IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-01697447.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Combining low-carbon economic development and oil exploration in Brazil? An energy–economy assessment

Author

Listed:
  • Julien Lefevre

    (CIRED - centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • William Wills

    (COPPE-UFRJ - Instituto Alberto Luiz Coimbra de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa de Engenharia - UFRJ - Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro [Brasil] = Federal University of Rio de Janeiro [Brazil] = Université fédérale de Rio de Janeiro [Brésil])

  • Jean-Charles Hourcade

    (CIRED - centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Brazil's nationally determined contribution (NDC) pledged under the Paris Agreement has marked a new stage in its climate policy towards strengthening low-carbon economic development beyond the recent drastic cuts in emissions from deforestation. Brazil especially means to limit oil consumption driven by future economic growth and to increase energy efficiency and biofuel use in the transport sector. On the other hand, Brazil still aspires to become a major petroleum province given its huge reserves of 'pre-salt' oil. This article aims to clarify under what conditions low-carbon economic development and oil exploration can possibly be combined in Brazil and what would be the energy system, environmental and macroeconomic implications of enabling policies for doing so. To address these questions, an energy–economy computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Brazilian economy is used to simulate alternative scenarios up to 2030. The results first show that implementing the most recent energy plans, which take into account the new economic reality in Brazil, should lead to over 20% lower domestic CO 2 emissions in 2030 than the indicative NDC target, and to the export of the bulk of newfound crude oil. Second, with the same level of oil production, deeper domestic decarbonization, triggered by additional carbon pricing and sustainable efficiency measures, appears achievable with very small gross domestic product (GDP) loss and maximum oil exports, while being aligned with a 2°C emission pathway. However, (i) extra oil exports may induce net additional emissions outside Brazil and be seen as a perverse incentive and (ii) the economic growth strategy based on high oil exports may hinder the necessary diversification of the Brazilian economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Julien Lefevre & William Wills & Jean-Charles Hourcade, 2018. "Combining low-carbon economic development and oil exploration in Brazil? An energy–economy assessment," Post-Print hal-01697447, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01697447
    DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2018.1431198
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aditya Prana Iswara & Jerry Dwi Trijoyo Purnomo & Lin-Han Chiang Hsieh & Aulia Ulfah Farahdiba & Andrian Dolfriandra Huruta, 2022. "More Is More? The Inquiry of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Upstream Petroleum Fields of Indonesia," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-18, June.
    2. Grottera, Carolina & Naspolini, Giovanna Ferrazzo & La Rovere, Emilio Lèbre & Schmitz Gonçalves, Daniel Neves & Nogueira, Tainan de Farias & Hebeda, Otto & Dubeux, Carolina Burle Schmidt & Goes, Georg, 2022. "Energy policy implications of carbon pricing scenarios for the Brazilian NDC implementation," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    3. Le Treut, Gaëlle & Lefèvre, Julien & Lallana, Francisco & Bravo, Gonzalo, 2021. "The multi-level economic impacts of deep decarbonization strategies for the energy system," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 156(C).
    4. Guevara, Zeus & Sebastian, Antonio & Carranza Dumon, Fabian, 2022. "Economy-wide impact of conventional development policies in oil-exporting developing countries: The case of Mexico," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 161(C).
    5. Bastidas, Daniel & Mc Isaac, Florent, 2019. "Reaching Brazil's Nationally Determined Contributions: An assessment of the key transitions in final demand and employment," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    6. William Wills & Emilio Lebre La Rovere & Carolina Grottera & Giovanna Ferrazzo Naspolini & Gaëlle Le Treut & F. Ghersi & Julien Lefèvre & Carolina Burle Schmidt Dubeux, 2022. "Economic and social effectiveness of carbon pricing schemes to meet Brazilian NDC targets," Post-Print hal-03500923, HAL.
    7. Brinkman, Marnix L.J. & Wicke, Birka & Faaij, André P.C. & van der Hilst, Floor, 2019. "Projecting socio-economic impacts of bioenergy: Current status and limitations of ex-ante quantification methods," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01697447. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.