The energy sector is Egypt’s highest emitting sector, as the country is still highly dependent on fossil fuels. The power sector makes up the largest share of energy emissions (30%), followed by transport (16%) and industrial energy use (12%). Industry processes and agriculture make up the next highest shares of total emissions, followed by waste.

Egypt’s total emissions fell from 2011 to 2014, coinciding with economic recession following the 2011 and 2013 revolutions.¹ The reductions came entirely from the energy sector, with energy emissions falling 9%. During this period, Egypt suffered from a slowdown in natural gas production resulting in severe fuel shortages and power outages.² Egypt’s economy and emissions have since rebounded, with energy emissions increasing 8% from 2014 to 2017. While the impact of COVID-19 on emissions is not yet clear, Egypt’s economy maintained positive growth in 2020 even as the regional economy in Africa contracted by 1.9%, maintaining positive growth in 2021.³

¹ Ministry of Environment. Egypt’s First Biennial Update Report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. (2018).

² Meighan, B. Egypt’s Natural Gas Crisis. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (2016).

³ IMF. World Economic Outlook Update: April 2021. (2021).

⁴ Fahmy, H. Will the lights stay on in Egypt? Middle East Institute. (2020).

⁵ European Commission. New era in EU-Egypt energy cooperation. (2018).

⁶ Magdy, M. Egypt in Talks Over Plan to Sell Power to Europe and Africa. Bloomberg Quint. (2020).

⁷ Arab Republic of Egypt. Sustainable Development Strategy: Egypt Vision 2030. (2016).

⁸ IRENA. Renewable Energy Outlook Egypt: Executive Summary. (2018).

⁹ New and Renewable Energy Authority. Renewable Energy Targets.-

¹⁰ Global Energy Monitor. Map. Global Coal Plant Tracker

¹¹ Target does not specify reference value.

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 IPCC SR1.5 used in this analysis and the present has at times led to distortions when downscaling these scenarios to the national level.

¹⁵ WRI‘s report, State of Climate Action, 2021.