SG Net-zero Primer: What Singapore’s (potential) 2050 Target means & some things to think about
Singapore’s National Climate Change Secretariat (NCCS) announced this Monday (5 September 2022) that it is considering setting 2050 as the target year for the country to reach net-zero emissions, and potentially revising its 2030 mid-term targets as well to align with such ambition.
This is the first time the government has indicated its intention in setting a concrete target year, with Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Lawrence Wong previously announcing during this February’s Budget 2022 that it aims to reach net-zero “by or around mid-century”.
So what exactly does net-zero mean? Why does it matter? And how do we/can we/should we get there?
What is net-zero?
Net-zero emissions simply means that the amount of emissions produced is equaled by the emissions taken out of the atmosphere, either through natural carbon sinks like forests and oceans or technologies such as carbon capture, utilisation, and storage (CCUS; more on this later).
You may have heard similar terms such as “carbon neutrality” or “climate neutrality” and they are indeed related to the concept of net-zero! Carbon neutrality refers to net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, whereas climate neutrality means net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (which includes CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, water vapour, and others).
Why does it matter? And why 2050?
The reason why we are talking about net-zero at all is, of course, because of global warming and the climate crisis. The 2015 Paris Agreement set the aims of keeping global temperature rise this century to 2℃ above pre-industrial levels and “pursuing efforts” to limit that rise within 1.5℃ — so as to minimise the human, social, and ecological ramifications of the climate crisis.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), keeping global warming to within 1.5℃ entails that CO2 and GHG emissions must rapidly decrease to net-zero around sometime between 2044–2052 and 2063–2068, respectively. After that, emissions should continue to decrease to be net-negative, which means that we should be taking out more emissions than we produce by then. This is why a growing number of countries and jurisdictions have chosen 2050 as their net-zero target year.
Where are we now? How are we getting there?
According to NCCS, Singapore’s total GHG emissions amounted to 51.6 MtCO2e in 2019. Based on current plans (last updated in 2020), this number is projected to peak at 65 MtCO2e in 2030 before being halved by 2050 and then subsequently driven down to net-zero. Should the government now set 2050 as the target year to reach net-zero emissions, nearer-term targets (e.g. for 2030) may also need to be adjusted to better align with this new goal.
In either case, since net-zero means balancing out the amount of GHGs we emit and the amount we take out, transitioning to a net-zero economy means (1) not emitting as much as possible and (2) trying to remove emissions from the atmosphere.
(1) “Emissions Reduction”
When it comes to energy, “not emitting as much as possible” implies two things:
- reducing our energy intensity (how much energy we consume to generate per unit of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP) and
- carbon intensity (how much carbon we emit per unit of energy).
Singapore plans to reduce energy intensity mainly by increasing energy efficiency — which simply means that a task or result is achieved by using less energy than before.
- Several grants (e.g. the Economic Development Board (EDB)’s Resource Efficiency Grant for Energy (REG(E)) and the National Environment Agency (NEA)’s Energy Efficiency Fund) exist to help companies and industrial facilities implement energy efficient technologies in their processes. These grants can be seen as a part of the country’s carbon tax scheme, as taxed heavy emitters are also eligible to apply.
- The 2030 SG Green Plan’s ‘Energy Reset’ Pillar also features targets to improve fuel efficiency as well as energy efficiency in buildings.
On the other hand, reducing carbon intensity has to do with our energy sources, or more specifically, swapping out sources of energy that emit a lot of CO2 and GHGs for clean, renewable ones.
- In Singapore’s current energy mix for electricity generation, natural gas accounts for 95%; other energy products like municipal waste, biomass, and solar collectively account for 3.2%; the remaining are filled up by coal (1.2%) and petroleum products (such as diesel and fuel oil, 0.6%).
- According to the SG Green Plan, the deployment of solar will be increased overtime to take up 2% of Singapore’s electricity demand in 2025 and 3% in 2030. Imported electricity will also be diversified to include more clean electricity.
Other than these measures, however, the government cites Singapore’s resource-restrained nature (“an alternative energy disadvantaged country”) as a fundamental limitation to wide-scale adoption of renewable energy sources, and have started to look into “emerging low-carbon technologies” — which brings us to the second part of the net-zero equation:
(2) “Carbon Removal”
[Technologies]
As mentioned earlier, one way to remove carbon from the atmosphere is through technologies like CCUS — which captures CO2 right on the site of emission (such as industrial facilities in cement production and steelmaking, gas- and coal-fired power plants, etc.) before it enters the atmosphere. The captured CO2 is then either…
- transported elsewhere to be used in different applications like fuels, chemicals, and building materials (the ‘U’ in CCUS), or
- injected underground to be stored permanently (the ‘S’).
The government has commissioned studies (like this one) to look into the feasibility of CCUS in potential decarbonisation pathways of Singapore’s energy and chemical sectors. These preliminary studies suggest that:
- there has not been any underground CO2 storage (CCS) options identified in Singapore itself, but there is storage potential in the wider Southeast Asian region—the feasibility of long-distance CO2 transport will thus need to be studied next.
- CCU technologies shortlisted for potential applications in Singapore still need (a) time to reach maturity and (b) supporting market mechanisms to help reduce implementation costs.
While the government has yet to specify the role it would want CCUS technologies to play in reaching net-zero, these recent international studies provide some crucial insights in thinking about any potential roles they might pick up:
- This latest study by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) finds that while CCUS may be an interim partial solution in hard-to-abate sectors like cement and steel, the financial and technical framework around the technology has overall continued to “overstate and underperform”.
- (Cont.) In the rare instances thus far where captured carbon has been successfully utilised, they are in enhanced oil recovery, which means that pressurised CO2 are injected into existing oil and gas reservoirs to squeeze out more hydrocarbons, which leads again to CO2 emissions — carbon, then, is used to produce more oil rather than curbing emissions.
- This New York Times op-ed, written by two co-founders of the first CCS start-up in the U.S., argues that putting the emphasis of subsidies on such technologies can create “a perverse incentive”, as resources and investments are directed to those that produce CO2 and then try to capture and bury them, instead of solutions that reduce carbon production in the first place.
- This 2019 research on two CCU plants of different forms found that they “increase or hold constant air pollution health damage and reduce little carbon”, before even considering potential leakages during storage or use processes and associated public health risks and impacts.
- In this 2021 op-ed, three leading climate scientists caution that such technological solutions should only be used as “a sort of ejector seat that could propel humanity away from rapid and catastrophic environmental change”, only to be used “as the very last resort”, or else net-zero frameworks can easily be rendered a “dangerous trap”.
[Land-based Sinks & Carbon Credits]
Another way to remove carbon from the atmosphere is, of course, through natural sinks like forests.
In the Singaporean context, this comes into play in the upcoming 2024 updates to the carbon tax scheme, which will give taxable facilities the option to use eligible “high quality” international carbon credits to offset a portion of their domestic emissions. This means that large emitters who are supposed to pay carbon taxes in Singapore can buy “credits” generated from afforestation, forest conservation, renewable energy or other projects elsewhere in the world and use them to deduct up to 5% of the carbon tax they were supposed to pay.
Earlier in late August, NEA announced that it had signed agreements with Gold Standard and Verra, two international organisations that certify emissions reductions. This indicates that the government’s criteria for “high quality” credits will likely build upon the standards these organisations already have in place.
But land-based removal projects also have their own challenges, these include:
- high measurement uncertainties, risks of indirect land-use change, land tenure issues, and high risks of carbon storage reversal with exacerbating climate change impacts (such as wildfires), per a 2019 IPCC report,
- a history of carbon credit companies forcibly evicting farmers, villagers, and Indigenous communities for their projects,
- a general lack of transparency and integrity.
For instance, an 2021 investigative study by the Guardian on forest protection projects accredited by Verra (the US nonprofit which administers the world-leading VCS, Verified Carbon Standard, and with whom the NEA just signed an agreement) and used as credits to offset carbon taxes in countries like Colombia found an “inconsistent use of predictive methods and tools” and overstatements on the threats to the trees their projects have supposedly prevented. (You can also see Verra’s response here).
How Singapore designs its criteria in a way that prevents destructive impacts on local communities elsewhere and ensures the validity of claimed reductions thus become critical as the government drafts out its plan for this next phase of the carbon tax scheme.
Some questions to ask & think about in relation to Singapore’s net-zero plan
- Does the net-zero target cover all sectors and gases, as well as emissions from international aviation and shipping?
- Is the net-zero target enshrined in law/legally-binding? Are there accountability measures in place should the target not be met?
- Are there separate targets for emissions reductions and removals? Is the plan transparent about its assumptions on the roles of land-based as well as technological approaches to carbon removal in achieving net-zero?
- How may the plan (in its transition away from fossil fuels, potential uses of technologies and carbon credits, among other aspects) impact different communities — by race, class, gender, generation, profession, etc. — both within and beyond Singapore? (How) does the plan support those who are hit by the transition?
- (How) does the plan consider the public health impacts of its solutions?
Some additional resources:
- Climate Action Tracker’s Evaluation methodology for national net-zero targets — from which we derived some of the questions above
- Net-zero Tracker — provides briefs and analyses on net-zero targets made by countries, regions, cities, and companies around the world
- World Resources Institute’s Climate Watch — an open data platform that integrates data and insights related to countries’ climate progress and commitments relevant to the Paris Agreement (GHG emissions data, NDCs, net-zero targets, long-term strategies, etc.)
- This list of relevant resources created by local environmental groups and advocates here in Singapore over the past two years, compiled by us at Energy CoLab :))
Members of the public are invited by the government to share their views on the 2050 net-zero timeline as well as potential updates to 2030 targets via its feedback portal Reach from 5 to 26 September. We hope that you will find this primer, our questions, and these resources useful as you think about your vision for Singapore’s path towards net-zero and draft your own responses!
Make sure to follow @energycolab on our social media platforms for more content and upcoming events (!) on charting a socially just transition to net-zero!
