New Nature article shows why fossil fuels use must decline rapidly to limit global heating to 1.5C

With COP28 being hosted in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil and gas producing region, it is inevitable that there will be many vocal advocates pushing for action for a phase out of fossil fuels. 

A new journal article recently published in Nature Communications, and featured this week in Carbon Brief, assesses what the scientific evidence tells us about the need to phase out fossil fuels in order to keep average annual global temperatures below 1.5°C. To do this, the researchers took a deep dive look at the scenario ensemble that was used in the recently published IPCC AR6 report on mitigation, by Working Group III. The team focused on the scenario group known as C1, which limit warming to 1.5°C with limited or no overshoot of this target.

In terms of necessary global fossil fuel reductions, the research shows that coal, oil and fossil gas use needs to decline by 95%, 62% and 42% respectively, from 2020 to 2050. While the declines for coal and oil show similar rates, there is large variability in gas supply, including pathways where gas supply continues to increase.

A key part of the research was to determine why the role for gas is so variable. The researchers found that gas supply was primarily influenced by three key factors - carbon pricing, constraints on the availability of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), and constraints on renewable energy deployment.

A closer assessment highlighted that many scenarios assumed rates of CCS and CDR that were likely to be greater than what could be feasibly achieved. Further filtering out of those ‘infeasible’ scenarios highlighted that gas would have to phase out twice as fast, declining by 84% in 2050 relative to 2020 levels. This also has implications for coal and oil, which declined by 99% and 70% respectively. Article co-author Steve Pye (UCL Energy Institute) noted:

“As has been shown by the Production Gap Report, Governments have yet to appreciate the need for reducing fossil fuel production, with continued plans for expansion of the industry. This paper provides further evidence of the critical need to rapidly decline fossil fuel production and use, if we are to have any chance of addressing the climate crisis. At COP28, governments need to address this challenge head on – and propose meaningful action.

The paper was led by Ploy Achakulwisut from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), with other selected authors, mainly made up of authors from the UNEP Production Gap report. 

Links

• Access the article on the Carbon Brief website

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