Based on the diagram published by Iran’s Ministry of Energy, around 70% of the country’s emissions in the energy sector are coming from the consumers’ side such as Households and Commercial Consumption (HC) (25%), Industry (16%), Transport (25%) and finally Agriculture sector which is responsible for less than 3%.

On the other side, the energy sector itself is a significant emitter, 27% for power stations and around 3% for the refineries (totally 30%).
The share of oil products and gas are almost 50-50 as the consumed energy carrier in this process. The HC uses more gas than oil products (75% vs. 25%) which is almost 65% to 35% for the industries, while 90% of the transport energy needs are fulfilled by oil products.

So let’s imagine that Iran is going to decrease its GHG emissions in the energy sector by 10%. How might that happen? Is that possible?

We would need 10% decrease in energy consumption in the HC (2.5% of the total), 10% less in the industry (1.5%), 15% decline in the transport system energy usage (3.75%), and finally 12% saving in the power stations (3.25%). These will give us around 11% decrease in the GHG emission of the energy sector in Iran.

We know that energy sector, on average, is responsible for 60% of the emission. I believe in Iran that is higher than that due to less contribution from the Land Use Change category, but let’s stick to the 60%. So, following the above numbers, Iran can decrease its total emissions more than five percent just by planning for on average 10-15% of less energy consumption by the mentioned four sectors. Now … is that possible? or ... it would be more ... more ... more!