Netherlands can technically achieve climate-neutral goal by 2050: PBL
The Netherlands can technically achieve and afford its goal of being completely climate-neutral by 2050. However, the feasibility depends on the timely implementation of planned measures, including controversial ones like CO2 storage, livestock shrinkage, and biofuels, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) said in a new report.
Working with thousands of pages of background reports, the PBL calculated over 30 routes to becoming climate-neutral in all major sectors. It looked at which scenarios are the most cost-effective against how large the changes in production and consumption would have to be.
“It is a huge task,” PBL director Marko Hekkert told NOS. “We only have 25 years left to achieve this. Any delay will make it extremely expensive or impossible. So the main thing now is to persevere—we have already seen the urgency in recent years.”
Achieving the climate-neutral goal is not only possible but affordable. “These are not astronomical amounts. It is mainly a transition that we have to go through. That requires large investments and fair distribution, but does not entail high net costs,” said Bart Streners, lead author of the report.
To achieve the goal, the Netherlands will have to produce at least three to five times more electricity than it does now, and it must come from renewable sources. That extra electricity will enable road traffic, heating, and the industry to stop using fossil fuels. Hydrogen can absorb peaks in electricity demand. The Netherlands will have to produce most of its hydrogen itself. Achieving that in time will require serious planning and parallel investments so that no one is waiting for progress elsewhere, the PBL said.
Shipping and aviation cannot be electrified. Shipping can switch to biofuel or ammonia, while aviation can switch to biokerosene and synthetic kerosene. The Netherlands must produce this alternative aviation fuel itself on a large scale and store the CO2 released underground. In doing so, the Netherlands can remove more CO2 emissions from the atmosphere than released in aviation fuel production, creating negative emissions.
Those negative emissions are needed for agriculture - the most difficult sector to make sustainable. By reducing the livestock population in line with the nitrogen policy, agriculture can lower its greenhouse gas emissions from the current 23 million tons per year to between 9 and 12 million tons in 2050. The remaining emissions can be compensated by the negative emissions from aviation fuel.
The PBL warned that underground CO2 storage is not an avenue to continue using fossil fuels. Only a very small part of fossil fuels can be offset with CO2 storage in 2050. It also warned against relying on biomass for electricity generation. Excessive growth in biomass demand can cause shortages and sustainability problems, including deforestation.
The report expects moderate population growth resulting in between 1 and 2 million additional people in 2050. That will require 1.4 million additional homes between 2020 and 2050. Space may be a problem as housing construction, agriculture, and the need for more forests compete for the limited room the Netherlands has.
Sustainable lifestyles can make achieving the 2050 goal much easier, but that requires further study and was not included in this report. However, the PBL did say that the first step must be wasting less energy by insulating homes and other buildings well. "But it is also in new technology. For example, heat pumps consume a net third to a quarter of the energy of gas heating and an electric car is roughly three times as efficient as a comparable combustion car,” said Bert Daniels, the second lead author of the report.
The advice for households is simply to keep taking steps to become more sustainable, Hekkert told NOS. “All sustainability must be scaled up. You can’t go wrong as long as you scale up.”
