In the lead up to the COP28 conference in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates starting at the end of the month, the government of China has released a plan to take more “forceful” action to reduce emissions of methane. The country is the world’s highest emitter of the gas (which is estimated to have contributed around one-third of total greenhouse gas emissions since industrialisation), and was not a part of the COP26 pledge by more than 150 countries to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030.

The newly released plan is seen as an “opening play” rather than a final offer, and does not include any hard targets, according to the report from the Financial Times. One imagines, therefore, that a target might be set during negotiations prior to and during the climate conference. If China were to sign up to the 30% pledge of other countries, that in itself would be highly significant in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Sultan al-Jaber, the president-elect for COP28, said of the plan that it was a “crucial step for global climate action”.

China has also made the news in the past fortnight in announcing a plan to guarantee payments to coal-fired power plants based on their capacity, with plant owners able to claim 30% of their capital costs between 2024 (the start of the plan) and 2025, through a tariff charged to industrial and commercial end users gathered by grid companies. The plan is designed to ensure stability of supply during the transition to cleaner forms of power generation, particularly for coal-fired plants that are used as back-up. From 2026 onwards, the capacity repayment will rise to 50%.

In other news in the lead up to COP28, the European Union, United States, and United Arab Emirates have been urging countries to sign up to a pledge to triple the deployment of renewable power generation technologies by 2030 while shifting away from fossil fuels and improving energy efficiency by 4% per year until 2030. More than 60 countries are reportedly ready to commit to the pledge; these do not presently include India, but negotiations with the Asian giant are reportedly “quite advanced”.

Shifting back to China, further detail on the country’s commitments came shortly before Chinese President Xi Jinping met with US President Joe Biden in an effort to thaw relations between the two nations. A document was released by the US State Department which included a commitment from China to “pursue efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030”, apparently from a 2020 base, so as to “accelerate the substitution for coal, oil and gas generation, and thereby anticipate post-peaking meaningful absolute power sector emission reduction, in this critical decade of the 2020s.”

The statement also says that the two countries will “aim to advance at least 5 large-scale cooperative CCUS projects each by 2030, including from industrial and energy sources” – presumably if they are “each” advancing projects, the other country will be a junior partner in the other’s projects such that they are then “cooperative”, perhaps through technology sharing. On methane and other non-CO₂ greenhouse gases, the key message was that the two countries “intend to elaborate further measures”, and generally cooperate, while at COP28 they will encourage countries to participate in the anticipated “global stocktake” of GHG emissions that will lead to further and stronger emissions reduction target setting.