UNIDO pursues climate change and clean energy options to meet environmentally effective goals

If mitigating climate change is a priority, then a transformation of how the world produces, transports and uses electricity will be required

Coping with climate change requires a vast array of new knowledge as well as related investments to deploy new technologies. This must be done with a sense of urgency.

Likewise, access to energy is also a major challenge. As demand for energy services is rising, the problem of energy access for the poor has become even more acute.

On 28 April 2010, United Nations’ Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented the report of his Advisory Group on Energy and Climate Change (AGECC), which calls for universal energy access to the billions of energy poor by 2030. These efforts will be fundamental to sustainable development, addressing the climate challenge and realizing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The report was launched during a major energy event at UN headquarters in New York, which was jointly hosted by the AGECC and UN-Energy, the UN’s inter-agency mechanism for energy cooperation.

As Chairman of both UN-Energy and AGECC, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s (UNIDO) Director-General, Kandeh K. Yumkella was invited to this years’ annual Statoil corporate summit at their headquarters in Stavanger, Norway.

Addressing Statoil's top executives, including President and CEO Helge Lund, Yumkella talked about the need to provide energy access to developing countries by investing in research and development, pursuing a wider range of energy technologies, and developing meaningful public-private partnerships.

“It is clear that the scale of the investment to fund the transition to a sustainable, equitable and low-carbon economy is enormous. What the recent UN climate talks clearly illustrated was that the energy sector is a priority area where we can put words into action immediately,” said Yumkella.

Countries worldwide are identifying, evaluating, and implementing a variety of climate change and clean energy policies and programs to meet environmental, energy, and economic goals.

To this end, UNIDO with several partners are developing a global technology roadmap for carbon capture and storage (CCS) for industrial processes. CCS is a climate mitigation tool that captures, separates and stores carbon dioxide (CO2) in deep geological formations, away from the atmosphere.

Statoil is an international energy company and is currently involved in three large CCS projects, one of which is the Sleipner platform field in the North Sea. There, CO2 is prevented from seeping into the atmosphere by an 800 meter thick cap rock above a storage location. Yumkella and Special Adviser to the Director-General Ole Lundby were able to visit the Sleipner platform to receive in-depth information on the CCS storage facility.

“If we're going to continue to use coal we're going to have to have some way of reducing the carbon dioxide." Lundby says.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that carbon capture and storage, trapping the carbon dioxide before it escapes from the smokestack and pumping it underground, will likely be a key technology solution for mitigating climate change, along with a variety of other options.

Statoil’s President and CEO, Helge Lund, believes CCS will be a central CO2 mitigation tool. “We need pioneers from industry, governments, researchers, and environmental NGOs to explore this path. Climate change is the biggest challenge of our time and finding sustainable solutions is a matter of urgency.” Lund says.

Posted May, 2010