Japan pushes fossil fuel tech in Asia carbon neutrality initiative

A third of the 158 agreements signed under the Japan-led Asia Zero Emission Community (AZEC) are linked to fossil fuel technologies, according to a report recently published by an international climate and energy research group.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba will chair an AZEC summit set to take place in Laos on Thursday on the sidelines of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit. The 11 AZEC partner countries are aiming to agree on a 10-year action plan for achieving carbon neutrality, economic growth and energy security.

International environmental groups and climate action advocates are worried that some of the projects promoted under the initiative would in fact slow the move to carbon neutrality, which is necessary to stop the continued warming of the planet.

The report by Zero Carbon Analytics shows that of the 158 projects for which memorandums of understanding have been signed between Japan and partner countries, 56 projects, or 35% of the total, involve fossil fuel technologies, including liquefied natural gas, ammonia co-firing and carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Only 34% of the agreements, or 54 projects, involve renewables and electrification technologies, such as solar, wind, geothermal and green hydrogen, which is hydrogen made using renewable energy. Only 11 agreements are related to wind and/or solar power, the report says.

CCS tries to capture carbon dioxide, a major cause of climate change, from power plants or factories before it goes into the air, storing it deep underground. The United Nations’ climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ranks CCS as the least effective and most expensive way to avoid planet-warming emissions in terms of energy supply in the near term, while the technology has also not been deployed at scale.

Critics also say CCS is incapable of capturing all emissions from a polluting source and is being used to justify the continued burning of fossil fuels — the primary cause of climate change.

Ammonia co-firing, meanwhile, involves burning traditional fuels like coal and natural gas with ammonia. This helps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions because ammonia doesn’t produce that greenhouse gas when it burns, but experts have questioned its role in the energy transition, citing its limited ability to reduce emissions, the possibility of increased emissions depending on the nature of ammonia production, high costs, and the risk that it helps coal plants — which are highly carbon intensive — stay online.

“A closer look into the AZEC agreements raises concerns about costs and climate impacts,” said Amy Kong, a researcher at Zero Carbon Analytics. “Fossil-based technologies, such as ammonia co-firing, CCS, grey and blue hydrogen, and LNG have much higher lifecycle emissions than solar and wind.”

Grey hydrogen refers to that produced using natural gas, while the blue variant is produced the same way but emissions are captured and stored.

AZEC, first proposed by former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and launched last year, includes Japan and Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.