Will the World Hit Net Zero by 2050?

Will the World Hit Net Zero by 2050?
'We view the next decade as critical'.
Image by NVS via iStock

BMI currently does not see enough progress on the decarbonization of the power mix, emissions reduction, or adoption of low carbon technology to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

That’s what Thomas van Lanschot, BMI’s Head of Power and Low Carbon Energy Research, told Rigzone, adding that BMI views the current spread of renewable targets and pledges to not reduce the share of high emitters significantly enough in multiple sectors, “leaving a substantial demand for mitigating emissions from sources such as coal”.

“We view the next decade as critical as the development of key technologies will need to be accelerated to have a meaningful impact over that time frame,” Lanschot said.

“These include commercializing and scaling up low carbon gas (such as hydrogen), energy storage, carbon mitigation, grid infrastructure and renewables in general,” he added.

Lanschot told Rigzone that “a major concern is the limited bilateral approach being taken between global economic leaders with counterproductive policy being developed”.

“Given net zero requires global cooperation we see the current geopolitical fragmentation as a major roadblock to substantially meaningful policy making,” the BMI representative said.

Back in May 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a “special report” it described as the world’s first comprehensive study of how to transition to a net zero energy system by 2050 “while ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth”.

In that report, the IEA noted that the number of countries announcing pledges to achieve net zero emissions over the coming decades continued to grow but highlighted that the pledges by governments at the time, even if fully achieved, “fall well short of what is required to bring global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050”.

The world has a viable pathway to building a global energy sector with net-zero emissions in 2050 but it is narrow and requires an unprecedented transformation of how energy is produced, transported, and used globally, the IEA said in the report, which set out more than 400 milestones “to guide the global journey to net zero by 2050”.

These included, from the date of the report’s publication, no investment in new fossil fuel supply projects and no further final investment decisions for new unabated coal plants, the IEA highlighted in a statement accompanying the report.

In an opinion piece published on Wood Mackenzie’s (WoodMac) website in February this year, WoodMac’s Vice President of Multi-Commodity Research, Prakash Sharma, and its Energy Transition Practice Director, David Brown, outlined that energy related emissions in WoodMac’s pledges case scenario decline eight percent from 2019 levels by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050.

Global net zero arrives around 2060 in that scenario, the WoodMac representatives highlighted in the piece. This means the world stays on track to reach 1.7 degrees Celsius warming with 33 percent probability and two degrees Celsius warming with 67 percent probability, the WoodMac representatives noted in the piece.

According to a climate action segment on the UN website, the world is not on track to reach net zero by 2050.

“Commitments made by governments to date fall far short of what is required,” the UN site states.

“Current national climate plans, for 193 Parties to the Paris Agreement taken together, would lead to a sizable increase of almost 11 percent in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared to 2010 levels,” it added.

“Getting to net zero requires all governments, first and foremost the biggest emitters, to significantly strengthen their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and take bold, immediate steps towards reducing emissions now,” it continued.

The site notes that transitioning to a net zero world is one of the greatest challenges humankind has faced.

“It calls for nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, consume, and move about,” the UN site states.

In a report published in January last year, McKinsey stated that the transformation of the global economy needed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 would be universal and significant, “requiring $9.2 trillion in annual average spending on physical assets, $3.5 trillion more than today”.

“To put it in comparable terms, that increase is equivalent to half of global corporate profits and one-quarter of total tax revenue in 2020,” McKinsey added in the report.

“Accounting for expected increases in spending, as incomes and populations grow, as well as for currently legislated transition policies, the required increase in spending would be lower, but still about $1 trillion,” McKinsey went on to state.

To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com


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