Report says universal adoption of satellite technologies by transport, energy, oil and gas and agriculture could quadruple current contribution to carbon emissions cuts
A report compiled for satellite technology firm Inmarsat by software consultancy Globant projects that adopting satellite technologies across three broad industry sectors could cut current and potential carbon emissions by an additional 4Bn tonnes per year.
According to the report’s calculations, use of satellite communications (satcomms) already eliminates some 1.5Bn tonnes (gigatonnes or Gt) of emissions from the atmosphere annually, but that figure could rise to 5.5 Gt/year if every possible use for the technology were to be implemented in areas of transport and logistics; agriculture, forestry and land use; and global energy systems (oil and gas and renewables).
“This is equivalent to one-sixth of the total carbon emissions currently estimated as necessary to keep the global temperatures rise below 1.5°C by 2030 – or one-third of that necessary to keep temperature rises below 2°C– underlining the positive impact space technologies could have on the largest single challenge facing the world,” the report’s authors said.
The report stresses that critical work on alternative energy sources and new energy storage technologies remains an urgent requirement to arrest global temperatures rising. But the firms say the benefit of adoptiong “existing space technologies” in hard-to-abate sectors is that the carbon cuts could be immediate and “buy more time” for work on other climate change-related fuels and technologies.
In its future projections, the report also found that 8.8 Gt of carbon emissions could be saved annually – equivalent to almost a quarter of global emissions in 2021 or the emissions per capita of 1.8Bn people – if emerging space-enabled technologies were widely adopted, including autonomous maritime vessels, AI-driven optimisation in the energy sector and, in aviation, the widespread adoption of the European Space Agency’s Iris technology, a satellite-based plane-to-ground communications technology.
The resulting emissions cuts are estimated to be100M tonnes in aviation, 400M tonnes in maritime and 1.3Bn tonnes in the energy sector, which has just seen oil and gas majors like Shell and Equinor again posting record profits.
A report from the International Energy Agency has tabulated the fossil fuel industry’s annual earnings in 2022 at US$4Tn, a “huge US$2Tn windfall” that, if the oil and gas industry invested “in low-emisssions fuels, such as hydrogen and biofuels… would fund all of the investment needed in these fuels for the remainder of this decade”.
Publication of the Inmarsat-Globant report comes ahead of the United Nations (UN) conference of parties on climate change (COP27) meeting and on the heels of multiple UN reports that have projected global emissions rises pushing the world toward irreversible climate breakdown.
A report from the UN’s environment programme found there is “no credible pathway” currently in place to keep global temperature rises below 1.5°C and that current progress on curbing carbon emissions was “woefully inadequate”.
