Un article écrit par Frédéric Branger (CIRED), Jean-Pierre Ponssard (CNRS-École Polytechnique), Oliver Sartor (Iddri), et Misato Sato (London School of Economics).
Présentation [en anglais] :
"This paper examines the impact of carbon leakage protections used in the EU ETS on incentives to reduce CO2 emissions in the European cement sector. It shows that the current EU rules lead to gaming behaviour by cement installations to maximise their free allocations and that this actually increases CO2 emissions in some cases. The results suggest that the current system should be replaced by either a) full auctioning of the sector’s allowances and a border carbon adjustment, or b) output-based allocation with inclusion of cement consumption in the ETS."
Résumé [en anglais] :
"This paper investigates incentives for firms to increase output above the activity level thresholds (ALTs) in order to obtain more free allowances in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. While ALTs were introduced in order to reduce excess free allocation to low-activity installations, for installations operating below the threshold, the financial gain from increasing output to reach the threshold may outweigh the costs, particularly in carbon intensive sectors with a high carbon to production costs ratio. Using installation level data for 246 clinker plants, we estimate the effect of ALTs on output decisions. The ALTs induced 5.8Mt of excess clinker production in 2012 (4% of total EU output), which corresponds to 5.2Mt of excess CO2 emissions (over 5% of total sector emissions). As intended, ALTs do reduce overallocation (by 6.6 million allowances) relative to a scenario without ALTs, but an alternative output based allocation would further reduce overallocation by 39.5 million allowances (29 % of total cement sector free allocation). Firms responded disproportionately to ALTs in crisis-hit countries with low demand, especially in Spain and Greece. The excess clinker output lead to increased EU clinker and cement exports, production shifting between plants and also an increase in clinker content of cement thus reducing the carbon efficie ncy of cement production."
