Volume 5: Innovative Solutions for Energy Transitions: Part IV

Drilling Technology System: A Win-Win Solution for Just Transition, Leapfrog and International Partnership: Case Study of Bangladesh Joyashree Roy, Hasan Mahmud, Mohsen Assadi

Abstract

IPCC special report on Global Warming of 1.5°C presents the assessment based on available scientific literature that accelerated deep decarbonization is at the core of global mitigation strategy consistent with 1.5°C warming compared to pre-industrial level. The same report also presents the high agreement and robust evidence of risks evaluated by the scientific community in faster and deeper mitigation strategies through possible threats to multiple social and economic dimensions of sustainable development for countries with high dependency on fossil fuels for revenue, economic development and employment generation. The same concerns are coming from literature on just transition which are representing voices around possible job loss, loss of investment flow despite new resource identification, high risks of stranded assets, lower revenue earning with fluctuating oil and gas prices, dwindling resources. Another set of literature on policy instruments talk of need for diversification of economy and energy sector to ease these adverse consequences of transition and need for creating enabling conditions. The diversification discourse is mostly dominated by focus on new investment opportunities limited to wind and solar energy sectors. Also, the countries at risk discussion get dominated by GCC (Gulf Countries Council) countries. All these discourses ignore multiple challenges and realities in many small but fast emerging developing country perspectives. So, the research question for this paper is how can accelerated global transition address the ‘trio’: ‘just, sustainable and peaceful transition’ through cooperation for oil and gas dependent developing countries and what is the potential for leapfrog. We refer this ‘trio’ with reference to oil and gas based fossil fuel energy systems which is caught up in a complex combination of problems due to likely uncertainty and redundancy of human resource currently engaged in the sector, stranded asset due to prospective early retirement of infrastructure and projected reduction in investment and need for finding substitute of fossil based energy carrier to cleaner, renewable energy carrier. Our hypothesis is that for Bangladesh endowed with gas resources and drilling infrastructure one of the transition path can be through geothermal energy system. The policy can encompass objectives of scaling up contributions of renewable energy to electricity production, promoting appropriate, efficient and environment friendly use of renewable energy and promoting clean energy as the country is facing risk of natural gas depletion. However, currently policies make no reference to geothermal potential as a part of the solution. So this study will make a novel and unique contribution in the subject and discourse.

Keywords Geothermal energy, Just Energy transition, Bangladesh, Sustainable transition, Peaceful transition, Stranded asset