Webinar Summary
On
January 12, 2022, the Gulf Research Center held a webinar discussion on the
topic of “Green Mobility in the GCC: Opportunities and Challenges.” The
objectives of the event was to examine the status of green mobility in the GCC
countries, look into recent innovations and business development activities for
electromobility solutions in transport and automotive industries across the GCC
countries, evaluate the pros and cons of different green mobility solutions and
what is best for the region, highlight the obstacles facing green mobility in
the GCC region, and better understand the role of green mobility to help
achieve carbon neutrality in the GCC.
Dr.
Christian Koch, Director of Research at the Gulf Research Center welcomed the
participants while Dr. Mohamed Abdelraouf, Environmental Security and
Sustainability Research Program Manager at the Gulf Research Center moderate
the discussion.
Urška
Skrt, Mobility Manager at the World Business Council for Sustainable
Development, started by highlighting a number
of key transitions in the transportation and mobility sector such as advances
in battery technology, the introduction of low carbon fuel and efficiency
innovation to decarbonize transportation. She then presented several action
areas for businesses in transportation and mobility and presented a transport
decarbonization roadmap in line with the IEA’s net zero plan. She further
outlined the different challenges facing this plan including the speed of
deployment and grid integration. At the end of her talk, she presented a number
of recommendations for faster technology deployment of green mobility
technologies.
Dr. Rubal Dua, Research Fellow at the King
Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, highlighted
that Saudi Arabia, led by the Saudi Energy Efficiency Center, was among the
first GCC countries to adopt fuel economy standards. He stressed that the
demand-side policies are costly and difficult to justify in countries without a
local EV manufacturing industry, as is currently the case with the GCC
countries. Market barriers to EVs in the GCC region are exacerbated by policies
that tend to favor hydrocarbon fuel use. An alternative approach for the GCC
region is to emphasize technology-neutral supply-side policies, such as fuel
economy standards. Such policies are based on a combination of more stringent
technology-neutral performance standards and credit-based mechanisms to
incentivize the uptake of lower emission vehicles.
Balqees
Al-Daghar, E-Mobility Solutions Manager at ABB in
the UAE, gave a presentation of the status of current green mobility in
GCC countries. She started by explaining the difference between AC and DC
charging options and the benefit of DC charging that can compete with
traditional fuel stations and presenting different car models. She then
discussed the potential impacts on power systems and the evolution of the grid
reaching to Virtual Power plants.
Several
questions raised around the negative impacts related to the spread of electric
cars such as natural resources usage and batteries disposal dominated the
subsequent discussion. The role of subsides in GCC countries and how it can
hinder or encourage promoting of green transportation was also mentioned. In
general, it was noted that one of the challenges is the usage of resources.
Here, technology is developing very fast and the recycling of materials is one
solution to maximize the usage of available resources. Meanwhile, the role of
subsides in the GCC countries and their lifting is seen as having a minimum
impacts of private cars usage.
Recording of webinar can be found here
