Tokyo, 16 April, /<a href=”https://en.ajmedia.jp/”>AJMEDIA</a>/
Group of Seven climate and energy ministers failed to set a deadline for ending coal power use after their two-day talks Sunday but committed to accelerating the phase-out of fossil fuels to achieve net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 at the latest.
Japan, which presided over the meeting in the northern city of Sapporo, has been reluctant to agree to a specific time frame for ending the resource-poor country’s use of coal given its likely need to rely on the energy source for at least most of the 2030s, despite a push by Britain and Canada to end the practice.
The ministers reiterated their commitment to “fully or predominantly” decarbonizing the power sector by 2035, according to a joint communique issued after their meeting on climate, energy and environmental issues.
Japanese Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura told a press conference that his country will work hard after the G-7 agreed to phase out so-called unabated fossil fuels, which includes gas, oil and coal, in the power sector for the first time. Unabated means a plant has not invested in pollution control technologies, such as carbon capture and storage.
Ministers also agreed to collectively reduce CO2 emissions from G-7 vehicle stock by at least 50 percent by 2035 or earlier, compared to emissions levels in 2000, as a halfway point to achieving net zero.
Japan was cautious about setting specific numerical targets in areas such as market volume, given the competitiveness of the country’s major automakers in gasoline-electric and plug-in-hybrid vehicles.
The gathering marked the first of a series of in-person ministerial meetings in the lead-up to the summit in May in Hiroshima, focusing on ways to reach the G-7 members’ target of realizing carbon neutrality by 2050 through a reduction in fossil fuel reliance and the expanded use of renewable energy sources.
Ensuring energy security has been a key agenda for G-7 ministers, who represent the member states of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States plus the European Union, following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a major fossil fuel exporter.
The Ukraine crisis caused prices of oil and gas to soar and pushed some importers to shift to coal and natural gas, slowing efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The G-7 also noted the use of hydrogen and its derivatives such as ammonia in the power sector as a potential solution to working towards zero-emission thermal power generation, a method Japan has been promoting.
Japan plans to make hydrogen a widely used source of energy, as it only emits water when combusted. It will be used not only to power vehicles and homes but also to reduce CO2 emissions from thermal plants by mixing it with coal and gas.
But the ministers were cautious about the implementation of hydrogen and its derivatives in thermal generation, saying the method needs to avoid producing pollutants such as greenhouse gas and nitrogen dioxide.
The ministers gathered as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. climate panel, pressed for rapid action, saying in a March report that for global temperature rises to be kept to 1.5 C compared with pre-industrial levels — the target under the Paris Agreement — the world needs to halve CO2 emissions by 2030 from 2019 levels and cut them by 65 percent by 2035.
The G-7 ministers also discussed ways to encourage companies to manufacture products that are easy to recycle and to ensure a transparent and sustainable supply of critical minerals, including lithium and cobalt, whose availability is dependent on certain countries such as China.
Ministers from India, the president of the Group of 20 major economies, Indonesia, the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the United Arab Emirates, the host of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, all for this year, attended as invitees.