Saudi pushes ‘green vision’ to counter climate change
Hydrogen cars and vehicles that capture their tailpipe pollutants. Computer mice made from recycled ocean waste plastic. Hundreds of millions of trees planted in the desert. Saudi Arabia's vision of an environmentally friendly future is on display just a short drive from the venue of the UN climate summit being held in Egypt.
In and around the conference, Saudi Arabia is presenting itself as a leader in green energies and eco-friendly practices, with pavilions, presentations and optimistic assessments of technologies like carbon capture, which can remove carbon dioxide from the air but is costly and years away from being deployed at scale.
“We have hugely ambitious goals and targets," Saudi climate envoy Adel Al Jubeir said at the two-day Saudi Green Initiative Forum on COP27′S sidelines. “We want to be an example to the world in terms of what can be done."
The effort is part of a large push by Saudi Arabia, which has some of the world's largest reserves of oil and is a leader of the Opec group, to make the case that the
nation should be part of the transition to renewable energies.
The Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud, announced a raft of new green projects or updates to existing ones, from beefed up tree planting pledges to fresh solar energy projects in the pipeline.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched his Saudi Green
Initiative at last year's COP26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, with a target for “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, which he changed to 2050 at the start of this year's meeting.
At the Saudi forum, officials and speakers from renewable energy companies held forth on topics like clean hydrogen, greening the desert, and a futuristic desert city project called Neom.
Among the Saudi announcements, there were plans to set up a regional centre to “advance emissions reductions” and one to host a regional climate week ahead of next year's COP meeting.
There's also a plan for 13 renewable energy projects with a total generating capacity of 11.4 gigawatts, though experts said that's a step back from numbers announced in previous years.
Once they're up and running, the new energy projects will cut carbon dioxide emissions by about 20 million tonnes a year.
Saudi Aramco plans to build the world's biggest carbon capture and storage hub, which will store up to 9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide when its up and running in 2027.
It's all part of the kingdom's pledged to cut emissions by 278 million tonnes a year by 2030. That's still small compared to about 10 billion metric tonnes of carbon spewed globally into the air annually.
The kingdom also upgraded its tree planting goal to 600 million by 2030, including mangroves, up from its 450 million initial target. — ap
We have hugely ambitious goals and targets. We want to be an example to the world in terms of what can be done.” Adel Al Jubeir
Saudi climate envoy