Norway to set new limit for Arctic oil drilling
OSLO (Reuters) – Norway may restrict oil firms’ access to offshore resources in the Arctic by moving the so-called ice edge, a line that sets a legal limit on the extent to which companies can go north in search of oil. The ice edge is a legally drawn boundary that is meant to approximate the constantly changing southern fringe of the permanent ice sheet. Anything north of that legal line is off-limits to oil drilling under Norwegian law.
However, instead of redrawing the line further north to reflect the retreating ice sheet, the ruling coalition may move it further south as it responds to political pressure to extend environmental protection of the Arctic.
The ice cover in the Barents Sea has halved over the past 40 years. In practice, it would be ice-free year-round by 2050 given the current trend, Tor Eldevik, a professor at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research at the University of Bergen told Reuters.
“It’s one of the difficult issues (for the government to decide on),” Prime Minister Erna Solberg told Reuters in an interview.
“The ice cap is moving, it’s been moving upwards … You can’t measure it every year, so you have to put the line, and have a discussions where that line would have to be.”
“If you take it too far down then it would cross some areas that are already being explored.”
The centre-right minority government has been reviewing the ice edge boundary and is due to present its new demarcation line to parliament in April. It has already received recommendation from an advisory group of Norwegian research institutions and state agencies, which have presented two options.
One would be to draw the line where the sea ice appeared at least 30% of the time in April, the peak month for the Arctic ice sheet in the Barents Sea, between 1988 and 2017.
That would place the line further north than today, as the current line, set in 2006, was based on sea ice observations from 1967 to 1989.
The other option is to draw the line at where sea ice probability is only 0.5%, in order to protect the Arctic environment. This would place the line further south and would be problematic for oil and gas companies, Norway’s biggest industry.
It would affect at least eight oil exploration licenses operated by Equinor, Aker BP and Spirit Energy, majority owned by Britain’s Centrica, the Norwegian Oil and Gas Association (NOG), a lobby group, said.
It would also come close to the Wisting discovery estimated to hold 440 million barrels of oil. Equinor plans to develop the discovery together with OMV, Idemitsu Petroleum and Petoro, a Norwegian state-owned firm.
“The sea ice influences the ecosystem that lies further south … and this is why some think that it should be further south than it has been before,” said Cecilie von Quillfeldt, a senior adviser at the Norwegian Polar Institute.
The NOG is proposing a third option: to use a “dynamic” ice edge definition, meaning that the line would move along with observable sea ice, and is not set as “a static and politically determined line on the map”.
Lawmakers Reuters spoke to said the most likely deal would be moving the line further south than now, but without affecting oil licenses already granted to companies.
“None of the extremes would gain enough support. The line would be put somewhere in the middle,” Lene Westgaard-Halle, a Conservative lawmaker on parliament’s energy and environment committee, told Reuters.
An opposition lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity, said such a compromise would be acceptable.
However, pro-green lawmakers in all parties are enjoying popular support and could be successful in pushing for the ice edge definition that goes the most south.
Waters close to the ice sheet are important feeding grounds for many Arctic species, from tiny zooplankton to polar bears and whales. At the same time, the Barents Sea may contain two-thirds of the oil and gas yet to be discovered off Norway, according to Norwegian official estimates.
LONDON – There is no doubt that by the year 2100, the world will enjoy abundant cheap zero-carbon energy. Coal will be confined to museums, and oil and gas use will be dramatically reduced. Technological progress makes that inevitable, even if unassisted by government policy. But to prevent potentially catastrophic climate change, a zero-carbon global economy must be achieved by mid-century. That, too, is possible, but only with strategic vision and strong policy support.
Electricity will dominate the future global energy system. Currently, it accounts for only 20% of final energy demand, with direct fossil-fuel use still dominant in transport, heating, and heavy industry. But most economic activities can be powered by electricity, and many will be far more efficient once electrified.
For example, internal-combustion engines typically turn 60-80% of all the energy they use into wasted heat, and only 20-40% into kinetic energy to drive the vehicle. Electric engines, by contrast, are over 90% efficient. Moreover, they are so much simpler to produce that within five years the cost savings on engines will offset the cost of batteries, making electric vehicles cheaper than diesel or gasoline cars. Similarly, electric heat pumps can deliver more than three kilowatt-hours of residential heating for only one kilowatt of energy input; no gas boiler could deliver more than 0.9 kWh for the same input.
Although battery-powered electric engines will play a growing role in short-distance aviation and shipping, batteries will be too heavy to power long-distance flights or intercontinental shipping for several decades yet. But ship engines could burn ammonia rather than fuel oil – and ammonia can be a zero-carbon fuel if it is made from hydrogen produced by electrolyzing water, using electricity generated from renewable sources. In addition, synthetic jet fuel can be made from hydrogen and carbon dioxide extracted from the air. Hydrogen, whether used as a fuel or a key chemical input, will also play a major role in the decarbonization of heavy industrial sectors such as steel and chemicals.
Without assuming any fundamental technological breakthroughs, we could certainly build by 2050 a global economy in which electricity met 65-70% of final energy demand, and hydrogen, ammonia, or synthetic fuel met a further 12-15%. Bioenergy and fossil fuels would then need to meet only about 20% of total energy use – and applying carbon capture to this greatly reduced fossil-fuel use could then ensure a truly zero-carbon economy.
Moreover, such widespread electrification would deliver huge environmental benefits, eliminating the pollution, noise, and unwanted or wasted heat inevitably produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, gas boilers, and industrial processes.
Building this economy will require an annual global electricity supply of about 90,000 terawatt-hours, compared to 23,000 TWh today; all of that must be generated in a zero-carbon way. But this goal, too, is undoubtedly attainable. Every day, the sun radiates to earth enough energy to cover humans’ daily energy needs 8,000 times, and we could provide 90,000 TWh of solar electricity using less than 1.5% of Earth’s land surface (or less than 0.5% if its water surface could be used as well). Solar-energy costs have fallen by 85% in the last ten years, and in many locations solar power is already cheaper than coal; by mid-century, it will be cheaper still.
Wind-power costs also have declined fast, and nuclear fusion may be a commercially viable technology within two decades. Battery costs have fallen by more than 80% since 2010 and will likely more than halve again by 2030, while a recent report suggests that electrolysis costs will now most probably “plummet.” Furthermore, a wide array of other energy-storage and demand-management technologies promises to answer the key question for renewable power systems: what to do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
These developments make it inevitable that by 2100 the world will have an ample supply of cheap and totally clean energy. But it is not inevitable that we will avoid catastrophic climate change. Fossil-fuel use is still increasing, and global warming is currently on track to reach 3°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, dramatically overshooting the target of well below 2°C set by the Paris climate agreement. And although solar and wind costs have plunged, we need to increase capacity at 3-4 times the current rate to have a feasible chance of producing 90,000 TWh of clean electricity by 2050.
The macroeconomic cost of such an effort is not at all daunting: the total incremental investment required to build a zero-carbon economy by 2050 amounts to about 1-1.5% of global GDP per year. But the required acceleration will not occur without forceful government policies.
Such policies must start by recognizing that massive clean electrification, plus large-scale hydrogen use, is the only route to zero-carbon prosperity. Governments should set challenging targets for increasing renewable (and in some cases nuclear) power capacity, while using auctions to secure private-sector delivery at the lowest possible cost. Road-transport strategies must aim to completely eliminate internal-combustion engines from our roads by 2050 at the very latest: this will require bans on the sale of new internal-combustion vehicles far sooner. In addition, carbon pricing is essential to make industrial decarbonization economic. Finally, governments must support new technologies with initial deployment subsidies of the sort that have helped to reduce rapidly the costs of solar photovoltaic technology, wind turbines, and batteries.
With such policies, the world could build a zero-carbon economy fast enough to limit climate change to a manageable extent. But without the right measures, a zero-carbon economy will come much too late.