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13 pages, 3 figures, 8 tables, This paper analyses the contribution of the high speed rail project in the Basque Country, Spain, to energy consumption reduction and to climate change mitigation by means of a simplified Life Cycle Assessment. The calculation of CO2 emissions and energy consumption reductions over the service lifetime of the infrastructure (60 years) shows that, even in the most optimistic scenarios considered, it would neither compensate the CO2 emissions linked to its construction and maintenance (2,71 MtCO2), nor would it contribute to net energy savings before 55 years of service. Robustness of these results leads us to conclude that GHG emissions reduction and energy savings should not be used as a general argument in favour of investing in high-speed rail infrastructure, Financial support by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) under research grants UFI11/03 and US15/11, by the Department of Education of the Basque Government through Grant IT-642-13 (UPV/EHU Econometrics Research Group) and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through grant ECO2014-52587-R is gratefully acknowledged

The progressive reduction of high-quality-easy-to-extract energy is a widely recognized and already ongoing process. Although depletion studies for individual fuels are relatively abundant, few of them offer a global perspective of all energy sources and their potential future developments, and even fewer include the demand of the socio-economic system. This paper presents an Economy-Energy-Environment model based on System Dynamics which integrates all those aspects: the physical restrictions (with peak estimations for oil, gas, coal and uranium), the techno-sustainable potential of renewable energy estimated by a novel top-down methodology, the socio-economic energy demands, the development of alternative technologies and the net CO 2 emissions. We confront our model with the basic assumptions of previous Global Environmental Assessment (GEA) studies. The results show that demand-driven evolution, as performed in the past, might be unfeasible: strong energy-supply scarcity is found in the next two decades, especially in the transportation sector before 2020. Electricity generation is unable to fulfill its demand in 2025–2040, and a large expansion of electric renewable energies move us close to their limits. In order to find achievable scenarios, we are obliged to set hypotheses which are hardly used in GEA scenarios, such as zero or negative economic growth.