Climate change
Rio Tinto accepts the need for climate change action and recognises the issue as being one of our greatest challenges and opportunities.
We believe that emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) resulting from human activities are contributing to climate change and that avoiding human-caused changes to the climate is an important international goal.
Our businesses have a positive future in a world that is working to a global carbon constraints. We recognise that addressing the challenge of climate change will impose costs for GHG abatement and necessitate a change in the way the world uses energy. We support efficient, effective and equitable measures to tackle climate change, which promise a comprehensive, long term response to a globally complex problem. We accept the need for a price on carbon. See our position on climate change.
- Approach
- Product lifecycle
- Engagement
- Results
Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions intensity of our production is a key performance indicator for the Group and we aim to improve the energy intensity of all our operations. We are also working to identify step change opportunities to improve our performance over the longer term.
We are targeting to reduce our total GHG emissions intensity by six per cent between 2008 and 2013. A further four per cent reduction is targeted to give an overall ten per cent reduction by 2015. We index our performance relative to 2008 as the base year.
Our GHG emissions intensity has reduced by 3.7 per cent between 2008 and 2010, largely as a result of the 2009 divestment of the Ningxia aluminium smelter in China. During 2010, the impact of closure or reduced production at older aluminium smelters that had hydroelectric or nuclear power sources offset some of the intensity reductions achieved during 2009.
In 2010, our scope 1 (on site) emissions were 27.6 million tonnes and scope 2 emissions were 17.0 million tonnes. Our total GHG emissions, defined as the sum of scope 1 emissions and those from the net purchase of electricity and steam (scope 2 minus the scope 1 emissions resulting from the supply to 3rd parties) minus net carbon credits voluntarily purchased from, or sold to, recognised sources, were 43.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, an increase of 2.3 million tonnes from 2009 as a result of increased demand for our products.
Please see the Performance data section for a breakdown of greenhouse gas emissions by product group and country.
The majority of our greenhouse gas emissions are generated as a result of energy use (electricity, fuel and anodes and reductants) during mining, milling and smelting activities at our sites.
We operate in an energy intensive sector and we seek to lower the greenhouse gas emissions over the full lifecycle of our products. For example, Rio Tinto Alcan is a leader in the development of energy efficient aluminium smelting technology and a significant proportion of our aluminium smelters are powered with low carbon, hydro or nuclear power sources. The high strength to weight ratio of aluminium allows its use to reduce the weight of cars and decrease the amount of fuel used during their operation and it can also be efficiently recycled.
We recognise that there are significant GHG emissions associated with the transportation, processing and use of Rio Tinto's products. In 2010, the three most significant sources of indirect emissions associated with our products were:
- Approximately 4.7 million tonnes of CO2-e associated with third party transport of our products and raw materials.
- An estimated 122 million tonnes of CO2-e associated with customers using our coal in electricity generation and steel production.
- Approximately 360 million tonnes of CO2-e associated with customers using our iron ore to produce steel. These emissions are not in addition to the coal use emissions above, as some customers use both our iron ore and our coal to produce steel.
