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Displace Indian coal power with Canadian natural gas: report
Canada is a founding member of the Powering Past Coal Alliance – a consortium of national and subnational governments committed to addressing climate change by phasing out coal power.
Conspicuously absent from the alliance is India, which has signaled plans to double coal production to 1.5 billion tonnes tonnes by 2030 in order to add 88 gigawatts (GW) of new thermal power from coal by 2032, according to the National Bank of Canada.
The amount of greenhouse gases that would produce would wipe out any emissions reductions Canada is able to achieve through its climate change policies many times over, National Bank of Canada says in a new report, which urges investors and policymakers to promote the use of Canadian natural gas, through LNG exports, to replace coal in thermal power generation in places like India.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), GHG emissions can be reduced by 50 per cent when combined cycle natural gas power plants replace thermal power from coal.
So while increased production of natural gas and LNG in Canada would contribute to an increase in Canada’s own GHGs, it could dramatically decrease GHGs outside of Canada, if it displaces coal power.
“Emissions are global, they are not bound by geographical boundaries, as such, we propose to reorient the conversation with a global tilt,” the report says.
“Continued efforts in constraining certain sectors of the economy could be futile in ‘deleveraging’ the global environmental balance sheet as a direct result of other countries increasing their absolute share by orders of magnitude more. “
The report is aimed at investors and policymakers, said report author Baltej Sidhu, ESG research analyst for National Bank of Canada.
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