The remaining challenges involve a complex trade-off between CCS and nuclear power. On the one hand, heavy reliance on CCS would place Korea among world leaders in this new technology, which may be a challenge given its lack of fossil fuel resources and relevant technological experiences. Transportation and offshore storage of CO2 may represent serious engineering challenges, raising the cost of electricity and provoking political and public opposition due to its sheer scale. While many of these challenges are uncertain and speculative in the case of CCS, the political challenges of expanding or even maintaining nuclear power seem very tangible, as clearly manifested in the government‘s current plans to phase out nuclear together with coal. Nevertheless, both Korea and other countries have historical experience of expanding nuclear power production at rates that, if replicated, would make CCS unnecessary. The bottom line is that at least one of these two options or their combination would help better to achieve zero emissions from the power sector no later than 2060. Therefore, the current government plans, which envision only very modest progress on CCS and nuclear phase-out, would need to be reconsidered to face this reality.
All in all, our scenarios identify that the challenges for decarbonising the power system in Korea are formidable but manageable. This message should also give hope to other similar countries. We also propose and illustrate a new method of evaluating the feasibility of climate strategies that can be used in Korea and beyond.
Yet, this paper is not without limitations. First of all, a richer set of technology scenarios can be developed to be more informative for policymakers. For example, considering the
availability of major negative emissions technologies, such as bioenergy with CCS and direct air capture, can provide more comprehensive insights. In addition, our power plant stock accounting model does not explore the uncertainty associated with the rate of electrification of end uses (e.g., transportation, space heating, or industrial furnace). Future research would
address the twin challenge of decarbonising the electricity sector while electrifying other economic sectors such as buildings, industry, and transportation.
Data Availability
Datasets related to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/py2fddx5ss.1, an open-source online data repository hosted at Mendeley Data (Hyun and Eom, 2022).
Acknowledgements
This research has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 821471 (ENGAGE). The research by Hyun and Eom has been supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea grants funded by the Korean government (NRF-2019K1A3A1A78112573). Eom‘s research has also been supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research
Foundation of Korea (NRF), funded by the Ministry of Education
(2021R1A6A1A14045741). The authors would like to give special thanks to Hyunseok Oh for the technical support that lessened computational burdens in our scenario exercises.
Declaration of interests
☒ The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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