Today is the only day of rest at the climate conference in Dubai. The halftime score: COP President Al Jaber was able to strike an early score with the loss and damage fund. In the following days, the presidency’s strategy was to launch a barrage of new initiatives, pledges and “accelerators.” At one point, Al Jaber’s statement claiming that science did not provide any evidence for the need to phase out fossil fuels to meet the 1.5-degree limit was clearly offside.
Today, Bernhard Pötter and Lisa Kuner take stock of the first week. They also look ahead to what is still on the agenda for the second half of the conference and which issues the COP presidency needs to deliver more on to make the conference a success.
Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry is trying to go into overtime. The oil company Occidental plans to offset its emissions using direct air capture systems. There was also talk of “emission-free oil” at a COP panel held by the fossil fuel industry. Climate activists see these debates as an “expensive, false solution,” reports Alexandra Endres.
Before COP28, Germany tended to sit on the side of the playing field at the High Ambition Coalition and refused to support some of the climate frontrunners’ resolutions. Teresa Ribera, who is negotiating on behalf of the EU in Dubai, says in today’s interview that the frontrunners must press on and, if necessary, increase the pressure on Germany. She also has a clear opinion on the fossil fuel phase-out.
The Climate.Table team is using today’s rest day to stretch their fingers and stock up on coffee. We will be back with daily issues on 9 December.
We’ve seen a great start of this COP. Numerous announcements, the agreement to the loss and damage fund and many financial pledges. Now that the initial excitement has died down, where do we stand?
It’s a very difficult COP. We need to ensure that the Paris mechanism wraps up and energizes the next steps. We left Sharm el-Sheikh last year with mixed feelings. For the first time, there was this conviction that we needed to work on Loss and Damage, but at the same time, there was no single word on mitigation. And the first measure to lower costs and ensure lower losses and damages is mitigation. So this is going to be the year to say we are not on track and we do need to do more.
Glasgow was the COP for the developed countries. Sharm el-Sheikh was the COP for the developing countries because of loss and damage and no mitigation at all. So what is this COP now going to be?
This is the COP of the Paris Agreement. It is going to prove to be functioning or useless. And I think everybody understands that it needs to deliver. But the question is whether the public opinion feels that it really delivers or is it just blah, blah, blah. And to deliver, we need to be as concrete as possible. What’s next in mitigation, and how to ensure that an increasing share of financial flows all over the world are climate proof. So 1.5 means mitigation and making the smart decisions on investments, public or private, and being ready to anticipate the climate impacts.
And delivering means to phase out fossil fuels?
Yes, we need to deliver on the package of tripling renewables, doubling energy efficiency and phasing out of fossil fuels. But what does it mean to phase out? There are some saying this is not a treaty on energy but on emissions. But we need to be coherent, not saying we need to reduce emissions when in fact we are talking about fossil fuels. We need to be very explicit on the fossil fuel-related aspects of the energy transition. We need a sharp decline in both supply and demand.
So you’re not talking about phasing down emissions of fossil fuels or CCS?
The EU mandate is very clear about that. When talking about capturing emissions, we say that abatement technologies should only be referred to hard-to-abate sectors. On electricity, we know that there are much more intelligent and faster solutions.
Where do you find allies for this when even the USA is in favor of CCS?
There are a lot more that we think that are asking for a bold language on fossil fuels. The absolute minimum should be Glasgow language or G20 language. Some of the most reluctant countries signed the G20 language.
But it was really hard to get there and G20 energy ministers did not even include it.
But leaders did. I don’t care what any of the negotiators or the presidency personally think about every single element discussed here. It’s about negotiating in good faith and creating the premises for negotiations. The COP28-president has the role of the honest broker.
Is he the honest broker he claims to be?
I hope so. We will be paying attention and asking him to be. It’s good that the president knows what the fossil fuel industry means, what renewable business means, what finance means and what those mean for African or for OPEC countries. He’s quite an experienced guy in this sector and has learned a lot in the last year about the way we need to make the decisions. Not being biased on one side or the other. This was a little bit missed in Sharm el-Sheikh. The impression was that the outcome was not very balanced. We focused so much on Loss and Damage that we forgot about mitigation.
How helpful are the Germans in pushing for mitigation after they twice refused to sign declarations of the High Ambition Coalition?
The Germans have been going through a complicated period dealing with energy – whether to walk the talk in energy transition and lower the energy dependency. Now they have to see how far they can commit.
But this weakens the HAC.
We learned a long time ago that if there are people willing to go faster, they are not going to wait for those having problems to go faster. It’s always good to count on the Germans. But they should be joining whenever they feel like it.
And if you can’t count on the Germans?
You still go on and keep the pressure up to ensure that they can join whenever as soon as possible.
What about the G77+China? We have seen a financing pledge from the United Arab Emirates here in Dubai. It is the first time that a non-Annex I country has made such a pledge. Do you see any discussions in the group that could change the blocs of developed countries against non-developed countries?
In Paris, we agreed that not only historic responsibilities count – even though they are very important. But also, the current share of pollution and current share of income per capita and emissions per capita count. This debate is also taking place in the G77. Countries in the G77 know very well that China, the Emirates or the Saudis are not the same as Rwanda, Cuba or the Philippines. Who’s contributing to climate finance is going to be one of the most sensitive issues in the negotiations. And our door is very open for a much more updated understanding of fairness and equity in terms of reducing emissions in terms of contributing to the general finance.
Would it be easier for you to negotiate if the G77 bloc were to dissolve? If China and the developing countries were separate?
We as Europeans need to pay attention to the different sensitiveness, but we need to respect their own governance platform. We should not play dirty, breaking down their own governance considerations. To understand what is happening, we need to talk to each regional group and alliance within the G 77. We make a mistake if we think they all think the same.
There are also very different opinions in Europe and not every country thinks along the same lines. How does Team Europe stick together here in Dubai?
That is our role as the council presidency to keep them together. Even if there may be differences from one country to another, in general terms we are on the same page. Because we know we are much more effective when we play together and send the same message with many different accents. That’s something that we have missed in the last years and that we need to recover from.
You are talking about the time under the leadership of former Climate Commissioner Frans Timmermans. How is his successor Wopke Hoekstra faring?
Well, he just started and toured the world with the shared message of our mandate. He is working in a very honest and constructive manner, understands that we need to work in Team Europe and he’s quite happy to do so. I’m sure that it will go very well.
There have been attempts in Europe to dilute the green agenda and the Green Deal. Are you sure that Europe still speaks with one voice on green policy?
There were many occasions when things could have exploded due to the different sensitivities. But we overcame that in a sensible way. Sometimes it is difficult because we feel the tensions that exist in Europe. The Spanish presidency had solved various problems within the legislative proposals that nobody thought we could solve. But it’s true, sometimes the problems came from countries that we didn’t expect.
You are looking at us Germans…
(laughs) The important lesson to be learned from this is that change is so important and so necessary that it cannot be postponed. You have to speed it up. But it can only work if public opinion and citizens feel the benefits of the green agenda and understand what and why we are doing what we are doing.
More than 2,400 lobbyists from the oil, gas and coal industries are attending the climate summit in Dubai. This is four times as many as at COP27 and more than at any previous climate summit. This is according to an analysis by “Kick Big Polluters Out,” an association of international climate organizations.
Lobbyists are also debating possible pathways to a greenhouse gas-neutral world at COP28 – and their own contribution to change. For instance, at a panel attended by prominent industry representatives. The panelists included Vicki Hollub, President of the US oil company Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) and Mohammed Hassani, Head of the Environmental Matters Department at OPEC.
The panelists envision a green future in which oil and gas still play an important role. Their plan is to use technical innovations to ensure the emission-free combustion and extraction of fossil fuels.
This idea received scientific backing from Myles Allen, a climate researcher at Oxford University specializing in attribution research and CCS, among other things. The industry must “make its product emission-free,” says Allen. He believes that the industry has the ability to change its products in such a way that they no longer cause global warming. “It’s the biggest industry the world has ever seen. Who else would be able to do that?”
According to industry figures, around 80 percent of global energy demand is currently covered by oil, gas and coal. Demand will not disappear overnight, said moderator Olivia Azadegan from the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) think tank. She hopes for a “pragmatic discussion” on how the entire energy system can be brought to zero emissions as quickly as possible. “The COP is the perfect place for this.”
All panelists agreed that the new technologies must be available very soon to achieve the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement. In order to adapt quickly enough, “to refine our technologies and build up our own capacities,” state-owned oil companies from developing countries have a particular right to receive support from developed countries, said OPEC representative Mohammed Hassani.
These developing countries need their oil revenues to finance their national budgets. Hassani said that loans for developing new technologies were almost impossible to pay due to the high interest rates. For this reason, he called on developed countries to lead the way and “actually provide support for all national (state-owned) oil companies in developing countries.” Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement regulates voluntary carbon markets and could also help “mobilize” financial resources.
The oil company Oxy is regarded in the industry as a frontrunner in the idea of using new technologies to render the fossil fuel business emission-free. The company has announced plans to reduce all emissions from its business to zero before 2050 where possible – including emissions from oil consumption (Scope 3).
According to President Vicki Hollub, Oxy relies on four different technologies in this endeavor. The “biggest and most important” is direct air capture (DAC). Without DAC, Oxy would not be able to achieve its goals: “Direct air capture has to happen,” says Hollub.
So far, however, the technology is costly: Using it to remove one ton of CO2 from the atmosphere currently costs between 600 and 1,000 US dollars. Nevertheless, Oxy has high expectations. Last August, the company announced it would acquire the DAC start-up Carbon Engineering for USD 1.1 billion.
Julia Attwood, an industrial decarbonization specialist at BloombergNEF, believes the acquisition could change the long-term prospects for DAC. She estimates that the DAC market could generate annual revenues of 150 billion US dollars by 2050. According to the industry service Argus Media, Oxy expects to ultimately generate more profit with DAC than with chemical production, which contributed around a fifth of earnings in 2022. In the long term, Oxy plans to build up to 135 DAC plants.
Secondly, Oxy utilizes a technology developed by the start-up Net Power, which aims to enable emission-free electricity generation from natural gas. Thirdly and fourthly, Hollub says that Oxy is investing in two other start-ups to advance the production of bioethylene from CO2 as well as the extraction of lithium from salty wastewater left over from oil production.
According to Hollub, it will be possible to produce emission-free oil (net zero oil) or even oil that ultimately reduces the greenhouse gas content of the air (net negative oil). To achieve this, the company focuses primarily on a combination of DAC and enhanced oil recovery.
In EOR, CO2 is injected into depleting oil wells to bring the remaining raw material to the surface. The technology is already in use. However, Hollub plans to use even more CO2 – obtained through DAC – for this purpose. She says the aim is to extend the utilization of oil. However, the prerequisite for this is that “more CO2 is injected into the oil field” than is ultimately released back into the air using the extracted oil.
The climate organization Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) criticizes DAC as “unproven and expensive.” The organization argues that by prolonging oil production, Oxy could ultimately generate several hundred thousand additional tons of CO2 emissions per year – just from a single DAC plant. The combination of EOR and DAC, in particular, would add more carbon to the atmosphere than it removes.
They conclude that DAC ultimately does more harm than good to the climate by extending the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure and diverting resources away from more efficient and already usable solutions, such as expanding renewables and greater energy efficiency.
The debate on the podium revealed just one side of the fundamental conflict at this year’s climate conference, which is still ongoing at the halfway point: It is about the future of fossil fuels and the question of what role technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) are to play in the future. While more than 100 countries are demanding in Dubai that COP28 decide on a complete phaseout of fossil fuels, the final declaration could not mention an end to the fossil fuel era.
Halfway through COP28, the conference has made more progress than many other climate conferences in the past. But things will get serious once the ministers arrive after the rest day on Thursday. The technical negotiations will then enter the political phase. In the best-case scenario, the negotiators will have narrowed the problems enough for the political leaders to concentrate on the most important issues by then.
All achievements so far:
In the first five days of the COP, 83 billion US dollars have been mobilized. There have been eleven pledges and declarations, including the first declaration at a climate conference on food systems and health. The details according to the Climate Action Tracker Fact Sheet of the COP Presidency:
Financial pledges so far:
The tracker from the Word Resources Institute allows you to keep track of the negotiation texts.
If you want to talk to Ingrid-Gabriela Hoven these days, you have to manage to get hold of her between two conferences. The Director of the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) only attended the African Climate Summit in Nairobi a few weeks ago, and in late November, she was in Dubai for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28). Both appointments already say a lot about Hoven’s focus at GIZ and how she intends to expand the organization’s activities. Whereas in the past, the focus was more on economic development, the Bonn-based organization is now focusing more and more on tackling climate change. “We need to bring together the various dimensions of development cooperation,” she says. By this, she means decarbonization, economic development, and climate change adaptation. “Since Paris, this is also what is expected of us.”
Hoven attended the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 as part of the German delegation. The 63-year-old is one of the most experienced minds in Germany when it comes to international cooperation. She learned development policy from the ground up, so to speak: She studied political science and economics in Giessen and Paris. She then completed her post-graduate training at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability in Berlin. Hoven is married and has a son.
From 1986 to 2020, she worked at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Her work was interrupted only by a five-year stint at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, which merged with Internationale Weiterbildung und Entwicklung gGmbH and the German Development Service to form GIZ in 2011 – and by a position at the World Bank Group. There, she represented Germany as Executive Director from 2010 to 2014.
She has been a member of the GIZ board since 2020. ‘I am delighted to be able to contribute my broad climate policy network and my experience, for instance, from my time as Executive Director at the World Bank, to GIZ’s work,’ says Hoven. She is leading GIZ in difficult times amid the uncertainty surrounding Germany’s national budget. “One of my goals for the coming years is to ensure that GIZ continues its work effectively to promote sustainable development worldwide. Climate change is a driver of social inequality, conflict and migration. More efforts and cooperation with the Global South are needed to meet this challenge,” says Hoven.
The company plays an important role in the German government’s climate efforts. According to Hoven, GIZ has a unique network around the world and “enjoys an excellent reputation.” She hopes that GIZ can now put this reputation to good use to advance transformation projects.
For example, GIZ is working on implementing the Just Energy Transition Partnerships between Western countries and countries such as South Africa and Indonesia. “In the South African state of Mpumalanga, 100,000 jobs depend directly on coal production,” explains Hoven. However, as South Africa wants to decarbonize, it needs support here: Retraining, facilities for start-ups, investors for new, sustainable industries, such as ecotourism or renewable energies. “Of course, every transformation is different and country-specific. In this respect, we adapt our support to the different situations, but also promote the exchange of experience between countries that are going through similar processes.”
Hoven hopes that COP28 will produce an ambitious result. “I am cautiously optimistic that climate action will pick up momentum. The world needs a sign of solidarity, especially in these times.” Lars-Thorben Niggehoff
Today is the only day of rest at the climate conference in Dubai. The halftime score: COP President Al Jaber was able to strike an early score with the loss and damage fund. In the following days, the presidency’s strategy was to launch a barrage of new initiatives, pledges and “accelerators.” At one point, Al Jaber’s statement claiming that science did not provide any evidence for the need to phase out fossil fuels to meet the 1.5-degree limit was clearly offside.
Today, Bernhard Pötter and Lisa Kuner take stock of the first week. They also look ahead to what is still on the agenda for the second half of the conference and which issues the COP presidency needs to deliver more on to make the conference a success.
Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry is trying to go into overtime. The oil company Occidental plans to offset its emissions using direct air capture systems. There was also talk of “emission-free oil” at a COP panel held by the fossil fuel industry. Climate activists see these debates as an “expensive, false solution,” reports Alexandra Endres.
Before COP28, Germany tended to sit on the side of the playing field at the High Ambition Coalition and refused to support some of the climate frontrunners’ resolutions. Teresa Ribera, who is negotiating on behalf of the EU in Dubai, says in today’s interview that the frontrunners must press on and, if necessary, increase the pressure on Germany. She also has a clear opinion on the fossil fuel phase-out.
The Climate.Table team is using today’s rest day to stretch their fingers and stock up on coffee. We will be back with daily issues on 9 December.
We’ve seen a great start of this COP. Numerous announcements, the agreement to the loss and damage fund and many financial pledges. Now that the initial excitement has died down, where do we stand?
It’s a very difficult COP. We need to ensure that the Paris mechanism wraps up and energizes the next steps. We left Sharm el-Sheikh last year with mixed feelings. For the first time, there was this conviction that we needed to work on Loss and Damage, but at the same time, there was no single word on mitigation. And the first measure to lower costs and ensure lower losses and damages is mitigation. So this is going to be the year to say we are not on track and we do need to do more.
Glasgow was the COP for the developed countries. Sharm el-Sheikh was the COP for the developing countries because of loss and damage and no mitigation at all. So what is this COP now going to be?
This is the COP of the Paris Agreement. It is going to prove to be functioning or useless. And I think everybody understands that it needs to deliver. But the question is whether the public opinion feels that it really delivers or is it just blah, blah, blah. And to deliver, we need to be as concrete as possible. What’s next in mitigation, and how to ensure that an increasing share of financial flows all over the world are climate proof. So 1.5 means mitigation and making the smart decisions on investments, public or private, and being ready to anticipate the climate impacts.
And delivering means to phase out fossil fuels?
Yes, we need to deliver on the package of tripling renewables, doubling energy efficiency and phasing out of fossil fuels. But what does it mean to phase out? There are some saying this is not a treaty on energy but on emissions. But we need to be coherent, not saying we need to reduce emissions when in fact we are talking about fossil fuels. We need to be very explicit on the fossil fuel-related aspects of the energy transition. We need a sharp decline in both supply and demand.
So you’re not talking about phasing down emissions of fossil fuels or CCS?
The EU mandate is very clear about that. When talking about capturing emissions, we say that abatement technologies should only be referred to hard-to-abate sectors. On electricity, we know that there are much more intelligent and faster solutions.
Where do you find allies for this when even the USA is in favor of CCS?
There are a lot more that we think that are asking for a bold language on fossil fuels. The absolute minimum should be Glasgow language or G20 language. Some of the most reluctant countries signed the G20 language.
But it was really hard to get there and G20 energy ministers did not even include it.
But leaders did. I don’t care what any of the negotiators or the presidency personally think about every single element discussed here. It’s about negotiating in good faith and creating the premises for negotiations. The COP28-president has the role of the honest broker.
Is he the honest broker he claims to be?
I hope so. We will be paying attention and asking him to be. It’s good that the president knows what the fossil fuel industry means, what renewable business means, what finance means and what those mean for African or for OPEC countries. He’s quite an experienced guy in this sector and has learned a lot in the last year about the way we need to make the decisions. Not being biased on one side or the other. This was a little bit missed in Sharm el-Sheikh. The impression was that the outcome was not very balanced. We focused so much on Loss and Damage that we forgot about mitigation.
How helpful are the Germans in pushing for mitigation after they twice refused to sign declarations of the High Ambition Coalition?
The Germans have been going through a complicated period dealing with energy – whether to walk the talk in energy transition and lower the energy dependency. Now they have to see how far they can commit.
But this weakens the HAC.
We learned a long time ago that if there are people willing to go faster, they are not going to wait for those having problems to go faster. It’s always good to count on the Germans. But they should be joining whenever they feel like it.
And if you can’t count on the Germans?
You still go on and keep the pressure up to ensure that they can join whenever as soon as possible.
What about the G77+China? We have seen a financing pledge from the United Arab Emirates here in Dubai. It is the first time that a non-Annex I country has made such a pledge. Do you see any discussions in the group that could change the blocs of developed countries against non-developed countries?
In Paris, we agreed that not only historic responsibilities count – even though they are very important. But also, the current share of pollution and current share of income per capita and emissions per capita count. This debate is also taking place in the G77. Countries in the G77 know very well that China, the Emirates or the Saudis are not the same as Rwanda, Cuba or the Philippines. Who’s contributing to climate finance is going to be one of the most sensitive issues in the negotiations. And our door is very open for a much more updated understanding of fairness and equity in terms of reducing emissions in terms of contributing to the general finance.
Would it be easier for you to negotiate if the G77 bloc were to dissolve? If China and the developing countries were separate?
We as Europeans need to pay attention to the different sensitiveness, but we need to respect their own governance platform. We should not play dirty, breaking down their own governance considerations. To understand what is happening, we need to talk to each regional group and alliance within the G 77. We make a mistake if we think they all think the same.
There are also very different opinions in Europe and not every country thinks along the same lines. How does Team Europe stick together here in Dubai?
That is our role as the council presidency to keep them together. Even if there may be differences from one country to another, in general terms we are on the same page. Because we know we are much more effective when we play together and send the same message with many different accents. That’s something that we have missed in the last years and that we need to recover from.
You are talking about the time under the leadership of former Climate Commissioner Frans Timmermans. How is his successor Wopke Hoekstra faring?
Well, he just started and toured the world with the shared message of our mandate. He is working in a very honest and constructive manner, understands that we need to work in Team Europe and he’s quite happy to do so. I’m sure that it will go very well.
There have been attempts in Europe to dilute the green agenda and the Green Deal. Are you sure that Europe still speaks with one voice on green policy?
There were many occasions when things could have exploded due to the different sensitivities. But we overcame that in a sensible way. Sometimes it is difficult because we feel the tensions that exist in Europe. The Spanish presidency had solved various problems within the legislative proposals that nobody thought we could solve. But it’s true, sometimes the problems came from countries that we didn’t expect.
You are looking at us Germans…
(laughs) The important lesson to be learned from this is that change is so important and so necessary that it cannot be postponed. You have to speed it up. But it can only work if public opinion and citizens feel the benefits of the green agenda and understand what and why we are doing what we are doing.
More than 2,400 lobbyists from the oil, gas and coal industries are attending the climate summit in Dubai. This is four times as many as at COP27 and more than at any previous climate summit. This is according to an analysis by “Kick Big Polluters Out,” an association of international climate organizations.
Lobbyists are also debating possible pathways to a greenhouse gas-neutral world at COP28 – and their own contribution to change. For instance, at a panel attended by prominent industry representatives. The panelists included Vicki Hollub, President of the US oil company Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) and Mohammed Hassani, Head of the Environmental Matters Department at OPEC.
The panelists envision a green future in which oil and gas still play an important role. Their plan is to use technical innovations to ensure the emission-free combustion and extraction of fossil fuels.
This idea received scientific backing from Myles Allen, a climate researcher at Oxford University specializing in attribution research and CCS, among other things. The industry must “make its product emission-free,” says Allen. He believes that the industry has the ability to change its products in such a way that they no longer cause global warming. “It’s the biggest industry the world has ever seen. Who else would be able to do that?”
According to industry figures, around 80 percent of global energy demand is currently covered by oil, gas and coal. Demand will not disappear overnight, said moderator Olivia Azadegan from the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) think tank. She hopes for a “pragmatic discussion” on how the entire energy system can be brought to zero emissions as quickly as possible. “The COP is the perfect place for this.”
All panelists agreed that the new technologies must be available very soon to achieve the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement. In order to adapt quickly enough, “to refine our technologies and build up our own capacities,” state-owned oil companies from developing countries have a particular right to receive support from developed countries, said OPEC representative Mohammed Hassani.
These developing countries need their oil revenues to finance their national budgets. Hassani said that loans for developing new technologies were almost impossible to pay due to the high interest rates. For this reason, he called on developed countries to lead the way and “actually provide support for all national (state-owned) oil companies in developing countries.” Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement regulates voluntary carbon markets and could also help “mobilize” financial resources.
The oil company Oxy is regarded in the industry as a frontrunner in the idea of using new technologies to render the fossil fuel business emission-free. The company has announced plans to reduce all emissions from its business to zero before 2050 where possible – including emissions from oil consumption (Scope 3).
According to President Vicki Hollub, Oxy relies on four different technologies in this endeavor. The “biggest and most important” is direct air capture (DAC). Without DAC, Oxy would not be able to achieve its goals: “Direct air capture has to happen,” says Hollub.
So far, however, the technology is costly: Using it to remove one ton of CO2 from the atmosphere currently costs between 600 and 1,000 US dollars. Nevertheless, Oxy has high expectations. Last August, the company announced it would acquire the DAC start-up Carbon Engineering for USD 1.1 billion.
Julia Attwood, an industrial decarbonization specialist at BloombergNEF, believes the acquisition could change the long-term prospects for DAC. She estimates that the DAC market could generate annual revenues of 150 billion US dollars by 2050. According to the industry service Argus Media, Oxy expects to ultimately generate more profit with DAC than with chemical production, which contributed around a fifth of earnings in 2022. In the long term, Oxy plans to build up to 135 DAC plants.
Secondly, Oxy utilizes a technology developed by the start-up Net Power, which aims to enable emission-free electricity generation from natural gas. Thirdly and fourthly, Hollub says that Oxy is investing in two other start-ups to advance the production of bioethylene from CO2 as well as the extraction of lithium from salty wastewater left over from oil production.
According to Hollub, it will be possible to produce emission-free oil (net zero oil) or even oil that ultimately reduces the greenhouse gas content of the air (net negative oil). To achieve this, the company focuses primarily on a combination of DAC and enhanced oil recovery.
In EOR, CO2 is injected into depleting oil wells to bring the remaining raw material to the surface. The technology is already in use. However, Hollub plans to use even more CO2 – obtained through DAC – for this purpose. She says the aim is to extend the utilization of oil. However, the prerequisite for this is that “more CO2 is injected into the oil field” than is ultimately released back into the air using the extracted oil.
The climate organization Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) criticizes DAC as “unproven and expensive.” The organization argues that by prolonging oil production, Oxy could ultimately generate several hundred thousand additional tons of CO2 emissions per year – just from a single DAC plant. The combination of EOR and DAC, in particular, would add more carbon to the atmosphere than it removes.
They conclude that DAC ultimately does more harm than good to the climate by extending the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure and diverting resources away from more efficient and already usable solutions, such as expanding renewables and greater energy efficiency.
The debate on the podium revealed just one side of the fundamental conflict at this year’s climate conference, which is still ongoing at the halfway point: It is about the future of fossil fuels and the question of what role technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) are to play in the future. While more than 100 countries are demanding in Dubai that COP28 decide on a complete phaseout of fossil fuels, the final declaration could not mention an end to the fossil fuel era.
Halfway through COP28, the conference has made more progress than many other climate conferences in the past. But things will get serious once the ministers arrive after the rest day on Thursday. The technical negotiations will then enter the political phase. In the best-case scenario, the negotiators will have narrowed the problems enough for the political leaders to concentrate on the most important issues by then.
All achievements so far:
In the first five days of the COP, 83 billion US dollars have been mobilized. There have been eleven pledges and declarations, including the first declaration at a climate conference on food systems and health. The details according to the Climate Action Tracker Fact Sheet of the COP Presidency:
Financial pledges so far:
The tracker from the Word Resources Institute allows you to keep track of the negotiation texts.
If you want to talk to Ingrid-Gabriela Hoven these days, you have to manage to get hold of her between two conferences. The Director of the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) only attended the African Climate Summit in Nairobi a few weeks ago, and in late November, she was in Dubai for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28). Both appointments already say a lot about Hoven’s focus at GIZ and how she intends to expand the organization’s activities. Whereas in the past, the focus was more on economic development, the Bonn-based organization is now focusing more and more on tackling climate change. “We need to bring together the various dimensions of development cooperation,” she says. By this, she means decarbonization, economic development, and climate change adaptation. “Since Paris, this is also what is expected of us.”
Hoven attended the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 as part of the German delegation. The 63-year-old is one of the most experienced minds in Germany when it comes to international cooperation. She learned development policy from the ground up, so to speak: She studied political science and economics in Giessen and Paris. She then completed her post-graduate training at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability in Berlin. Hoven is married and has a son.
From 1986 to 2020, she worked at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Her work was interrupted only by a five-year stint at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit, which merged with Internationale Weiterbildung und Entwicklung gGmbH and the German Development Service to form GIZ in 2011 – and by a position at the World Bank Group. There, she represented Germany as Executive Director from 2010 to 2014.
She has been a member of the GIZ board since 2020. ‘I am delighted to be able to contribute my broad climate policy network and my experience, for instance, from my time as Executive Director at the World Bank, to GIZ’s work,’ says Hoven. She is leading GIZ in difficult times amid the uncertainty surrounding Germany’s national budget. “One of my goals for the coming years is to ensure that GIZ continues its work effectively to promote sustainable development worldwide. Climate change is a driver of social inequality, conflict and migration. More efforts and cooperation with the Global South are needed to meet this challenge,” says Hoven.
The company plays an important role in the German government’s climate efforts. According to Hoven, GIZ has a unique network around the world and “enjoys an excellent reputation.” She hopes that GIZ can now put this reputation to good use to advance transformation projects.
For example, GIZ is working on implementing the Just Energy Transition Partnerships between Western countries and countries such as South Africa and Indonesia. “In the South African state of Mpumalanga, 100,000 jobs depend directly on coal production,” explains Hoven. However, as South Africa wants to decarbonize, it needs support here: Retraining, facilities for start-ups, investors for new, sustainable industries, such as ecotourism or renewable energies. “Of course, every transformation is different and country-specific. In this respect, we adapt our support to the different situations, but also promote the exchange of experience between countries that are going through similar processes.”
Hoven hopes that COP28 will produce an ambitious result. “I am cautiously optimistic that climate action will pick up momentum. The world needs a sign of solidarity, especially in these times.” Lars-Thorben Niggehoff
