#international energy agency

[reasonsforhope]

"The prospects of the world staying within the 1.5C limit on global heating have brightened owing to the “staggering” growth of renewable energy and green investment in the past two years, the chief of the world’s energy watchdog has said.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, and the world’s foremost energy economist, said much more needed to be done but that the rapid uptake of solar power and electric vehicles were encouraging.

“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” he said in an interview. “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.” ...

The IEA, in a report entitled Net Zero Roadmap, published on Tuesday morning, also called on developed countries with 2050 net zero targets, including the UK, to bring them forward by several years.

The report found “almost all countries must move forward their targeted net zero dates”, which for most developed countries are 2050. Some developed countries have earlier dates, such as Germany with 2045 and Austria and Iceland with 2040 and for many developing countries they are much later, 2060 in the case of China and 2070 for India.

Cop28, the UN climate summit to be held in Dubai this November and December, offered a key opportunity for countries to set out tougher emissions-cutting plans, Birol said.

He wants to see Cop28 agree a tripling of renewable energy by 2030, and a 75% cut in methane from the energy sector by the same date. The latter could be achieved at little cost, because high gas prices mean that plugging leaks from oil and gas wells can be profitable...

He also called for Cop28 to agree a doubling of energy efficiency. “To reduce fossil fuel emissions, we need to reduce demand for fossil fuels. This is a golden condition, if we are to reach our climate goals,” he said.

Birol stopped short of endorsing the call that some countries have made for a full phase-out of fossil fuels by 2050 to be agreed at Cop28, but he said all countries must work on reducing their fossil fuel use."

-via The Guardian, September 26, 2023

#climate change #sustainability #climate anxiety #climate and environment #climate crisis #climate news #climate emergency #global warming #environment #climate action #iea #international politics #international energy agency #cop28 #united nations #greenhouse gas emissions #fossil fuels #renewable energy #solar power #electric vehicles #ev #solar panels #climate tech #good news #hope #hope posting #hopepunk

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The world isn’t on track to meet its climate goals — and it’s the public’s fault, a leading oil company CEO told journalists.

Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Darren Woods told editors from Fortune that the world has “waited too long” to begin investing in a broader suite of technologies to slow planetary heating.

That heating is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and much of the current impacts of that combustion — rising temperatures, extreme weather — were predicted by Exxon scientists almost half a century ago.

The company’s 1970s and 1980s projections were “at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models,” according to a 2023 Harvard study.

Since taking over from former CEO Rex Tillerson, Woods has walked a tightrope between acknowledging the critical problem of climate change — as well as the role of fossil fuels in helping drive it — while insisting fossil fuels must also provide the solution.

In comments before last year’s United Nations Climate Conference (COP28), Woods made a forceful case for carbon capture and storage, a technology in which the planet-heating chemicals released by burning fossil fuels are collected and stored underground.

“While renewable energy is essential to help the world achieve net zero, it is not sufficient,” he said. “Wind and solar alone can’t solve emissions in the industrial sectors that are at the heart of a modern society.”

International experts agree with the idea in the broadest strokes.

Carbon capture marks an essential component of the transition to “net zero,” in which no new chemicals like carbon dioxide or methane reach — and heat — the atmosphere, according to a report by International Energy Agency (IEA) last year.

But the remaining question is how much carbon capture will be needed, which depends on the future role of fossil fuels.

While this technology is feasible, it is very expensive — particularly in a paradigm in which new renewables already outcompete fossil fuels on price.

And the fossil fuel industry hasn’t been spending money on developing carbon capture technology, IEA head Fatih Birol wrote last year on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

To be part of a climate solution, Birol added, the fossil fuel industry must “let go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.”

He noted that capturing and storing current fossil fuel emissions would require a thousand-fold leap in annual investment from $4 billion in 2022 to $3.5 trillion.

In his comments Tuesday, Woods argued the “dirty secret” is that customers weren’t willing to pay for the added cost of cleaner fossil fuels.

Referring to carbon capture, Woods said Exxon has “tabled proposals” with governments “to get out there and start down this path using existing technology.”

“People can’t afford it, and governments around the world rightly know that their constituents will have real concerns,” he added. “So we’ve got to find a way to get the cost down to grow the utility of the solution, and make it more available and more affordable, so that you can begin the [clean energy] transition.”

For example, he said Exxon “could, today, make sustainable aviation fuel for the airline business. But the airline companies can’t afford to pay.”

Woods blamed “activists” for trying to exclude the fossil fuel industry from the fight to slow rising temperatures, even though the sector is “the industry that has the most capacity and the highest potential for helping with some of the technologies.”

That is an increasingly controversial argument. Across the world, wind and solar plants with giant attached batteries are outcompeting gas plants, though battery life still needs to be longer to make renewable power truly dispatchable.

Carbon capture is “an answer in search of a question,” Gregory Nemet, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin, told The Hill last year.

“If your question is what to do about climate change, your answer is one thing,” he said — likely a massive buildout in solar, wind and batteries.

But for fossil fuel companies asking “‘What is the role for natural gas in a carbon-constrained world?’ — well, maybe carbon capture has to be part of your answer.”

In the background of Woods’s comments about customers’ unwillingness to pay for cleaner fossil fuels is a bigger debate over price in general.

This spring, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will release its finalized rule on companies’ climate disclosures.

That much-anticipated rule will weigh in on the key question of whose responsibility it is to account for emissions — the customer who burns them (Scope II), or the fossil fuel company that produces them (Scope III).

Exxon has long argued for Scope II, based on the idea that it provides a product and is not responsible for how customers use it.

Last week, Reuters reported that the SEC would likely drop Scope III, a positive development for the companies.

Woods argued last year that SEC Scope III rules would cause Exxon to produce less fossil fuels — which he said would perversely raise global emissions, as its products were replaced by dirtier production elsewhere.

This broad idea — that fossil fuels use can only be cleaned up on the “demand side” — is one some economists dispute.

For the U.S. to decarbonize in an orderly fashion, “restrictive supply-side policies that curtail fossil fuel extraction and support workers and communities must play a role,” Rutgers University economists Mark Paul and Lina Moe wrote last year.

Without concrete moves to plan for a reduction in the fossil fuel supply, “the end of fossil fuels will be a chaotic collapse where workers, communities, and the environment suffer,” they added.

But Woods’s comments Tuesday doubled down on the claim that the energy transition will succeed only when end-users pay the price.

“People who are generating the emissions need to be aware of [it] and pay the price,” Woods said. “That’s ultimately how you solve the problem.”

#us politics #news #the hill #2024 #carbon emissions #green energy #climate change #climate crisis #exxon mobil #Darren Woods #United Nations Climate Conference #COP28 #carbon capture and storage #renewable energy #International Energy Agency #Fatih Birol #fossil fuels #Securities and Exchange Commission #emissions

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

In its new Global EV Outlook 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said electric vehicle (EV) sales will reach 17 million this year — up from 14 million in 2023.

In 2024, EVs are projected to make up roughly one out of nine cars sold in the United States, one in four in Europe and 45 percent of total car sales in China, an IEA press release said.

“Electric cars continue to make progress towards becoming a mass-market product in a larger number of countries,” the report said. “Tight margins, volatile battery metal prices, high inflation, and the phase-out of purchase incentives in some countries have sparked concerns about the industry’s pace of growth, but global sales data remain strong.”

More than one-fifth of cars sold globally in 2024 are predicted to be electric, with growing demand set to substantially reduce oil consumption used for road transportation over the coming decade, the press release said.

The pace of EV sales means road transportation’s oil demand is expected to peak around 2025, according to the IEA report, as Reuters reported.

The report added that around six million barrels of oil per day would be cut from oil demand by 2030, with an 11 million barrel reduction by 2035 if countries meet their stated climate and energy policies.

By 2030, EVs are projected to make up nearly one in five cars on the roads in the U.S. and European Union and one in three in China.

#International Energy Agency #electric vehicles

[gearsandbranches]

The world energy system

The world energy system is very complex. Surprise. I´m not able to compress everything there is to know about it, and all the factors (economic, social, political...) that influence it, into one post. However, I´ll try to give a first impression.

The first distinction that has to be made is between ENERGY supply, that includes transportation, electricity, heating, cooling, fires for cooking, etc. and ELECTRICITY supply. For example the quite big amount of biofuels and waste in the first graph is based on regions of the world where the main energy that is used is open fires for heating and cooking. They are kindled with collected fire wood, animal dung, etc. The amount of oil unfortunately makes sense if you take into consideration that that includes traffic of all kinds, from cars to container ships.

Right now, the main energy sources are still coal, oil, and natural gas, but also biofuels and waste, nuclear power and a growing slice of solar, wind and other renewables supply the world with energy.

According to the IEA, the International Energy Agency, the energy supply of the world looks like this right now:

(Source: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-statistics-data-browser?country=WORLD&fuel=Energy%20supply&indicator=TESbySource)

If we look at the electricity generation instead, the graph looks like this:

(Source: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-statistics-data-browser?country=WORLD&fuel=Electricity%20and%20heat&indicator=ElecGenByFuel)

That looks a little bit better. The amount of oil that we use to generate electricity has gone down, and the slice of wind and photovoltaic (PV) has been growing fast. The amount of natural gas has grown, that is true, but natural gas causes less CO2-emissions than oil or coal. It´s not perfect, no. Maybe not even good. But better than covering the demand with coal or oil, that´s for sure. There is much to do, no doubt. But much is happening, too. The costs for renewable energy production is getting lower and lower. More altenative energy sources are being looked into, like tide power, which is such a small amount that it´s not visible on this graph, but neither was solar power 10 years ago.

If you´re interested in the world energy supply and consumption, you find a LOT of data on the IEA website:

Here you can choose world region or country, and energy topic and play around a bit.

If you don´t want to click on a random link on the internet (fair enough!), you can just search for IEA or International Energy Agency, hover over the link "Data" and click on "Data explorers". There is a LOT of information to be found about the energy and electricity supply, sorted by country and world region, and the whole website is a treasure of information about the different kinds of energy production, the effects on the environment and a lot more.

#science #environment #environmentalism #energy #renewableenergy #fossil fuels #international energy agency #climate change #climate action

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

3.3: Carbon Capture and Storage with Prof Mike Bickle

In this ep, Christina talks to Dr. Mike Bickle, professor emeritus at the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Cambridge about carbon capture and storage: methods, dangers, what it would take to deploy at necessary scale. Join us!

Conquering climate change for our survival and that of much of the rest of the biosphere calls for more than attaining net zero emissions of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. We also need to actively remove much of the 140 extra parts per million of carbon dioxide currently up there in the atmosphere thanks to our burning of fossil fuels and destruction of so much of Earth’s biosphere. Both…

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#carbon #carbon capture and storage #carbon dioxide #climate change #climate disaster #earth sciences #global heating #International Energy Agency #Lake Nyos #Mike Bickle #rock weathering #science #Sleipnir Gas Field #solarpunk #University of Cambridge

[kp777]

#russia ukraine war #vladimir putin #russian oil #international energy agency #world economy

[pressnewsagencyllc]

EU trails China and US after ‘monumental’ energy mistakes, IEA chief says

The International Energy Agency chief has criticised the European Union for falling behind China and the US after making “two historic monumental mistakes” in energy policy, by relying on Russian gas and turning away from nuclear power. Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, said that European industry was now paying the price for these errors and that the bloc would need “a new industrial…

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#China #Climate Change #European Union #international energy agency #Russia

[edouardstenger]

Heat pumps are an incredible energy transition solution

One of the main tools to slash our global dependence to fossil fuels for heating and cooling is the mighty heat pump.Let's see in this post the why and how.

One of the main tools to slash our global dependence to fossil fuels for heating and cooling is the mighty heat pump.Installed in already efficient buildings that have received the adequate amounts of insulation and weatherization, heat pumps allow homes, offices and hospitals (and any other kind of buildings) to heat and cool without breaking the bank. The beauty of heat pumps is that with just…

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#Buildings #District heating and cooling #Europe #Germany #Green buildings #Heat pumps #Homes #International Energy Agency #Residential sector #Rhine #Solar PV

[industriadepetroleoygas]

The UN Secretary-General António Guterres outlined a major new Acceleration Agenda in his message to launch the Synthesis Report, which includes:

Ensuring net-zero electricity generation by 2035 for all developed economies and 2040 for the rest of the world.

Ceasing all licensing or funding of new oil and gas – consistent with the findings of the International Energy Agency.

Stopping any expansion of existing oil and gas reserves. Shifting subsidies from fossil fuels to a just energy transition.

Establishing a global phase-down of existing oil and gas production compatible with the 2050 global net-zero target.

Speeding-up efforts to deliver climate justice to those on the frontlines.

#oil and gas #International Energy Agency #fossil fuels #energy transition #net-zero electricity generation

[filosofablogger]

So You Want To Be 'Exceptional', Eh?

We’ve all heard the term ‘American Exceptionalism’, one which causes me to shake my head and roll my eyes.  It ties in with the ultra-discriminatory ‘America First’ ideology and other supremacy notions and has no place in this world.  But, it turns out there is one area in which we are ‘exceptional’ … we, particularly the wealthy in this nation, contribute more per capita to the destruction of…

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#&039;exceptionalism&039; #Carbon Dioxide Emissions #Climate change #fossil fuel use #International Energy Agency #New York Times #Somini Sengupta #wealthy 1%

[emeriobanque]

Europe was the most prominent & biggest importer in the global liquified natural gas sector in the year 2022, with the region buying considerably higher volumes than its competitors as it attempts to replace the shrinking Russian pipeline gas supplies. As per the news, EU nations acquired 101mn tonnes last year, which is 58% more than in the entire of 2021, as per the data provided by Refinitiv.

In previous years, the EU fall down to Japan and China on LNG imports but Russia’s attempt at energy weaponisation since its invasion of Ukraine has compelled the bloc to adopt alternative fuel sources.

Due to Europe’s requirements to import higher volumes to cater to its storage facilities in 2023, the global LNG market is expected to stay tight, possibly pushing up costs for gas users across the world.

“When the prices increase in Europe, Asia undoubtedly is required to expand the amount it pays accordingly to survive the competition to attract LNG cargoes,” stated Olumide Ajayi, senior LNG analyst at Refinitiv. “Europe has turned into a top-notch market.”

Read more: https://www.emeriobanque.com/news/europe-gears-up-lng-imports-as-global-competition-for-fuel-grows

#Europe nations #Refinitiv #International Energy Agency #Global Competition For Fuel Grows

[indizombie]

The war, and consequent rising gas prices, forced Indonesia to reduce ballooning subsidies aimed at keeping fuel prices and some power tariffs in check. But this was a very “hurried reform” and doesn’t address the challenge of weaning the world’s largest coal exporter off fossil fuels and reaching its 2060 net zero goal, said Anissa. R. Suharsono, of the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Coal exports have increased nearly 1.5 times between April and June, compared to 2021, in response to European demand and Indonesia has already produced over 80% of the total coal it produced last year, according to government data. The country needs to nearly triple its clean energy investment by 2030 to achieve net zero by 2060, according to the International Energy Agency, but Suharsono said it wasn’t clear how it was going to meet those targets. “There are currently no overarching regulations or a clear roadmap,” she said.

‘What the war in Ukraine means for Asia’s climate goals’, Associated Press

#Associated Press #gas prices #Indonesia #energy subsidies #power tariffs #2060 net zero goal #Anissa R Suharsono #International Institute for Sustainable Development #Coal exports #coal production #clean energy investment #International Energy Agency

[hultprivatecapitalreviews]

#Hult Capital #HULT Private Capital #Hult Private Capital Reviews #oil price hikes #uk #international energy agency #coal demand #uk market #finance #Business #investment #investment company

[szepkerekkocka]

#ahang #petíció #mailbombing #eu #európai unió #európai bizottság #európai parlament #International Energy Agency #IEA #Greenpeace #gazprom #lukoil #rosatom

[danny4xb]

Do not sign any new gas supply contracts with Russia. [Impact: Enables greater diversification of supply this year and beyond]

Replace Russian supplies with gas from alternative sources [Impact: Increases non-Russian gas supply by around 30 billion cubic metres within a year]

Introduce minimum gas storage obligations [Impact: Enhances resilience of the gas system by next winter]

Accelerate the deployment of new wind and solar projects [Impact: Reduces gas use by 6 billion cubic metres within a year]

Maximise power generation from bioenergy and nuclear [Impact: Reduces gas use by 13 billion cubic metres within a year]

Enact short-term tax measures on windfall profits to shelter vulnerable electricity consumers from high prices [Impact: Cuts energy bills even when gas prices remain high]

Speed up the replacement of gas boilers with heat pumps [Impact: Reduces gas use by an additional 2 billion cubic metres within a year]

Accelerate energy efficiency improvements in buildings and industry [Impact: Reduces gas use by close to 2 billion cubic metres within a year]

Encourage a temporary thermostat reduction of 1 °C by consumers [Impact: Reduces gas use by some 10 billion cubic metres within a year]

Step up efforts to diversify and decarbonise sources of power system flexibility [Impact: Loosens the strong links between gas supply and Europe’s electricity security]

#energy #iea #international energy agency #war #europe #russia

[abhishekshahgaur]

#Fukushima #International Atomic Energy Agency #Japan #Nuclear accident #Nuclear energy #treated water #Tritium