Data and Code to the Paper - Shifting burdens: How delayed decarbonisation of road transport affects other sectoral emission reductions

Code and data of the paper "Shifting burdens: How delayed decarbonisation of road transport affects other sectoral emission reductions" by Elisabeth Zeyen, Sina Kalweit, Marta Victoria and Tom Brown.Abstract of the paper: In 2022, fuel combustion in road transport accounted for approximately 21% (760 million tonnes) of CO2 emissions inthe European Union (EU). Road transport is the only sector with rising emissions, with an increase of 24% comparedto 1990. The EU initially aimed to ban new CO2 -emitting cars by 2030 but has since delayed this target to 2035,underscoring the ongoing challenges in the push for rapid decarbonisation. The pace of decarbonisation in this sectorwill either ease or intensify the pressure on other sectors to stay within the EU’s carbon budget. This paper explores theeffects of speeding up or slowing down the transition in road transport. We reveal that a slower decarbonisation path notonly drives up system costs by 126 billion e/a (6%) but also demands more than a doubling of the CO2 price from 137to 290 e/tCO2 in 2030. On the flip side, accelerating the shift to cleaner transport proves to be the most cost-effectivestrategy, giving room for more gradual changes in the heating and industrial sectors, while reducing the reliance oncarbon removal in later years. Earlier mandates than currently envisaged by the EU can avoid stranded assets and saveup to 43 billion e/a compared to current policies.Code is based on a fork of PyPSA-Eur and can be found also in the following Github repository https://github.com/lisazeyen/pypsa-eur-transport/tree/transport-paperTo reproduce and re-run the results:1.) set up the conda environment based on the envs/environment.yaml 2.) open a terminal and activate the environment conda activate pypsa-eur 3.) run the workflow with snakemake -call --configfile config/config.yaml -c4 --keep-going --rerun-triggers=mtime --rerun-incomplete