Ukraine crisis injects urgency, complexity into energy transition plans – study

Russia's invasion of Ukraine added uncertainty to already complicated climate change projections, but it likely will accelerate Europe's development of renewable resources to get away from Russian natural gas, a Washington, D.C., environmental and economic think tank said.

"There's nothing like a war and people lying in streets to motivate action," Resources for the Future President and CEO Richard Newell said at an April 7 online presentation for the group's "Global Energy Outlook 2022: Turning Points and Tension in the Energy Transition."

Europe already had an ambitious schedule to replace fossil fuels with renewables resources, Newell said, and the Ukraine invasion will cause the continent to "double down" on efforts to develop renewable energy and wean itself off Russian natural gas.

"There's very likely to be some short-term reactions that look like they are in the other direction; for example, keeping open coal plants," Newell said. But he said the long-term effects of Europe's already aggressive emissions program would outweigh a sudden burst of fossil fuel use.

In the "Global Energy Outlook," Resources for the Future, or RFF, normalized data from a variety of energy forecasts so they can be compared on an apples-to-apples basis. The outlook's 18 scenarios were split into three groups: the traditional business as usual; the pursuit of already announced emissions goals; and ambitious efforts to limit fossil fuel use and emissions to meet the 1.5 degrees C global temperature increase goal envisioned in the Paris Agreement on climate change. The scenarios were developed by companies such as Shell PLC and Equinor ASA and by energy researchers with the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Ambitious goals

The RFF researchers said natural gas demand would grow in almost every scenario, and wind and solar resources would grow dramatically. Despite the growth in cleaner energy resources, emissions would exceed climate change goals in most scenarios, RFF research analyst and report co-author Erin Campbell said. Carbon capture, utilization and storage projects, or CCUS, a solution favored by oil and gas drillers, would also grow, Campbell said.

"This technology deployment shows itself to be important in closing the growing gap between the ambition of 1.5 C and the reality of rising greenhouse gas emissions," Campbell said. Despite a massive expansion of CCUS projects envisioned in the ambitious scenarios, most emissions forecasts still exceeded the 1.5 degree goal, Campbell said.

Even before the Ukraine invasion, there was a wide range between the highest and lowest forecasts of energy use and emissions from different organizations, said report co-author Daniel Raimi, an RFF research fellow. The spread between the highest forecast oil demand and the lowest was 109 million barrels per day by 2050 — a number larger than current worldwide oil consumption, Raimi said.

It was not clear whether renewables, which are growing rapidly, will replace fossil fuels or just be added to fossil fuels to meet growing energy demand, Raimi said.

Concern and optimism

The need for action — by both the private and the public sector — to reduce fossil fuel use to net-zero emissions to meet the 1.5 degree limit is urgent, Sarah Ladislaw, the managing director for the U.S. at Colorado energy think tank RMI, said after the webinar. The combination of the energy crisis and a looming food security crisis is "the largest alarm bell combo that I've seen in the 20 years that I've been doing this, and so I actually think they reinforce each other in some pretty important ways," Ladislaw said.

Despite her concern, Ladislaw was optimistic that the transition to a low-carbon economy would charge ahead.

"There's just an unprecedented amount of money and attention and strategy going into creating new energy systems," Ladislaw said.

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