Save the planet by creating a new economy
Luca Longo's in-depth analysis
In 2040, we will share this planet with 9 billion people. Each of them will have the same rights as ours to life, health, well-being and personal and social growth. Each of them will need energy to get them and to defend them.
But we cannot imagine that the same development model that is applied today in the richest countries can be maintained and extended to everyone. We consume more than we need, we waste resources, energy, water, food, materials. In 150 years, with our activities, we have practically doubled the content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we have caused an increase in the greenhouse effect that is already significantly changing the earth's climate.
We are far from the goal of limiting the rise in temperatures to below 2 C as set by the Paris Accords. Already by 2030 we will have to reduce the amount of CO2 that we release into the atmosphere every year from 32 to 24 billion tons. But at the current rate we risk instead of rising to 34 billion.
For this reason, Eni – the first among the world's major energy companies – has set itself the goal of contributing to giving energy to the planet according to a circular economy model.
Circular means Reducing: creating the same good or service with a lower consumption of resources, favoring those with less impact on the environment.
Circular means Reuse: using the same good several times avoiding the consumption of raw materials and reducing waste and the need to dispose of them.
Circular means Recycle: when an asset has reached the end of its life, recover the material it contains and transform it so that it can be reused, reducing disposal and consumption.
To achieve these objectives, Eco-design is necessary: the ability to design the production of a good or service in such a way as to ensure its longest possible duration, simple maintenance / repair, the opportunity to rework it, modernize it or update it, possibility to easily recycle it at the end of its useful life.
Eni has already drastically reduced the carbon component of its activities. It is committed to reducing flaring (methane gas leaks from plants and refineries) to zero and thanks to EST technology it reuses the heaviest refining waste to create lighter fuels.
Scientific research and digitalization are now helping the six-legged dog to do even more: smart digital solutions to be applied in all areas can, alone, help reduce CO2 emissions by 20% by 2030.
It is necessary to build a model of final energy consumption (this is where 90% of the sector's emissions occur) more attentive to efficiency, to minimize waste, to favor the use of cleaner sources even with the application of technologies more advanced. Versalis – Eni's chemical company – has studied, developed and put into production numerous technologies for the recycling of plastic packaging materials. In the first biorefinery in the world, Eni's in Venice, 230,000 tons of vegetable oils are processed per year – including half of the used frying oils collected in Italy – to transform them into biofuels. In 2024, the processing capacity will grow to 560,000 tons per year.
After more than three million hours of work, in August 2019 the biorefinery in Gela also started its activities. The Sicilian plant has an annual processing capacity that can reach 750,000 tons per year of used vegetable oils, frying fats, animal fats, algae and advanced waste by-products to produce premium quality biofuels.
The new biorefinery, considered by all technical standards the most innovative in Europe, has taken the place of the great petrochemical, built starting in 1962, and whose plants have been shut down. The expenditure for the conversion of the refinery was approximately 285 million euros, to which must be added another 15 million investment in the construction of a biomass pre-treatment plant and logistic structures to increase the flexibility of the feedstock, whose completion is scheduled for the end of 2020.
In the medium term, the energy multinational born in Italy, aims at a mix that progressively shifts the balance from the more polluting fossil fuels, especially coal, to the less polluting ones, first of all natural gas, which – for the same amount of energy produced – causes half the emissions of coal.
But the six-legged dog has a growth model based on energy with the lowest environmental impact. It invests in the research, development and production of renewable energies, such as solar photovoltaics, solar thermal, the transformation into biofuels of biomass from urban organic waste, agricultural and forest waste, microalgae grown in arid areas. In this way, the biofuels of the future do not compete with agriculture dedicated to feeding the planet.
Eni – once again unique among all the major energy companies in the world – has created the Commonwealth Fusion System led by scientists from MIT in Boston with the aim of producing clean energy from magnetic fusion within 15 years. This initiative is now joined by other among the most innovative and visionary actors on the planet, such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani and Richard Branson.
As the CEO Claudio Descalzi had already declared in 2018: "The challenge is enormous, but so is the opportunity that presents itself to us: saving the planet while creating a new, more inclusive economy, building an entire range of businesses and jobs that do not yet exist. "
Article published on eni.com
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/circular-economy/salvare-il-pianeta-creando-una-economia-nuova/ on Sat, 28 Nov 2020 06:00:17 +0000.