Chile

Historical emissions from 1990 to 2021 were taken from the PRIMAP National Historical Greenhouse Gas Emissions Database (Gütschow and Pflüger, 2022). The data is provided in AR4.

LULUCF data for 1990-2018 is taken from the Greenhouse Gas Inventory in Chile’s Fourth Biennial Update Report to the UNFCCC (Ministerio del Medio Ambiente, 2020).

No assumptions or calculation were made with respect to the unconditional NDC target for 2030 as it already included an absolute target for emissions excl. LULUCF. The NDC also included a peak year (2025) and an emissions budget (excl. LULUCF) for the period between 2020 and 2030. These numbers were taken directly into our calculations and no additional assumptions were needed.

For the new conditional target – a reduction of up to 45% in net emissions by 2030, compared to 2016 levels– we assumed that reductions from “net emissions” refers to economy-wide emissions incl. LULUCF. This translates into a target of 25.4 MtCO₂e, incl. LULUCF, by 2030. Chile has not provided further details on the extent to which it will rely on LULUCF to meet the conditional target, thus we have developed a range based on the following assumptions:

• For the lower end of the range, we assumed that the further emissions reductions needed to meet the conditional target, as compared to the unconditional target, will come from reductions in all sectors, except LULUCF. Thus, we assume the 45% reduction would come entirely from emissions excluding LULUCF. This translates into an 88 MtCO₂e emissions level by 2030, excl. LULUCF. For the same year, LULUCF captures would stand at -62.7 MtCO₂e.

For the upper end of the range, we assumed that the further emissions reductions needed to meet the conditional target as compared to the unconditional target will come entirely from removals in the LULUCF sector. This means, emissions excluding LULUCF by 2030 will remain at 95 MtCO₂e (as in the unconditional target), while LULUCF captures will stand at -69.6 MtCO₂e.

Current policy projections have been harmonised to historical emissions up to 2021. We estimated current policy projections using a variety of sources across the different sectors, as described below:

Agriculture and Waste

Emissions for agriculture and waste are taken from MAPS Chile (Línea Base 2013, PIB bajo) (Government of Chile, 2014). The base year of the MAPS Chile scenario is 2013, it is based on macroeconomic projections from 2013 (low case GDP growth, an average annual GDP growth of 3% through 2030) and includes implemented policies up until 2013. For projections historical emissions are extrapolated to future years.

Industrial processes

The Industrial Processes and Product Use sector is quantified from MAPS Chile (Línea Base 2013, PIB bajo) (Government of Chile, 2014). The base year of the MAPS Chile scenario is 2013, it is based on macroeconomic projections from 2013 (low case GDP growth, an average annual GDP growth of 3% through 2030) and includes implemented policies up until 2013. For projections historical emissions are extrapolated to future years.

Energy

The energy sector projections are taken from two original sources: the Mitigation Plan’s current implemented policies scenario (Ministerio de Energía, 2017b) and the Outlook from the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) (APEC, 2022). As the APEC scenario already includes all current policies, no additional calculations were added. It was used for the lower end of the emissions projections between 2022 and 2025. The policies included in the Mitigation Plan’s scenario are the Unconventional Renewable Energy Law (Law 20.257/2008), the carbon tax (Law 20.780/2014), and the results of electricity supply tenders as of December 2017 (Ministerio de Energía, 2017b). We have additionally quantified and subtracted the potential emissions reduction from Chile’s Electromobility Strategy, the updated first-phase of Chile’s coal phase-out plan and the new Energy Efficiency Law (Law 21.305/2021) from the Mitigation Plan current policy scenario.

Potential emission reductions from the Electromobility Strategy are quantified by estimating a range of private electric vehicle market penetration and urban electric bus fleet renewal.

• For Light Duty Vehicles, we estimated a range for Chile’s future fleet based on different projections for LDV development and EV market penetration(INE Chile, 2022). Emissions reductions were then estimated from the total amount of conventional vehicles that could be replaced by electric ones.
  • For the lower end, we assumed historical private vehicle fleet from the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Chile, 2021), total vehicle fleet projections from the Agencia Chilena de Eficiencia Energética (EBP Chile, 2018), and LDV projections through stock turnover calculations accounting for the 2035 ban on sales and historical market shares from IEA’s latest EV Data (IEA, 2022a).
  • For the higher end, we linearly projected the LDV fleet by using the amount of electric vehicles expected by the government in 2050 (Ministerio de Energía, 2017a) and historical LDV fleet numbers from the IEA Global Outlook on EVs (IEA, 2021a) and from the Electromobility Platform launched by the government in April 2019 and repeatedly updated since (Ministerio de Energía, 2021i).
• For the urban electric bus fleet, we first estimated a range of electric vehicle fleet projections based on different assumptions outlined below. We then assumed the emissions reductions by using different factors such as the vehicle use and the consumption factor from various sources (Directorio de Transporte Público Metropolitano; Ecoscore; Ministerio de Transportes y Telecomunicaciones Chile; E2BIZ Consultores, 2017; EBP Chile, 2018).
  • For the lower end, we used the projections for urban electric buses in Santiago from the Chilean Association of Electricity Suppliers (in Spanish: Asociación de Generadoras de Chile; referred to as “Suppliers”) (E2BIZ Consultores, 2017). We extrapolated the evolution of the national urban electric bus fleet from those local projections and used the conservative scenario’s growth rate of the Suppliers’ report, which corresponds to a Business-As-Usual scenario. We also assumed that the total national urban bus fleet would remain stable as of 2019 onward, as the Suppliers did for the TranSantiago bus fleet.
  • For the higher end of the range, we linearly interpolated the historical electric urban bus fleet numbers from the Electromobility Platform (Ministerio de Energía de Chile, 2019) and the expected amount of electric urban buses expected by the government in 2050 (i.e 100% of the urban bus fleet). The projection of the urban bus fleet in 2030 was obtained by using the historical urban bus fleet from the Sub-secretary of Transport (Subsecretaría de Transportes) and extrapolated it to 2030 applying the population growth as a proxy.

The maximum emission reduction potential assumes that the electricity demand from electric LDVs and electric buses will be met by renewable sources. The minimum emission reduction potential assumes that the electricity demand will be met by increasing electricity generation from the grid using the same mix as in CAT current policy scenario.

Emissions reductions from Chile’s coal phase-out plan were estimated using the chronogram published on the website and report on coal-phase out by the Ministry of Energy (Ministerio de Energía, 2020c, 2021b) and updated articles on actual retirements (Global Energy Monitor, 2022; Ministerio de Energía, 2022b)

• We first estimated electricity generation from those plants using capacity factors from an Inodú (2018) study prepared for the Ministry of Energy. We then estimated an average emission factor from coal-fired power plants in Chile between 2010 and 2019 from IEA data (IEA, 2021b).
• Finally, we estimated emission reductions by multiplying the replaced electricity generation per year by the average emission factor assuming that this electricity generation would be replaced by non-conventional renewable energy sources as specified by Chile’s Ministry of Energy. The upper end of the range assumes that electricity generation from retiring coal-fired power plants will be replaced by gas-fired power plants. For this we estimated an average emissions factor from plans in Chile between 2010 and 2016 using data from the IEA (IEA, 2021b). This method is also applied to the lower end for those power plants that we know will be repurposed to operate with gas..
• After applying the method to the first 11 power plants, we assume linear retirement of the additional power plants until 2040 and apply the same method.

Due to the wide scope covering different sectors, the emissions reductions from the new Energy Efficiency Law (Law 21.305/2021) were assessed in a simplified manner, taking into account the expected 28.6 MtCO₂e emission savings until 2030 (Ministerio de Energía, 2021e) and assuming a linear reduction. 37% of this reduction comes from the transport sector (10.6 MtCO₂e) (Ministerio de Energía, 2021f) but it was unclear to us which part of these reduction are covered by our calculations in the EV strategy. As these 28.6 MtCO₂e seem very large and detailed measures on achieving them remain vague, we omitted the reductions from the transport sector for the current policy scenario and instead only accounted for the aforementioned calculations of the electromobility strategy. As such, we expected a reduction of 18 MtCO₂e over 10 years, thus a yearly reduction of 1.8 MtCO₂e.

Some policy developments such as the update on the Distributed Generation Law (also referred to as the “Net Billing” Law) (Law 20.571), which triples the capacity threshold for installed capacity for projects of self-consumption, are not quantified due to lack of available data.

Planned policy projections have been harmonized to historical emissions up to 2019.

Additional to the current implemented policies scenario, Chile’s Mitigation Plan includes a scenario which is aligned to the 2050 Energy Strategy. We have added and adapted this scenario to develop our planned policy scenario. This scenario includes the targets of electricity generation from renewable energy of at least 60% by 2035 and 70% by 2050. Additionally, we have quantified and subtracted emissions reductions from the electromobility strategy using the same methodology as in the current policy scenario. We have also included the same emission reductions through coal-phase out but have added the retirement of another three plants in 2025, which have been announced but not confirmed, and we have assumed a linear retirement of coal-fired electricity generation until 2040. The upper end assumes that this generation will be supplied by gas, while the lower end assumes that the electricity generation from coal will be met by renewable energy sources. Unlike with the current policy scenario, we have kept the transport-related emission reduction from the energy efficiency law but have subtracted 6.1 MtCO₂ from the total 28.1 as this amount of reduction through energy efficiency measures is already included in Chile’s Mitigation Plan.

We applied a method to estimate the COVID-19 related dip in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, its rebound and its impact until 2030 for projections whose sources were published before the pandemic. We first update these projections based on the most recent developments, before the pandemic. We then distil the emission intensity (GHG emissions/GDP) from this pre-pandemic scenario and applied it to the most recent GDP projections that take into account the effect of the pandemic.

We used GDP projections from the IMF and Banco Central de Chile (Banco Central, 2022; IMF, 2022). We derived GDP estimates for the period 2023 to 2030 from the growth rates in the original pre-pandemic current policy scenario.

The CAT uses Global Warming Potential (GWP) values from the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) for all its figures and time series. Assessments completed prior to December 2018 (COP24) used GWP values from the Second Assessment Report (SAR).