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Enough Meaningless Phrases on Fossil Fuels [1]
['Lara Williams']
Date: 2023-10-30
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A sphinxlike term keeps popping up in discourse around phasing out fossil fuels: “unabated.” Easily overlooked, it’s an important modifier that changes an ambitious demand — stop burning fossil fuels — into phrases with more elusive meanings. Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend. ArrowRight The European Union has decided it will push for the phasing out of unabated fossil fuels at COP28 in Dubai. More than 130 businesses, collectively worth almost $1 trillion, signed a letter this week calling for governments to commit to the full discontinuance of unabated hydrocarbons. US climate envoy John Kerry has pressed for the end of new unabated coal-fired power plants. Sultan Al Jaber, president-designate of this year’s United Nations climate summit, has set an action plan for “an energy system free of unabated fossil fuels in the middle of this century.” Back in 2021, at COP26 in Glasgow, nations promised to accelerate efforts toward the “phasedown of unabated coal power.”This ambiguity leaves an enormous loophole for the continued expansion of fossil-fuel production under the vague promise that all will be abated in the future.
Abatement was a popular term originally used in pollution regulation, mandating companies to stay within certain limits, Katrine Petersen, a senior policy adviser at think tank E3G, explained to me. Now it’s crept into how we discuss emissions, yet the specificity required for effective regulation remains ephemeral.
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The closest we get to a definition is in an IPCC footnote, which says:
“‘Unabated fossil fuels’ refers to fossil fuels produced and used without interventions that substantially reduce the amount of [greenhouse gas] emitted throughout the life-cycle; for example, capturing 90% or more from power plants, or 50-80% of fugitive methane emissions from energy supply.”
Likewise, in the EU council’s conclusions ahead of COP28, some guardrails have been included in its negotiating position. For instance, it stresses that the power sector should be “predominantly free of fossil fuels well ahead of 2050,” and that technology should be used to reduce emissions mainly from hard-to-abate sectors and not delay action where “feasible, effective and cost-efficient mitigation alternatives are available.”
These are both good places to start, but higher-level standards are necessary.
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For example, carbon capture and storage (CCS) needs to separate high percentages of carbon dioxide from factory emissions — preferably 95% and above — while methane leakage must be set at a low rate, eventually diminishing until no fugitive emissions exist. Petersen suggests excluding offsets since they don’t directly reduce the emissions of a given fossil-fuel project. The entire emissions life cycle should be covered, from those released when the fuel is extracted through to the CO2 discharged when the fuel is used. Captured carbon should be required to be stored permanently rather than used in enhanced oil recovery.
There’s evidence that strong abatement regulations can have a significant impact. In the UK, the government’s coal phaseout allowed for new power plants, but only if the facilities could demonstrate CCS from the start. Once the technology was commercially viable, plants would have five years to install 100% CCS. No new coal plants have been built.
After all, though the tech works, the economics are trickier. Developers in the UK found it more cost effective to invest in renewables instead.
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As my colleagues at Bloomberg News have pointed out, total CCS capacity is only about 45 million tons of CO2 a year although the basic process has been around since the 1970s. Putting that into context, that’s 4% of the carbon capture needed by 2030 to be on track for net-zero emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.
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Other than being extremely expensive, there are other reasons why we can’t just carbon capture our way out of this mess. Even if you scrub emissions clean of CO2, a smorgasbord of other nasties persist: particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and mercury. They lead to oil spills, acid rain and water pollution. Air pollution from fossil fuels was responsible for about 1 in 5 deaths worldwide in 2018.
Of course, as we get closer to COP28, some countries may want to keep the terms as vague as possible. But leaving that door open will allow nations to create individual standards based on their interests, which may not be aligned with what the science says we should do.
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I expect we’ll see “unabated” in the final text of COP28’s agreement. But if there’s going to be a credible push for an unabated fossil-fuel phaseout, then countries must be open to negotiations on what that actually entails. Abatement standards could be a potent force to help us finally turn the tide. Without them, the commitments will ring hollow.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
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[1] Url:
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