Guest essay by Eric Worrall

“It’s a total joke”: Japan throwing a hilarious smokescreen over their commitment to climate action.

Climate change: Is ‘blue hydrogen’ Japan’s answer to coal?

By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes
BBC News, Tokyo

It’s a glorious autumn afternoon and I’m standing on a hillside looking out over Tokyo Bay. Beside me is Takao Saiki, a usually mild-mannered gentleman in his 70s.

But today Saiki-San is angry.

“It’s a total joke,” he says, in perfect English. “Just ridiculous!”

The cause of his distress is a giant construction site blocking our view across the bay – a 1.3-gigawatt coal-fired power station in the making.

“I don’t understand why we still have to burn coal to generate electricity,” says Saiki-San’s friend, Rikuro Suzuki. “This plant alone will emit more than seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year!”

Suzuki-San’s point is a good one. Shouldn’t Japan be cutting its coal consumption, not increasing it, at a time of great concern about coal’s impact on the climate?

So why the coal? The answer is the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

…

In their place Japan’s gas-fired power stations have been doing a lot of overtime. But, as Britain has found out recently, natural gas is expensive.

So, the Japanese government decided to build 22 new coal-fired power stations, to run on cheap coal imported from Australia. Economically it made sense. Environmentally, not so much. Japan is now under intense pressure to stop using coal.

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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59525480

Japan claims their coal plants are green hydrogen ready, but given how they baulked at the price of natural gas, I’m guessing the switch to green hydrogen will be a long time coming.

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