The US Dept. of Energy issued their monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook on AUgust 10th, which includes this text:

Forecast economic growth combined with increased use of coal and natural gas is expected to contribute to increases in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions of 3.4 percent in 2010 (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). Projected coal-related CO2 emissions increase by 6.0 percent in 2010 primarily a result of increased electricity sector coal usage. Higher natural gas consumption in the industrial and electric power sectors is expected to lead to a 3.9-percent increase in CO2 emissions from natural gas. Demand for petroleum in the transportation sector (motor gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel) combined with continued industrial sector fossil fuel demand growth contribute to the projected 0.8-percent increase in fossil-fuel CO2 emissions in 2011. However, even with these increases, projected CO2 emissions in 2010 and 2011 remain below their level in any year from 1999 through 2008.

and links to this graphic:

Add your own commentary. I got nothin’…

If you follow the energy and climate news you’ve probably noticed the occasional article about some big coal plant being canceled. This is usually positioned as a reason to celebrate for those of use concerned about climate change. I really hate to say this, but climb down from the table, take off that ridiculous party hat, and pay attention, because Killer Koal isn’t going anywhere, as the AP points out in, Old-style coal plants expanding (emphasis added):

An Associated Press examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.

The construction wave stretches from Arizona to Illinois and South Carolina to Washington, and comes despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by tragic mine disasters in West Virginia, the Gulf oil spill and wars in the Middle East.

The expansion, the industry’s largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted “clean coal” technology is still a long ways from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail. The Senate last month scrapped the leading bill to curb carbon emissions following opposition from Republicans and coal-state Democrats.

…

Approval of the plants has come from state and federal agencies that do not factor in emissions of carbon dioxide, considered the leading culprit behind global warming. Scientists and environmentalists have tried to stop the coal rush with some success, turning back dozens of plants through lawsuits and other legal challenges.

…

As a result, current construction is far more modest than projected a few years ago when 151 new plants were forecast by federal regulators. But analysts say the projects that prevailed are more than enough to ensure coal’s continued dominance in the power industry for years to come.

Sixteen large plants have fired up since 2008 and 16 more are under construction, according to records examined by the AP.

Combined, they will produce an estimated 17,900 megawatts of electricity, sufficient to power up to 15.6 million homes — roughly the number of homes in California and Arizona combined.

They also will generate about 125 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to emissions figures from utilities and the Center for Global Development. That’s the equivalent of putting 22 million additional automobiles on the road.

The new plants do not capture carbon dioxide. That’s despite the stimulus spending and an additional $687 million spent by the Department of Energy on clean coal programs.

A few observations…

The AP dared to directly connect fossil fuels and “wars in the Middle East”? Wow, that’s one I don’t see often (enough).

The additional 125 million tons of CO2 emissions is about a 2% increase in all US emissions, or a 3.5% increase in emissions from electricity generation. Those sound like small amounts, but at a time when we should be struggling to cut every ton possible, any increase emissions, even if it’s “only” 125 million tons, is a big deal because it represents that much more we have to cut somewhere else.

The relevant agencies don’t take CO2 emissions into account? Let me be perhaps the millionth or so person to suggest we pass some laws to change that, along with a time machine so we can make the new rules go into effect around the mid-1970’s.

As a very round number, assume that a new coal plant will be in operation for 50 years. So these plants will be cranking out electrons and CO2 until 2060. Just wondering — what percentage of people who read this site reasonably expect to still be alive in 2060?

I don’t find the comments in the article about what assumptions the coal companies are making about legislation to be convincing. The article says it’s an acknowledgment that “clean coal” technology isn’t close. I think it’s just as likely to be proof that the plant operators think existing plants will be grandfathered in when legislation is eventually passed in another five or ten or who knows how many years. In short, they’re trying to build as many plants without emissions controls or CCS as possible now, on the assumption that they’ll be able to keep running them with only relatively affordable upgrades being forced on them. The “if you force us to spend this money, we’ll be able to convince the public service commission to let us hike rates, and the voters will send you packing in the next election” argument convinces a lot of politicians to go easy on power companies.

Overall, I think this article is one more piece of evidence that shows how insanely hard it will be for the US to get on an emissions reduction path anywhere near what’s in our own best interest.

Circle of Blue, which should be one of the news feeds you follow via RSS reader, has posted an excellent summary of the interaction between coal and water, A Desperate Clinch: Coal Production Confronts Water Scarcity, that begins with a focus on the Dump Creek tributary of the Clinch River in Virginia, and then broadens out to the coal and water portion of the energy/water nexus (emphasis added):

Within Dumps Creek’s 20,000- acre watershed there are two active and two abandoned deep mines. There’s also a scraped off mountaintop, that fully comprises one-fifth of the watershed, where miners blasted away the overburden to get at coal. Dumps Creek is critical to these operations—hundreds of thousands of gallons of water are used daily to cool and lubricate mining machinery, wash haul roads and truck wheels to reign in airborne particulates as well as to suppress underground dust that otherwise could ignite.

…

These production practices are just the first stages of an economically essential and ecologically damaging accord between coal and water that is coming into sharper national relief. It’s not just that mining and combustion of coal could not occur without using vast amounts of water; it’s occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and an increasing demand for energy. The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, shipping and burning of coal is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve.

…

Slowing down the vortex of coal’s conflicted outcomes has only gotten harder. The Energy Information Administration, a research unit of the federal Department of Energy, forecasts that by 2050 the demand for energy in the U.S. will be 40 percent higher than it is today. As the nation considers what it will take to cool the planet and serve the country’s steadily increasing energy appetite, federal scientists and policy makers are taking a fresh look at how long the coal era will persist, and by necessity the tumultuous space where water and coal intersect.

Nothing about what they see is pretty. Scientists define water use by two basic measurements. One is how much water is “withdrawn” from America’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers for domestic, farm, business, and industrial use, most of which is returned to those same sources. The second is how much water is actually “consumed” in products, by livestock, plants and people, or evaporates in industrial processes. In both measurements of withdrawal and consumption coal is at the top of the charts.

The U.S. withdraws 410 billion gallons of water a day from its rivers, lakes and freshwater aquifers. About half is used to cool thermoelectric power plants, and most of that cools coal-powered plants, according to the most recent assessment by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Similarly, the U.S. consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day; nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain: industrial, mining and power plants use nearly 8 billion gallons a day, most of that for mining, processing and burning coal, according to the Department of Energy.

…

Coal industry executives insist their favorite fuel will be part of the energy mix for at least the next generation, and likely beyond. And they are readying a favored fix for climate change, an unproven technology to snare all the carbon emissions at coal-fired plants and store them deep underground—so-called “carbon capture and sequestration” or CCS.

But there’s a big problem there, too. Scientists with Sandia National Laboratories who’ve studied carbon capture and storage say CCS will increase water withdrawal and use by 25 percent to 40 percent. In other words, without significant advances in a technology that is only now being tested in a handful of applications, the path to a low-carbon economy that still burns coal will put enormous new pressure on America’s declining supply of fresh water.

…

The numbers—like a splash of cold water—are a national wakeup call: Mining companies use from 800 to 3,000 gallons of water to extract, process, transport and store one short ton of coal and dispose of mining waste, according to estimates by researchers at Virginia Tech University.

The typical 500-megawatt coal-fired utility burns 250 tons of coal per hour, uses 12 million gallons of water an hour—300 million gallons a day—for cooling, according to researchers at Sandia National Laboratories.

To produce and burn the 1 billion tons of coal America uses each year, the mining and utility industries withdraw 55 trillion to 75 trillion gallons of water annually, according to the USGS. That’s roughly equal to the torrent of water that pours over Niagara Falls in five months.

It almost seems like piling on poor old coal. We’ve known for a long time that it’s a dangerous and filthy way to move electrons down a wire, but now this growing awareness of its share in the energy/water nexus should make it clear to even the most hardened coal advocate just how bad an idea it is. The issue with water is not merely the amount that coal plants (and all other thermoelectric generation facilities) consume or how much heat pollution they cause when water is returned to a lake or river, but the long-term dependency that’s created when we build a coal plant. If any thermoelectric plant can’t get enough water that’s sufficiently cool it can’t run at full capacity and might not be able to run at all.[1][2] Our decision to build a new generating plant is based on numerous factors — e.g. do you build a plant here, near a big city that needs the electricity but has a questionable water supply, or would it be prudent to build it hundreds of miles away where the water supply seems much more secure, but with the added expense of adding new transmission lines to deliver the juice? These decisions are all based on assumptions about the future, and in the case of climate-dependent issues, like the availability of cooling water, those assumptions are riskier now thanks to the changing rules of the game. It’s almost as if someone delivered a swift jolt to the environment and knocked it out of its old, comfortable (to us) and predictable (by us) equilibrium…

[1] This is talking about once-through cooling systems, which are still in widespread use, and account for just over half of US thermo plants. See the stats at Annual Steam-Electric Plant Operation and Design Data, especially the spreadsheet F767_COOLING_SYSTEM.xls available from that page. Closed-loop or recirculating cooling systems can dramatically reduce water consumption. For more than you ever thought you would need or want to know about cooling systems, see Water Use Benchmarks for Thermoelectric Power Generation [PDF].

[2] The US Dept. of Energy report Impact of Drought on U.S. Steam Electric Power Plant Cooling Water Intakes and Related Water Resource Management Issues says, page 2:

During the summer and fall of 2007, a serious drought affected the southeastern United States. As shown in Figure 1, a part of this area of the country is still experiencing extreme drought. In 2007, river flows in the southeast decreased, and water levels in lakes and reservoirs dropped. In some cases, water levels were so low that power production at some power plants had to be stopped or reduced. The problem for power plants becomes acute when river, lake, or reservoir water levels fall near or below the level of the water intakes used for drawing water for cooling. A related problem occurs when the temperature of the surface water increases to the point where the water can no longer be used for cooling. In this case, the concern is with discharge of heated water used for cooling back into waterways that are just too warm to keep temperatures at levels required to meet state water quality standards. Permits issued under the Clean Water Act (CWA) National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program limit power plants from discharging overly heated water. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Gallatin Fossil Plant is not permitted to discharge water used for cooling back into the Cumberland River that is higher than 90°F (WSMV Nashville 2007).

The southeast experienced particularly acute drought conditions in August 2007. As a result, nuclear and coal-fired plants within the TVA system were forced to shut down some reactors (e.g., the Browns Ferry facility in August 2007) and curtail operations at others. This problem has not been limited to the 2007 drought in the southeastern United States. A similar situation occurred in August 2006 along the Mississippi River (Exelon Quad Cities Illinois plant). Other plants in Illinois and some in Minnesota were also affected (Union of Concerned Scientists 2007). Given the current prolonged drought being experienced in the western United States (see also Figure 1), and also the scarcity of water resources in this region in general, many western utilities and power authorities are also beginning to examine the issue. The problem has also been experienced in Europe as well. During a serious drought in 2003, France was forced to reduce operations at many of its nuclear power plants (Union of Concerned Scientists 2007)

It’s hard to read the energy and climate news some days and not hear a frustrated Vince Lombardi, the legendary US football coach, shouting, “Does anyone here know how to play this game???”

That’s precisely the reaction I had last night when I ran into a couple of articles, one concerning the coal industry and the other the prospects for a meaningful US climate bill.

Bradford Plumer, a writer you should be following, asks the non-rhetorical question, Is The Coal Industry Suicidal?, in a piece which begins with a perfect description of the coal business:

For years, the coal industry’s strategy for dealing with climate change has gone something like this: 1) Fight off caps on carbon pollution for as long as possible. 2) Convince politicians to throw gobs of money at fancy low-carbon technologies like carbon capture and sequestration. 3) Pray that those fancy technologies actually work. The strategy has succeeded so far. Seeing as how half the electricity in the United States comes from coal, there’s never a shortage of members of Congress willing to do whatever the industry wants.

But it might be time for King Coal to switch gears…

For a long time, coal was the cheapest energy source because the industry was allowed to offload so many of its hidden costs onto the public—asthma-causing air pollution, shoddy safety regulations, coal debris dumped in Appalachian streams… But as the government starts regulating these side effects more closely, it will become clear that coal isn’t actually all that cheap. Meanwhile, natural gas prices are falling and prices for renewables are tumbling. Fewer and fewer utilities want to keep plunking money down on coal.

Then there’s global warming. Again, the industry is clinging to the hope that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) will become viable someday, and low-carbon coal can become America’s energy source of choice. Right now, though, CCS is very much unproven, and it’s hugely expensive. A recent GAO report found that CCS simply won’t take off unless there’s a price on carbon or some sort of restriction on greenhouse gases. The coal industry could fight for a cap-and-trade system that a) allowed utilities to continue operating (some) coal-fired plants, and b) provided financial incentives for carbon capture. But, instead, the industry is just digging in its heels—and, in the end, that may prove to be a huge blunder.

Quite the nasty corner coal is stuck in, isn’t it? If they stick to their old game plan, they can likely help to delay a price on carbon emissions a little while longer, but that only digs them deeper into a losing proposition and heightens the potential loss from betting on CCS. And no one should doubt the importance of CCS to the coal business. Given that the proper level for CO2 emissions is, as one scientist (Ken Caldeira?) once said is the same as the proper number of muggings of little old ladies: zero, we cannot and will not tolerate a highly polluting form of electricity generation like coal to continue with business as usual in the long run. In the US, coal accounts for 36% of all energy-related CO2 emissions, meaning if we wiped out all other CO2 emissions we’d still be well above the required 80%-by-2050 reduction and emitting nearly twice our limit.

The coal industry is running out of time and options.

The second article has the grim title Climate Bill, R.I.P. and starts with a body blow:

A comprehensive energy and climate bill – the centerpiece of President Obama’s environmental agenda – is officially dead. Take it from the president’s own climate czar, Carol Browner. “What is abundantly clear,” she told Rolling Stone in an exclusive interview on July 8th, “is that an economy-wide program, which the president has talked about for years now, is not doable in the Senate.”

But the failure to confront global warming – central not only to Obama’s presidency but to the planet itself – is not the Senate’s alone. Rather than press forward with a climate bill in the Senate last summer, after the House had passed landmark legislation to curb carbon pollution, the administration repeated many of the same mistakes it made in pushing for health care reform. It refused to lay out its own plan, allowing the Senate to bicker endlessly over the details. It pursued a “stealth strategy” of backroom negotiations, supporting huge new subsidies to win over big polluters. It allowed opponents to use scare phrases like “cap and tax” to hijack public debate. And most galling of all, it has failed to use the gravest environmental disaster in the nation’s history to push through a climate bill – to argue that fossil-fuel polluters should pay for the damage they are doing to the atmosphere, just as BP will be forced to pay for the damage it has done to the Gulf.

Top environmental groups, including Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, are openly clashing with the administration, demanding that Obama provide more hands-on leadership to secure a meaningful climate bill. “We really need the president to take the lead and tell us what bill he’s going to support,” says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund. “If he doesn’t do that, then everything he’s done so far will lead to nothing.”

But Obama, so far, has shown no urgency on the issue, and little willingness to lead – despite a June poll showing that 76 percent of Americans believe the government should limit climate pollution. With hopes for an economy-wide approach to global warming dashed, Congress is now weighing a scaled-back proposal that would ratchet down carbon pollution from the nation’s electric utilities. It has come to this: The best legislation we can hope for is the same climate policy that George W. Bush promoted during the 2000 campaign. Even worse, the “utilities first” approach could wind up stripping the EPA of its newfound authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.

You get the idea, but you should go read it all.

Related: Forward or Backward on Global Warming?

The US Government Accountability Office has released COAL POWER PLANTS: Opportunities Exist for DOE to Provide Better Information on the Maturity of Key Technologies to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions [PDF]. From the report’s “What the GAO found” page:

DOE does not systematically assess the maturity of key coal technologies, but GAO found consensus among stakeholders that CCS is less mature than efficiency technologies. Specifically, DOE does not use a standard set of benchmarks or terms to describe the maturity of technologies, limiting its ability to provide key information to Congress, utilities, and other stakeholders. This lack of information limits congressional oversight of DOE’s expenditures on these efforts, and it hampers policymakers’ efforts to gauge the maturity of these technologies as they consider climate change policies. In the absence of this information from DOE, GAO interviewed stakeholders with expertise in CCS or efficiency technologies to identify their views on the maturity of these technologies. Stakeholders told GAO that while components of CCS have been used commercially in other industries, their application remains at a small scale in coal power plants, with only one fully integrated CCS project operating at a coal plant. Efficiency technologies, on the other hand, are in wider commercial use.

Commercial deployment of CCS is possible within 10 to 15 years while many efficiency technologies have been used and are available for use now. Use of both technologies is, however, contingent on overcoming a variety of economic, technical, and legal challenges. In particular, with respect to CCS, stakeholders highlighted the large costs to install and operate current CCS technologies, the fact that large scale demonstration of CCS is needed in coal plants, and the lack of a national carbon policy to reduce CO2 emissions or a legal framework to govern liability for the permanent storage of large amounts of CO2. With respect to efficiency improvements, stakeholders highlighted the high cost to build or upgrade such coal plants, the fact that some upgrades require highly technical materials, and plant operators’ concerns that changes to the existing fleet of coal power plants could trigger additional regulatory requirements.

CCS technologies offer more potential to reduce CO2 emissions than efficiency improvements alone, and both could raise electricity costs and have other effects. According to reports and stakeholders, the successful deployment of CCS technologies is critical to meeting the ambitious emissions reductions that are currently being considered in the United States while retaining coal as a fuel source. Most stakeholders told GAO that CCS would increase electricity costs, and some reports estimate that current CCS technologies would increase electricity costs by about 30 to 80 percent at plants using these technologies. DOE has also reported that CCS could increase water consumption at power plants. Efficiency improvements offer more potential for near term reductions in CO2 emissions, but they cannot reduce CO2 emissions from a coal plant to the same extent as CCS.

Euan Mearns has an excellent post up at The Oil Drum: Europe, The Chinese Coal Monster, which I highly recommend. The piece is, as you can guess from the title, a look at the statistics of China’s coal production and consumption, with what seems to be a good explanation for the rise of China’s coal imports even though they are self-sufficient.

See also:

• China’s consumer class
• The battle over CO2 emissions
• China’s oil consumption
• Welcome to our coal-fired future
• The IEA and the future of carbon capture
• Doc alert: IEA’s Energy Technologies Perspectives
• The water footprint of carbon capture

If you’ve spent any appreciable time delving into the minutiae of US energy statistics (and honestly, who hasn’t when perched in front of the computer, sleepless at 2AM?), you’ve no doubt encountered the US Department of Energy’s PECSS diagram (primary energy consumption by source and sector):

(Click here to see the home page for this diagram.)

This is easily one of the best single-page summaries that the DOE produces, simply because it includes so much information and shows so many relationships between sources and uses of energy.

In the spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I’ve taken the data from another terrific DOE one-pager, Table 12.3 from the Annual Energy Review, and created a diagram that shows CO2 emissions instead of energy consumption:

A few notes on this diagram:

• The data is essentially a year old. The next edition of the AER will be released in July, according to the DOE. I will update and repost the chart when the new numbers are available.
• Note that this diagram shows only CO2 (and not other greenhouse gases), and it includes only emissions from the consumption of energy.
• The minuscule “other” category is municipal solid waste and coal coke net imports.
• I followed the basic approach of the PECSS diagram, in that I did not allocate the emissions from generating the electricity each sector consumes, but left it as its own sector. For example, in my diagram the residential sector’s 345.9 million tons of CO2 does not include the emissions from generating the electricity that the residential sector consumes. Doing so would add another 903.7 million tons of CO2 (yes, it more than triples the total for that sector — surprise!). That 903.7 figure comes from Table 12.3; it can’t be derived from the numbers in the diagram, so don’t bother trying. I will likely create a second version of this diagram that eliminates electricity generation as an explicit sector and allocates its emissions to those for the various fuels and each of the other sectors. I might not do this until the new AER comes out.
• I broke out residential and commercial into separate sectors because that’s the way the numbers are given in Table 12.3, and I think it makes more sense than lumping them together as the PECSS does.
• For those who always want to know such things: I made this diagram in PowerPoint.

Comments, criticisms, suggestions, etc. are welcome, of course.

There’s a fascinating piece online from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory regarding the additional water requirements of CCS carbon capture and sequestration), Determining Carbon Capture and Sequestration’s Water Demands. This is one of those numbers, or sets of numbers, I’ve been trying to track down, as I knew there was some additional water required, but I honestly didn’t know if the amount was trivial or the proverbial Big Deal. The answer is that it’s certainly not a trivial increment, but it varies with the technology being used to generate electricity:

The additional withdrawal increases the water footprint by 55% to 97%, and while consumption grows by 73% to 93%.

As for what this means for, say, the US fleet of power plants, you could make a rough estimate by doubling the water withdrawal and consumption figures for subcritical and supercritical coal plants (which the DOE/NETL numbers show grow from 88% (subcritical, consumption) to 97% (subcritical, withdrawal)), and increasing IGCC withdrawal by 50% and consumption by 73%. Given that roughly 50% of the US’ electricity comes from coal, that’s a hell of a lot of gallons of water. The same article provides a pair of pie charts and text regarding showing US water withdrawal (2005) and consumption (1995):

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that thermoelectric generation accounted for approximately 41% of freshwater withdrawals, ranking slightly ahead of agricultural irrigation as the largest source of freshwater withdrawals in the U.S. in 2005. However, thermoelectric water consumption accounted for only 3% of total U.S. freshwater consumption in 1995 (Figure 1). A recent DOE/NETL study estimated that in 2005 total U.S. freshwater withdrawals for thermoelectric power generation amounted to approximately 146 billion gallon per day (bgd), while freshwater consumption was 3.7 bgd.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to dig into the numbers and cook up a more precise guesstimate of what a magic-wand style instant conversion of existing US generation facilities to full CCS operation would mean for water consumption and withdrawal. (Hint: The pie charts above show water figures for all thermoelectric generation, which includes natural gas and nuclear. So you can’t simply double the existing figures to get a ballpark estimate.)

But while we’re here, let me point out one detail that I think gets overlooked. If you look at those two pie charts above, one thing that leaps out at you is the disparity between withdrawal and consumption for thermoelectric generation. One way to think of this situation is that for power plants, withdrawal is more than anything a measure of any given the plant’s dependency on outside conditions, as opposed to its impact on the environment.[1] If your 1MW subcritical coal plant with CCS needs 1,200 gallons of water per hour, it better get it or you don’t push electrons, period. In other words, this is a measure of the vulnerability of a plant to local water availability.[2]

The water consumption, while roughly 75% of the withdrawal figures across the board for both CCS and non-CCS plants and quite literally a subset of the withdrawal amount, is more a measure of the plant’s impact on water flow, since that water is not returned to the source.

Taking a step back from the specifics, we’re left with some very big and troubling questions. How much of a factor will this additional water demand have for CCS and our ongoing struggles to reduce our CO2 emissions? I’ve said repeatedly that the biggest concern I have with CCS is the economic cost of retrofitting existing plants in the US, China, India, and basically everywhere else. These water withdrawal and consumption increments are so large that one has to wonder how many existing plants, even newer ones that happen to be close to a sequestration site or CO2 pipeline and have the on-site room for CCS hardware, will be viable candidates for retrofitting. Any reasonably accurate estimate of how the existing electricity generation infrastructure sorts out would require a plant-by-plant assessment that takes into account all these factors, with the potential for any one of them to escalate the cost of a retrofit, possibly to a prohibitive level.

With China, the world’s largest consumer of coal by a wide margin, already facing many water challenges even as they build more coal plants (which they would be all the more reluctant to abandon, since they’re brand new), one can only conclude that their prospects for nearly universal CCS retrofits are even worse than the US’.

This is certainly not the result I was hoping for when I found the water/CCS numbers, and it emphasizes yet again the importance of the energy/water nexus. If I can find the right inputs and the time, I will try to do a more detailed analysis of this situation.

[1] Yes, there certainly are such impacts, such as heated water that’s returned to lakes or rivers. I’m ignoring those effects here, as I’m focused more on the flow of water issues.

[2] The issue is slightly more perverse than that, as plants require not merely X gallons/hour to operate, but water at an acceptable incoming temperature, since it’s primarily used for cooling. This has already become an issue during heat waves with thermoelectric plants, and it’s one of the stealth issues that I think will become far more prominent.

The International Energy Agency has released a new report about CCS (carbon capture and sequestration), a.k.a. coal’s Hail Mary Pass Attempt.[1]

From the press release:

Two years after the G8 leaders’ commitment to the broad deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) by 2020, significant progress has been made towards commercialisation of CCS technologies. Yet the 2008 Hokkaido G8 recommendation to launch 20 large-scale CCS demonstration projects by 2010 remains a challenge and will require that governments and industry accelerate the pace toward achieving this critical goal. This is one of the main findings of a new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), and the Global CCS Institute, to be presented to G8 leaders at their June Summit in Muskoka, Canada.

Analysis has shown that CCS is an essential component of a portfolio of technologies and measures to reduce global emissions and help avoid the most serious impacts of climate change. Together with renewable energy technologies, nuclear energy and greater energy efficiency, CCS contributes significantly to the least-cost route of reducing and stabilising the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Over the past two years, governments have made substantial financial commitments, totalling over USD 26 billion in funding for large-scale, integrated demonstration CCS projects and, by 2020, plan to facilitate the launch of between 19 and 43 of those projects. “This level of commitment is very promising, as government support is vital to helping projects under development overcome the final hurdles,” said IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka. Victor Der, chairman of the CSLF Policy Group, said: “By any measure, governments and stakeholders have made impressive strides toward promoting CCS technologies and encouraging the collaboration and sharing of information necessary to foster the broad, global advancement of CCS. As this report indicates, we are moving steadily from R&D to commercialisation of effective, deployable CCS technologies.”

The report integrates a recent study commissioned by the Global CCS Institute, which identified 80 large-scale integrated CCS projects at various stages of development around the world. Five of these are in operation at present, and one new project has been launched and is proceeding to construction and a significant number could well proceed to launching and construction in the coming years. Notable efforts can be found in the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union, particularly the United Kingdom. Projects are also under development for example in China and the Middle East. “The growing number of projects under development around the world demonstrates that increased action is being taken,” said Nick Otter, chief executive officer of the Global CCS Institute. “Rapid progress towards operation of those projects is now required if CCS is to be on-track for broad deployment by 2020.”

The report itself is freely available here [44 page, 1.7MB PDF].

I have yet to read the report cover to cover, but let me offer a few observations, some directly related to this document, some more oriented toward CCS in general:

• I referred to CCS as coal’s attempt at a Hail Mary pass, and it is. Without broadly applicable and economically competitive CCS, there is no future for coal as an energy source, period.
• The IEA report is a curious piece of work, in that it focuses very narrowly on the technical aspects and the kind of new-technology issues one would expect, like how soon a critical mass of large-scale demonstration plants can be put into service and the need for a strong public policy push (e.g. direct funding, enacting a mechanism to price carbon emissions) . But it apparently ignores some of the gigantic hurdles between our current situation and the widespread use of CCS on new and existing coal plants, most notably cost. Again, this is from a quick skim of the document plus numerous searches of the PDF; if you think I mischaracterized anything in the document, please feel free to say so.
• The cost of CCS is really two separate issues. The first is what it costs to use it on a brand new plant that hasn’t been built yet. A key component here is location, since you can’t just C the carbon, you have to have a good place to S it, as well. For a new plant, you can take that additional factor into account and avoid the really bad locations, possibly by accepting the cost of new transmission lines to put a plant in a sequestration-friendly location, but you’re still left with something like a 30% reduction in electricity generation over a comparably sized plant of the same technology without CCS.
  

  The second issue, which I’ve talked about before, is the cost of retrofitting plants that were not designed, located, or built with CCS in mind. Those legacy plants, the “installed base”, in computer terms, present a gigantic problem. It’s clear that not all of those plants will be retrofitted, since the cost would be astronomical in at least some instances. Those plants that can’t be retrofitted with CCS at a “reasonable” cost will likely be decommissioned before they reach their intended service lifetime and will have to be replaced with some other form of generation, thereby increasing the per-unit cost of electricity. No matter how you slice and dice the numbers, CCS will be anything but cheap, even if you make some very generous assumptions about how well we can solve its technical issues.

• China is barely mentioned (although the report does point out that 4 of the 80 demonstration projects in some stage of development are in China), and India isn’t mentioned at all. I will leave as an exercise for the reader an evaluation of what our chances are of avoiding catastrophic climate change impacts without both of those countries deploying massive retrofit operations on their still very quickly growing fleets of coal plants. As a brief reminder of what’s going on in those countries and the US:
  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  
  
  

  Notice that as of 2007 India’s coal-fired generation is nearly a third of the US’s, and China’s is actually greater. I would guess that based on the shape of the purple wedges on those three graphs that the situation in 2010 is considerably worse.

• All of the material I’ve seen on CCS talks about capturing and sequestering roughly 90% of the CO2 emissions from coal plants. This isn’t the windfall that it seems. If you look at the history of US CO2 emissions from energy consumption, you’ll see that we had roughly 5 billion metric tons in 1990 (the universally adopted baseline for calculating needed reductions) and 6 billion in 2007. With a goal of an 80% reduction by 2050, that leaves the US needing to shed 5 billion tons/year.
  

  If you make a magic wand assumption and instantly convert 100% of coal fired electricity generation to 90% effective CCS with zero-leakage transport and storage, then based on our current mix of CO2 sources, that buys us roughly 1.8 billion tons of emissions reductions (90% of the 1.979 emitted from coal-fired electricity generation), dropping the US to 4.2 billion tons/year and needing to find another 3.2 billion tons.

  If you assume that we can apply CCS to all fossil fuel fired electricity generation (which would make our magic wand even more magical) at the same level of effectiveness, then we realize savings of roughly 2.2 billion tons/year, with our total emissions falling to 3.8 billion tons/year, 2.8 billion tons/year short of our goal.

  Those additional reductions would have to come from some mix of cuts in emissions from stationary sources (residential: 1.25 billion tons/year; commercial: 1.09; and industrial: 1.63), and transportation: 2.01. I’ll leave it up the reader as another exercise to figure out the most economical and politically viable cuts that can be made to achieve the needed goal. And remember that 2050 is not the finish line, but a critical milestone on the way to zero CO2 emissions.

  Despite what one might reasonably conclude, my point here is not to depress readers into a near-suicidal funk. My dragging you through all these numbers is an attempt to stress two things: First, even with wildly successful CCS technology in hand and a rollout at a blistering pace, it will be expensive and it will require the US to do a lot more heavy lifting in other areas. The situation in China and India is even more problematic, given their continued breakneck expansion of their coal fired generation. Second, how can we possibly consider using coal for anything other than samples in museum exhibits if we can’t achieve stunning technical and economic success with CCS, and very soon? Take away any significant portion of those magic wand savings above and it only increases the burden on other sectors and sources and creates almost unimaginable pressure to abandon existing coal plants and close the gap with cleaner generating options and efficiency savings. The math of climate change is every bit as unforgiving and suffocating as is that of peak oil.

• Where does this leave us? I’m not at all optimistic about the future of CCS, at least as much for economic as technical reasons. But if I’m sitting in the Kirk Chair at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (and the very thought of it scares me even more than it does you), I would enthusiastically and publicly support major funding for research into CCS and the development of pilot projects. Sometimes, as when you’re reduced to throwing a Hail Mary pass, your optimal path isn’t necessarily one you would consider good, and sometimes the pass actually works.

[1] For those who are not fans of American football, a “Hail Mary Pass” is a term coined in the 1970’s by American football star Roger Staubach to refer to a last-second, low-probability desperation play that has to succeed to avoid a defeat.

Let me take a look at my checklist — what haven’t I done in a while? Oh, here it is: “Piss off the mindlessly pro-nuke crowd”.[1]

So, what shall it be this time? How about plain ol’ economics?

New Nuclear Energy Grapples With Costs:

President Obama may be pressing for the nation to increase its supply of nuclear power, but the market is pushing in the opposite direction—at least in the view of one of the leading figures in the U.S. nuclear business.

John Rowe, chief executive of Chicago-based Exelon, operator of the nation’s largest fleet of nuclear power stations, says the economics of the electricity business have changed sharply in just the past two years, dimming the prospects for a significant number of new nuclear reactors in the United States.

Though Obama has touted nuclear as “our largest source of fuel that produces no carbon emissions,” cleanliness is not a benefit that currently shows up on the bottom line. Without congressional action to make competing fuels that emit greenhouse gases more expensive, Rowe says, fossil fuel plants are still cheaper to build. “I just don’t think nuclear has a chance in a pure marketplace without a carbon price,” Rowe said last week in Washington, D.C., in a speech hosted by Resources for the Future, a think tank focused on cost-benefit analysis in environmental policy.

While Rowe noted that some companies are still working on nuclear projects, he pointed out that they tend to be in “rate-based jurisdictions.” In other words, they are in traditionally regulated states where monopoly power companies can sometimes recoup the costs of building nuclear plants during construction through the rates they charge their customers.

Exelon, in contrast, operates only in states where deregulation has created competitive markets. In effect, it sells the power it produces into the electricity marketplace. And because electricity prices have dropped—particularly due to new, abundant supplies of natural gas—Rowe thinks that building new nuclear plants does not make economic sense now.

What to make of this?

A massive increase in the use of natural gas for electricity generation would be a colossal mistake. It emits a lot less CO2 than does non-CCS coal[2], but when you consider the long lifetime of generating plants, the percentage reduction in CO2 from replacing coal-fired generation with NG-fired capacity, and the extremely aggressive CO2 reduction schedule the US must meet, you find out that such a conversion very quickly leaves us “above the curve”, i.e. emitting more CO2 than we can afford.

Putting a price on carbon is indeed going to happen, one way or another, and that will certainly help the nuclear industry, possibly as much as all the direct financial help and loan guarantees it gets from the federal government. The economics of a complex situation can’t be any simpler than that.

Will a price on carbon help or hurt the expanded use of natural gas? Well… I’m not so sure there’s a cut and dried answer to that one. If we wimp out and put only a low price on carbon, with not much prospect for it increasing to what’s needed to effect the CO2 reductions science dictates, then natural gas will likely continue to boom and we’ll see things like coal fired plants being converted to NG plants.[3]

But if we get a much more appropriate carbon tax, meaning one with a real chance of getting US emissions on the needed glide slope, then we might not see a rush to embrace natural gas for new or converted electricity generation. The reason is that “above the curve” issue I mentioned above. If you’re going to spend a lot of money to build a brand new electricity plant, then you’re counting on it being in service for a long time, likely 40 years at a minimum. In fact, you need it to be in service for decades just to produce electricity at anywhere near a market-friendly price. But why would you do that when you see that the current carbon price (or the price likely to be in effect in merely 10 or 20 years) will be so high that you’ll be forced to choose between paying a high carbon levy or spending a lot more money to retrofit CCS technology (assuming it ever becomes a mainstream technology)? And I don’t think that the relatively lower cost of converting a coal plant to natural gas would be a much rosier prospect, given that you’re starting with a facility that’s already been in service for anywhere from years to decades.[4]

The bottom line is that we’ll likely wind up making much greater use of nuclear power, but only after we’ve exhausted and/or re-priced the CO2-heavy ways of pushing electrons and figured out that renewables can’t grow fast enough to pick up the slack in a country that thinks “conservation” is a commie pinko Nazi homo plot to corrupt our children, curve our spine, and lose the war for the allies. Will we have good solutions to the problems of waste management or reprocessing, proliferation, supply concerns, etc.? Of course not, but that won’t stop us.

[1] Two things about this statement:

First, I don’t really try to piss off anyone, except climate change deniers, and even then I’m much more interested in mocking them until they’re wracked with shame and self-loathing until they sit in a corner and weep uncontrollably. I’m merely making a joke about the hate mail I get almost every time I say something about nuclear power.

Second, if you don’t understand that “mindlessly pro-nuke” is not a redundancy, not an oxymoron, and not an insult aimed at all pro-nuke individuals, then please leave this site and go read something that’s a better match for your intellectual capacity.

[2] By “non-CCS coal” I mean “the only type of coal-fired generation that will be a major contributor to the electricity supply in the US, ever”. Again, it’s brute-force economics. The high cost of CCS will keep it from being a mainstream solution to coal plant emissions, whether we’re talking about new plants or retrofitting old ones. And that’s assuming we can get past all the technical and political hurdles along the way.

[3] My understanding is that the cost of converting a non-CCS plant to a non-CCS NG plant are small compared to the cost of retrofitting CCS onto a coal plant or building a new non-CCS NG plant. If anyone has solid numbers from a reliable source, let me know in the comments.

[4] This is much the same reason why I think natural gas as a vehicle fuel is a non-starter. It takes far too much infrastructure investment for a paltry 25% savings in CO2 emissions when we need to do dramatically better than that for the transportation sector overall.

A new paper by Christine Ehlig-Economides and Michael J. Economides is getting more than a little attention because it claims that CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) is a deeply flawed concept.

The paper’s abstract:

The capture and subsequent geologic sequestration of CO2 has been central to plans for managing CO2 produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. The magnitude of the task is overwhelming in both physical needs and cost, and it entails several components including capture, gathering and injection. The rate of injection per well and the cumulative volume of injection in a particular geologic formation are critical elements of the process.

Published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system. Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1% of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions.

Material balance modeling shows that CO2 injection in the liquid stage (larger mass) obeys an analog of the single phase, liquid material balance, long-established in the petroleum industry for forecasting undersaturated oil recovery. The total volume that can be stored is a function of the initial reservoir pressure, the fracturing pressure of the formation or an adjoining layer, and CO2 and water compressibility and mobility values.

Further, published injection rates, based on displacement mechanisms assuming open aquifer conditions are totally erroneous because they fail to reconcile the fundamental difference between steady state, where the injection rate is constant, and pseudo-steady state where the injection rate will undergo exponential decline if the injection pressure exceeds an allowable value. A limited aquifer indicates a far larger number of required injection wells for a given mass of CO2 to be sequestered and/or a far larger reservoir volume than the former.

The Guardian’s coverage says::

A new research paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon in the fight against global warming.

The document from Houston University claims that governments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.

Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the “totally erroneous” premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University

“It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface,” Economides said.

The paper concludes that CCS “is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others.”

…

The British Geological Survey confirmed it was looking at the Economides findings and was hoping to shortly produce a peer-reviewed analysis.

Economides, who has a PHD from Stanford University, said he had seen the arguments against his paper from the API and dismissed them as “nonsense” saying vested interests are protecting a new concept foisted on the world by geologists without proper thought.

“I was a [practising] petroleum engineer for many years and soon realised that geologists did not understand flow and the laws of physics, against which you can’t argue.”

Chapman pointed out that Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, had been injecting CO2 into an old reservoir on the North Sea Sleipner field for some time as a successful experiment in carbon storage. But Economides says the Sleipner scheme involved a million tonnes over three years, while one 500mW commercial station would need to absorb and store 3m tonnes annually for 25 years.Economides, who admits he veers towards being something of a climate change sceptic, says the oil and coal industries see these schemes as potential solutions so they can keep on doing what they have been doing in the past, but “CCS is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” he said.

A man who is “something of a climate sceptic” throws rocks at geologists and claims to have figured out why the only lifeline the fossil fuel industry has is frayed to the point of breaking before it’s even used? Fire up the microwave and make a big ol’ bowl of popcorn. This one is going to be a show.

The paper itself is here [PDF].

Another article on CCS (Carbon: from pollutant to potential resource), from December, contains this passage:

As Robert Kunzig and Wallace Broecker point out in their book, Fixing Climate, Carbon Capture and Storage would mean landfill on a ‘stupifying’ scale:

‘If the twenty-nine gigatons produced by the world’s fossil-fuel burning in a single year were liquefied and spread over Manhatten, they would bury the island to about the eighty-fifth floor of the Empire State Building.’

Frank Zeman, from the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University says we have not yet even started to address the huge issues involved with disposing of carbon.

‘We already have a huge waste problem: imagine what it is going to be like with CO2 as well. It’ll be nimbyism.’



I’ve long thought that the primary roadblock to CCS’ becoming a major tool in addressing the climate change mess was economics. Assume we find exactly the right kind of geologic formations to serve as CCS reservoirs, so we can dismiss all of the issues related to the sheer volume of CO2 to be stored as mentioned above. Just in the US alone, you still have to retrofit 1,445 coal generators at 599 plants, plus 5,467 natural gas generators at 1,653 plants with CCS hardware.[1] And none of those plants was designed with such a retrofit in mind, which will only make the task much more difficult (read: expensive). On top of that, we need an entirely new network of pipelines to carry the CO2 from those existing power plants to the sequestration sites. Just as the plants were not designed with CCS in mind, they were not sited to minimize the cost of removing captured CO2. Think those pipelines will be cheap, especially when the urgency of our climate situation becomes ever more apparent in the next five to ten years, and we have to either shut down some of those plants or implement CCS as soon as possible?

While the paper mentioned above might indeed prove to be right — there could be some very serious physical limitations to CCS that have been overlooked, and I’m certainly no making any judgments either way — I think there’s a much stronger case to be made about the cost of widespread CCS use for existing plants. Everyone talks about a CCS coal plant requiring about 30% more coal to generate the same amount of electricity as a non-CCS plant[2], but it’s a huge (albeit understandable) mistake to assume that 30% is therefore the final cost increment for a full CCS rollout.

And if you want to use CCS only for new, conveniently sited plants, then we still need a solution for those hundreds of coal and natural gas plants cranking away in the US and dumping over 2.3 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air every year, combined. When you have a workable and affordable solution for that part of the problem, please contact the US Department of Energy. I suspect they’ll be quite happy to take your call.

[1] See Electric Power Annual - Count of Electric Power Industry Power Plants, by Sector, by Predominant Energy Sources within Plant and Electric Power Annual - Existing Capacity by Energy Source.

[2] This 30% is due to the additional energy needed to drive the CCS process itself. I have no reason to doubt this number’s accuracy; my point is that it describes just part of the entire infrastructure change needed for a full CCS implementation. Imagine you discover a new fuel for cars that will reduce their CO2 emissions by 90 to 95%. Great news, right? You get about 30% fewer MPG at the same cost per gallon of fuel, and it costs a lot to convert an existing car to use the new fuel, but that ignores the fact that the fuel can’t be transported in any existing pipelines — you need to build an entirely new distribution network that covers the US. Ignoring that last part, in terms of both cost and time, is a huge mistake.

Like many of you, I’ve been watching the spasmodic reaction to President Obama’s offshore oil drilling announcement. Some of you probably contributed to said reaction. I have to admit, I’m not nearly as upset about this as most of my fellow greenies. It will likely take a long time–at least 10 years, by most estimates I’ve seen–for any oil to be produced from these areas, and no one has a solid estimate of how much oil is down there. (There are estimates, to be sure, but we should consider them all to have a +/- 80% implicit fudge factor.)

I have no delusions that we’ve found a way to extract oil from deep offshore areas with such precision that we’ll never have a major spill, and I’m one of the last people on this planet who needs to be reminded about the CO2 emissions of that additional oil consumption. Many people are running around proclaiming that this is a “political move”, since it will have (we’re guessing) a negligible impact on prices and a very small impact on reducing the US’ reliance on imported oil. To those people, I say, “Well, duh.” Some are saying it’s a really stupid political move, because the Republicans will take any offered olive branch and beat you with it until you knock them down and kick them into submission. “Well, duh, squared.”

I’ve been saying since the very earliest days of this blog that humanity would very like use all the oil we can pump out of the ground, plus an astonishing amount we can cook and shovel out (oil shale and/or tar sands). Peak oil is no less an issue just because we’re finally waking up to the immensity and urgency of the climate change problem. Consider this announcement from Obama as supporting evidence for that “we’ll use it all” prediction, as well as just one more nasty thing people on the part of the ideological spectrum I and most of you inhabit will have to live with.

Even with all that hanging over our heads, there’s a much bigger, nastier problem America has to deal with, as Howard Fineman points out in Forget oil, coal is Obama’s thorn:

Forget whatever else you hear about energy policy, the real fight — and the real political problem — this year in Congress will be how to deal with our nagging reliance on the most abundant component of our carbon-based patrimony.

We can talk until we’re blue in the face about offshore drilling, wind power, natural gas, and energy conservation … but the short-term drift of history still dictates a heavy reliance on the dirtiest and deadliest of all fuels: coal.

The big question in the energy bill — if there is one — is how and whether Congress will ask the American people to pay for the cost of controlling the environmental consequences of that reliance.

At its core, the president’s energy vision calls for switching our transportation system from oil to plug-in electricity. But 45 percent of all electricity in the country is still generated by coal-fired power plants. In other words, we run the real risk of merely replacing one polluting and increasingly scarce fuel, petroleum, with an abundant but even more environmentally troublesome one, coal.

…

The hard part is going to be convincing senators from coal-producing and/or electricity-exporting states to go along with any sort of carbon tax.

States with power plants that generate electricity from coal read like a roster of presidential swing states. Among them: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri and North Carolina. And other states with major coal commitments include: Georgia, Arizona, Kentucky and Wyoming.

Getting 60 votes for some kind of carbon-pollution tax, even if it’s in the most attenuated “cap-and-trade” form, will be next to impossible.

(Note that running a car on coal-generated electrons is still cleaner than running an equivalent oil-powered car, but not by much.)

The problems with coal are legion–mountain top removal or dangerous underground mining, the release of methane, mercury, and heavy metals, CO2 and sulfur dioxide emissions, etc.

In 2007, the US emitted over two billion tons of CO2 just from burning coal, which accounted for 36% of our total CO2 emissions. And nearly all of that coal was used for electricity generation.

We have two choices with coal: Figure out how to burn it vastly cleaner than we do it now, or stop using it. The first option is a logistical and economic (and therefore a public policy) nightmare, thanks to the hundreds of coal plants that were sited and built with no concern whatsoever for CCS (carbon capture and sequestration). And as for stopping altogether–good luck with that one. Any solution not only has to clear the state-level hurdles Fineman mentions, but it will also have to overcome the political clout of the coal companies and the railroads, which derive a huge portion of their revenue from hauling coal around the country.

And once you figure out how to get the US off its coal kick, you can move on to China, India, and Russia.

So, remind me again why this offshore oil thing is worth having baskets of kittens over?

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday–the head of an oil company sounding the alarm over climate change.

Oil chief: my fears for planet:

The head of one of the world’s biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him “really very worried for the planet”.

In an interview in today’s Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration.

“Sequestration is difficult, but if we don’t have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world,” said Lord Oxburgh. “No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present … with consequences that we really can’t predict but are probably not good.”

His comments will enrage many in the oil industry, which is targeted by climate change campaigners because the use of its products spews out huge quantities of carbon dioxide, most visibly from vehicle exhausts.

His words follow those of the government’s chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.

“You can’t slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position,” said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March.

…

Lord Oxburgh said the situation is particularly urgent because many developing countries, including India and China, are sitting on huge untapped stocks of coal, probably the most polluting fossil fuel.

“If they choose to burn their coal, we in the west are not in a very good position to tell them not to, because it’s exactly what we did in our industrial revolution.”

One of my rules of life is: Pay the most attention to people who argue against their own best interests. Almost universally they’re being brutally honest because they feel/are compelled to take a stand, or they’re employing a high-risk gambit to fool you about something.[1]

In this case, I think Oxburgh is telling the truth, as he sees it, no matter how incredibly inconvenient it is for him and his company.

And let’s be clear about this: If we can’t figure out a way to make CCS work on a broad enough scale, we have one hell of a global problem. The challenge is not just figuring out how to capture, transport, and sequester permanently the CO2 from new coal-fired plants, but how to do so for the immense installed base of plants, virtually none of which were designed or sited with CCS in mind, in the US, the UK, China, India, and everywhere else.

(Before you leap to the conclusion that David King, mentioned above, is concerned about “just” climate change, see Oil reserves ‘exaggerated by one third’.)

Just to put an edge on it, here’s an indication of how China, India, the US, and the entire world use coal to generate electricity (the purple wedge in each graph is coal):

Stare at those graphs for a few seconds and the magnitude of the challenge to decarbonize our electricity supply at least 80% by 2050, through whatever combination of conservation and adoption of renewables you care to invoke, is all too apparent.

Anyone know of publicly traded companies I can invest in that specialize in orbital mirrors, artificial trees that suck CO2 from the air, and building really big walls around coastal cities?

[1] Notice, for example, all the times I’ve said on this site that I think it’s an inescapable conclusion that humanity will build a lot more nuclear power plants, try to “save ourselves” via some combination of geoengineering schemes, and resort to much more overt, centralized control of the “free market”. I don’t like any of those things, and geoengineering, i.e. trying to hack the Earth system, scares me spitless. But my best guess is that’s exactly where we’re headed.

In trying to communicate the urgency of our climate situation to newcomers, there are two basic approaches we can take, and we’re doing a reasonable job on just one of them. We can talk about all the “feeds and speeds” of climate change–if we let atmospheric CO2 reach X parts per million it will mean Y degrees of warming and Z cm of sea level rise and W people turned into climate refugees because of inadequate food and/or water. This is the kind of talk that consumes about 95% of the blogosphere, and quite understandably–it’s hard not to scream about will happen if the ship we’re all on hits the iceberg that’s dead ahead.

But there’s another aspect of this, tied to that old devil I keep bringing up, timing, that realists who know what’s going on are doing a terrible job conveying to the newcomers: The difficulty of doing what science says we must to avoid all those horrific ramifications. The implication of ignoring that side of the coin are terrible; if mainstream consumers and voters think that climate change is a distant concern and that we “have plenty of time to deal with it”, then they will be far less inclined to do something about it now. This is hardly a new phenomenon, or one restricted to climate change. Ask dentists how many patients they see who neglect their teeth for years and then suddenly need root canal procedures or extractions. Ask doctors how many patients they treat who “have been meaning to quit smoking for years” but never did, only to discover they have a serious lung disorder or even cancer.

I find it very frustrating how many of my fellow dedicated enviros are utterly clueless about the sheer magnitude of the effort needed to hit that 80 by 2050 goal. Far too many of “us” think that driving a hybrid, changing their light bulbs, bringing home their groceries in reusable cloth bags, and not buying bottled water “makes them green” and they’re “doing their part to help”, etc. Not only are they not even close to doing “enough”, they’re actually doing considerable harm by inadvertently sending the message to mainstreamers that what they (the enviros) are doing is the silver bullet that will solve our environmental problems if only we could get everyone to be like them. The mainstreamers see that what the enviros do isn’t all that different from what they themselves do, so what’s the rush? Why is everyone getting so worked up about it?

One way to approach this particular gap in our communications is to look at just what it will take to reduce US CO2 emissions below 20% of the 1990 level by 2050. An excellent book on the topic, albeit one focused on the UK and not the US, is George Monbiot’s Heat, which I very highly recommend. I don’t plan to write a US-centric version of Monbiot’s book (although I would certainly read it if one were available). Instead, I plan to look at a series of scenarios for cutting US emissions, and present them in a slightly different way than I’ve done things in the past. For each installment of this series, I will create a spreadsheet that readers can download and fiddle with, and I will write a post that walks you through the spreadsheet and what it says, but without talking about every single cell.

I can’t stress this enough: I want your feedback about this idea in general, as well as what kind of scenarios to include in future installments. You don’t have to write a detailed treatment, just leave a comment here and we can talk about it publicly and narrow it down to something specific enough to be done in Excel. And to be blunt, I will likely not pursue this project unless I have some indication that it’s of value and people want to see more installments; this first one is an experiment.

For the first installment, I wanted to look at one of the enduring memes that’s arisen in the last few years, that we can make huge strides in reducing our CO2 emissions by making much wider use of our vastly increased natural gas reserves. We all know that natural gas is cleaner than coal or oil (and it certainly is), so making a big, long term commitment to using it in place of those other fuels would be a big win, right? Well, maybe not so much.

The Excel spreadsheet accompanying this post is here [XLS]. Please note that I added some pop-up comments to help explain exactly what I did. (Look for the little red triangle in the upper-right corner of some cells; hover your mouse over the cell to see the comment.)

In the spreadsheet, I started off by reproducing some data from the US Dept. of Energy’s Annual Energy Review. The first two tables present data from tables 12.3 and 12.2, which provide US CO2 emissions from energy consumption for 2008 and 1990, respectively. Next is a table showing how much each sector of the economy derives its energy from various sources (coal, oil, etc.).

The next thing in the spreadsheet is Scenario 1: All NG for electricity, transportation, and stationary use, which is simply a reworked version of the AER table 12.3 at the top of the spreadsheet. This is a “magic wand” scenario, in which I’m looking at what would happen if we could wave a magic wand and instantly transform the entire US infrastructure to replace all use of coal and oil for electricity generation, transportation, and stationary use, e.g. space heating and industrial processes). Thus there is no time lag for infrastructure transformation, no issues of how to finance such a massive undertaking, etc. Wave your wand and POOF!, it’s done.

I scaled the emissions from natural gas to replace coal and oil in the residential, commercial, industrial, and electricity sectors to show what they would be if an equivalent amount of energy were provided by natural gas. This assumes that the same mix of natural gas technologies would be used as is currently in place.

For transportation, I reduced the CO2 emissions from oil use by 25%. Why only 25%? As it turns out, that’s all the CO2 savings you get from burning natural gas instead of gasoline in a motor vehicle. Proponents of CNG vehicles talk about how it’s vastly cleaner than gasoline, and it is, if you take into account all pollutants, like particulate matter. But we’re talking here about CO2 emissions, and that’s all you get.

The results? This sweeping change gets us a whopping 13% reduction from 1990 emissions levels, or 26% from 2008 levels. If you look at the sector totals in the spreadsheet, you’ll see that transportation is a wash compared to 1990 levels, and the other sectors shoe a 13% to 24% improvement. Not exactly the improvement we were hoping for.

In Scenario 2: Scenario 1 + 50% more nuclear, I bumped the amount of electricity the US gets from nuclear power from 20% to 30%, and continued to make the simplifying assumption that nuclear power has zero CO2 emissions. (It does have some associated emissions, of course, but the level is very low so I hand waved it.)

This improves the situation, but not by a lot. We’ve now reduced CO2 emissions by 17% (compared to 1990), 30% (2008). Suddenly, 80% is starting to look like really immense number.

And I note that in the real world where we don’t have magic wands, that 50% bump in nuclear power would require one new nuclear reactor to go online every week for a year, or one a month for over four years. Anyone care to bet on that happening?

In Scenario 3: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear, I assumed a 100% increase in nuclear power, bring its contribution to 40% of US electricity (with a real-world contrustion time of two years at one/week, over 8 years at one/month).

The results improve slightly, and we’re now up to 21% less CO2 (vs. 1990), or 33% (2008).

In Scenario 4: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear + 33% reduction in elect I assume that not only do we have the full natural gas changeover plus a doubling of nuclear power capability, but we also achieve an ongoing reduction in electricity demand of 33%. That one-third conservation factor is purely a visceral guess about what could be possible in the US. I realize that would still leave us higher, per capita, than Japan and the EU, for example, but I don’t think that sort of mass hypnosis you could do better than that, given how many Americans think conservation is part of some vast hippy pinko plot to turn their children gay, remove religion from public life, and force them to eat cardboard-like cereal for breakfast.

Note that in calculating the conservation savings I assumed that all of it would come from that portion of electricity generation provided by natural gas, so we would get the maximum benefit fro the doubling of nuclear power.

This drags our numbers up to a 30% CO2 reduction (1990), or 40% (2008).

Finally, Scenario 5: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear + 33% reduction in elect + 33% reduction in trans adds a 33% reduction in all transportation emissions. You can make whatever assumption you want about how we get there–much greater use of public transit, more people walking and bicycling, a conversion of a large swath of private vehicles to EV’s, or some combination thereof.

After all that–NG conversion, doubling nuclear power, 33% reduction in emissions from non-nuclear electricity generation and 33% reduction in transportation emissions–we’re still at only a 40% CO2 reduction (1990), 50% (2008).

Clearly, this is a rough first pass at estimating the difficulty of making the kind of CO2 emissions reductions required. I didn’t take into account a major electrification of transportation, for example, the possibility of algae fuel delivering a major portion of our transportation at nearly zero net carbon emissions, or the continue expansion of wind and solar power. But I also didn’t point out that the population of the US is projected to rise to 420 million by 2050, according to the US Census Bureau [PDF], which throws a gigantic wrench into the works.

Stephen E. Koonin gave a presentation last October, Addressing America’s Energy Challenges. Koonin is Under Secretary for Science of Energy at the US Dept. of Energy, and he pulled together a lot of information and presented it in an excellent, and sometimes quite enlightening way.

The presentation is available here [36 page PDF].

The most interesting slides are:

• 15: Greenhouse gas emissions in 2000 by source, which shows a detailed breakout of worldwide emissions. (The slide doesn’t actually say that it’s worldwide and not US emissions, but it gives a 2000 figure of 42 billion tons of CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases, which is clearly a worldwide figure.)
• 20 and 21: The relationship between yearly emissions and the overall level of CO2 in the atmosphere. This graphically depicts one of the nastiest details in our current energy and environmental predicament: The long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere.
• 23: CO2 emissions, OECD and non-OECD, from 1865-2005, which has a couple of call-out boxes that neatly delineate the biggest single point of contention between “developed” and “developing” countires, namely who emitted what when.
• 30: Renewable electricity costs. Let the hair-splitting and food fight begin!
• 31: Cost of CO2 reductions. This could be the best single graph I’ve seen on the topic to date.

Why, you might well ask, don’t I just reproduce these slides here? Because I want you to click through to the presentatoin and look at it all, of course.

If ever there was a potential to answer the question, “Are we too shortsighted to fix the climate change problem?”, it seems the upcoming ad campaign from our friends in the coal biz will provide it.

Coal Ad Blitz Launches New Spot as Industry Sees Political Gains:

An advertising campaign that previously pushed the phrase “clean coal” launches new spots this week focused on jobs and low-cost power, the latest offering in a three-year, nearly $120 million effort to sell Congress and the White House on coal’s future. Increasingly, there are signs that it is working.

Coal companies and utilities that use coal in the past year have won a number of gains. Top policymakers, including President Obama, are echoing a key message from the ads, that technology in the future could reduce coal’s carbon pollution and keep coal a part of the energy mix.

The Obama administration last week created a task force charged with advancing five to 10 commercial demonstrations of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology by 2016. Obama told a White House gathering, “If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future.” That followed the inclusion in the stimulus bill earlier this year of $3.8 billion for research, development and deployment of carbon capture and sequestration projects.

…

“There’s a reason companies do these campaigns,” said Kenneth Green, resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “It’s because they tend to work.”

At the same time the industry has marked some gains, it has seen significant resistance in other areas. Mountaintop-removal coal mining proposals are getting increased scrutiny under the Obama administration, and plans for new coal-burning plants have stalled in the face of rising uncertainty about possible climate regulations. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) last week criticized the administration for what he called inconsistent messages about the future of coal. Coal interests say it shows more education efforts are needed.

Coal’s ad campaign dates back to the summer of 2007, when Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a precursor of the coal trade group that later became American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), told its members it needed to commit to a lengthy and expensive effort to protect coal. They would have to spend $35 million to $40 million a year through 2010 as Congress decided major energy issues, said Joe Lucas, senior vice president for communications at ACCCE.

The group spent $37 million on ads in 2009 and $38 million in 2008, Lucas said. About the same is budgeted this year, he said, although that could increase if climate and energy legislation activities pick up in Congress. The campaign could stretch into 2011 if there is no vote on a climate bill this year, Lucas said.

Seriously–how am I supposed to write about this without resorting to imagery that involves drug dealers selling “a good time” to kids in a playground, or something equally offensive?

There’s no way to avoid the obvious message in the Times article above: The closer we get to doing what science says we must regarding our CO2 emissions, the harder the fossil fuel companies and their hangers-on will fight. Right now, talking about cheap energy and jobs will almost surely make this campaign a winner. Economic stress makes people even more myopic than they normally are, and such promises will appeal to a public that’s desperate for ways to avoid further pain, even if it requires them to not think about what they’re doing to their own children and grandchildren.

And yes, for the newcomers in the audience (I see a few new faces in the crowd today), I’m saying that I’m not at all optimistic about CCS as a solution to CO2 emissions from coal-fired electricity generation. The combination of technical and economic hurdles involved mean CCS has very little chance of helping the US (or China or India or …) significantly reduce our CO2 emissions. The US gets half its electrons from coal plants and virtually none of them were designed or sited with CCS in mind. And even if you build a new CCS-equipped coal plant, you get 30% less electricity per unit of coal compared to a non-CCS facility.

So, the coal companies will run their ads, and we’ll see how this plays out. My guess is that it will result in a further retreat from our already meager environmental commitments.

If you want to whip an energy and climate geek into a frenzy, there are a few go-to topics, the two most prominent being nuclear power and coal. A couple of interesting items appeared in Google Reader today regarding coal that I thought were definitely worth your time.

First is The Future Of Coal Power Will Require Hard Choices:

Next Monday, governments of some of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are scheduled to announce how much they’ll limit the emissions that warm the planet. That’s the deal they made at the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

No matter what cuts they promise, they’ll all have to take a long, hard look at how much coal they use.

It used to be that coal was king in the U.S. But now, coal is guo wang — that’s “king” in Chinese.

“Coal is 80 percent of all power generation in China,” says Richard Morse, an energy analyst at Stanford University. “And the Chinese use of coal is really one of the largest drivers of global coal consumption and, hence, global emissions.”

The Top Source Of Greenhouse Gases

Coal is the biggest single source of greenhouse gases. China and India are now huge consumers of coal, and their appetite is growing. “As long as economic development is a priority,” says Morse, “I think climate takes a back seat, and in that situation, coal is going to win every time.”

That’s the conventional wisdom. But the deal made in Copenhagen may change all that. By Monday, as many as two dozen countries will have listed their emissions targets. China and the U.S. — the two biggest coal users — are leading the group. India is expected to join them, and so will South Africa — a major coal exporter.

So it’s governments whose economies depend on coal who are now driving climate diplomacy by saying that they’ll cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

And that means these countries will have to wrestle with the coal conundrum — we can’t live without it, but we can’t live with it.

Our current coal situation reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation about slavery, “we have the wolf by the ear and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose.”

Courtesy of the IEA, here are the electricity fuel graphs for China, India, and the US (click on each image for the full-size version in PDF format):

Notice the slope of the total electricity generation for each country, and in particular the alarmingly steep rise of the purple coal segments for China and India. Also notice that the vertical axes are different. The total electricity generation of the US and China re reasonably close, but India’s is far lower. This is little comfort, given that India is expected to become the world’s largest country by population in not to many more years.

Second is a 51-minute audio from The Envronment Report, Coal: Dirty Past, Hazy Future. You can stream the report from that site or download it as a 36MB MP3 file.

I highly recommend this one, despite its length, because it provides a really (dare I say it) fair and balanced view of the coal situation in the US.

Now here’s an item to make you grind your molars: New Anti-Smog Restrictions Could Warm Planet:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to tighten the ozone standard for smog will have an unfortunate side effect: Because of a quirk of atmospheric chemistry, those measures will hasten global warming.

There’s no question that smog is a hazard that deserves attention. Lydia Wegman of the EPA says the new ozone limits would have significant health benefits.

Less smog means fewer asthma attacks, fewer kids in the hospital, fewer days of lost school, “and we also believe that we can reduce the risk of early death in people with heart and lung disease,” she says.

Here’s the tough part: The way many states and localities will reduce smog is by cracking down on the chemicals that produce ozone. And those include nitrogen oxides, or NOx.

The Net Effect Could Make Global Warming Worse

But Jason West at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill says that when you reduce NOx, you don’t just reduce ozone; you change the chemistry of the atmosphere in such a way that you end up increasing the amount of methane in the air. And methane is a potent gas when it comes to global warming.

“By reducing NOx, the net effect is you make global warming worse,” West says.

In fact, you could make warming a lot worse. If you got rid of all NOx and a related sulfur compound, that action alone would be enough to increase the Earth’s temperature by 2 degrees Celsius — and that’s in the danger zone for the climate, according to many scientists and governments.

Ouch.

I said this was “another” climate catch-22. The main one is alluded to in the above quote: The reduction in sulfate aerosols when we reduce our coal usage.

Mining and burning coal has a lot of side effects. It emits CO2, particulate matter, mercury, and other bad things. One of the things it emits is sulfate aerosols, which actually have a cooling effect and partially offset the warming from all that coal-use-triggered CO2. This puts us in a truly nasty corner. We have to reduce our CO2 emissions a lot, and CO2 from coal burning is such a large portion of those emissions that we have to either dramatically curtail our coal burning or we have to pull on hell of a techno-rabbit out of out hat and figure out how to make CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) not only work, but work at an acceptable cost, and then roll it out on a large scale to existing coal plants, which were never designed or located with CCS in mind.

My conclusion: The hurdles are simply too high for CCS to ride to the rescue, so we have to use a lot less coal. That will almost instantly reduce the atmospheric aerosols, since they stay around for days to months (unless we’re talking about a major volcano eruption, in which case it’s longer). And that results in a jump in global warming because CO2 has a vastly longer atmospheric lifetime, so the CO2 we’ve already emitted is still up there doing its thing. Even without the drop in aerosols, a big reduction in CO2 emissions would still leave us with decades of continued warming, thanks to all the warming that’s “in the pipeline”.

You can see the IPCC’s table of radiative forcings for various anthropogenic emissions here.

If you prefer the graphic:

I’ll leave the interpretation of the graph below as an exercise for readers. Consider it your energy geek weekend homework, if you like.

(Click image for larger version in a separate browser window.)

The graph is from the IEA’s China graphs, available here.

US carbon emissions on rise again:

The US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA’s) latest Short-Term Energy Outlook says that economic recovery means carbon emissions will rise over the next two years, making it harder for the US to meet its proposed target of cutting emissions by 17 per cent on 2005 levels by 2020.

The report, the first to include monthly forecasts for carbon emissions, found that US carbon emissions fell by 6.1 per cent last year, led by a nearly 11 per cent fall in coal-based emissions. “Declines in energy consumption in the industrial sector, a result of the weak economy, and changes in electricity generation sources are the primary reasons for the decline in CO2 emissions,” it said.

However, it predicts that economic recovery will contribute an expected 1.5 per cent increase in CO2 emissions this year. “Increased use of coal in the electric power sector and continued economic growth, along with the expansion of travel-related petroleum consumption, leads to a 1.7 per cent increase in CO2 emissions in 2011,” it continued.

Everyone, repeat after me and help spread the word: Coal Sucks.