MIT has made the copious material from its symposium in March regarding CCS (carbon capture and storage) available: Retro-Fitting of Coal-Fired Power Plants for CO2 Emissions Reductions.

That page has 31 PDFs (according to DownloadThemAll), enough that I won’t even pretend that I’ve had a chance to read them all–yet.

Note that the MIT link above is a generic link to the reports page for the MIT Energy Initiative, so in time this material will likely move to a different web address.

You can quote numbers all day about how much oil the US uses and for which purposes, but few things drive the point home like the graph below. This shows US oil consumption for just transportation (broken out by mode), with a line plot of domestic production, revealing a humongous gap and explaining why so many peak oil adherents are so freaked out.

The description from the graph’s page:

In 1989 the transportation sector petroleum consumption surpassed U.S. petroleum production for the first time, creating a gap that must be met with imports of petroleum. By the year 2030, transportation petroleum consumption is expected to grow to nearly 17 million barrels per day; at that time, the gap between U.S. production and transportation consumption will be 3.7 million barrels per day.

The graph’s caption:

Note: The U.S. Production has two lines after 2005. The solid line is conventional sources of petroleum. The dashed line adds in other inputs — ethanol, liquids from coal, and liquids from biomass. The sharp increase in values between 2006 and 2007 are caused by the data change from historical to projected values.

The graph’s page has a table of the data, but it doesn’t break out those “other inputs”, which seem to be particularly loaded with assumptions. (”Liquids from coal”???) The sources cited for the data are “Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 27, and EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2009, December 2008″.

BusinessWeek: Car-Scrapping Plans: Germany’s Lessons:

The global auto industry may be facing its worst crisis ever, but you’d never know it at Ford Motor’s factory in Cologne. There, workers are putting in extra shifts on weekends to cope with demand for the compact Fiesta. In fact, Ford (F) sales have been booming in Germany. Customers have placed orders for 68,500 Fiestas, Ka subcompacts, and midsize Fusions in the four months to April, more than triple the year-earlier figure.

Thanks for this gravity-defying performance go—at least in part—to the German government’s so-called environment bonus, which Germans prefer to call the Abwrackprämie, or “wreck rebate.”

The program, launched in January and renewed in March, is Chancellor Angela Merkel’s most visible economic stimulus measure. It pays $3,320 to people who scrap a car that’s at least nine years old and buy a new car instead. The scheme has more than offset the effects of the global downturn on domestic auto sales, preserved factory jobs, and encouraged people to replace gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing clunkers with the latest engine technology.

…

But the rebate also has some major downsides. Retailers, for example, have complained bitterly that the program sucks spending from other categories. German retail sales fell 1.5% in March—the third monthly decline in a row—a decline that retail industry groups blame partly on incentives to buy cars rather than other goods.

The rebate also is expensive. Nominally it will cost $6.6 billion if Germans take full advantage of the program. The real cost is harder to figure. Increased sales will boost sales tax revenues, and the state will avoid the cost of unemployment benefits for workers who might have lost their jobs. On the negative side of the balance sheet, the program will kill jobs in other parts of the economy, for example auto repair shops or used-car dealers. A study by the Halle Economic Institute, a major think tank, estimates that the net burden on the German government budget will be $3.5 billion.

And you thought public policy involving the economy and energy would be simple… why, exactly?

Monbiot.com: How Much Should We Leave in the Ground?:

The two papers on carbon emissions published in Nature last week were ground-breaking: they show us how much carbon dioxide we can produce if we’re to have a reasonable chance of preventing two degrees of global warming. It’s a completely different approach from the UN’s and national governments’. They set targets for reductions by a certain date but have nothing to say about the total amount of carbon we can release.

One of the papers, by Myles Allen and others(1), suggests that we can burn, at most, another 400-500 billion tonnes of carbon at any time between now and the extinction of humanity if we want to avoid two degrees of warming. The other, by Malte Meinshausen and others(2), suggests that producing 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 between 2000-2050 would give us a 25% chance of exceeding two degrees. That’s a lot less than Allen’s estimate, as one tonne of carbon produces 3.667 tonnes of CO2 when it’s burnt: 1000 billion tonnes of CO2 arises from 273 billion tonnes of carbon.

…

Even ignoring all unconventional sources and all other greenhouse gases and taking the most optimistic of the figures in the two Nature papers, we can afford to burn only 61% of known fossil fuel reserves between now and eternity.

Or, using Meinshausen’s figure, we can burn only 33% between now and 2050. Sorry - 33% minus however much we have burnt between 2000 and today.

So the question which arises is this: which fossil fuel reserves will we decide not to extract and burn? There is, as I have argued before(9), no point in seeking to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels unless we also seek to reduce their production. Yet, apart from the members of OPEC (who do it only to shore up the price), no government is attempting to limit the amount of fuel extracted. Far from it; they all pursue the same strategy as the United Kingdom: to “maximise economic recovery”(10).

The test of all governments’ commitment to stopping climate breakdown is this: whether they are prepared to impose a limit on the use of the reserves already discovered, and a permanent moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Otherwise it’s all hot air.

George Monbiot gets his geek on breaks out his calculator. Worth reading.

One thing to keep in mind is how hard it is to pin down world oil reserves, a point Monbiot acknowledges. He uses a figure of 162 billion tons (not, not barrels), which is almost exactly what BP last published in their yearly energy stats compendium. The problem is that as we approach and pass peak oil and see some dramatic and sustained price rises, the incentives to find ways to improve the recovery rate for existing wells (typically about 33% today) or go after very expensive fields (like those in ultra deep water locations) will rise considerably. Oil is probably the most susceptible of the fossil fuels to this effect of resources being a function of market price.

I don’t quite get his point about distinguishing between leaving the evil stuff in the ground instead of not using it. If consumers greatly slow their use of fossil fuels, I guarantee that producers will stop mining or pumping them. (For example, there’s been a lot of talk lately about how there’s 100 million barrels of oil sitting in tankers at sea, waiting for a customer, as if that’s a tremendous amount. It’s about 1.2 days of world consumption, so I’m not impressed.)

FT.com: US carbon cap-and-trade - more data on its effects:

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has become the latest organisation to wade into the murky waters of the Waxman-Markey bill, the proposed legislation that would introduce a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide in the US.

The Pew Center’s analysis suggests that the impact of a cap-and-trade programme on energy-intensive manufacturers would be small. The analysts based their study on an examination of historical trends among energy-intensive manufacturing industries, using 20 years of data on 400 energy-intensive subsectors.

They found that energy-intensive manufacturing industries would on average lose only 1 per cent of their annual production to imports, if a carbon price of $15 per tonne was assumed, and if there was no carbon price in other countries.

(That $15 figure comes from projections of the carbon price under Waxman-Markey produced by the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.)

Such a small impact could easily be addressed through policies targeted to energy-intensive sectors, the authors of the report said, including straightforward compensation or more complex border adjustment measures (tariffs) for imported energy-intensive goods.

In all candor, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of the impact of a price of carbon on various parts of the US economy. I’m reasonably sure that $15/ton won’t be nearly enough to trigger the cuts we’ll need by 2050, but it’s probably a good start. The key point, as I’ve argued before, is that no one knows in advance how a given amount of reduction in CO2 emissions maps to a market price, which is one reason why we should control the level of emissions (via a cap) and let the evolving market decide on the price (via trade).

Green Car Congress: Study Finds That Plankton Blooms Do Not Send Atmospheric Carbon to the Deep Ocean; Weakens Iron Fertilization as Geo-Engineering Approach:

Oceanographers Jim Bishop and Todd Wood of the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have measured the fate of carbon particles originating in plankton blooms in the Southern Ocean, using data that deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats collected around the clock for well over a year. Their study reveals that most of the carbon from lush plankton blooms never reaches the deep ocean.

The results weaken the applicability of the simplest version of the Iron Hypothesis as a geo-engineering approach to climate change. Iron Hypothesis adherents suggest global warming can be slowed or even reversed by fertilizing plankton with iron in regions that are iron-poor but rich in other nutrients like nitrogen, silicon, and phosphorus. The Southern Ocean is one of the most important such regions.

Oops.

Translation: This lesson in the hubris of geoengineering was brought to you by reality. Remember–if it’s not Reality, it just ain’t real!

People just now seem to be waking up to the fact that, golly gee, the Intertubes run on electrons, and it uses a lot of them.

Two related articles:

guardian.co.uk: Web providers must limit internet’s carbon footprint, say experts

New Scientist: Unknown web: Is the net hurting the environment?

The one thing to keep in mind is that what matters is not merely the cost of the Internet but what we get for it. For example, how many errands do I have to avoid by doing online banking or shopping before I completely offset the carbon footprint of all the Internet resources I use in the process? I’m guessing it’s a very favorable ratio; even several errands bundled together in a single 20 mile trip in my Scion xA would seem to emit far more CO2 than hours of online activity.

Another issue is that a large portion of the Internet infrastructure was built with little attention to electricity consumption. The benefit of adding Internet capacity is (or is perceived to be) high, while the price of electricity is relatively low, so we’ll only feel pressure to make it more efficient as we run up against limits of electricity supply or funding.

Finally, the big issue with data center electricity consumption is cooling. I’ve seen figures that estimate that for ever watt of power spent on running hardware another 1.5 watts is used in cooling it. This means that lower-temp chips and drives could do a lot to reduce data center energy consumption, far more than just the their own power consumption figures might suggest.

One of the themes I keep returning to, on this site and in meatspace, is “respect for your own ignorance”. That’s shorthand for understanding the limits of your (or humanity’s) knowledge and then restraining yourself from acting on assumptions when you don’t have the knowledge to back up those actions or decisions.

On a personal and trivial level, I don’t do major plumbing work in my house because I don’t know enough to get it right with any real certainty. Sure, I can change the cartridge in a faucet and do other minor low level stuff, but anything that requires the use of a propane torch, for example, sends me to the phone to call a professional. Because of my background and long-time hobby interest in computers, I’m much more comfortable building them, taking them apart, and generally doing “screwdriver and software driver” work. (But don’t tell anyone; it’s a pain being known as the “go-to guy for computer stuff” in your neighborhood.)

In terms of peak oil and climate chaos, this general philosophy makes me conclude that we should have been doing much more to transition away from oil and reduce our CO2 emissions decades ago, even when our situation was far less certain than it is now. And now that both of those situations are far more urgent, our decisions have shifted from “should we do anything about this” to “which X of our Y possible solutions to these problems should we pursue, and how should we fund them”. Of course, the proximity of peak oil and serious climate chaos impacts only makes these decisions all the more difficult and important; we’ve long passed the point where we could rely on gradual, comfortable, and low risk solutions. The higher the stakes in the decisions we’ve now forced ourselves to make, the more important it is that we “respect our own ignorance” and not make too many mistakes.

All of which leads to back to one of the great assumptions that many people seem to be all too willing to make: That sequestered CO2 will remain sequestered “forever”. A pretty decent treatment of this issue is in the article Nature’s underground carbon stores aren’t rock solid:

Carbon dioxide stored underground in nature eventually ends up mainly in fizzy water, not rocks — and that could have implications for artificial carbon capture and storage projects.

A new study by British, Canadian and U.S. researchers, published in Thursday’s edition of Nature, sheds some light on the conditions that allow carbon dioxide to be safely stored underground for thousands or millions of years, as well conditions under which it might leak back out into the atmosphere.

Carbon capture and storage projects have been touted as a possible way to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and reduce climate change, but the research is still in the very early stages.

“We haven’t figured out as a planet yet how to do this,” said Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a University of Toronto researcher who was one of the co-authors of the study.

…

In the past, researchers have suggested that the carbon dioxide could end up dissolved in water — turning it into sparkling water or club soda — or incorporated into minerals such as carbonates and limestone, but did not know which would be dominant and under what conditions.

University of Manchester doctoral student Stuart Gilfillan, who led the study with his supervisor Chris Ballantaine, decided to examine nine natural gas fields in North America, China and Europe. He and his colleagues discovered that carbon dioxide was largely dissolving into the water within a narrow, slightly acidic pH range, and less than one-fifth of the carbon dioxide was being incorporated into solid minerals.

This could be interpreted as bad news by some people, suggested a commentary by Heidelberg University researcher Werner Aeschbach-Hertig published in the same issue of Nature.

“Clearly, mineral trapping is the preferable pathway, as it promises to store the carbon over geological time scales,” he said.

Sherwood Lollar acknowledged that carbon dioxide dissolved in water and bottled up underground can come up to the surface in different ways, such as through natural gas wells and other holes drilled by humans as well as through natural faults.

“So there are many places where CO2 gases bubble up through water naturally. We call them spas,” she said with a laugh. She later clarified that such natural discharges are on a small scale and the implications for leakage from engineered carbon storage sites would require further study.

Please see the article for a bit more detail.

We’re making a lot of collective decisions right now about energy and environmental issues, and some of them orbit the general question of what the US (and other countries) can and should do about their coal-fired electricity generation. The US alone burns over a billion short tons of coal per year to produce 50% of our electricity and almost exactly one third of our CO2 emissions, over 1.9 billion metric tons, related to energy consumption. That’s a big mess by any measure.

What would it cost to replace all that generation capacity with some mix that was not just cleaner than what we have now, but clean enough that we wouldn’t need to immediately start to replace it again with something even cleaner? (And whatever solution will also have to take into account things like shifting patterns of water availability for any technology, like thermoelectric plants, that typically has a high cooling water requirement.)

If replacement is out of the question, then what would it cost to retrofit a large portion of those hundreds of existing coal plants with CCS technology? And that retrofit would have to include not just on-site capture hardware, but the infrastructure to transport the CO2 to a geologically suitable and politically palatable site, sequester it, and then monitor it forever.

And what do we do if we decide to start rolling out CCS, based on the assumption that we know how to sequester that amount and flow rate of CO2 forever, spend a large pile of billions of dollars on the effort (money that could have built wind turbines or solar panels or geothermal plants, to name just three possible alternatives), and find out 20 years into the conversion that some non-trivial portion of the sites have begun leaking?

No matter how we slice and dice the details, we’re left with a nasty problem. We have to clean up our electricity generation. There is no other option, simply because we can’t get to the needed level of emissions cuts without doing so. That means dealing with the coal issue, which in turn means deciding how large a bet we want to make on our ability to make CCS work on the needed scale.

Such society-wide decisions are made in anything but a vacuum; as much as some people decry the role of economics in the process, consider what happens when politics comes into play. Such should-be trivialities like which party is in power or where the coal plants are located (as in which Congressional district or key electoral states) could become key contributors to which path we choose.

This post sounds more cynical than I intended it to, and I apologize for that. What I’m really appealing for, aside from a thorough examination of CCS technology before we bet the farm on it, is that more of us stop contributing to the polarization in the energy and environmental arena. We have to show the courage to “just say I don’t know” on some issues. There’s a lot of gray area in between the black and white extremes, and we shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed to set up camp there, resist the screamers at both ends of the debate, and respect our own ignorance until we have more facts.

And speaking of assumptions–as I type this the news feeds are all reporting the latest updates on the shooting in Binghamton, NY. My wife and I lived in Binghamton from 1979 until 2004, and it’s a perfect example of the kind of small city that people on the news always describe by saying “things like that don’t happen here”. Or so we and they assumed.

My heart goes out to everyone in the Parlor City.

Ford is starting to separate itself from GM and Chrysler, and in more than the oft-mentioned “they’re the only US company not asking for a handout way”, as important as that is today in fact and in perception. Even better, they’re showing conspicuous signs of a deep understanding of the challenges facing their industry in the coming years, not just this year or this quarter.

The latest example is evident as Ford readies mix of all-electric and plug-in hybrids (emphasis added):

Amid questions over the viability of General Motors and Chrysler, Ford will detail its fuel-efficient car strategy and show off an all-electric Focus and hybrid Fusion sedan on Wednesday.

Company executives are scheduled to demonstrate the cars and update its “sustainable mobility technology” plans at the New York International Auto Show. The company says it is on track to bring both all-electric cars and plug-in hybrid vehicles using a new generation of lithium ion batteries to market starting next year.

The company already offers hybrid vehicles that use a combination of a gasoline engine and a battery, charged by regenerative braking. Next year, it will release an all-electric commercial Transit Connect van, which is expected to have a range of 100 miles and top speed of 70 miles per hour.

Ford is also working with auto supplier Magna International to release an all-electric compact sedan in 2011, which will get about 70 percent better mileage than non-hybrid models. This car will be a Focus-size vehicle that will go 100 miles on a charge, said Greg Frenette, the assistant chief engineer of battery electric-vehicle applications at Ford.

Then in 2012, Ford expects to release a plug-in version of one of its current hybrid vehicles. The anticipated mileage will be about 120 miles per gallon for the first 30 miles and then the vehicle will get the mileage of a traditional hybrid–in the 40 miles per gallon range, Frenette said.

…

The obvious advantage of a gas-electric combination is a longer range since a person taking a long drive can refuel at a gas station.

But a raft of companies, including Nissan, Mitsubishi, and start-ups Tesla Motors, Detroit Electric, and Miles Electric, are developing pure electric cars, betting that a car with a roughly 100-mile range will appeal to consumers.

In Ford’s case, it expects that its battery electric sedan will primarily fill the role of a household’s second car in North America. The battery, supplied by Johnson Controls Saft, will be able to store about 20 kilowatt-hours, said Frenette.

“People will find in a course of week that using a battery-electric vehicle not only saves costs on the fuel bill, but it also makes a positive statement about their concern about the environment, the global warming issue, national energy security and the convenience of not going to a gas station,” he said.

On a regular U.S. 110-volt outlet, a battery that size would require a 12-hour charge to replenish. Although it’s not necessary, people could install a 220-volt outlet at home to cut charge time in half or plug in at public places, like malls or offices, Frenette said. He said ultimately, two-hour charges are possible and safe.

Excuse me while I leap to my feet and yell, “BINGO!!!”[1]

Ford has posted details of their plan on their web site, and there’s plenty to like.

The key point is something you’ve all heard me talk about endlessly–the usefulness of a 100-mile range EV as a second car. Once customers get a little taste of owning one of these vehicles, and they see that (1) they save a lot in gasoline and maintenance expense, and (2) they almost never have to drive all the cars in their household over 100 miles on any given day, they will absolutely love these cars. I commented the other day that Nissan will find the proverbial knee in the curve with their EV offerings; it’s looking like Ford will be joining Nissan, Mitsubishi, and other companies in that club.

The 12-hour recharging time sounds bad, but that’s for a full recharge of an empty battery.[2] If you drive 33 miles on a given day, which is much closer to the norm, our recharge time is only 4 hours.

At this point, I have no idea how the GM and Chrysler train wrecks will sort out. But I do know that, as with almost any major disruption of an existing economic situation, there will be winners and losers and more than a few surprises as the problem and our responses to it unfold. Right now we’re seeing the worst of the downside, thanks to all the unemployment and uncertainty caused by the banking, housing, and car company messes. But eventually we’ll awake from this nightmare to find a landscape that’s very different in some ways, yet still very recognizable.

Let me anticipate and respond to some of the e-mail I expect to receive about this post:

“We need to kill off the car culture in the US! The problem is we travel too many miles!” No problem. Show me how to get from where we are, in terms of the physical layout of cities and suburbs (you know, those places outside of cities where so many homes and businesses and schools and religious institutions and medical facilities and government offices, etc. are), to a model where a big chunk of our current travel is no longer necessary, and in a time frame that reduces the oil and carbon intensity of the US economy quicker and cheaper than electrifying cars, and I’ll sign up for it in a heartbeat. Ditto for the “light rail is the answer” crowd; show me how it works within the real world constraints of geography, current development, and the economic pressures squeezing every level of government in the US, and I’ll be a tireless proponent.

“But we get half of our electricity from coal! And coal is evil! EVIL!!!” Yes, coal truly is evil. You’ll get no argument from me on that point. But the pressure of climate chaos ensure that we have to clean up our electricity generation (and update the grid) regardless of how we fuel our cars, so electrifying cars means that as we fix those other problems the installed base of PHEVs and EVs will only get cleaner. By comparison, relying on non-plug-in hybrids or CNG puts a relatively high floor under the CO2 emissions from personal motor vehicles. And we won’t be able to clean up our electricity generation as quickly as we’d like, so wasting triple the kWh/mile on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (compared to an equivalent EV) will be an unaffordable luxury.

“You’re just a corporation-loving economist!!!” Oh, please. No one, and I mean no-bloody-one, has to remind me of the horrors that corporations (or governments or religious institutions or any other concentration of power) have visited on the innocent. So go ahead and rant all you want, but the bottom line is that we’ll need both government and business to work with individuals to help us all get through the current economic challenges and then deal with peak oil and climate chaos. As I said above: If you can make a case for a different and better way to achieve the same goals, I’m very eager to hear it.

[1] Actually, I yelled something I care not to repeat on a family-friendly web site. Use your imagination.

[2] 20kWh charging over 12 hours requires 1,666 watts, which at 110 volts is 15.14 amps, about the maximum current you could safely require.

The mythological creature known as “clean coal” continues to get a lot of attention, as it should. The US gets almost exactly half of its electricity from burning coal, which emitted over 1.9 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2006, just over 32% of our total CO2 emissions from energy consumption. China is building coal plants at a horrific clip, none of which have CCS capability, just like all those plants currently in service in the US.

In the US, those electrons and CO2 are set in motion by 1,470 generators working in about 600 plants and burning just over a billion tons of coal per year. Moving all that coal around accounts for about 44 percent of the freight tons-miles carried by US railroads.

Did I forget to mention that this is a really big problem?

In my normal trawling through the infosphere for E&E items worthy of your and my time, I recently came across three interesting articles.

Cleaning Coal Won’t Be Dirt Cheap:

Clean coal refers to the idea of harnessing the black rock’s energy while safely disposing of the resulting CO2 rather than sending it skyward. In dueling television commercials, the power industry portrays it as a silver bullet nearly ready to be deployed, while environmental groups allied with Mr. Gore imply it’s a smokescreen from a fossil-fuel industry under fire.

Right now, clean coal seems both possible and improbable. The basic elements of clean coal are already in use in small corners of industry. But whether it is broadly and quickly adopted around the world will depend less on science than on economics. Cleaning coal is very expensive.

…

A year ago, the Pleasant Prairie plant entered this first phase with an experiment to capture its CO2. The machinery for extracting the gas here is three stories tall. But at the 425-acre plant, it seems tiny. Its pipes pull a bit of exhaust from the power plant and then remove the CO2 in a process that involves mixing the gas with ammonia.

So far, the test is grabbing only about 1% of the greenhouse gas the plant coughs out. The method still consumes too much energy, says Sean Black, a manager at Alstom SA, the French company managing the test. “We’re just in the beginning of this process,” he says.

The second step — one not yet attempted here at the Wisconsin plant — is to take the captured CO2 and dispose of it safely, perhaps by burying it. CO2 has been shot underground for decades in places like Texas, where it is injected into aging oil and gas fields to force the remaining fossil fuel up through wells. Some 30 million tons of CO2 are injected into oil and gas wells annually in the U.S., according to federal statistics. That is tiny — less than 1% of the roughly six billion tons of CO2 the country annually exhales.

A sober and relatively even-handed treatment of the topic. Highly recommended.

Why Clean Coal Is Years Away:

Coal’s problems, however, are getting to be so big and serious that they are not just overshadowing the industry but threatening to render it obsolete. About 80 percent of the electricity sector’s carbon dioxide emissions come from burning coal. A price on CO2 pollution, which Congress might impose as early as this year, is expected to be so costly that the mere prospect of it is already shaking things up. Some states have banned new coal plants, and many companies are canceling their plans in other places.

The industry’s greatest hope for survival, as far as CO2 emissions go, is a work-in-progress technological arsenal known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. With all the makings—and risk—of a classic American gamble, it is in some ways the energy equivalent of missile defense. It’s ambitious, expensive, intricate, and wildly controversial.

This is a longish article, and I can’t do it justice by quoting more of it. Please go read it all.

Debating a ‘Clean Coal’ Future - Council on Foreign Relations:

Coal is responsible for about 40 percent of global electricity generation as well as 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. It is present in seventy nations, with the United States, Russia, and China possessing the largest reserves (PDF). Coal produces a varied spectrum of energy and pollutants depending on its quality–ranging from low-quality lignite to pure coal. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects modest increases in coal use for most of the world by 2030 but significant increases in Asia, particularly in China, where coal power generation is expected to more than double between now and 2030. Though China and India are pursuing other forms of energy, both possess large reserves of coal, making it a natural choice to fuel their rapid growth and acute energy needs. Analysis by CFR Senior Fellow David Victor shows coal is currently the cheapest way for China to generate power (PDF), with hydropower a close second.

Another longish piece, this one containing several worthwhile links to related information.

I also recommend the Union of Concerned Scientists’ report Coal Power in a Warming World, and their links page, Resources: Impacts of Coal-fired Electric Generation.

After thinking a lot about CCS lately, and reading these articles and everything else about it I can get my hands on, I think it’s fair to say that:

• CCS is really nothing more than an indirect form of geoengineering, but without the titanium-plate-bulkhead-reinforced terminology and testosterone saturated posturing. It’s expensive, it’s risky (think about leaks that could release millions of tons of this heavier-than-air gas in the vicinity of “children and other living things”, as the saying once went), and it seems we’ve put ourselves in such a bad situation that it’s hard to imagine a solution that doesn’t include it.
• The first of two huge issues with this technology is scalability. Applying it to a single, new, hand-picked power plant is a far cry from rolling it out on a US- or China-scale. And don’t forget the temporal dimension of any attempt to scale up CCS. We can’t spend a lot of human and technical resources making even numerous plants sequester their emissions and then abandon those sites. We’re stuck babysitting them (and hoping they don’t release their CO2) forever.[1]
• The second issue is one I keep bringing up that no one else seems to talk about, the coal dichotomy. This is the (likely) sizable difference in the cost of CCS for a new plant designed and located with CCS in mind, versus those 600 plants with 1,470 generators already cranking away in the US, plus who knows how many more around the world. I’ve yet to see a breakout of cost estimates for what it will cost to retrofit CCS onto those plants, many of which aren’t nearly old enough that their owners would want to retire them. And then there’s the cost of building and maintaining CO2 pipelines, many of which would run dozens or hundreds of miles to reach an acceptable burial site. Faced with a choice of running a pipeline 300 miles to a “really good” CO2 burial site or running a 20 mile pipeline (or effectively none at all) to a “not quite as good” site, which one do you think companies will try to justify? Any guesses as to whether their judgment will be perfect or the first stab at writing government regulations will be tight enough to prevent a disaster?

As skeptical as I am about CCS, I think it’s critical that we continue all related R&D efforts, as well as think seriously about how to regulate the practice. There seems to be little chance we’ll be able to reduce CO2 emissions to 20% of 1990 levels by 2050 without it.[2] CCS, nuclear waste and proliferation worries, and geoengineering are among the prices we’ll pay for the situation we’ve created over the last 150 years.

[1] The thought of monitoring CO2 burial sites for leaks reminds me of the old programming adage: Never check for an error condition you don’t know how to handle. Aside from an evacuation of nearby population centers, which might or might not happen in time to save people, what do you do if a site decides that it’s tired of storing all that CO2?

[2] Unless, of course, the car salesman I talked to recently is right. He explained to me with great conviction that “the government” has long ago perfected “zero point energy” but doesn’t want to let the common people have it. And no, I don’t think he was drinking.

For those who haven’t heard it, the classic definition of chutzpah is a child who murders his parents and then asks a judge for mercy because he’s an orphan. While nothing below or in the recent news reaches quite that mythical height (with the possible exception of the rampant idiocy over at AIG), sometimes one has to wonder…

The first example is a real beauty that comes from the UK, where Green lobby and nuclear groups clash over role of renewable energy:

EDF and E.ON have warned the government they may be forced to drop plans to build a new generation of nuclear power plants unless the government scales back its targets for wind power.

The demands – contained in submissions to the government’s renewable energy consultation – reinforces the worries of wind developers that the two sectors cannot thrive simultaneously.

EDF of France and E.ON of Germany, two of the most high-profile nuclear supporters, said attempts to reach 35% of electricity generated by renewables is not only unrealistic but also damaging to alternative schemes such as nuclear plants.

“The deployment of high levels of intermittent renewables for electricity generation will require the construction of additional carbon-emitting plant as back-up for when renewables are not available to meet demand,” EDF argued. “This is likely to be predominantly gas-fired and will therefore undermine efforts to reduce dependence on non-domestic fuel sources.”

“A 25% electricity target will provide the best platform for further decarbonisation of electricity generation in the period beyond 2020, through a combination of further renewables, new nuclear and coal and gas with carbon capture and storage.”

The attempt to dilute the contribution from renewables has infuriated the environmental lobby. “We’ve always said that nuclear power will undermine renewable energy and will damage the UK’s efforts to tackle climate change – now EDF agrees,” said Nathan Argent, head of Greenpeace’s energy solutions unit.

What really frosts my cookies (and not the browser variety) is that the people who most strongly push nuclear power tend, on average, to be the same people who scream the loudest about letting the free market do its thing without the evil, corrupting hand of Government Intervention involved. Unless, of course, it’s a situation like the one here in the US where nuclear power gets massive subsidies, including loan guarantees, then it’s just peachy keen.

The other example involves The Quarrel Over Coal Ash Waste (emphasis added):

More than 500 million gallons of toxic waste from a Tennessee Valley Authority coal plant broke through the containment wall of a storage pond, destroying homes and contaminating two rivers.

“Any new coal project shouldn’t be approved until there’s a thorough analysis of how it will be dealt with in a way that’s fully protective of public health and the environment,” said Peter Lehner, the N.R.D.C.’s executive director.

But Thomas Adams, executive director of the American Coal Ash Association, said, “Kingston was a problem of containment, it wasn’t the ash that was the issue. The solution is to encourage beneficial use of coal combustion products and to make sure disposal requirements are up to speed.”

Next thing you know we’ll be seeing bumper stickers that say, “coal doesn’t cause environmental impacts, people cause environmental impacts”.

On a more serious note, the coal article links to a (new?) set of pages on the NRDC’s web site about CCW (coal combustion waste), available here which I highly recommend. Clearly, someone at the NRDC has been doing his or her homework on this topic to put together all that sate-level information. From that site:

The Harriman spill isn’t the first time that the inadequacy of our nation’s coal waste storage systems has been proven, and it isn’t likely to be the last. In a 2007 draft report, the EPA identified 24 sites in 13 states where pollution from coal combustion waste dumps and lagoons has contaminated surface water and groundwater.

Coal-fired power plants produced more than 126 million tons of contaminated coal waste in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available, according to figures reported to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And NRDC estimates show that the waste produced in a single year contains nearly 100,000 tons of toxic metals.

That’s just the waste from plants already in operation. But coal plant developers want to build more than eighty more coal-fired plants that would produce nearly 18 million tons of additional coal waste, contaminated with more than 18 thousand tons of toxic metals.

Despite the well-documented risks, no federal regulations govern the storage of this toxic coal waste, even though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined as far back as 2000 that rules were needed. State rules are inconsistent and often laxly enforced, and the utility industry has lobbied hard to keep it that way.

So, not only does coal have the huge negative externality of CO2 emissions, but it has the additional unpriced impact of pollution from coal waste, which we clearly don’t know how to manage.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: Price every form of electricity generation to include all impacts–CO2 emissions, mercury pollution, waste management (what’s the half-life of coal waste, anyway?), fresh water draw and/or consumption, insurance, and loan guarantees, grid upgrades, etc.–and let’s see how wind, solar, wave, tidal, and geothermal fare against coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Or am I just indulging in my own enviro version of chutzpah by posing such a comparison?

The EIA (Energy Information Administration), the statistical arm of the US Department of Energy, has suddenly changed its mind about what most energy prices will do across the years 2008 and 2009, and it’s not happy news.

The data below is from the STEO (Short Term Energy Outlook), which the EIA issues around the first week of each month. The home page for the STEO is here, while the archive of prior versions is here.

So, what do the numbers say?

First up is everyone’s favorite, oil:

In the May 2008 release, the EIA projected that crude oil would average $103.36/barrel in 2008, and then decline to $97.62/barrel in 2009.

But in the June release, which was posted yesterday, they upped their estimate for 2008 to $122.15/barrel (quite a jump from that $103 value in May, but not too surprising in light of the current $135+ price). Even more surprising is that they’re now projecting oil to average $126.00 in 2009, almost $4/barrel higher than in 2008.

From May to June, the projection for the 2008 average price rose 18.2%, and the projection for 2009 rose by 29.1%. The projected change from 2008 to 2009 went from a decline in the May report to an increase in the June report.

Gasoline (regular unleaded, retail price):

May: $3.52/gallon in 2008 declining to $3.44 in 2009

June: $3.78 in 2008 rising to $3.92 in 2009

From May to June, the projection for the 2008 average price rose 7.4%, and the projection for 2009 rose by 14.0%. The projected change from 2008 to 2009 went from a decline to an increase.

Diesel fuel (retail price):

May: $3.94/gallon in 2008 declining to $3.67 in 2009

June: $4.32 in 2008 and 2009

From May to June, the projection for the 2008 average price rose 9.6%, and the projection for 2009 rose by 17.7%. The projected change from 2008 to 2009 went from a decline to no change.

Natural gas (US average wellhead price):

May: $8.64/thousand cubic feet in 2008 declining to $8.52 in 2009

June: $9.82 in 2008 rising to $9.96 in 2009

From May to June, the projection for the 2008 average price rose 13.7%, and the projection for 2009 rose by 16.9%. The projected change from 2008 to 2009 went from a decline to an increase.

(Note that this is not the retail price of natural gas; that price is much higher, and is projected by the EIA to be about $15 for residential customers in 2008 and $17 in 2009, both very high numbers by historical standards.)

Coal:

May: $1.87/per million Btu in 2008 rising to $1.91 in 2009

June: $1.89 in 2008 rising to $1.96 in 2009

From May to June, the projection for the 2008 average price rose 1.1%, and the projection for 2009 rose by 2.6%. The projected change from 2008 to 2009 was an increase in both months.

Conclusions

First and foremost, don’t go nuts over price projections from the EIA or anyone else. As I so often point out here, the energy field is littered with predictions that didn’t exactly hit the mark. The EIA seems to have a particularly inaccurate dart board. That’s not to say that I think this revision of their numbers is wrong; if anything I think it’s conservative and overdue. In fact, it’s hard to look at this flip in projections–from generally downward (2008 to 2009) to generally upward–and not leap to the ever so slightly tin-foil-hatted conclusion that the EIA held out as long as they could before delivering the bad news. A month ago they were predicting an average price for oil in 2008 of only $103.36, for example. In those intervening four months did they suddenly notice (as they say in the STEO release for June):

The combination of rising consumption, further downward revisions in the supply outlook for countries outside of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and low surplus production capacity reinforce the perception that supply is having a difficult time keeping up with demand growth, accounting for much of the upward trend in oil prices. Consumption in countries outside of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) continues to grow rapidly, offsetting weaker consumption in OECD countries, especially the United States. Declining production in a number of non-OPEC nations, including Mexico, United Kingdom, and Norway, is largely offsetting increases in other countries. Slow growth in non-OPEC supply is coinciding with disruptions in supplies from some OPEC countries, such as Nigeria. Ongoing geopolitical concerns in several producing countries, including Venezuela and Iran, have contributed to oil price volatility.

The market remains concerned that the cushion of surplus production capacity of less than 2 million bbl/d (almost all located in Saudi Arabia) and/or stocks is insufficient to protect against possible changes in supply or consumption, especially as we enter the summer hurricane season. The absence of a Saudi commitment to add capacity beyond its current goal of 12.5 million bbl/d adds to the uncertainty about the adequacy of future supply capacity growth.

See the June STEO for the other stunning revelations behind these latest projections, revelations that absolutely no one (by which I mean practically everyone on the planet) has been talking about for a long time.

Combine this report, which I’m sure has a huge influence on commodity traders, with the big drop in US oil stockpiles released in today’s TWIP report (likewise), and you probably have all the explanation you need for why oil is up $6.29/barrel and gasoline is up over 17 cents/gallon on the NYMEX as I type this.

The abstract of The Water Intensity of the Plugged-In Automotive Economy (7 page, 3.9MB PDF) (also available in HTML format):

Converting light-duty vehicles from full gasoline power to electric power, by using either hybrid electric vehicles or fully electric power vehicles, is likely to increase demand for water resources. In the United States in 2005, drivers of 234 million cars, light trucks, and SUVs drove approximately 2.7 trillion miles and consumed over 380 million gallons of gasoline per day. We compare figures from literature and government surveys to calculate the water usage, consumption, and withdrawal, in the United States during petroleum refining and electricity generation. In displacing gasoline miles with electric miles, approximately 3 times more water is consumed (0.32 versus 0.07–0.14 gallons/mile) and over 17 times more water is withdrawn (10.6 versus 0.6 gallons/mile) primarily due to increased water cooling of thermoelectric power plants to accommodate increased electricity generation. Overall, we conclude that the impact on water resources from a widespread shift to grid-based transportation would be substantial enough to warrant consideration for relevant public policy decision-making. That is not to say that the negative impacts on water resources make such a shift undesirable, but rather this increase in water usage presents a significant potential impact on regional water resources and should be considered when planning for a plugged-in automotive economy.

I can’t stress enough how important it is that we take a broader view of our public policy regarding energy and environmental matters. Papers like this one, looking at the water impacts of electrifying our transportation, are a good example.

It’s also worth pointing out that hydrogen fuel cells, which require three to four times as much electricity per mile traveled than PHEV’s or EV’s, would have a correspondingly higher implication for water consumption.

With global warming triggering shifts in where water is and isn’t, it’s also notable that we’re not just talking here about the issue of how much water does thermoelectric generation pull away from other sources, like agriculture, personal consumption, etc. (even though that’s clearly important), but what happens to electricity generation and everything that’s increasingly dependent on that flow of electrons when thermoelectric plants have to reduce their output or shot down completely because of a lack of cooling water. That’s where it gets ugly in a hurry.

I’m most worried about one scenario, which I still think is the most likely one as all these factors unfold and interact:

• Higher oil prices provide enough incentive to send people rushing toward PHEV’s and EV’s. This market incentive and response will completely outstrip any other single transportation trend in the next ten years. (Unless someone actually makes teleportation work, in which case all bets are off and even I will stop complaining that I never got my own personal jet pack.)
• That shift drives up electricity demand. And yes, I’m aware of the studies that talk about how we can electrify a lot a of our transportation purely on the nighttime excess generating capacity. I strongly suspect that a lot of people counting on that presumed pattern to ease our transition to electrified transportation will be shocked (no pun intended) by the number of drivers who don’t plug-in on a schedule that’s optimally convenient for society.
• Global warming concerns will only intensify in the coming years, leading to ever more pressure to de-carbonize our electricity generation, even while some want to keep using the cheapest fuel around (coal) and ignoring the consequences. If you think we’ve seen some public policy fistfights over energy and the environment to date, hold on to your keyboard, kiddies, this one will be a stunner.
• Add to this tangle the global warming-induced drought conditions triggering cooling problems for thermoelectric generating plants, including coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear, and suddenly it’s no longer a matter of keeping the lights and the A/C and your big-screen TV on, but also refueling your vehicle.

Utilities Turn From Coal to Gas, Raising Risk of Price Increase:

Stymied in their plans to build coal-burning power plants, American utilities are turning to natural gas to meet expected growth in demand, risking a new upward spiral in the price of that fuel.

Utility executives say they have little choice. With opposition to coal plants rising across the country — including a statement by three investment banks Monday saying they are wary of financing new ones — the executives see plants fired by natural gas as the only kind that can be constructed quickly and can supply reliable power day and night.

But North American supplies of natural gas will be flat or declining in coming years, according to the Energy Information Administration. The United States already has high natural gas prices, a problem for homeowners and many industries, like chemical and fertilizer producers. Some experts fear a boom in gas demand for electricity generation will send prices even higher.

…

Power generated with natural gas is already sold at a premium. In Florida, for example, where five coal projects have been derailed in the last year, Barry Moline, the executive director of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, looks at Tallahassee’s municipal utility as an indicator of the future.

It is nearly 100 percent gas fired, he said, while Gulf Power, to the west, is 70 percent coal. Tallahassee’s electricity rates are about 40 percent higher than Gulf Power’s.

Companies that have canceled coal plants have two immediate options other than building gas plants. They can work to hold down customer demand, though most would have to do so on a far more ambitious scale than before. Or they can wait to see what happens.

Experts say electricity shortages are a distinct possibility in coming years.

“There’s going to be a lot of white knuckles, frankly, as building does not go forward aggressively on any kind of plant, and demand keeps going up,” said Ernest J. Moniz, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former under secretary of the Department of Energy.

Is this the point where I remind you all, for perhaps the 7,353rd time, of how much more difficult this situation will get once people start plugging in their cars? Or the complications from the US trying to import more natural gas from overseas than our meager number of LNG terminals can handle?

Instead, let me remind you that this isn’t the only time the US has made a major shift from another fossil fuel to natural gas for generating electricity. Check out the fuels used by the US to push electrons (Figure 8.4 from the current Annual Energy Review):

Notice how the petroleum curve dipped in the early 1970’s, recovered, and then dipped again in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s and went into a long decline? My guess is that power companies looked at the suddenly uncertain oil supply and decided that cars waiting in gas lines was bad enough, but the lights going out (and hammering their profits and public image) was far worse.

University of Texas to Begin First Long-Term Underground CO2 Storage Test in US:

The Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin has received a 10-year, $38 million subcontract to conduct the first intensively monitored, long-term project in the US studying the feasibility of injecting a large volume of carbon dioxide for underground storage.

…

The bureau’s project will study the feasibility of injecting large volumes of CO2 at high rates into deep brine reservoirs. The project has been designed to develop best practices for future large-volume injections by gathering a greater variety of subsurface data than any previous experiments. Key issues include estimating the CO2 storage capacity of brine reservoirs, understanding the effects of injection pressure and developing methods for documenting retention of CO2 in the injection zone.

Let me say up front that whenever I hear a serious discussion of CCS, I flash back to that famous scene in the TV show MASH when Radar O’Reilly famously observed, “that looks pretty breakdownable.”

I mean–storing a gas, underground, permanently?

But intuition shouldn’t be a guide in such matters, and from what I’ve read in various sources, the science seems to say, pretty convincingly, that this will work. We’ll no doubt have a few surprises along the way, in terms of rates of injection, which types of geology are better or worse for our purposes, etc., but the bottom line is that this technology very likely can and will be made to work for permanent (there’s that heebie jeebie-inducing word again) CO2 storage.

And frankly, it damn well better work, because if we’re serious about making the kind of overall reductions in CO2 emissions that the scientists (as opposed to the politicians) say we must (80 to 90% by 2050), then we’ll have almost no choice but to make very heavy use of CCS. Consider it one of those “inescapable conclusions” I’ve mentioned before.

Consider the details given in the current DOE/EIA Annual Energy Review:

• The US emitted 6.008 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2005 (table 12.1), which does not even include the CO2-equivalent adjustment for other gases. The worldwide total for 2004 was just over 27 billion metric tons (table 11.19).
• In 2005, the transportation sector in the US emitted 1.959 billion metric tons of CO2, while electricity generation accounted for another 2.375 billion metric tons (table 12.3).
• The CO2 emissions from US electricity generation included 1.944 billion metric tons from coal use alone–over 32% of the total US CO2 emissions (table 12.3).

The US has 1,493 coal fired electricity plants, nearly all of which cannot be retrofitted for carbon capture at anything approaching a “reasonable” cost, i.e. in many cases it would be cheaper to tear them down and build a new plant. Similarly, virtually none of them were sited with the intention of transporting their captured CO2 emissions to an appropriate place for permanent sequestration, further raising the cost of retrofitting CCS onto existing plants, as we now have a need for new CO2 pipelines.

Add to this static snapshot one of the the dynamics of our energy and environmental situation I talk about most, the coming, creeping electrification of transportation via plug-in hybrids and EV’s. That trend will be welcome, on one hand, as it reduces the CO2 emissions of US transportation, also, oddly enough, about 32% of the total. That increased demand for electricity will make it even harder to reduce our total CO2 emissions from that sector–we won’t be able to build out renewable generation quickly enough to both meet new demand and displace CO2-intensive coal generation at the needed rate.

Therefore, CCS damn well better work, and even if it does, expect electricity to get more expensive and the entire electricity sector to change at a surprising rate. Nowhere will we see the trend to our “D&D” future–decentralized and diversified–more clearly. We’ll be using much larger shares of wind, wave, solar, tidal, and geothermal generation, with many more homes, businesses, and institutional buildings sporting their own solar PV panels.

Related: Pace of coal-power boom slackens

…you run the risk of reaching unsupportable conclusions.

As most of you probably realize by now, there’s a post over at The Oil Drum that is an attempt to take a long term view of our energy situation. The posting is Chris Clugston’s When Is “Global Peak Energy?” According to Publicly Available Data, Probably Sooner Than You Think.

To say that I have some misgivings about this post would be a decided understatement.

The basic notion of predicting what energy supplies will do out to the year 2200 is deeply flawed. If there’s one thing I learned in both economic and computer systems modeling (analytic as well as simulation), it’s that you have to be exceedingly careful of plunging too far into the unknown and reaching that point where any set of assumptions, no matter how accurate and predictive it may be in the short run, breaks down. Hell, I wouldn’t want to put together a projection more than 10 years out with the apparent precision of this one, let alone reaching all the way to 2200.

But that’s not even the biggest issue with the post at hand. The core problem, as with virtually any projection that looks beyond the immediate short term, is the assumptions that are made. Get those right, and you’re a hero. Get them wrong, and you’re in deep trouble in a hurry.

Clugston provides a couple of tables (”conservative” and “optimistic” scenarios) detailing his assumptions about the supply of various individual energy sources. If you look at his optimistic scenario, he sees all renewable energy sources (biomass, hydro, biofuels, solar, geothermal, wind, and “waves and tides”) growing very slowly and then peaking 2050.

How slowly? The low is hydro at 0.9%/year from 2025 to 2050, and the high is solar at 6% from now until 2050. Wind, which is currently growing very quickly worldwide, is assumed to grow at 5% until 2025 and then 2.5% from 2025 until its peak in 2050. Nuclear doesn’t escape the same treatment, as it’s projected to grow at 1.4%/year until it peaks in 2040. And again, this the “optimistic” scenario. The conservative scenario assume that renewables will peak sooner and then actually decline at 1% to 2%/year starting in 2050 for most sources. (Biomass is the exception, as it peaks in 2050 and then holds steady.)

As you can imagine, with these assumptions and the very safe conclusion that fossil fuels will peak and decline a great deal in the next 193 years, some dire conclusions are reached.

Let’s look at these assumptions just a bit. Wind, wave, tidal, solar, and geothermal will all peak in 2050? Even at or past the time when we’re seeing (according to Clugston) fossil fuels peak? Really? We’ll just march in lock-step off that cliff and not continue to build out these renewable energy sources? This has to be one of the most egregious examples of linear extrapolation I’ve seen.

I’ll leave it as exercise for the reader to find other items worth discussing in that post.

Someone made the comment in the discussion thread over on TOD that this was a case of “garbage in, garbage out”. I couldn’t agree more. There’s a reason why computer geeks use that cliche so often that they refer to it by the well worn acronym GIGO; it’s very easy to fall into the trap of making superficially reasonable assumptions and then getting useless results by relying too much on them. In this case, I honestly can’t see how the assumptions meet even the narrowest of examinations.