Impacts of PV Adoption in Qatar on Natural Gas Exports and Carbon Dioxide Emission Reduction

Abstract

Qatar seeks to generate 2% of its electricity from solar power by 2020 (Bryden et al., 2013, REN 2015), and 20% by either 2024 (PV Insider, 2014) or 2030 (REN, 2015). Since electricity is produced almost entirely from natural gas in Qatar, these renewable energy targets introduce the prospect of natural gas savings that can be made use to increase trade and/or reduce carbon emissions. Electricity production in Qatar has been growing at a very fast pace since the mid-nineties. An estimated 7.3 millions of tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) of natural gas were used in 2013 to produce 34.7 terawatt-hours (TWh), double the amount in 2007 and over five times as compared to 1997 (Table 1). Table 1: Electricity production with associate natural gas (NG) use in Qatar 1971–2013. Source for electricity data: http://www.iea.org. Gas usage calculated as the estimated average efficiency for power plants using natural gas in the US for the period 2003–2013 (40.84%) estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (ht...