IEA: Surge In Renewables And EVs Has Limited Global Emissions

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Oct 19, 2022

• The growth in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion is expected to be far smaller in 2022 than the year before.
• According to the IEA, a surge in renewable energy and electric vehicles has helped to cap emissions.
• The IEA believes that CO2 emissions this year would be more than three times greater if that surge in renewables and EVs hadn’t taken place.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels globally are expected to rise by just under 1% in 2022, a much smaller increase compared to last year’s thanks to record deployment of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a new analysis on Wednesday.  

Last year, CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels jumped as the global economy began to recover rapidly from the economic crisis triggered by Covid, the IEA said.  

This year, the rise in those emissions will be much smaller, defying expectations of a major jump because of the increased use of coal for power generation amid soaring natural gas prices, the international agency said.

According to the IEA’s analysts of the latest data, CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are on track to increase by nearly 300 million tons in 2022 to 33.8 billion tons. The rise of 300 million tons would be “a far smaller rise than their jump” of nearly 2 billion tons in 2021.

“Global CO2 emissions would be set for a 3-times-bigger rise in 2022 – of nearly 1 gigatonne – were it not for a major expansion of solar, wind & EVs,” the IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol said.  

“This is contributing to an improvement in the CO2 intensity of global energy supply, resuming a key trend,” Birol added.

“The global energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a scramble by many countries to use other energy sources to replace the natural gas supplies that Russia has withheld from the market. The encouraging news is that solar and wind are filling much of the gap, with the uptick in coal appearing to be relatively small and temporary,” Birol said in a statement.

The IEA analysis shows that CO2 emissions are growing far less quickly this year than some people feared, he added.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com