CO2 emissions will continue _{to rise until 2030, OPEC says}

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) predicted on Monday that energy-related carbon emissions will continue to rise for the rest of the current decade, although they will slow in the medium term, before starting to decline after 2030.

The vision presented by OPEC in its annual report “World Oil Outlook 2022”, are more pessimistic than those of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which considers that the world could reach the peak of CO2 emissions by 2025.

“As expected, the partial recovery in global energy demand (after the fall due to the covid-19 pandemic) during 2021 and 2022 resulted in an increase in energy-related CO2 emissions,” the report recalls.

Global emissions

Global greenhouse gas emissions increased last year by more than 1 billion tonnes compared to 2020, due to the strong recovery in economic activity and increased mobility.

For OPEC, that figure gives rise to “expect an increase in global CO2 emissions for the rest of the current decade, despite various efforts to minimize them.”

In the medium term, it considers it likely that stabilization will be achieved, before the “downward trajectory” begins “sometime at the beginning of the next decade, although decreasing at a slower pace than required by the Paris Agreement.”

In its main scenario, it predicts that annual energy-related CO2 emissions will rise to 35 billion tons by the end of the current decade, from the 33.7 billion tons estimated for 2021.

“Subsequently, they are expected to start slowly declining over the remainder of the forecast period, broadly returning to 2021 levels in 2045,” he explains.

Evolution

Developments will diverge in the industrialized nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), where a faster and more drastic reduction is expected, than in developing countries.

In the first case, OPEC calculates that, in parallel to a reduction in demand for oil and coal from 2023, emissions will fall steadily, accumulating a fall of 3,000 million tons of CO2 between 2021 and 2045.

In China they will “grow marginally” until 2025, peaking at about 10.3 billion tonnes a year, before gradually falling to 8 billion tonnes in 2045.

Some reduction, “of the order of 300 million tons”, is also expected in Eurasia, mainly caused by the fall in energy demand in Russia.

At the same time, emissions in developing countries are expected to rise, in line with their rapid economic and population growth, OPEC says.

Even so, the organization highlights that by 2045, rich countries will still have per capita rates of cumulative greenhouse emissions since 1900 considerably higher than those of developing nations.

Source: EFE Green