Chris Stark, Committee on Climate Change: Where our energy comes from and how we use energy

Tim Hughes: Before we return back to those statements in a little bit way have our final panel for this weekend. Assembly members, you know them well, but for the purposes of the livestream, I'm going to give them a proper introduction again. So we're gonna hear from two panellists on some of the key issues to think about about how we practically might achieve zero. So we'll hear from Chris Stark from Committee on Climate Change, obviously one of our expert leads you know well, and Professor Rebecca Willis, again, one of our expert leads from Lancaster University. So same format applies to this panel as before. They're going to talk for about 10 minutes, at the end of the 10 minutes we're going to give you a little bit of time at your table to note down any questions, but please do feel free to note questions as we go. Just a reminder that you have the red and yellow cards on your table. I think we might have missed a couple of red cards yesterday, so we'll do a bit better at spotting them today. But if the speakers are speaking too fast then stick up yellow cards and they will slow down. If one of their points doesn't-- if you're not quite sure what they meant, then put up a red card and they will stop and will repeat the points, hopefully in a more understandable fashion. So I think that's all from me for now, so I'll hand over to Chris to start off.

Chris Stark: Thanks, Tim. Lets see if we can get these slides working. So hello again, everybody. Now, I don't mind saying that this is the bit I have some trepidation about. So I'm gonna try and in this session, talk about the steps that leads to net zero. So yesterday, if you can imagine when we were thinking how we would plan the weekends, yesterday was really about climate change itself. So science, some of the impacts that it's causing, and some of the the more philosophical questions about climate change. Very deliberately, because we wanted you to understand that. What you'll be dealing with really from now on is the solutions, so that things that need to be done to reduce emissions and to get to that goal of net zero overall. So just to begin, net zero, and we'll keep repeating this, net zero, the goal, means balancing completely the emissions that are released into the atmosphere with the various things that we could do to take them back out of the atmosphere, and we'll talk about that in just a second, and balancing them at zero overall. Hence net zero. So I will talk about in a second how that can be done, but I want to preface this by saying, I mean, this is the work that I do day-in and day-out, but I do not claim to be standing in front of you with an answer about this. I want to make that very clear. What I'm gonna give you is an example of how the UK might reach that net zero goal. And the reason I want to do it like this is because I want to give you a sense of how integrated this question is. So we've been hearing a lot about climate change and emissions, and that could be quite a quite a difficult topic in and of itself. But the solutions have lots and lots of implications. So what I'll show you is an example of how the UK could get to net zero in a simple of a way as I can. Mainly, it's about, rather than that kind of the strategies and the quantity of the things that I'll talk about, it's more about seeing how these things fit together. So that's what I hope I can talk to you about in the next five or so minutes. We're gonna be talking about these three things, energy supply, energy use, and land use. And their very broadly the topics that you will need to think about, too. And we're going, after this, we're going to take you through in the next weekend's-- some of these issues and much more detail to allow you to make some decisions about the things that I'm about to tell you about. Okay, does that sound okay? Alright, so let's begin then.

So we heard yesterday, lots and lots of things about what's causing climate change, what's causing them, and in particular about greenhouse gas emissions. So the challenge is to change what's what we're doing at present to create those greenhouse gas emissions on to change what we do at present to bring carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and to store it away. So that matters immensely because of these things. [inaudible 00:04:53] land use, which are utterly fundamental to the way that we live our lives in the UK. I'm going to start with energy supply. Let's start first with electricity generation. At the moment, because of the things that we've been doing over the last 10, 15 even longer years in the UK, at the moment, half of the electricity that's supplied to you roughly in any one year, it comes from what we call low carbon means. That's either nuclear power or renewable power. Don't worry. We'll talk to you about what that means in a second. But think about nuclear power stations, which don't cause those greenhouse gas emissions or wind power. So half of, at the moment, uses zero carbon and half uses fossil fuels like coal, and like gas. This is what we talked about yesterday if you remember the pie chart that I showed you all. So about 50% of the supply of electricity now at the moment is zero carbon. That, by the way, is a pretty remarkable statistic other countries around the world haven't achieved that level of, and this is a word you'll hear a lot about, decarbonisation so far. So that's something that the UK has already achieved. But it is not enough, not nearly enough to get to the goal of net zero overall. So what we need to do is to is to finish the job if you like, and complete that task of fully decarbonised electricity production. I've used a windmill there. It can be achieved through wind, or it could be done through nuclear power. Please don't take that to mean that it's just wind that we use here, but it's just an icon to try and demonstrate what we're doing. So finishing that job of getting to fully decarbonised electricity. And then we have to think about all this stuff. And this is all the ways that we use energy at the moment, and the ways in which we use energy at the moment, by and large, involve lots and lots of use off fossil fuels. So at the top, there you see, the buildings that we have in the UK in broad numbers is about 30 million. They are mostly heated entirely, actually, from mostly from fossil fuels. And mostly that fossil fuel, the one that we use most is gas. Natural gas. We have in the UK one of the most extensive networks of gas anywhere in the world. We spent a long time building it and constructing it. So mostly buildings are heated from fossil fuels and from the gas system in the main. Beneath that, you've got the road transport system, the surface transport system, which is as I mentioned yesterday, the biggest single source of emissions, when we look at all the bits of that pie chart. That's cars and vans. Then beneath that you've got more vehicles. You've got heavy goods vehicles, trucks. You've got tractors and things that you'll find on farms, and you've got boats, ships, all of which use fossil fuels to to move around. And then at the bottom is industry. Remember that part of the chart that we showed yesterday about 1/5 of the missions overall. Now, that's how we use energy at the moment. We have to decarbonise those uses of energy through various different means.

One of the ways we can do that is by having more clean electricity. So more low carbon, zero carbon electricity. In this example, we double the amount of electricity that is being produced in the UK from what we produce at present. And if we do that, then we can electrify many of the things that presently we use fossil fuels for. So let me just briefly explain what that means. So think about the top box there, which is buildings, 30 million buildings, mostly heated from the gas system. It is possible to heat those buildings using electricity instead of gas. We can use things that you will hear about it, I won't go into detail now, things like heat pumps which take energy from outside of the home using electricity to create heat inside the home, and we don't have many off them at the moment but it's possible to do that. We can-- something I'm sure a lot of you will have heard of, we can have electric vehicles on the road. At the moment there are nearly 40 million vehicles on the road, and they all use petrol and diesel. In this example, they're all electric. By mid-century, by 2050. There's a dotted line here around the truck and the tractor because some of those things, we think, could be electrified as well, so we could have electric basis for that's some heavy goods transportation and some machinery on farms. And some of the industrial processes can also be electrified. So it's possible to use electricity to create some of the process heat, for example, that presently we use fossil fuels for. So we can use more electricity and we can use more clean electricity to address these things overall. But it's not enough, so way also need something to replace that. It's a fuel that can be used to replace those applications where we can't use electricity. In this example, we're using a fuel called hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most abundant thing in the entire universe. You find it very often in stars. It's everywhere, but it isn't found naturally as a gas. You can't just go find some hydrogen, so you have to go through a process to create it. We do create hydrogen at the moment through an industrial process, but we do that by using natural gas in the main and turning it into hydrogen releasing carbon dioxide, which is one of the greenhouse gases. So nothing's easy.

So we can go through a different process to create hydrogen. And then we have a clean fuel that we can use in alternative applications, and in this example, that's what we do. So it turns green there. I'm sorry that the slides look like they've come out slightly differently, but there's an H hiding underneath a green circle if you see a H too. Now green hydrogen just means hydrogen that's being produced without creating those greenhouse gases, and we'll talk to you about that, too. But you can do that through one of two ways. One is that you can pass a electoral current across water, and you might have done that in school in your chemistry class. You create a gas that pops when you light it, that's hydrogen. So that's one way of doing that, we call that electrolysis. And the other way of doing it is to take natural gas to turn it into hydrogen but capture the carbon, and I'll talk to you about that in a second as well. But that doesn't then create the greenhouse gas that we were talking about yesterday. That's hydrogen. If you have hydrogen, that's very useful, but we don't have enough of it at the moment to replace those areas where we can't use electricity. So in this example, we scale up the production of hydrogen tenfold, so 10 times the amount of hydrogen that we produce at the moment, and we do that all without causing those greenhouse gas emissions. And if we have that amount of hydrogen overall, we can then use it in a few other things in our energy use bit of this chart. So you can use it as a replacement in your boiler. You have a different sort of boiler in your house, so at the moment you have a natural gas boiler, probably, most of you. You could have a hydrogen boiler instead and we would pipe hydrogen to some homes in the UK in this example. Hydrogen can also be used in transport as a fuel in what's called a hydrogen fuel cell, which is where you put hydrogen into the car. You don't actually burn it, it's not combusted. It goes through a chemical process, and it can create electricity, which then can fuel these things. You can use it in industry as a replacement for, in particular, natural gas, So that's hydrogen. What's also possible in industry is that you can keep burning fossil fuels but capture the carbon. So that's a process called carbon capture, and you, then can store it. And that is a well investigated process, but we don't do it at this scale at the moment. So it is possible to capture that carbon, then pipe it down into in particular, where we used to have oil and gas reserves, and put it back under the ground, where it goes into safe geological storage. That might sound like a like a difficult concept, but it's-- we understand quite a lot about what could be done there. So we can keep using fossil fuels as long as we capture the carbon.

Nearly at the end. There are some uses and some causes of emissions where we can't we can't use hydrogen and we can't use electricity, at least not not any credible scale at the moment, and that one of those is aviation. So we think that in particular for long haul aviation, there isn't an alternative to fossil fuels because you get a particular amount of energy from using that fossil fuel, in particular kerosene, and the other one is agriculture. So we talked yesterday about livestock causing greenhouse gas emissions. So those things sit there and I'll just briefly go through that. So for those things that we can't then get the missions down, we've got to think about what we can do to take the gases in the atmosphere to replace it. To net it off at zero. So for that we need to change how we use land and to free up land, we also have to think about things like what we eat. So if we're going to use land in a different way, we need to think about using doing less of some of the agricultural stuff that we do at the moment. We can plant trees, and they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That's roughly how many trees we plant at the moment each year. If we scale that up roughly three fold you can-- this is compatible overall with the example I'm giving you here. So this is the amount of trees that we're planting in this this example. And we can also do something on agricultural land which is weaken plant crops which you can then use in energy so you can burn those crops, they are called bioenergy crops, and we can use those for things like generating electricity as well as long as we capture the carbon from it. So we can link all this up. If you can see that, link the carbon dioxide storage with those bioenergy crops. And we can create energy and store carbon overall and that has a use in other parts of the energy system as well.

And the last thing in this example that we could play around with, is the demand for the things left that still caused the emissions. So our use of, for example planes what we eat, so eating less off, in particular, the livestock that caused the emissions. So red meat and dairy. We can play around with that a little bit. By demanding less and using less of those things that causes the emissions. This, in very broad outline, is an example of how the UK could reach net zero. That kind of proportions that you see there are accurate it's of course very deliberate. It's very simple and very deliberately so. But what I really wanted to land with you is how integrated, how interconnected, how connected all of these things are. So in particular think about something like land use. So it's not as simple as saying 'we need to grow lots of trees' although that would help. We also need to think about what we're not doing on that land if you're going to do that. Now what we're gonna do over the successive weekends is divide this stuff up into meaningful chunks to allow you to make meaningful decisions about some of these things. So what I've talked to you about is an example of how you could get two net zero. Other examples are available, so we really need to understand what you think about these things and what things you want to do more off and what things you want to do less of. And we'll give you as much information as we can to help you make that decision overall. But the challenge itself is one of the most challenging things that a country could ever set for itself. And the last thing I'll say is that that is the implication off the net zero target that Parliament has now set for the UK. It is a huge mission overall. Thank you very much.

Tim Hughes: Thank you very much to Chris for that. So a couple of minutes now just to note down any questions on your table and pass them across to your facilitator.