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Milton Catelin, Chief Executive, WCA

I was fortunate enough to participate on a panel at the FT Energy Leaders Summit in London a couple of weeks ago. The panel was focused on “energy solutions for today and tomorrow” and also included the DG of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA), the President/CEO of US-based NRG Energy, the CEO of the FutureGen Alliance, and the Chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (AEA). There’s usually a lot of rhetoric at these things and not a lot of unanimity amongst the panellists who often simply tout for their own energy source.

What was interesting on this occasion was the degree of consensus among the panellists.

After being asked to imagine the world 30 years from now, no panellists saw a successful outcome on climate change arising from the current Kyoto Protocol negotiations.  One panellist even indicated that he thought the Kyoto Protocol negotiation process had for all intents and purposes died in Copenhagen (2009) and had not really made any positive strides for many years in any case.  All panellists envisaged a large uptake of renewables over the period but none except the IREA representative imagined a sharp decline in either coal or nuclear.  All, except the IREA representative, agreed on the basic value proposition of coal and nuclear when it came to base load electricity.

For my part I suggested a successful global effort on both climate change and poverty eradication needed investment in coal, power plant efficiency improvements, and carbon capture and storage and pointed out that:

•    The IEA had estimated that climate change efforts would be 70% more expensive and probably unsuccessful without CCS.

•    Governments need to be both more aggressive and more thoughtful in low carbon investments – government funding on low carbon technologies needed to match government rhetoric on climate change, and investments in expensive renewable options needed to be at least equalled by investments in other areas such as CCS.

•    UN Millennium Development Goals needed to be revisited.  Why aspire to improve access to information technology (internet, mobile phones) but not to electricity?

The Summit was not without a remedial education element.  Many of the supposedly well-informed audience were quite surprised to learn that coal consumption grew by 7.6% last year, making it yet again the world’s fastest growing fuel.  (Gas grew by 7.4%, oil by 3.1%, nuclear by 2% and hydro by 5.3%.)  Virtually no-one knew that coal’s share of global energy consumption last year was its highest (29.3%) since 1970.