Energy transition can be the way to a safer future

It is more than 50 years since the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East in October 1973 led to oil producers’ cartel Opec cutting production and the consequential spiralling high oil prices.

It was also the catalyst for UK inflation reaching 16.04%, strikes and power cuts leading to three-day working weeks, as well as a shortage of water, heating and almost everything else in Britain.

We seem again to be at a watershed. There is war in Europe, conflict throughout the Middle East and great power struggles which have led to security of supply issues over energy, high inflation and a cost-of-living crisis.

There is also the problem of climate change. In 2015’s Paris Agreement – COP21 – 196 countries agreed to keep global average temperature increases on pre-industrial levels below 2C.

They also agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels without threatening food production.

In Article 4 of the agreement is the concept of net-zero greenhouse emissions, with carbon neutrality by 2050. This means carbon emissions produced must balance against carbon taken out of the atmosphere.

Energy transition is about the world moving from fossil-fuel-based energy to net zero.

But what exactly is net zero? Article 4 does not define it.

Greenhouse gas emissions include carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapour, nitrous oxide and methane (CH4). There has been much focus on CO2 emissions but maybe not enough on CH4.

Methane is 25 times more abundant than CO2 and as the world gets warmer, the northern permafrost melts and releases substantial amounts of CH4 into the atmosphere.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Commission has reported the warmest year on record was from January 2023 to January 2024. Global temperatures were, on average, more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

And a Nasa Global Climate Change report earlier this year highlighted a rise of 1.36C in 2023, higher than the 19th Century pre-industrial average between 1850 and 1900.

Meanwhile, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation also confirmed recently that 2023 was the warmest year on record. It said the average global temperature was 1.45C above pre-industrial levels, with a margin of uncertainty of 0.12C.

We need to invest nine trillion US dollars per annum by 2030 if we are going to tackle climate change. We also need to adopt new energies and their systems, including offshore and onshore wind, solar, hydrogen, nuclear, geothermal, hydro power, biomass, tidal and wave energy, and energy storage, carbon removal and sequestration.

Despite the gloomy backdrop, there exists a big opportunity for change towards a more sustainable future for the planet – and for us to be part of the investment.

With this in mind, 24 people working in and with Stronachs worked together to publish a second edition of A Guide to the New Energies. It came out last December, around the time of the COP28 climate change summit in Dubai.

Published by Aberlour Press, which is owned by Stronachs, the guide is nearly 800 pages long and available for free at aberlourpressrenewables.com.

The big idea was to pull public-sourced information into short chapters which have been carefully referenced, peer reviewed and made available to people throughout the world.

The north-east will play a big part in new energies in Scotland, the UK and internationally due to its huge experience in energy supply and supply chains.

In turn, the UK is expected to be one of the world’s superpowers in fixed and floating offshore wind, and possibly hydrogen, in the coming decades.

From 2025 the economic outlook may look much brighter. The cost of borrowing will come down and big investments in new energies worldwide will begin to happen. And they will happen alongside oil and gas production.

UK energy supply security will improve in the 2030s as large new energy projects come onstream and there is less dependence on imported oil and gas.

A Guide to the New Energies looks at what it means to raise substantial investment and manage that capital to deliver projects on time, on budget and onstream.

The development of new supply chains for these new energies in Europe, the US and other countries is happening now. This is critical to new investments.

Sourcing vital minerals, keeping UK infrastructure safe, and developing new processes against cyber attacks and hostile incursions into our infrastructure are all part of developing security of supply.

Our guide is about education, as the more we know about new energies the more achievable net zero will be.

■ Ewan Neilson is a consultant for Aberdeen and Inverness law firm Stronachs.

■ An Israeli tank in the Golan Heights, near the border with Syria, dates from 1973’s Yom Kippur War.