Modeling Analysis Of Thailand's Low Carbon Energy Development Scenarios

Rapid growth of energy demand,especially the demand for electricity and petroleum products,has posed a significant challenge on Thailand to ensure its adequacy of supply.For decades,Thailand has to import large amount of crude oil which accounted for more than 70% of the total primary energy supply in the country in order to satisfy the needs for petroleum products.Similarly,the reliance on natural gas in power generation sector has further exposed the country to natural gas supply disruption.Consequently,under newly issued Power development plan 2015(PDP2015),the priority in planning future power system of Thailand has been focused on energy security.As a solution towards energy security problem that might happen in the future,clean coal technology has exhibited a strong potential,due to its low cost and abundance in nature.Somehow,the PDP2015 has disregarded an environmental problem created from coal fire power plants which can evoke the public opposition in the future.This thesis considers Thailand as a whole region in which its future energy system is modeled by the help of LEAP software.The forecasting of electricity demand is based on the PDP2015,while the demand for other types of energy is calculated based on the value-added of various economic sectors.Three alternative planning scenarios of power sector have been proposed by taken PDP2015 as a reference,whereas various assumptions have been presumed.It can be found that the reference scenario tend to produce the highest emission amongst all other scenarios.However,the future of Thailand power sector will still rely on natural gas,in which greater amount of natural gas import is to be expected in the future.The promotion of ethanol based gasoline is also considered in the study,with the objective to reduce the crude oil import.Largely,two scenarios were proposed in the study to analyze the future aspect of the demand for gasohol.It can be observed from the study that a complete shifting towards the consumption of gasohol E85 by the year 2035 shows little improvement on the import of crude oil in Thailand energy system portfolio.