PROGRESS REPORT
ON THE
PARIS
CLIMATE AGREEMENT
PART 19
2023 APRIL ISSUE
By ANDREW SIA
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From the Desk of the Publisher
In this report we emphasized on the natural gas and also the new perspective arise from the North Sea where we can find those mega wind farms. This wind farm scheme is needed because the rate of offshore windfarms are being built in Europe is not enough to deliver the goals of the Paris climate agreement. Also the space is running short near to the coastlines to allow more economic connect turbines. This power hub is becoming very important.
Peninsula and the conflicts of the European Unions have between them all for the supply of the natural gas where Portugal has the largest refinery and the nearest point to receive it from the U.S.
Spain is known for its vast network of gas pipelines that can help to transport the gas to the other parts of Europe.
We have seen the negligence and the imbalance of the energy policy in Europe and the current system should call for the reform.
A Tale of Two Cities
A decade ago, the capital of Asia’s two largest countries had the dirtiest skies in the world. On the worse day, millions of the inhabitants were enveloped in thick gray canopies of smog that darken the sun and besieged the lungs.
Beijing – If you visit Beijing today, you would find that it has significant changes after the Chinese government declared a war against pollution in 2013 with a hefty effort of spending $100 billion to clean up the sky. The authority closed hundreds of factories around Beijing, took old vehicles off the road and didn’t allow them to enter into the city and shifted from burning coal to natural gas.
In China, the one-party system doesn’t allow any opposition. When central government prioritized an initiative, local authorities fall in line.
In the forty years, which began in the early 1980s, China grew its economy hundred-folds. Its economic output per capita is $12,500 compare with India’s $2,300 per person. The rapid industrialization and urbanization had driven China’s extraordinary rise as an economic power. Its energy-intensive heavy industry fueled for the growth of its economy came with an immerse environmental cost eventually.
In recent years, the growing middle class made their frustration known even within the authoritarian system. Especially when the study was made to disclose the air pollution attributed to more than one million premature deaths across China every year. Although today’s censorship has made it harder to express any discontent and dissatisfaction.
In 2013, it released a new national air-quality action plan by setting up air-quality index and raised the awareness of the pollution problem. It set up target to reduce the pollution by 25%. It tightened industrial emissions standards and phased out or upgrade other outdated ones. It upgraded 200,000 industrial boilers; switched to natural gas from coal as the source of electricity for six million households; replaced 20 million old vehicles.
From 2013 to 2017, the concentration of dangerous fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 in China’s atmosphere declined by roughly a third. This has to do with the fine particles in the air that reduce our visibility and cause the air to appear hazy when levels are elevated.
Today, Beijing’s air is still far from perfect, especially in the winter. For more than 100 days last year, the air was considered as unhealthy for a sensitive group of people. According to Professor Greenstone of the University of Chicago, Beijing’s average level of microparticle pollution in 2020 was three times of that in Los Angeles.
New Delhi – Its air in this past autumn has been as foul as ever. In this air pollution season, it has brought weeks of haze to the city, prompting officials to stop truck traffic, closed schools and asked people to work from home. The people who ventured out would have to wear masks and prevented to rub their eyes. The sky remained foul and acrid from pollution generated by millions of vehicles. The burning of stubble on surrounding farms and the use of open fires for heating and cooking in rural homes. And with every years, nothing has changed.
India is known for its huge and messy democracy while China is ruled by an authoritarian system. India has lack of the political resolve and public pressure to address the issue. The voters have more pressing issues in a country where tens of millions are still living in poverty. Politicians are using the crisis to attack adversaries than to seek solutions. In this instance, the blaming of the air quality is becoming a blame game.
Delhi is surrounded by regions that are predominantly occupied by farmers and blue-collar workers who typically prioritize urgent economic needs over the environment.
Indian leaders have little incentive to clean the sky as it is low among the voters’ priorities, even if it is known that air pollution has been known to kill more Indians that any other factors. Voters ranked air quality as their 17th most urgent concern in a survey before the 2019 election. This was well behind jobs, health care and infrastructure, and only 12% called air pollution a priority. This is something we can understand.
In recent years, Delhi officials have taken limited action by closing two coal-fired power plants and asked the factories to switch to natural gas through pipes. They have plans to deploy 8,000 electric buses in 2025.
While the city has seen improvements overall, in Delhi, the concentration of air pollutants remained at roughly the same hazardous levels between 2013 and 2020.
India knows how to fix the air quality of their capital in Delhi and it was already in 1997 the government has the white paper that identified vehicle exhaust and industrial emissions as the main culprits. It was already during the 1990s, the city tightened emission standards, relocated polluting industries and requires thousands of its buses and auto-rickshaws to switch to compressed natural gas from diesel fuel.
But Delhi continues to struggle with its air quality. There should be more actions than talks.
Toll from the Extreme Weather of 2022
In 2022, we had experienced the severe weather and during the summer we saw the heat was scorching the Earth in different continents. For the U.S. we noted the following:
83 tornados tore across southern part of the United states and hails battered swaths of Minnesota and Wisconsin, damages homes, vehicles and businesses.
The flooding inundated Yellowstone National Park.
There are 7,472,995 acres burned by wildfire according to the National Interagency Fire Center. On average, 6.3 million acres were burned by wildfires each year in the decade preceding 2005, by 2021, the average had risen to more than 7 million acres, more than 10% increase.
Alaska saw the largest amount of scorched land by far during 2022, at more than 3 million acres.
Nine inches of rainfall that fell during a single day this summer in St. Louis. The summer was full of torrential rainfall, from eastern Kentucky to inland Florida, from Chicago to Wisconsin, massive rain brought the flooding that was becoming more common and it battered the outdated infrastructure.
2022 made the third-hottest summer on record in the past 128 years in according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It was 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average measured from June 1 to August 31 for the three months period.
Prolonged droughts tormented the West and marked the driest 22-year period which can compare to our planet since at least 800 A.D.
During the fall, Hurricane Ian recorded as the fifth-strongest hurricane in Category 4 struck the west coast of Florida. It caused tens of billions of dollars of damage along its path and killed more than 125 people.
The latest was the blast from the Arctic that blown out the electricity for 1.5 customers for nearly a dozen states. More than 20,000 flights were cancelled and hundreds of drivers stranded on highways. Blizzard warning throughout the states during the storms and more than half of the U.S. population was under the severe winter warning. More than 4 inches of snow fell in western New York, and at least 39 people in the Buffalo area reported dead.
We can sum up the total of fifteen “billion-dollar disaster” in the U.S. for the past year. If we looked back, the mother nature was merciful to us as this number was lower than 2020 and 2021, in those two years we had 22 and 22 disasters respectively. But 2022’s cases still represented a massive suffering.
Over the past four decades, the U.S. experienced an average of $7.7 billion financial losses annually.
A New “South-North Axis” to Connect Africa’s Abundant Renewable and Fossil Fuel Resources with the European Market
Eni, an Italian multinational energy company, with its headquarters in Rome, is considered as one of the seven major oil companies in the world, is saying that the EU should look to Africa rather than the U.S. for replacing Russian energy exports. This close collaboration with the African countries can offer a new “south-north axis” connecting the continent’s abundant renewable and fossil fuel resources with the European market.
Eni is not a stranger in Africa as it has operated in Africa since 1954. It has operations in 14 countries and has continued its investment on the continent.
Eni started first with the importation of natural gas to replace the 20 billion cubic meters that Italy previously imported from Russia. From Algeria, it plans to increase the import through pipelines for 9 billion cubic meters to 15 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2023 and a further 18 billion cubic meters in 2024.
For Europe, Eni secured an export of 3 billion cubic meters of liquified natural gas from Egypt. With the Republic of Congo, a plan for LNG project to provide 1 billion cubic meters for export in 2023 and 4 billion cubic meters by 2025.
In Mozambique, there is a $7 billion project for LNG terminal, a partnership of Eni, ExxonMobil, CNPC, Galp and Korea Gas Corporation, the first and one of the several gas projects planned since the discovery of natural gas in Mozambique ten years ago.
Europe is used to exploit the African resources for centuries and only paying to their royalties to export commodities with little or no awareness to foster the development for the local economies. But now an effective and a new “south-north axis” connecting the continent’s abundant renewable and fossil fuel resources with the European market should benefit the people living in those countries.
Eni’s investment in Africa was mainly for the production of gas serving the African market. In 2021 it was about 85% of its production. The environmental groups are lobbying energy companies to stop their projects in Africa and they have successfully stopped a new hydrocarbon project in Africa. And since the signing of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, there are debates whether to provide funds to develop new fossil fuel projects in developing region such as Africa. Knowing that almost half of the Africa’s 1.4 billion people have lack the access to electricity and the Africans have the right to develop their national resources to drive their economic growth and improve their access to energy.
In the last COP27 meeting, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari addressed the continent’s share of global emissions would only rise from 3% to 3.5% if they were to use all its natural gas reserves.
Eni has two refineries in Italy producing biofuels and has plans to feedstock 35% of it biorefinery from agricultural hubs in Africa. And its production of feedstock crops, such as castor, croton and brassica does not interfere with food crop production.
But Eni is not the only European energy company trying to diversify its activities in Africa. BP has also signed a memorandum of understanding with Mauritania and Egypt for the developing of green hydrogen.
France’s TotalEnergies has already the biggest portfolios of African oil and gas assets, is also running solar power projects in Egypt, Burkina Faso, Uganda and South Africa.
The African continent produces only 6% of the global fossil fuels from 4% of the global reserves is totally out of proportion. And it has access to 39% of global renewable energy potential in according to the energy thinktank, RMI. Again, Africa needs the right investments and the mutual respect to help to address energy security in Europe and energy access for the African states at the same time. This is the kind of trust and the relationship that has to be built upon.
Brazil’s Rainforest Under the New President Lula
Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest rainforest and on Earth. It is roughly 40% of the South American continent and have parts of eight South American countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.
Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has soared in recent years, especially during the five years’ rein under Bolsonaro’s presidency, an estimate of the size of 3,000 football fields is razed every day. It has undercut the rainforest’s function as a carbon sink for global emissions. It is part of the biome which spreads across nine Latin American nations, is now emitting more carbon that they used to absorb.
Marina Silva, who was in her first term in office during 2003 to 2008, as Brazil’s environment minister during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. She is now back again, to find the country is more desperate than before.
During Bolsonaro’s time, it not only damaged of the rainforest, but also its indigenous people.
At this time under the Lula government, Marina Silva reintroduced new management of public forests, created a forest service and biodiversity institute and several funds for the maintenance of Amazon. But her unyielding manner offended agricultural and mining interests who complained that she was holding back development by refusing to issue environmental licenses. Only this time she found those criminal enterprises in the Amazon are more savvy and technologically advance, which has made her task more difficult than before.
World’s Four Big Emitters
China – For the past two decades, China’s emissions have surged as the country has developed its economy mainly because of its reliance on coal, the highest-emitting fuels. China is now accounted for a third of all human-caused greenhouse gases—more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined.
On the other hand, China has also the world’s largest renewable energy projects. It is now both the producers and users of the vast majority of the world’s wind turbines and solar panels.
It is the world’s leader in hydroelectric power and it is still expanding its nuclear power capacity which is considered as large.
According to the Climate Action Tracker and other monitoring organizations, China’s emissions are nearing its peak. And since its emissions are so high, it is crucial for China to lower its emissions. In the COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, China had not disclosed its emissions reduction plan it pledged for 2022. And due to the diplomatic tensions with the United States, Chinese officials suspended dialogue between the two countries on climate goals.
The United States – The United States is by far the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, and it remains the largest per capita emitters.
Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, with the largest infusion of federal funding that country ever made in the carbon-free energy initiatives. It will bring the emissions down significantly, but still not enough to cut its emissions by half by 2030 when compared with 2005 levels.
India – India is like most developing countries failed to announce a specific timeline toward peaking its emissions.
India stated that it should not be required to comply, given its historical emissions were so insignificant and how the country needs now to develop its economy in order to lift hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty.
Its emissions are steadily increasing, but no where near to what China has been developing. And like China, India is depending on coal as a fuel. It is also investing on renewable projects.
India set its target for reaching net-zero for emissions in 2070.
Projects showing that India’s emissions will surpass the European Union in 2023 and also the country’s population will overtake China and become the most populous country in the world.
Its per capita emissions is still very low: less than half of the European Union’s and less than a third of China’s.
European Union – Being one of the world’s biggest emitters, the European Union has been most affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The global market has to stay with fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal, which are the main carbon emitters.
Most of the 27 nations have to find new sources of fuels as part of the efforts to reduce their overreliance on Russia’s supply. This is most obvious with Germany as it has increased its coal mining activities and its importations to stock up its energy reserves ahead of winter when consumption rises.
European countries are facing record high energy prices at this time.
Meanwhile, European leaders have laid out a plan to increase investment in renewable energy infrastructure. Both solar panels and electric heat pumps are used to replace gas importing from Russia.
The European Union is already well ahead of other major emitters in its transition from fossil fuels to renewables and it is the closest of the big four to achieve its emissions reductions pledges.
A New Perspective for New North Sea Energy Infrastructure
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has delivered the message about Europe’s dependence on Russian’s supply for oil and natural gas can be jeopardized by its aggression. This has also alerted the future of European industry to look for locations to shift their production.
They have seen the American’s protectionists and their subsidy-laden Inflation Reduction Act including $370 billion in subsidies and tax credits to promote climate-friendly products and services in their homeland industry and to lure away industries from the European continent. They have seen the world is quickly developed into three camps—America, China and Europe.
In the early days of the first industrialization, we have seen the Lancashire cotton mills being powered by the hydropower and Ruhr Valley’s steel plant powered by cheap coal.
But if today’s abundant wind power in the North Sea can attract industries to move to Europe’s northern coast, it would give the European continent a new and greener industrial edge. It is also known that the North Sea’s strong winds and relatively shallowness together make it a huge basin of potential energy. With the tall and powerful wind turbines and the more efficient underseas cables and other technological advances, it is now the ideal haven for Europe to enter once again in their industrialization.
There are a group of nine countries along the coast of the North Sea, also known as the Nordic Region consists of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland, as well as the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Aland has plans to install 260 gigawatts of offshore wind stations by 2050 to power 200 million households. This new coastal economy, with its capital in Esbjerg, a town in south-west Denmark, is now promoting companies that can build equipment and provide technical services to maintain the wind turbines.
To assure North Sea economy, facilities to turn ammonia into hydrogen to replace coal or gas from Germany will set up on the North Sea’s coast in Germany for steelmaking. The rise of the new coastal economy can replace the old industrial heartlands.
But the Europeans would need to be able to remove the bureaucracy and have to work together to plan and to help to map out the cables and pipes under the sea to allow the infrastructure to be under the faultless maintenance.
This North Sea economic model can be used in other parts of Europe, and immediately we can think of the Iberian peninsula where the solar is abundant. Such shift of economic geography will not only help Europe to achieve its goal in their carbon emissions in the climate change, but also rebalance their energy mix and stay away from Russia and other autocracies.
North Sea’s Opportunities Today
North Sea has always been economically significant. It is bordered by six countries—Belgium. Britain, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway. It is also where many important shipping routes intersect. Its strong tides which sweep fisheries to its shallow seabed, are godsend for fishermen.
Esbjerg is the bub of Europe’s offshore-wind industry. Two-third of the turbines currently spinning off the European’s coast, were put together in Esbjerg, the Danish port town of 72,000 people. Its port operators plans to triple its capacity to handle wind projects by 2026. Its local engineering companies that once served the fossil-fuel industry have switched to supply the wind-power sector instead.
In the 20th century, oil and gas were discovered in North Sea and at its peak in 1990s, Britain and Norway, the two largest North Sea producers, were producing 6 million barrels of crude a day, which is half as much as United Arab Emirates’ production today.
One of Scotland’s oil station, Brent, lent its name to the oil global price benchmark.
North Sea is famous for its awful weather with its average wind speeds of ten meters per second. It is one of the gustiest basin in the world.
The North Sea’s seafloor is mostly very soft and it makes the fixing of the turbines onto the seabed relatively easy, although the floating type is using everywhere in the world. Because that the turbines can be installed more than 90 meters deep, which allows the wind farms to be further away from the coast where winds are more consistent. The offshore turbines work at up to 60% of capacity, compared with the 30-40% onshore wind farm.
In 2022, North Sea countries auctioned of 25 gigawatts in wind-power capacity, making it the busiest year so far. In the next three years, another 30 gigawatts of tenders have been scheduled. In May 2022, at a meeting in Esbjerg where four North Sea countries signed to install 150 gigawatts by 2050, which is five times Europe’s and three times the world’s current total. In September 2022, the same group of countries together with another five countries raised the number to 260 gigawatts.
The variability of wind power is to use it to split water molecules to produce “green” fuels, such a hydrogen and ammonia. The European Commission pledged a ten-fold increase of EU manufacturing capacity for electrolysis by 2025. This would allow the production of 10 million tons of green fuels by 2030.
North Sea countries are also an excellent place to store and process data. Low electricity prices make for cheaper number-crunching which is energy-intensive. A cold climate means data centers can be cooled just by circulating outside air instead of using the cooling systems.
Meta, also known as Facebook, bought 212 hectares of farmland outside Esbjerg to build a renewables-powered data center for its social network. The cables that will carry 30% of the international data traffic to travel as far as Vietnam and other parts of the world.
Other data centers are already there as big cloud companies like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, have built several farms in the Nordics.
Mercedes and Volkswagen have set up computers in former mines in Norway, simulating wind-tunnel and crash tests for their cars.
The idea of de facto wind-power and hydrogen community centered on the North Sea would give Europe as a whole a much-needed economic and geopolitical boost.
Iberian Peninsula in the Middle of the Energy Crisis
We have to know that Portugal has no coal mines, oil wells and gas fields. Its hydropower production was crippled by drought in 2022. It is disconnected from the rest of Europe for the energy network has left the country as the status of “energy island.”
For years that the Iberian Peninsula was cut off from the pipelines and supply of Russian gas that powered much of Europe that left the two countries, Portugal and Spain, turned to invest heavily in renewable resources of energy like wind, solar and hydropower. Also the importation of gas from North and West Africa and the United States.
During the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially with the recent indefinitely suspension of gas by Gazprom, to Germany through its Nord Stream 1 pipeline, the European Union seeks to counter Russia’s energy blackmail and manage the transition to renewables and determine infrastructure investments to offset the political tensions.
One of the options come into mind is through the funneling of more gas to Europe through the Iberian Peninsula and both Portugal and Spain were among the first European nations to build the processing terminals need to offload the boatloads of natural gas in liquefied form and to convert it into vapor that can be sent out through pipes into homes and businesses.
Earlier on, the imported liquified natural gas (LNG) was more expensive than the type of gas sent by Russia through gas to Europe, but this time they looked at it differently as they have to import from almost every direction.
Together, Spain and Portugal are accounted for one-third of Europe’s capacity to process LNG. Spain has the most terminals and also the biggest, Portugal is the most strategically located.
Sines Refinery in Portugal is the closest in Europe to the U.S. and the Panama Canal. It is the first port in Europe to receive LNG from the United States.
Spain has the most extensive network of pipelines that carry natural gas from Algeria and Nigeria, as well as the large storage facilities.
Meanwhile Portugal is suggesting a new gas pipeline to carry green hydrogen from Sines to the Spanish border to help to ease the energy supply.
But discussing a unified energy policy among the European countries with different resources, needs and priorities have always remain a knotty political problem.
Before, France was not interested about constructing any gas and electrical connections through its country, and Germany was relying on its link of its energy from Russia. Every country was protecting its energy producers and some even back up their nuclear power industry from competition. Portugal and Spain who initially objected to the European Commission’s proposal for a 15% curb on natural gas use knowing through their energy network it could ease the pressure.
At this time, to create a more integrated energy system would benefit the European Union as a whole. And Portugal has at times in the past that excess electricity produced primarily by wind in Portugal and sun in Spain could ease shortages in the rest of Europe. To correct the “imbalance” in priorities and the voices from southern Europe had been neglected in the past.
Portugal and Spain’s ability to generate cheap electricity from wind, sun and hydropower is putting pressure on Europe’s energy market. France has been the country who is so hostile towards this, but other countries like Germany, Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, Luxembourg and Belgium for instance would need the cheaper energy now. The European Union is still trying to reconfigure a system that is currently based the price of electricity from gas when at time the gas price was cheap. But now with the soaring of the gas prices, the electricity cost has also skyrocketing. Both Portugal and Spain are called for exception and can cap their price for electricity by decoupling from the gas price for one year.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said that the current system didn’t work and would need to be reformed and to face the new realities of the domain of renewables. The European Union would need to face the reality collectively and not to argue on individual interest while considering that the energy crisis is right at their doorsteps now.
Before the press – We came across two images from Pinterest and please refer to the following:
