“It is very good that there is this agreement on coal but it is largely insufficient”, estimates a researcher

“It is very good that there is this agreement on coal but it is largely insufficient”, estimated Thursday, November 4 on franceinfo Sandrine Mathy, research director in environmental and energy economics at the CNRS, within the Applied Economics Laboratory of Grenoble (GAEL). At COP26, at least 190 countries and organizations announced on Thursday that they would put an end by the end of 2022 to overseas financing of fossil energy projects without carbon capture techniques, including large investors like the United States and Canada.

franceinfo: Is coal still widely used?

Sandrine Mathy: It is widely used in the production of electricity on a global level since about a third of the world electricity production is made from coal and this mainly in Asian countries, but also in the United States and in the European countries. So this agreement is a major issue.

Are these countries already in a phase of reducing coal production?

CO2 emissions are on the rise again. We see that China has not planned to reduce its emissions in the very short term since the peak of its CO2 emissions will not come until 2030. What is contradictory during this COP is that the we are overwhelmed by announcements of carbon neutrality by 2050-2060, but these objectives appear to be totally disconnected from the decisions that are taken for the very short term. It is very good that there is this agreement on coal, but it is largely insufficient since it will not prevent the construction of new plants in China or elsewhere. A coal-fired power plant has a lifespan of 40 years, so if it is built today, 40 years from now it will still be there. In 2020, in China, there was the equivalent of 40 gigawatts of electricity production from coal. In 2060, these coal-fired power stations will still be present. The reduction in coal consumption from 2030 is too little ambitious. A study published in Nature says that 90% of coal reserves must be left underground. If we don’t have China, the United States and India in the agreement and if the horizons are 2030 and 2040 for developing countries, that’s far too unambitious.

The signatories of this agreement undertake not to build new coal-fired power stations abroad. What do you think ?

There are already announcements that had been made in this direction during this year when including China pledged not to finance coal plants abroad. It is very good. What will happen is that there will be mistrust of these highly polluting energies and that it is a safe bet that ultimately the large groups that invest in these plants will no longer go too much towards these technologies. But when we see the national plans for the construction of thermal power stations, there are still a lot of them.