Decarbonizing Transport Sector in Thailand Towards 2050

The transport sector is one of the important contributors of increasing GHG emissions in Thailand. The implementation of emissions reduction in this sector, especially in the road transport, is a significant endeavor that can help to prevent increasing the average global surface temperature. However, the questions are how mitigation measures or mitigation policies are appropriate for reducing GHG emissions in the road passenger transport. Therefore, this study aims at formulating decarbonization pathway scenarios of Thailand's road transport. The studied period for GHG mitigation is 2015–2050. This study assesses the potential of GHG mitigation by the use of renewable energy and energy efficiency in Thailand's NDCs and identifies advance technologies and fuel substitution in the road transport sector in order to achieve the 1.5-degree global climate target. The Asia-Pacific Integrated Model/Enduse (AIM/Enduse) is selected for the analysis. The AIM/Enduse is developed by National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan. It is employed to investigate the decarbonization pathways achieving 1.5-degree target during 2015–2050, extended from the Thailand's updated NDC2020. In addition to the BAU scenario, three GHG countermeasure scenarios are formulated for the transport sector in Thailand, namely the extended NDC 2050 (EX_NDC2050), full battery electric vehicle implementation (BEV) and full bio-fuels implementation (BIOF). Results suggests that the emission pathway in the EX_NDC2050 scenario will be higher than the 2-degree target in 2050. The Thailand's updated NDC 2020 in the transport sector are not in-line with the 2-degree and 1.5-degree targets. The emissions pathway of the transport sector will be in-line with the 2 -degree target when the battery electric vehicles (BEV) and bio-fuels are fully implemented. The 2-degree target can be achieved when the combined measures in the transport sector are implemented in the proportion of BEV to bio-fuels of 75:25 or 25: 75 vice versa. Finally, the policy implication on energy efficiency and CO2 emissions suggests that Thailand should increase the share of electric vehicles and the use of bio-fuels. Moreover, the government should encourage green electricity generation from cleaner technologies and renewable energy including transportation demand management.