All Sectors Have a Role to Play in Meeting the Climate Challenge: OPEC
Chinese oil facilities, 2024. X/ @CE_ChinaEconomy
By: Haitham Al Ghais
November 8, 2024 Hour: 11:08 am
It is not only the oil industry that faces the challenge of reducing emissions while continuing to provide goods and services.
Discourse can sometimes reduce the climate challenge to a simple formula: hydrocarbons caused it; halting hydrocarbons will solve it. The complexity of the challenge, its multicausal character, is narrowed to this single, misguided narrative. The reality, of course, is far more nuanced.
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As Mike Hulme, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cambridge has written, climate change is a “wicked problem, one with diffuse causes, effects that are unevenly distributed, and with no universal solution.” It is an issue that defies the notion of singular pathways, with its consequences evolving at different speeds, in an indeterminate manner.
A recognition of energy realities helps correct some of the connected myths related to emissions. Three realities warrant particular focus:
1-. Human activities involving multiple industries, sectors, consumption patterns, processes and factors result in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. All of them will be required to be part of the solution to the climate challenge.
2-. Energy related emissions encompass a diverse range of sources and span multiple fuels.
3-. Many industries face the same conundrum as the oil industry: namely, delivering a vital product, resource or commodity upon which billions of people depend, in the face of growing demand, while trying to reduce emissions.
Meeting the emissions’ challenge requires innovative solutions across many sectors. Take for example, the great challenge of feeding the world’s more than eight billion people. Estimates for the proportion of global GHG emissions that come from agriculture range from a quarter to a third.
With the world’s population expected to rise to 9.7 billion in 2050, the scale of the challenge is reinforced. Secure food supply for this expanded population is essential while emissions will need to be reduced across the agricultural sector, including from land use, degradation of grasslands or croplands, deforestation, crop burning, rice cultivation, agricultural soils and livestock and manure.
Waste, landfills and wastewater are also significant sources of emissions. When organic matter such as food scraps, garden waste, paper and card decompose they emit GHGs. By some estimates, decomposing waste is responsible for about 20 percent of anthropogenic methane emissions.
The fashion industry will also have an important role in reducing emissions. In addition to the water and fertilizer requirements needed for inputs such as cotton, there is the issue that by some estimates, the lifetime of clothes has fallen by 40 percent in the last 15 years, with as much as half of all clothing ending up in a landfill within one year of its manufacturing date.
These examples underscore the need for all industries to play their part in addressing the climate challenge, deploying a range of solutions and innovations, adapted to national circumstances.
On the second point regarding energy related emissions, one of the most frequently cited statistics is that over 70 percent of GHG emissions come from the energy sector, but this incorporates a vast array of energy uses including generating electricity, heating and transportation.
Within these groups there are some important distinctions. Generating electricity and heat are the largest contributors to global emissions and have been for a significant length of time, accounting for around one third of GHG emissions. This is more than double the emissions in the transportation sector.
It is worth bearing in mind that oil represents approximately just 15 percent of energy use for buildings-related energy demand for heating globally. Natural gas is the largest energy source for heating buildings, amounting to approximately 42 percent. Regarding electricity, only 2 percent of electricity globally is generated by oil. Coal remains the world’s largest source of electricity generation, at about 35 percent.
To the final point, reducing emissions while continuing to provide services and amenities that people depend on is a challenge that many industries face, not just the oil industry. For example, the process of making cement contributes about 8 percent of global CO2 emissions.
It is a difficult sector to decarbonize and should be seen in the context of expected urbanization growth in the decades to come, given how prominent cement is in urban development. Over the next six years, it is expected that another half a billion people will move into cities across the world. To put this in context, this urbanization drive will require the addition of approximately 250 cities the size of Vienna.
The steel industry is another sector that faces the challenges of meeting expanding demand, while reducing emissions. The two billion tons of steel manufactured each year is responsible for about 8% of global CO2 emissions. Almost two-thirds of this steel is produced in blast furnaces. To frame it differently, if the steel industry was a country, it would be the fifth largest contributor to CO2 emissions.
It is also worth considering how integral steel is for the renewables industry. Depending on make or model, anywhere between 66-79 percent of a wind turbine’s mass is made of steel. While progress has been made in developing technologies to reduce the steel’s industry’s carbon footprint, this will remain a challenge going forward, especially in the context of increasing steel demand.
A further risk of oversimplification is to assume a direct linear relationship between policy and intended outcomes. Reality shows us that there are usually unintended consequences to even the best intended policies.
For example, the enormous increase foreseen in renewables and EVs envisaged under many ambitious net zero plans will see an exponential increase in the mining sector for critical minerals, such as copper, cobalt, silicon, nickel, lithium, graphite and rare earths (see SG’s Corner: Critical minerals: a realistic assessment). Mining currently accounts for 4-7 percent of GHG emissions, and unless the industry reduces emissions rapidly, this could increase as the sector expands in line with critical mineral demand.
For these reasons, as is the case with the oil industry, technological advancement and innovation will be key across many sectors, particularly abatement and removal technologies. As a result, OPEC Member Countries are investing heavily in advanced carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) systems, hydrogen production technologies and direct air capture, alongside developing renewables.
The purpose of these figures is not to absolve the oil industry from the need to take action to reduce emissions, in fact, the industry has acted boldly in this regard. However, as we approach COP29, re-emphasizing the range of industries and sectors that will need to be part of the solution to the climate challenge underscores the fact that there are no simple fixes in emissions reduction. Production and consumption, supply chains and lifestyles ̶ all need to be assessed.
As OPEC has argued for many years, there is no single pathway to a low emissions future. It is up to each country to chart a path that addresses the difficult trade-offs between reducing GHG emissions while meeting the economic and social needs of an expanding global population. Binding uniform prescriptions will yield limited progress; whereas an inclusive dialogue and a degree of flexibility for national circumstances will enable the global community to work towards a brighter future.
Autor: Haitham Al Ghais
Fuente: teleSUR
The opinions expressed in this section do not necessarily represent those of teleSUR