Energy and Climate Scenarios

S&P Global has decades of experience in the development and use of integrated, long-term scenarios that project energy use and emissions by fuel type, country and sector. Our Energy and Climate Scenarios include three bottom-up forecasts to 2050 and two low emissions cases that are “back-cast” from a pre-determined goal of a 1.5°C pathway. Each of the five long-term outlooks encompasses different assumptions and drivers and can be used to test future business strategies, including economic growth, policy, politics, trade, technology evolution, consumer behavior, etc.

• Three forward looking scenarios (S&P Global base case “Inflections”; dysfunctional world “Discord”; and more climate-aggressive, greener outlook “Green Rules”) start from today and project outlooks for energy markets and emissions at a country and sector level under a set of articulated assumptions around the evolution of policies, consumer behavior, costs, technologies, geopolitics and economics. All three are considered plausible outcomes by our experts and our clients, with much debate within and across companies as to which is the most likely based on different perspectives. Please Note: Two of these scenarios were updated in July 2021.
• Two net-zero cases start with the pre-determined outcome of being on a pathway to prevent the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C/1.6°C by 2050 compared with pre-industrial times. They are hence “back-cast” to 2020 and would require radical change to be achieved compared with history.
  
  We provide a net-zero scenarios with a high use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) applied to large stationary emitters in the power and industrial sectors. This would assume that all new gas and coal-fired power generation in emerging and mature markets would require CCS units, with some existing facilities being retrofit. Robust carbon pricing and policy mechanisms would be required to underpin such an outlook.
  
  We provide a net-zero scenario with very limited employment of CCS—as a contrast to most of the other low emissions outlooks that are available. Such an outlook would assume that societies around the world do not wish to enable new hydrocarbon developments through the use of carbon capture, and would instead be based on a massive buildout of low-cost renewables, significant advances in energy efficiencies, changes in consumer behavior, and comprehensive fuel switching across all end use sectors.

Deliverables include:

• Energy Scenarios and Net-zero cases: data sets, descriptions, and analysis of implications
• Scenarios signposts
• Climate policy country profiles for the G20 countries
• Climate Energy Transition Indices
• Strategic insights and reports
• Analytics dashboards
• APIs
• Workshops and webinars
• Access to experts