in CCS deployment, IEA recommends that governments allocate more funding that can be dedicated to RD&D work and demonstration projects. It also calls for broad carbon and other regulatory policies to be enacted in order to help incentivize investment in the technology. The Agency highlighted frameworks established in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom in helping spur CCS technology development. In the absence of pursuing CCS, IEA recommended that governments push for investments in more efficient coal technologies like Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle or ultra-supercritical pulverized coal combustion systems.
Agency Aims to Prompt Action at Ministerial
IEA released the report in advance of a Clean Energy Ministerial meeting held in London this week, a high-level gathering of energy ministers from nearly two dozen of the world’s largest economies which together comprise roughly four-fifths of the world’s energy demand. It urged energy ministers to step forward and “level the playing field” for clean energy technologies by committing to national policies that account for the positive and negative impacts of energy production. The Agency also recommended that ministers remove subsidies for fossil fuels, promote energy efficiency efforts and advocate for public funding to go towards clean energy RD&D work. Doing so, according to IEA, would help incentivize industry to invest further in clean energy technologies and ultimately help slow greenhouse gas emissions. “Private sector financing will only reach the levels required if governments create and maintain supportive business environments for low-carbon energy technologies,” the report says.
In an op-ed in the British newspaper The Guardian published ahead of the meeting, IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven emphasized that clean energy technologies are “not being deployed quickly enough to avert potentially disastrous consequences.” “The present state of affairs is unacceptable precisely because we have a responsibility and a golden opportunity to act,” she wrote. Van der Hoeven underscored what could be advanced at the meeting. “The ministers meeting this week have an incredible opportunity before them. It is my hope that they heed our warning of slow progress and act to seize the security, economic and environmental benefits clean energy transition can bring,” she said.
