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MOSCOW (MRC) -- Japan aims to eliminate
gasoline-powered vehicles in the next 15 years, the government said on Friday in
a plan to reach net zero carbon emissions and generate nearly USD2 trillion a
year in green growth by 2050, reported Reuters.
The "green growth strategy,"
targeting the hydrogen and auto industries, is meant as an action plan to
achieve Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga's October pledge to eliminate carbon
emissions on a net basis by mid-century.
Suga has made green investment a
top priority to help revive the economy hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and to
bring Japan into line with the European Union, China and other economies setting
ambitious emissions targets.
"The government has set up ambitious targets
to achieve a carbon neutral society in 2050," said Yukari Takamura, professor at
the University of Tokyo.
"Making clear goals and policy direction in the
green growth strategy will give incentives for companies to invest in future
technology."
The government will offer tax incentives and other financial
support to companies, targeting 90 trillion yen (USD870 billion) a year in
additional economic growth through green investment and sales by 2030 and 190
trillion yen (USD1.8 trillion) by 2050.
A 2 trillion yen green fund will
support corporate investment in green technology.
The plan seeks to
replace the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles with electric vehicles,
including hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles, by the mid-2030s.
To accelerate
the spread of electric vehicles, the government targets slashing the cost of
vehicle batteries by more than half to 10,000 yen or less per kilowatt hour by
2030.
It aims to boost hydrogen consumption to 3 million tonnes by 2030
and to about 20 million tonnes by 2050 from 200 tonnes in 2017, in areas such as
power generation and transportation.
The strategy identifies 14
industries, such as offshore wind and fuel ammonia, and targets the installation
of up to 45 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind power by 2040.
Japan also
aims to use renewable energy "as much as possible" by 2050, mainly through
off-shore wind farms, with reference goal of renewable energy sources accounting
for 50% to 60% of the nation's power by 2050, up from less than 20% now, while
reducing reliance on nuclear power.
As MRC informed earlier,
Japan will aim to make hydrogen a power source viable enough to produce the
output of more than 30 nuclear reactors by 2030, the Nikkei newspaper reported
in December, 2020. To achieve that goal in its bid to reduce carbon emissions
Japan will have to make a technology now in its infancy commercially viable at
scale, as the world accelerates an energy transition to prevent the worst
impacts of climate change. Japanese companies including Toyota Motor Corp
on 7 December, 2020, said they established a new organisation, the
Japan Hydrogen Association, to promote the creation of a hydrogen supply chain
in the country. By 7 December, 88 companies had joined the initiative,
including Japan's biggest refiner ENEOS Holdings Inc and trading house
Mitsui & Co Ltd.
We remind that ENEOS
Corporation (formerly known as JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy) took its larger
naphtha cracker in Kawasaki off-line on 4 December 2020 for repairment after a
technical issue reported at the butadiene separation unit in late November. The
cracker was operating at 95% capacity before the shutdown in early December. The
cracker with an annual capacity of 515,000 tons/year of ethylene, 300,000
tons/year of propylene, and 105,000 tons/year of butadiene would be shut for a
month. The company’s smaller cracker at the same location is not affected by the
issue.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene
(PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report,
Russia's estimated polyethylene (PE) consumption totalled 1,990,280 tonnes in
the first eleven months of 2020, up by 1% year on year. Only high density
polyethylene (HDPE) shipments increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP)
shipments to the Russian market reached 1 090,900 tonnes in the first eleven
months of 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus
imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of
exclusively PP random copolymer increased. |
