DOE sees transport causing dramatic spike in PH carbon emissions

While the government is pushing for massive-scale green technology installations in the power industry, the Department of Energy (DOE) indicated that the main segment that will trigger radical spike in the country’s carbon emissions will be the transport sector.

As stated in the updated Philippine Energy Plan (PEP), “emission from oil-based fuels, primarily consumed in the transport sector, puts in 47-percent share;” emphasizing that such will be in terms of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the Philippines onward to 2040.

The energy department primarily projected that GHG emissions will be increasing at an annual growth rate of 5.8-percent to 370.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) by 2040, which is roughly triple from 120MtCO2e in 2020.

The DOE highlighted that the share of transport sector in carbon emissions will be higher compared to the 35.3-percent emissions contribution expected from the coal-fired power facilities through year 2040.

The continued installation of gas-fired power facilities is likewise seen contributing 16.8-percent in the overall carbon emissions of the Philippines; hence, some project developers on that sphere are already casting plans to eventually shift to hydrogen fuel.

Apart from coal and oil resources being utilized in the energy sector, it was similarly stipulated in the updated PEP that services, households and the agriculture sector will likewise contribute to overall carbon emissions of the country for a fraction of 14.6-percent.

The energy transition agenda of the Philippines had been mainly anchored on deploying clean technologies in the power sector – and that will be underpinned by enforcing mandatory capacity off-take by the distribution utilities from renewable energy (RE) facilities.

Coal is still the reigning technology in the country’s energy mix, but the energy department is eyeing to balance that with the targeted 44,000 megawatts of additional RE installations until year 2040.

In the transport sector, the initiative of the government will be shift to electric vehicles (EVs) – but the promotion as well as consumer uptake had not been as aggressive compared to what is being done in the power segment.

At this stage, the EV deployment in the country is still at its very nascent phase; and so far, only two oil companies had taken initiative of installing EV chargers in their retail stations.

The recently passed Electric Vehicle Industry Development Act (EVIDA) targets transformation of the Philippine transport sector; with 10-percent of the fleets seen switching to EV by year 2030 – although consumer appetite is not really whetted until this time due to array of factors – primarily the higher cost of EVs as well as the lack of support infrastructure, such as accessible EV chargers.

There are also nagging debates about the source of power that will be fed into EV chargers – that if the technology underpinning them will be fossil fuels, it would end up to be a zero-sum game when it comes to the decarbonization goal of the country. (MMV)