Industrial Strategy and the Low Carbon Supply Chain Challenge
The paper recommends a long-term strategic approach to decarbonisation focussed on manufacturing and industrial transformation.
This project spans the length of the UKERC 4 research programme and is a continuation of work started in the Resource and Vectors theme of UKERC 3. It is led by Professor Mike Bradshaw at Warwick Business School and involves researchers at Durham University, UCL and the University of Southampton, as well as the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
The geopolitics of energy is understood to be the political consequences of patterns of supply and demand, and inter-state and market relations. The project is divided into five over-lapping work packages that together will provide a comprehensive assessment of the global context for the UK’s transition to net-zero.
This first work package will develop a new approach combing energy research in geography, international political economy (IPE), economics and business and management using a whole-systems framework. A review of established research on geopolitics and the energy security challenges related to the current fossil fuel energy system, alongside the geopolitics of renewable energy will be used to develop a whole system framing of the geopolitics of energy system transformation.
This second work package will deliver a number of case studies that demonstrate the potential for energy system transformation to generate new geopolitics of energy. This strand of research builds on previous UKERC work on natural gas and the impact of unconventional oil and gas.
In this third work package, the UCL project team will evaluate existing ‘global energy futures’ and create a set of typical decarbonisation scenarios using TIAM-UCL. They will then create a further set of scenarios based on geopolitical narratives, for fossil fuels and renewables, and will evaluate the extent to which the model is able to produce plausible scenarios from a political economy perspective. This will help us to understand how scenario modelling could be improved in the future to mitigate the shortcomings that are identified.
TIAM-UCL takes a similar approach to many other energy system models by identifying future energy pathways, and hence commodity trading, that minimise the total cost of supplying energy across the world. In reality, there is no such benevolent cooperation between countries. Fossil fuel and other commodity trade are strongly affected by geopolitical concerns.
This fourth work package builds on the earlier Advent project and is led by the University of Southampton and will be delivered in close collaboration with the Energy, Environment and landscape theme. The ‘transition scenarios’ developed by UCL will be used to assess the potential impact of energy system transformation on global ecosystems. This will also allow the scenarios to be test against global ecosystem service capacity in areas such as biomass production and trade.
This final work package will assess the impact of energy system transformation across a number of dimensions: geopolitical, economic and environmental. A final assessment of the global context for the UK’s net-zero energy transition will also inform the final stages of other UKERC 4 research activities.
The paper recommends a long-term strategic approach to decarbonisation focussed on manufacturing and industrial transformation.
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