POWER February 2022 - 40

COMMENTARY
Phil Hart, PhD
W
The Developed World Must
Turn Fossil Fuel Industries
into Green Tech Powerhouses
for Developing Countries
hen environmental advocates implore less-wealthy
countries to cease oil or gas investment and production
because it is the cause of climate change,
they are often branded as naive and ridiculous. Do we really
expect, in the cold light of day, that nations will comply? The
developing world can claim-in a perfectly reasonable and
compelling way-that the well-being and growth in living
standards of their own people is a short-term necessity, and
that longer term, issues can only be fixed with revenue from
sales of fossil fuels. They could rightly ask why they should
limit their national development when they have a single viable
path out of financial destitution.
We must adapt our well-meaning demands to give flexibility
for those who, for local reasons, cannot realistically
cease fossil fuel production. Rather, we must act to address
the global problem ourselves. All wealthy oil and gas producing
nations can and should make a change to dramatically
reduce fossil fuel production and use immediately. We
have the wealth. We can absorb the pain. There really is no
excuse for inaction locally. We must focus on cleaning up
our own backyards by limiting (and ultimately reversing) the
damage from our own fossil fuel production. We can do this
by turning them off as quickly as possible, reducing our outputs
decisively, and then by driving a change in consumption
patterns from our populations. That's a pain we should
assume as soon as possible, because we have alternatives
and we have the ability to do so.
Helping the World Transition
Developing countries cannot absorb the financial pain or impose
the results of turning off fossil fuel revenues on their
populations. In the short term, they could (and maybe should)
be encouraged to replace some of the lost production globally-resulting
from developed countries dramatically scaling
back their operations-and gain increased revenue for
their economies. They could make hay while the sun shines,
using this to make sensible, informed investment decisions
to build a more robust diversified long-term economy.
Overall, and over time, global production would still decrease
because the consumer demand from the developed
world would decrease, but in this crucial transition period,
the developing countries would get a fair crack at accessing
fossil fuel revenues to accelerate growth and raise living
standards within their populations. This isn't the instant
win demanded by idealists, but it is a practical approach
that could work.
If we went this route, we must ask ourselves a different
question: how can rich countries help make continued
fossil fuel production by others less harmful? Instead of
40
screaming " turn it off, " we must reframe the conversation
and offer to help developing countries stop polluting. Our
efforts under this concept would be to put our impressive
research and innovation capability into developing tools,
technologies, and processes that limit or remove the negative
impacts of fossil fuel extraction. We could help the
developing world extract fossil fuels in a cleaner way by
exporting our high-tech green products.
Aligning Incentives with Desired Outcomes
The significant
incentive regimes-the tax breaks-that
currently encourage highly developed nations to produce
hydrocarbons need to be overhauled as soon as possible.
We must align those mechanisms with our revised ambitions
and remove local production incentives immediately.
To hasten the transition of our fossil fuel industries to a majority
service and technology export-led model (rather than
production led), we should repurpose some of the incentive
regimes to subsidize the development of greener extraction
solutions and support their uptake by the developing world.
This would ease our industry's short-term pain and protect
local jobs, whilst assisting our global net-zero goals. Given
the substantial scale of the numbers involved, we could
then take remaining sums to add further inducement to our
renewables industry locally, and to support the retraining
and transitioning of our fossil fuel workforce.
We can make these low-emissions technologies more attractive
by pricing them competitively. In our drive for net-zero,
we would subsidise them over the traditional solutions to encourage
their uptake and use. That would include helping support
fuel hungry chemical plants, concrete, or steel works to
adopt our high-tech export of carbon capture and storage, and
greenhouse gas capture technologies to remove harmful emissions.
Longer term, we could help countries to locally refine
their fossil fuels into useful non-polluting products, such as hydrogen
or base chemicals, to become long-term exporters of
green commodities rather than polluting fossil fuels.
A Realistic and Workable Approach
So, should we accept the reality of continued fossil fuel production
in the developing world, while applying our skills to avoid/
limit the damage done to the planet and to our economies?
The solution is imperfect-it's a non-ideal, twisting route to the
end of fossil fuels-but, this more pragmatic idealism would
limit the economic and social shocks to all of us, be fairer, and,
I would argue, could even mean a faster global transition to a
new world of sustainable energy. ■
-Phil Hart, PhD is a professor and director of
Energy and Power at Cranfield University.
www.powermag.com
POWER | February 2022
http://www.powermag.com
POWER February 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER February 2022
