Cement, Energy & Environment

em1ss1on levels will cause further warming , the global community needs to carry out effective mitigation and policy action to arrest climate change. The sceptics can point out that the rate of warming during the 15-year period , 1998-2012, has been a mere 0.05° C, and so far slower than the trend since 1951 . But the report avers that the figures for short periods can be misleading and adds that many of the lately observed changes in climate patterns are unprecedented in decades and millennia. The contrast between wet and dry seasons and interregional variations are expected to increase, with the water cycle affected. Here, in India, C0 2 emissions remain minuscule in per capita terms, but given that energy poverty is widespread and energy demand likely to greatly increase going forward , we need to rev up energy efficiency and step up supply of alternative, renewable energy sources to boost overall supply and better manage the risks of climate change. It is entirely possible that in the future, there would be viable scientific solutions for global warming and climate change, and the techno economic paradigm based on fossil fuels of today is likely to change. But that possibility is a matter of conscious policy and investment, not chance. Courtesy: The Economic Times, 8.10.2013 CHINA'S COAL CONUNDRUM International climate-change diplomats, who have had a rough decade, got some potentially exciting news in May when reports emerged that China will consider an absolute cap on carbon emissions in advance of the climate talks scheduled in Paris for 2015. A hard emissions cap would be a dramatic policy shift for the People's Republic, which has previously limited emissions reduction schemes to compressing the Chinese economy's energy intensity (the amount of C0 2 released per unit of GOP) and which has decried international efforts to limit the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions -and thus the economic growth - of developing countries. The shift was signaled by remarks made by Jiang Kejun , a carbon policy researcher at the influential National Development and Reform Commission in Beijing, who told the Financial Times, "I am sure China will have a total emission target during the 13th Five-Year Plan." The move could enable an achievement that has eluded the world's major nations for years: a binding international agreement on carbon caps that includes both the developed economies of West and East Asia and rising economic powers like China and India. If true , this move would mark the latest in a series of measures to reduce GHG pollution in China , the world's largest producer of atmospheric C02. Seven Chinese cities plan to enact experimental carbon-trading programs , starting in 2014. Already the world's largest investor in renewable energy, China has set the goal of obtaining 15% of its power from nuclear power and renewables by 2020. Since taking office in March, President Xi Jinping has made shifting to a less resource-intensive economy and reducing the country's catastrophic air pollution major priorities. In many respects China has leaped ahead of both the United States and the European Union in its efforts to shift away from fossil fuels. There's one problem with this scenario: any program to reduce carbon emissions on the mainland depends on shrinking China's reliance on coal - and coal-fired power in China is not going away anytime soon. "It is very unlikely that demand for thermal coal in China will peak before 2030 ," said William Durbin, the Beijing-based president of global markets with Wood Mackenzie, in a statement accompanying the release of a new report entitled "China: The Illusion of Peak Coal." "Despite efforts to limit coal consumption and seek alternative fuel options, China's strong appetite for thermal coal will lead to a doubling of demand by 2030," the report concludes. Coal consumption in China, bolstered by a period of rampant construction of coal-fired plants that has only recently slowed, must rise to feed China's explosive demand for power, which will nearly triple to 15,000 TWh by 2030. Even existing goals for reducing coal consumption are sketchy, many analysts believe. "Achieving these targets eventually would come at considerable economic cost, "said John Reilly, an environmental economist at MIT. China is by far the world's largest importer of coal, and despite massive investments in nuclear, wind, and solar power, along with a crash program to develop domestic natural gas reserves, no other energy source can replace coal as a source of primary power in the next two decades. China's leaders are determined to replicate America's shale gas boom, but "natural gas supplies will struggle to meet demand growth due to modest investment in conventional reserves and the very slow development of domestic unconventional shale gas reserves ," Wood Mackenzie states. The continued coal boom in China also reflects the provincial divisions that make enacting nationwide policies increasingly challenging for leaders in Beijing. Most coal-reduction schemes are centered in the big cities of the coast, while the poorer provinces of the interior still rely on dirty, cheap 14