Mohamed Ezz and Valerie Volcovici
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt/BAKU (Reuters) – Black dust covers the streets and settles on rooftops in a neighborhood near a huge cement factory in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.
Activists and local residents accuse the plant, run by Alexandria Portland Cement Company (APCC), a subsidiary of Greece’s Titan Cement, of burning coal and polluting the air.
Mustafa Mahmoud, a grocery store owner in the Wadi al-Qamar area, said: “Every night I see particles falling from the chimneys. You can clearly see the dust pouring out from under the street lights.”
Reuters could not independently verify this claim. Titan Cement said its power plant’s emissions are within legal limits and it plans to reduce its use of coal in the coming years.
Like many cement manufacturers in Egypt and across North Africa, the plant uses imported coal to fire its kilns. Recently, an increasing amount of the region’s coal has been imported from the United States, according to U.S. export data.
Fossil fuel exports were a hot topic at this year’s United Nations climate conference in Baku. Activists and representatives of some climate-vulnerable countries have argued that countries should be held accountable for the pollutants they send abroad, often to poor, developing countries. Forms of oil, gas and coal. Some are trying to put the question of how to do this on the agenda of future climate summits.
A landmark agreement signed in Paris in 2015 to combat climate change requires countries to set targets for reducing national levels of global warming greenhouse gas emissions and report on progress. But it imposes no such requirements on emissions from fossil fuels drilled, mined and transported elsewhere.
This has led countries such as the United States, Norway and Australia to produce and export fossil fuels at an alarming rate while making progress toward international climate goals, said Bill Hare, co-founder of Climate. action (WA:) Tracker is an independent scientific project that tracks government climate action.
“Most fossil fuel exporting countries can make a good showing with their domestic climate action,” he said on the sidelines of the COP29 conference in Baku this week. “Their exported emissions are someone else’s problem.”
Conducted by Climate Action Tracker and Reuters for the International Energy Agency. This represents about a third of U.S. domestic emissions, the data showed.
A drilling boom over the past few years has made the United States the world’s leading oil and gas producer, and robust demand has led to a fourth straight year of increased coal exports, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Asked how Washington realizes its climate ambitions through fossil fuel production and exports, Ali Zaidi, a climate adviser to President Joe Biden, said robust energy production is needed to keep consumer prices low while transitioning to clean fuels.
“I don’t think there is a social license in the market for a decarbonization playbook that would put upward pressure on retail consumers,” Zaidi told Reuters.
New President Donald Trump, a climate change skeptic, has said he wants to further increase the country’s fossil fuel production.
For other producers, greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel exports are sometimes greater than domestic emissions, Climate Action Tracker said.
This was the case for Norway, Australia and Canada in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available for all countries analyzed. Reuters obtained exclusive access to the calculations.
Norway’s Ministry of Climate and Environment said it was up to other countries to manage their own carbon emissions.
“Each country has a responsibility to reduce its own emissions,” the Ministry of Environment said in a statement to Reuters.
Environment and climate officials in Canada and Australia did not comment.
At a summit in Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev accused some Western politicians of double standards in lecturing his government on oil and gas use, saying: “They would do well to look at themselves.” .
cement and bricklayer
Most of America’s gas exports now go to European countries seeking to reduce their dependence on Russia, and China has become one of the largest buyers of coal, according to EIA figures. However, the largest growth market for coal in the United States is North Africa.
U.S. coal mines exported about 52.5 million short tons globally in the first half of 2024, up nearly 7% from the same period a year earlier, according to the data.
Most of the increase was driven by cement and brick manufacturers in Egypt and Morocco, which collectively consumed more than 5 million short tons during the period, the EIA said in a recent report.
“These customers value the high heat content of U.S. thermal coal, which makes manufacturing operations more efficient,” the report said.
Meanwhile, U.S. domestic coal use has been declining due to cheaper subsidies and subsidies for renewable energy, such as solar and wind power and the retirement of coal-fired power plants, which has led to more than 15 years of lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Egypt’s cement industry has relied on imported coal for nearly a decade as persistent natural gas shortages have forced many factories to look for alternatives, said Ahmed Shireen Korayem, vice president and director of the Arab Cement and Building Materials Association, a regional industry body. .
The United States is Egypt’s largest supplier, accounting for 3.1 million tons of the 6.6 million tons of coal imported this year, according to Egyptian data. london stock exchange group(LON:).
Russia supplied most of the remainder, 2.1 million metric tons. The Environment Ministry referred questions to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but did not immediately comment.
Activists argue that the Egyptian government’s decision in 2015 to lift a long-standing ban on coal imports to support an industry central to its economic development plans is harmful to the environment and health of communities such as Wadi Al Qamar.
Researchers from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, Cairo University and the Ministry of Environment used data from the Alexandria Power Plant’s emissions monitoring system to simulate the dispersion of polluted dust and toxic gases between 2014 and 2020.
The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Health Science and Engineering in 2022, found that switching from using natural gas to coal as the primary fuel increased emissions and concentrations of total suspended particles (TSP), nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. We concluded that it leads to . However, concentrations were mostly within legal limits.
Egypt’s greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels rose by more than a fifth to 263 million in the decade ending in 2022, according to data from the Global Carbon Budget, a project led by the University of Exeter in the UK. It is said to have reached metric tons of carbon dioxide.
Most of these emissions came from gas and oil, which remain Egypt’s main energy sources. Coal accounted for 9 million tons, or 3.4% of the total in 2022.
The government has pledged to phase out coal in 2021 and has called on companies that use coal to introduce more renewable energy sources into their energy mix. However, Egypt’s environment ministry spokeswoman Heba Mattok said there was a shortage of alternative fuels, such as waste-derived fuel (RDF), which is made from combustible waste.
“If companies cannot get RDF, they will not stop operations and will use coal to avoid losses,” Maatouk told Reuters.
legal battle
Decarbonizing the cement industry is particularly difficult in poor developing countries such as Egypt. That’s because it requires huge amounts of energy and the technology to prevent emissions into the atmosphere is expensive.
In his COP29 speech last week, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said his country’s plan to increase renewables to 42% of its power mix by 2030 depends on foreign support.
Hoda Nasrallah, a lawyer for the Egyptian Initiative for Individual Rights (EIPR), said residents of the Wadi al-Qamar area have been waging a long legal battle with the Alexandria Cement Plant APCC, filing several lawsuits.
In 2016, community members supported by EIPR asked the administrative court in Alexandria to overturn amendments to the country’s environmental regulations that would have allowed heavy industry to use coal on health and environmental grounds, according to the rights group.
APCC officials did not respond to a request for comment through a legal representative.
Titan Cement confirmed that the plant sources coal from the United States, but did not provide further details.
In a statement issued by Lydia Yannakopoulou, group corporate communications director, the company said the plant had not broken any laws, had invested €40 million in pollution control since 2010 and would reduce the use of coal in the coming years. They said they plan to reduce it. The use of alternatives increases.
She said a court-appointed committee of experts from Alexandria University concluded that there were no environmental violations due to the company’s emissions or operating processes and that its emissions were within legal limits.
Nasrallah said lawyers representing the community believed the committee was led by company employees and had taken the case to Egypt’s highest administrative court in Cairo.
Neither side provided a copy of the committee report and Reuters could not independently verify their claims.
A ruling in the case is expected in December.
Meanwhile, discontent is growing among residents nearby, such as Hisham al-Akary, who say they cannot afford to move because their families have lived in Wadi al-Qamar for generations.
“This factory should not be here,” he told Reuters. “We must stay and they must go.”
(Reporting by Mohamed Ezz from Cairo and Valerie Volcovici from Baku; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Alexandra Zavis)
