ONGOING energy disruptions are pushing climate goals down the priority list as governments focus on securing supplies, said Bloomberg News citing a speech by Geraldine Slattery, president of BHP’s Australian operations.
Speaking in Canberra, Slattery said the geopolitical landscape had fundamentally reordered policy thinking. “Geopolitical fragmentation has repositioned resources and energy from traded commodities into instruments of national power,” she said.
“Resource and energy security and affordability have overtaken supply chain decarbonisation as the dominant policy priority in many major economies.”
The shift, she added, has “real implications for investment decisions, and for the pace and pathways of decarbonisation.”
The conflict in the Middle East and disruption to tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz have roiled oil and gas markets, prompting some nations to cap fuel exports while parts of Asia have returned to coal, said Bloomberg News.
Although consumers have shown appetite for electric vehicles and solar technology, large industrial sectors face a considerably harder transition, the newswire said.
BHP has reduced its operational emissions by more than a third against a fiscal year 2020 baseline and is deploying renewable energy and electric equipment across major sites. But Slattery said decarbonisation spending would slow until the 2030s, reflecting the pace of technological development.
“Decarbonising large industrial sectors depends on technologies that are not yet commercially viable at scale, rely on immature supply chains, or lack established markets,” she said. “Diesel displacement in large-scale haulage and fugitive emissions from coal mining remain technically and commercially difficult to address.”
