sectoral economic costs and benefits of ghg mitigation - IPCC

Jonathan Stern
Discussion: Impact on Natural Gas Industries 1
Jonathan Stern
In general I found myself very much in agreement with the thrust of the paper, what follows are
some comments on a series of issues which seemed to me problematic in the model results for
natural gas.
Global Natural Gas Demand
As table 1 shows, natural gas is a relatively “young” fuel, especially outside OECD and the
economies in transition (EIT). 2 If we look at the position of gas in the 1990s compared to 1980, it
is clear that – OECD and EIT aside - demand has increased very rapidly in Latin America,
Middle East, Africa and Asia/Oceania. In many countries in these regions, it is not so much a
situation of increasing demand, but of introducing natural gas into the economy for the first time.
It is clear that the absolute levels of demand in 1980 were extremely small and even the 1998
demand figures do not represent anything like the demand potential for these regions. All these
regions are therefore likely to see significant growth in gas demand, as demonstrated in Table 2.
Table 1 Global Gas Demand 1980-98
1980 = 100 (Bcm)* 1990 1998
North America 100 (628) 97 112
Latin America 100 (63) 137 195
Europe 100 (235) 123 169
Central Europe 100 (74) 116 93
Former USSR 100 (383) 184 148
Africa 100 (19) 112 182
Middle East 100 (42) 126 321
Asia/Oceania 100 (75) 105 239
WORLD 100 (1518) 136 154
*billion cubic metres
Source: Marie Francoise Chabrelie, Le Gaz Naturel dans Le Monde, Edition 1999, Cedigaz: Rueil
Malmaison, October 1999, Table 33, p.72.
Table 2 shows the “business as usual” projections from the International Energy Agency’s 1998
World Energy Outlook to 2020. It is clear that annual demand growth rates for non-OECD
regions are more than double those of the OECD – 3.5% compared with 1.7% while in many of
the regions which we have mentioned above, annual growth rates are above 5%. This only serves
to reinforce the point that – outside the OECD and some of the countries in the EIT group
(notably the independent states of the former Soviet Union) gas is still an emerging fuel.
1 Comments on paper Impacts of the Kyoto Protocol on Fossil Fuels, Ulrich Bartsch and Benito Müller,
IPCC Expert Meeting on Sectoral Impacts, Eisenach, Germany, 14-15 February 2000.
2 A methodological point which might be taken into consideration in the model and the paper is that in the
countries designated under “EIT” there are very significant differences between the countries of central
and eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, and the other former Soviet republics, in particular Russia and the
Ukraine which are important subjects in this comment, given the significance of natural gas in their energy
balances.
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