“The obvious solution is replacing our use of fossil fuels to the maximum degree with electricity sourced from renewable sources, this is when we talk about the electric planet. It’s obvious, but hard.
Electrons (electricity) are only useful to a finite extent, maybe they could support 70 or 80% of everything that we need. We do need a transportable high energy fuel; hydrogen as this fuel obviously comes to mind but using it efficiently and effectively across all the economy is not easy.
Take the Australian economy and break it up by sectors as reported by government, the three biggest sectors for this discussion are electricity generation, stationary energy, and transport.
Electricity generation is self-evident.
Less obvious is stationary energy, this is energy used for heating buildings and hot water and things like producing steam in industrial processes.
Transport must also be included in this mix.
Today, all three of these depend on fossil fuels, a very high percentage of fossil fuels are used for energy rather than elsewhere in the Australian economy.
So, all the use of fossil fuels for energy, not as a chemical feedstock, appear in those three sectors and these are large carbon emitters.
The fourth sector where carbon emissions have a significant effect is fugitive emissions.
Fugitive emissions are associated with producing natural gas and coal. We can tweak them and improve them to some extent as we go forward. But for Australia, fugitives will intrinsically go away as the rest of the world stops buying our coal and oil.
So, if you do the numbers 72% of all of Australia's emissions from those first three categories of electricity generation, stationary energy, and transport, 10% is in fugitive emissions, which adds up to 82% of our emissions.
These will be addressed by replacing fossil fuels for energy generation."