The Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015 by 195 countries (UNFCCC 2015) makes it very clear that the world needs to take significant steps towards decarbonising the global economy and energy systems until the middle of the century. The agreement requires countries to intensify their respective strategies and policies towards this aim.

Future global and EU decarbonization policies will affect the industrial cluster at the Port of Rotterdam, as the bulk of the port’s economic activities focuses on trading, handling, converting and using fossil fuels, i.e. fossil carbon. This makes the port’s businesses particularly vul- nerable to global and European decarbonization efforts, as the stepwise phasing out of fossil resources is at the very core of any decarbonization strategy. Furthermore, with annual CO2 emissions of well over 30 million tonnes, the port area is one of the major European hot spots of GHG emission and therefore bears a particular responsibility to actively contribute to Eu- ropean GHG emission reduction efforts.

Therefore, already in 2007, the Port Authority set an ambitious goal of reducing the emissions of the port and its industrial complex by 50% by 2025 and by 60% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels as part of the Rotterdam Climate Initiative (Port of Rotterdam Authority 2011). Furthermore the Port Authority commissioned the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environ- ment and Energy to conduct a study on Decarbonization Pathways for the Industrial Cluster of the Port of Rotterdam, in order to explore the consequences of global decarbonisation for the port’s industrial cluster and to identify possible scenarios on how the port could prepare for such a future and prepare for a pro-active stance towards deep decarbonisation.

For this purpose, four different scenarios (one “business as usual” and three decarbonisation scenarios) are developed, describing how the port’s industrial cluster could look like in 2050 in case of ambitious decarbonization efforts globally and in Europe, and to what extent the cluster might contribute to GHG mitigation. The decarbonisation scenarios cover different levels of ambition as well as different technological strategies for decarbonisation.

While the actual future developments of the port’s industrial cluster can and will most likely be quite different from the developments laid out in these scenarios, the scenarios are intend- ed to help broaden today’s thinking on potential future developments of the port’s industry in a decarbonizing world. By thinking in an open and unrestricted way about the future, the Port Authority together with its industries and possibly other stakeholders can increase their capabilities to be prepared for potential future developments – so as to better tackle the challenges ahead and to fully exploit the opportunities awaiting. As the port’s industry profits from its cluster structure, it is logical to prepare for the future jointly – even if individual companies will also pursue separate strategies. As a first step towards such a joint process, this study was developed in interaction with Port of Rotterdam stakeholders from industrial companies as well as civil society.

The process of scenario development is depicted in Figure S1. First, a framework for the sce- narios of the port’s industrial cluster was determined: An overview of recent global GHG mit- igation and decarbonisation targets and respective EU GHG emission reduction strategies provided information for deriving assumptions about the future developments of the business environment for the companies within the port’s industrial cluster. The assumptions about the future EU GHG emission reduction strategies were mainly based on an analysis of available European decarbonisation scenarios. According to these scenarios (which we refer to in this study as our “framework scenarios”), considerable changes are expected in the coming decades particularly in the transport and power generation sectors. This will have strong effects on the production of fuels and electricity in the port and on the technologies and energy carri- ers used. Plausible economic visions for the industrial cluster were derived based on the business environments foreseen by the framework scenarios. Potential “low carbon” technologies were selected in the scenarios based on literature and a survey among the port’s industrial stakeholders.

Read the full report and the analysis around the pathways here:

rapport-decarbonization-pathways-for-the-industrial-cluster-of-the-port-of-rotterdam

Source: Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy