Spain's Appetite for Carbon Credits

Spain will invest some 57 million dollars over the next five years to buy carbon dioxide credits in Latin America to balance its greenhouse gas emissions. Madrid has its eye on clean energy projects like Mexico's La Venta II.

MADRID - Spain is staking its bets on Latin America for a place in the global "carbon market", with the hope of counterbalancing its emissions of greenhouse gases, which continue on the rise.

Spanish companies are already working in several countries in the region on clean energy plants, which would allow the European nation to "buy" credits equivalent to the carbon dioxide that would otherwise have been produced from the burning of fossil fuels, deductible from the total emissions of its polluting energy plants at home.

Carbon dioxide, CO2, is the main "greenhouse gas", which trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere and contribute to climate change.

With CO2 emissions on the rise (in 2004 alone they increased 45 percent), Spain hopes to acquire at least 60 million tons of CO2 equivalent through the international carbon market.

Some nine million tons' worth of carbon credits will come from the Iberoamerican Carbon Initiative (IIC), established on Oct. 10, and which is focused on renewable energy projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Spanish government will contribute 8.5 million euros (10.2 million dollars) for the IIC in 2006, and up to 47.4 million euros (57 million dollars) in 2010.

The projects come in the context of the "clean development mechanism" (CDM) of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which allows industrialized nations to invest in clean energy projects in the developing South in order to meet their own commitments to curb greenhouse gas
emissions.

The IIC will be managed by the Andean Development Corporation (CAF), the financial arm of the Andean Community of Nations, which encompasses Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

"For CAF, and for the Spanish government, it is important that renewable energy projects are the main beneficiaries, which is why this will be an essential filter for evaluating the projects," CAF's environment director María Teresa Szauer told Tierramérica.

In the opinion of environmentalist Domingo Jiménez Beltrán, former director of the European Environment Agency and adviser to Spain's head of government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the IIC "will place value on
the vast natural resources of Latin America, with a view to the future."

The CO2 "trade" should be part of large-scale actions to produce energy with renewable resources that are abundant in the Americas. In that way, less fossil fuel will be consumed, said Jiménez in a conversation with Tierramérica.

Most scientists attribute the bulk of the climate change phenomena to industrial pollution, and in particular the contamination produced from fossil fuels: natural gas, petroleum and coal.

The Kyoto Protocol, in force since February, obligates all industrialized countries (except the United States and Australia, which did not ratify the treaty) to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below the 1990 levels, and to do so by 2012.

Spain is a long way from curbing its emissions. Its C02 output increased 39 percent in 2000, 41 percent in 2003 and 45 percent in 2004.

Although precise figures for 2005 are not yet known, further increase in emissions is predicted, due to the drought, which cut into hydroelectric energy production and increased reliance on fossil fuel-driven plants, while electricity consumption rose six percent.

One of Spain's first projects under the CDM is in Guatemala: Las Vacas hydroelectric plant, proposed by the Spanish transnational Iberdrola, which aims for an annual reduction of 90,000 tons in C02 emissions through this "trade".

Las Vacas, in operation since May 2002, is part of a company strategy in which 74 percent of the energy generated is from sources that do not produce greenhouse gases, an Iberdrola spokesperson told Tierramérica.

The company is studying building another hydroelectric plant in Guatemala, and wind energy "farms" in Brazil (Rio do Gofo) and Mexico (La Venta II).

La Venta II complex would have 98 turbines and would be located on the southern isthmus of Tehuantepec, with a production capacity of 200 megawatts. It is slated to begin operating in 2006.

Madrid has already given the go-ahead for the paperwork so that the project might be accepted under the Kyoto Protocol's CDM. Iberdrola assures that when it begins producing energy, the peasant farmers in the area will be compensated for the use of the land where the turbines are to be installed.

The Spanish government also gave its approval for another CDM initiative in Mexico, aimed at improving the public transportation system, with more efficient and less polluting engines in buses, which will travel in exclusive bus lanes, Arturo Gonzalo Aizpiri, the Spanish Environment Ministry's secretary-general for pollution and climate change prevention, told Tierramérica.

Another Spanish energy company, Endesa, with heavy investment in Latin America, is negotiating projects in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru to acquire emissions credits worth 15 million tons through 2012, part of them within the IIC, says Endesa's environment and sustainable development director, Jesús Abadía.

The company is also investing in less-polluting technologies, "like combined cycles, renewable energies and improved efficiency of existing plants," he said.

* Tito Drago is an IPS correspondent.