アジア太平洋地域におけるCO₂対策エネルギー技術のモデル評価

抄録

Global warming is one of the most serious issues in the modern world. Various innovative technologies have been proposed worldwide to reduce CO₂ emission and thus mitigate global warming. Among these technologies are, for example, 1) the WENET project launched in 1993 by the government of Japan which aims at transporting energy produced by photovoltaics or hydro power systems in the vast areas such as Sahara desert far from demand sites in terms of hydrogen, and 2) the hydrocarb process proposed by Steinberg which will coprocess fossil fuels and biomass into carbon and methanol.
Japan is among resource-poor countries but has an advantage that it is located relatively close to Southeast Asian countries and Australia which are endowed with vast space and solar energy. The objective of this paper is to investigate how much these innovative technologies be introduced in Japan and the surrounding resource-rich regions in the coming 30-40 years.
An energy model of optimization type has been developed for this purpose and model simulation results provide a number of interesting suggestions on the future strategies for Japan to mitigate global warming.