MELBOURNE, Sept 15 (Reuters) - A forecast for Southeast Asia's coal consumption to more than triple by 2040 underscores the need for more investment in low emissions coal technology to help meet global climate targets, a world coal trade body chief said on Thursday.
Regional demand for coal is expected to grow at 4.6 percent a year to 2040, outpacing overall growth in energy demand as the region taps plentiful and comparatively cheap reserves, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Coal's share of Southeast Asia's energy mix is expected to rise to 29 percent by that time from 15 percent in 2013, the IEA said in a report this week.
"We have to recognise that we're not going to meet the world's climate targets just by focusing on renewables," Benjamin Sporton, Chief Executive of the World Coal Association told a briefing.
"We need a mix of technologies. No one technology can be deployed to achieve the 2 degree target ... From an Australian perspective that is good reason to continue investing in coal," he told reporters.
In Paris last December, nearly 200 countries agreed on a binding global compact to slash greenhouse gases and keep global temperature increases to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius. The agreement was ratified by China and the United States at the G20 meet in Hangzhou earlier this month. said investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS), as well as low emissions power plants, were key to keeping emissions down.
"We need to be focusing on all the technology options and CCS is an absolutely critical component," he said.
Some climate groups have backed CCS as necessary for industrial processes like steel-making, which can't be powered by renewables, and especially for newer steel plants that are being constructed in Asia.
"We have been supportive of CCS as a technology, that's partly because we will need technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it back where it came from - deep underground," CEO John Connor of Australia's independent Climate Institute told Reuters.
However, he said investment in such technologies should come from the coal industry itself.
"It's the future of their own industry so they should be investing heavily. The coal power industry must face the real costs of its emissions."