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.
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