One of China’s top climate research institutes has said that the country would phase out coal power in about 2050 on its path toward meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) new climate targets.
Carbon emissions are to peak sometime between 2025 and 2030, and total energy demand would start to decline in about 2035, according to a new report from Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy, which works closely with the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment on projecting long term goals.
The report, presented in a Webinar on Sunday, is the first road map from a government-affiliated group showing how the country might proceed to becoming carbon neutral by 2060, a goal last week laid out by Xi in a speech to the UN.
Xie Zhenhua (解振華), who led China’s climate policies and represented the country in international climate negotiations for more than 10 years, runs a separate climate research institute at Tsinghua, which works with the Energy and Environment Economy Research Institute.
The path outlines a slow transition over the next decade-and-a-half, with a rapid acceleration after 2035. China’s energy mix would undergo a drastic transformation.
Some of the other key benchmarks include:
China’s carbon emissions are projected to rise from about 9.6 billion tonnes a year to 10.2 billion tonnes between 2025 and 2030.
Emissions would fall to about 9 billion tonnes in 2035, and then would decline dramatically to 3 billion tonnes per year by 2050, 900 million tonnes by 2055 and 200 million tonnes by 2060.
Energy demand would peak in about 2035 at somewhere between 6 billion tonnes and 6.5 billion tonnes of coal equivalent.
Coal-fired power would be phased out in about 2050. The share of non-fossil fuels in total energy demand would grow from about 15 percent last year to 20 percent by 2025, 24 percent in 2030, 62 percent in 2050 and 84 percent in 2060.
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