IEA World Energy Outlook 2022

[elbows]

This years report is out. It will take me a while to cover all the detail, but I will attempt to do so via a series of posts in the coming days and weeks.

World Energy Outlook 2022 – Analysis - IEA

World Energy Outlook 2022 - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.

www.iea.org

Unsurprisingly some of the emphasis involves what has happened with Russia and the resulting global energy crisis, eg this from the foreword of the full pdf:

For example, there is a mistaken idea that this is somehow a clean energy crisis. That is simply not true. The world is struggling with too little clean energy, not too much. Faster clean energy transitions would have helped to moderate the impact of this crisis, and they represent the best way out of it. When people misleadingly blame climate and clean energy for today’s crisis, what they are doing – whether they mean to or not – is shifting attention away from the real cause: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Another mistaken idea is that today’s crisis is a huge setback for efforts to tackle climate change. The analysis in this Outlook shows that, in fact, this can be a historic turning point towards a cleaner and more secure energy system thanks to the unprecedented response from governments around the world, including the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, the Fit for 55 package and REPowerEU in the European Union, Japan’s Green Transformation (GX) programme, Korea’s aim to increase the share of nuclear and renewables in its energy mix, and ambitious clean energy targets in China and India.

And for anyone such as myself that used to look at energy from a peak oil perspective 20 years ago, it became clear many years ago that not only were the timescales, including length of plateau wrong in that version of peak oil, but also that the mainstream narrative would be one where deliberate human planning and decisions would be placed firmly in the driving seat, and thus the talk would be of a peak in fossil fuel demand, rather than supply. And we are now well into the period where in a range of planning scenarios that demand peak looms large:



Looking back on the peak oil theories at the start of this century, I consider that what can be salvaged from them was the sense that this would be a century of energy transition, and at the very least of an impending ceiling to maximum peak production levels.

I am aware that in order for people to make any sense of this sort of data, it is necessary to properly describe the three example scenarios they make use of in this report. I will attempt to do so in the next post I make on this thread.

 

[elbows]

I may as well just quote from the report in order to describe the scenarios:

Each scenario is based on a different vision of how policy makers might respond to today’s crisis. In the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), we explore how the energy system evolves if we retain current policy settings. These include the latest policy measures adopted by governments around the world, such as the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States, but do not assume that aspirational or economy‐wide targets are met unless they are backed up with detail on how they are to be achieved.

In the Announced Pledges Scenario (APS), governments get the benefit of the doubt. In this scenario, their targets are achieved on time and in full, whether they relate to climate change, energy systems or national pledges in other areas such as energy access. Trends in this scenario reveal the extent of the world’s collective ambition, as it stands today, to tackle climate change and meet other sustainable development goals. Only in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario, do we work back from specific goals – the main one in this case being to cap global warming to 1.5 °C – and show how they can be achieved.

 

[elbows]

The report is so long that its going to be very challenging to do it justice on this thread. I will keep trying, but fairly slowly.

I've also had reason to quote the report and some of its charts on some other threads, so I will point out some of those as I go along. For example I've just used a few bits from the report in the thread about nuclear power: #228

 

[elbows]

The net zero scenario in the report is, as we would expect, by far the most dramatic, so I'll be tempted to focus on that one more than the others.

Here is the sort of investment picture over the decades that they envisage for that scenario: