In Egypt, the transport sector is the second largest source of emissions (16%) after the power sector. In 2019, the transport sector almost entirely relied on oil, with a small contribution from non-biomass gas fuels (2%) and electricity (0.3%).
Across analysed pathways, the extent of electrification varies, reaching 3 to 28% by 2030 and 24 to 82% by mid-century for the most ambitious scenarios. Pathways with lower electrification rates have higher shares of hydrogen or biofuels, which reach 12-52% and 16-25% of the transport energy mix by 2050, respectively. Given Egypt’s limited available agricultural land and water resources, production of energy crops for biofuels faces challenges; however, IRENA has identified significant potential for jatropha and sugar residues to supply biodiesel in Egypt, with biofuels supplying about 10% of Egypt’s transport energy mix by 2030 in their REmap Case.
Egypt’s NDC does not include actions to shift away from oil in the transport sector, but does indicate the government’s intention to promote a modal shift for freight and passenger transit to rail, river and buses.
1 Ministry of Environment. Egypt’s First Biennial Update Report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (2018).
12 Global cost-effective pathways assessed by the IPCC Special Report 1.5°C tend to include fossil fuel use well beyond the time at which these could be phased out, compared to what is understood from bottom-up approaches, and often rely on rather conservative assumptions in the development of renewable energy technologies. This tends to result in greater reliance on technological CDR than if a faster transition to renewables were achieved. The scenarios available at the time of this analysis focus particularly on BECCS as a net-negative emission technology, and our downscaling methods do not yet take national BECCS potentials into account.
13 In some of the analysed pathways, the power sector assumes already a certain amount of carbon dioxide removal technologies, in this case bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
14 Note that the model High Energy Demand shows a slight decline in electricity consumption between 2020 and 2030 mainly due to modelling artefacts. Consistency with national context: The significant gap between the starting year of the first generation of scenarios of the IPCCSR1.5 used in this analysis and the present has at times led to distortions when downscaling these scenarios to the national level.