好似對中國有利...
www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,
The vulnerability of global energy markets is once again back in focus due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The
race for a renewable future will come with its own geopolitical issues
and could lead to new conflicts as new supply chains emerge.
In
March, President Biden introduced a plan to secure the strategic and
critical materials necessary for the clean energy transition—such as
lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese.
Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine has exposed, once again, the vulnerability of the
global energy markets and economy to the actions of petrostates with the
power to weaponize their energy resources for political purposes. In
the biggest shock to oil flows since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the war
in Ukraine and the hesitancy of Europe to immediately punish Putin threw
into sharp relief the geopolitical power that countries with huge oil
and gas resources currently hold.
The European Union’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to
wean off Russian energy as soon as possible and reduce overall fossil
fuel consumption in the longer term in order to stop being beholden to
malign actors for energy sources.
The mad dash to boost renewables and transport electrification, however, comes with its own set of geopolitical issues.
Countries
that aren’t Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran hold vast resources of the
metals and minerals that will be critical to enabling a faster energy
transition. But those resource holders also include Russia, China, and a
host of African and South American nations still living “the resource
curse”, where conflict, forced and child labor, and critically low
environmental standards are undermining the “green” credentials of the
clean energy transition.
As developed economies look to lessen
their dependence on fossil fuels and, by extension, on the political
goals and whims of major oil and gas resource holders such as Russia and
the members of OPEC, the geopolitical influence of the petrostates
would likely wane over time. But a new geopolitical issue would
rise—potential dependence on countries holding resources of critical
minerals. And those countries include the likes of China and the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example.
Oil Wars
The geopolitics of oil resources has shaped the second half of the 20th century and continues to do so in the 21st century.
“Although
the threat of "resource wars" over possession of oil reserves is often
exaggerated, the sum total of the political effects generated by the oil
industry makes oil a leading cause of war,” Jeff D. Colgan, Assistant
Professor in the School of International Service at American University
in Washington, D.C, wrote in a policy brief in the peer-reviewed journal International Security nearly a decade ago.
Since
1973, between one-quarter and one-half of interstate wars have been
connected to one or more oil-related causal mechanisms, Colgan notes,
adding that “No other commodity has had such an impact on international
security.”
International and energy security continue to be influenced by fossil fuel resources a decade later.
Due
to the high dependence on Russian oil by some of its members, the EU is
debating how to implement an oil embargo on Moscow without plunging
Europe into a recession and without fracturing a united EU front against
Putin and his aggression in Ukraine.
Renewables Could Hold The Key To Energy Independence…
Therefore, the EU is looking to switch to renewables faster, as a way to reduce fossil fuel consumption and reliance on Russia.
“The
quicker we switch to renewables and hydrogen, combined with more energy
efficiency, the quicker we will be truly independent and master our
energy system,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in early March, announcing a goal to reduce EU demand for Russian gas by two-thirds before the end of this year.
“Renewables
give us the freedom to choose an energy source that is clean, cheap,
reliable, and ours. And instead of funding fossil fuel imports and
Russian oligarchs, we can create jobs here,” European Commission
Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans, said.
The EV revolution would also help reduce the geopolitical power of petrostates.
“The
ability to electrify transportation and get off combusting fossil
fuels, and oil specifically, means we would solve massive geopolitical
problems, which have been just a plague for the last 100 years,” Adam
Scott, executive director at Toronto-based charity advocating for
sustainable investing, Shift, told Andre Mayer of Canada’s CBC News.
…If Clean Energy Didn’t Need Key Metals Resources
The
war in Ukraine is accelerating the shift to increased investment in
renewables as a way to lessen dependence on imports of fossil fuels, a
large part of which comes from OPEC and Russia.
However, the big
challenge in the energy transition will be supply chains, Simon Flowers,
Chairman and Chief Analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said last week.
“Costs
for solar and wind turbine components are already experiencing
inflation and demand is only going to intensify. There’s also going to
be a massive scramble to access the metals to build out electrification –
from steel, key base metals including copper, aluminum and nickel, and
battery raw materials,” Flowers noted.
Developed economies,
including the United States, currently depend on imports for boosting
low-carbon energy sources. The U.S. imports more than half of its annual
consumption of 31 of the 35 critical minerals, the Department of
Energy said at
the start of President Biden’s term in office. America does not have
domestic production for 14 of those critical minerals and is completely
dependent on imports to supply its demand.
President Biden included in
March strategic and critical materials necessary for the clean energy
transition—such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and manganese for
large-capacity batteries—in the Defense Production Act of 1950.
This
is a step in the right direction for ensuring more domestic supply,
considering that geopolitics will play a role in the energy transition,
too, although the resource holders may be different.
“There is an
underappreciated risk to the energy transition: the supply of clean
energy depends on mined natural resources, which are steeped in
geological, geopolitical, and governance challenges,” KPMG and Eurasia
Group said in a report last year.
The
new global energy ecosystem could shift “from OPEC to OMEC”, where OMEC
is what KPMG and Eurasia Group describe as a “freshly minted acronym
for ‘Organisation of Mineral Exporting Countries’ – this grouping may
not yet exist, but the point remains: geopolitical power could shift
from oil-dominated countries to critical metal-dominated countries.”
