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.

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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.

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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.

Lake Mead’s Water Level Plunges as 11-Year Drought Lingers:

Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir of Colorado River water that hydrates Arizona, Nevada, California and northern Mexico, is receding to a level not seen since it was first being filled in the 1930s, stoking existential fears about water supply in the parched Southwest.

…

In the 75 years since the workers began to hold back the Colorado River behind the Hoover Dam, the lake’s water has taken two precipitous plunges: first during the prolonged drought of the 1950s, which ranks second only to the current dry spell, and again in the mid-1960s, when water managers began filling Mead’s cousin 250 miles upstream, Lake Powell.

Neither dip was as severe or prolonged as that of the past decade. Nearly full in 1999, Mead has shrunken to 40 percent capacity, causing the ominous, bleach-white bathtub ring on the surrounding mountainsides to grow taller by the year. In the past five months, the lake steadily shed another 15 feet, to about 1,087 feet above sea level today. Four more feet and the lake surface will hit what would be the lowest mark since 1937 — something the government projects will happen in October.

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Mead’s disappearing act highlights the Southwest’s chronic overuse of Colorado River water. Trouble originated with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which estimated the river’s water flow at 16.4 million acre-feet per year and divided that up among seven states and Mexico. Today, scientists believe the compact overestimated the flow by as much as 2 million to 3 million acre-feet, because flow measurements taken during the 20th century were skewed — it was the wettest century of the last 500 to 1,200 years, according to recent paleoclimate studies of tree rings.

Climate change threatens to stretch the river’s water even further. Over the last decade, the Southwest has suffered the sharpest temperature increase on the continent, declining late-season snowpack, loss of vegetation and rampant wildfires — all while growing faster than any other region in the United States. Eight studies completed from 1991 to 2007 predict that climate change will reduce the snowpack runoff that feeds the Colorado River anywhere from 6 percent to 45 percent over the next half-century.

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“We need to be making major policy changes to Western water,” Udall said. “And a lot of people aren’t willing to do it until you have a full-fledged crisis on your hands.”

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Greater cutbacks and impacts follow as Mead’s surface plunges further. When the 28.5-million-acre-foot reservoir’s surface hits 1,050 feet, or about 26 percent capacity, deliveries get slashed by 417,000 acre-feet, Las Vegas shuts down one of its two intakes and Hoover Dam’s massive turbines lose the hydraulic pressure needed to generate electricity. The maximum cutback of 500,000 acre-feet kicks in when Mead’s surface hits 1,025 feet, or about 20 percent capacity.

Even holding back the maximum 500,000 acre-feet of water — enough to serve 2 million residents for a year — accounts for less than a third of the reservoir’s current deficit, which is expected to grow as temperatures increase an estimated 2 to 4 degrees Celsius by 2050, as studies predict.

It’s hard to find a more immediate large-scale example of the energy/water/climate nexus in action than the US Southwest and the Colorado River. Rising temps, rising population, reduced water input, and potentially reduced hydroelectric generation, with a steaming pile of political gridlock and inadequate action thrown in for good measure.

A few more specific observations:

The article above also details some other, pricey, steps that are being taken to ensure that Las Vegas, which gets 90% of its water from Lake Powell, won’t run out of water. This is one of those utterly boring yet terrifying aspects of our energy and climate challenges: Even in those cases where we can “fix” a situation to alleviate the impacts through mitigation or adaptation, it can be very expensive. Similar to the peak oil situation, which is not a case so much of running out of oil (at first) as it is one of running out of cheap oil, we’re entering an age when many things we implicitly assumed would “always be cheap”, like water and basic food supplies (ask anyone counting on this year’s Russian wheat harvest), are about to become much more expensive. Tat will likely be true even in those cases where we take the right steps once we get around to recognizing and responding to the problems.

In a way, the worst thing about the Colorado River situation is that it will teach us the wrong lesson. I’d guess that Las Vegas won’t run dry any time soon, although we might have to spend billions to keep those taps flowing. The problem here is that we’ll see what happens here — wait for a growing mess to turn into a true emergency before acting and then save ourselves with a big, heroic effort — and assume we can apply that to other situations, like climate change in general. As I’ve pointed out so many times that frequent readers of this site must be spontaneously bleeding from the eyes at the merest mention of it, climate change is an extremely perverse situation because of the timing involved. A significant portion of the CO2 we emit tends to hang around in the atmosphere essentially forever, in human terms. It’s not something we can throttle up and down more or less at will, but a ratchet that goes up quickly (thanks to our current emissions rate) or at a more moderate rate (under any emissions rate one can reasonably expect us to achieve), but barring any technological miracle it will continue to rise throughout the lifetime of everyone reading this.

That’s still not the perverse part, though. The impacts that CO2 creates on human beings don’t appear instantly; many of them, like unfortunate shifts in water availability and sea level rise, take from years to multiple decades to creep into our consciousness, even though we’re continually adding to the atmosphere’s CO2 level during that time lag. And let us not forget those nasty feedbacks triggered by the warming from our CO2 emissions, such as the albedo flip in the Arctic from shrinking ice cover and everyone’s two favorite monsters under the bed, methane hydrate deposits and the already defrosting permafrost. Oh yeah — and there’s ocean acidification and the 40% die off of phytoplankton in the last 50 years. Got a good solution for either of those in a spreadsheet sitting in your desktop folder?

My point here is not to retrace the hall of horrors we’ve constructed for ourselves, but to point out that a business as usual approach to problem solving once we’ve recognized the danger is just as bad as the BAU practices in our economics and industrial processes and politics that helped create the mess in the first place. We’ll probably avoid a disaster in the Colorado River basin through the semi-panicked spending of large sums of money and possibly a little luck, but I fear that experience will only reinforce the wrong mindset for dealing with the problems of the next few decades to centuries.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 been clear for years that the biggest single breakthrough one could reasonably hope for, the killer app, in computer terms, for addressing our energy and climate challenges, is batteries. That “reasonably” qualification is intended to rule out the SF stuff, like Doc Brown’s Mr. Fusion or some urban myth come true of a magic fuel injector that will let your V8 powered eclipse-inducing SUV get 200 miles per gallon. Once you weed out those fantasies, batteries are sexier than [something you find disturbingly sexy that I can’t mention on this site].

That’s why I just love seeing things like this press release, DuPont News: DuPont Launches Energain™ Separators for High-Performance Lithium Ion Batteries:

DuPont™ Energain™ battery separators can increase power 15–30%, increase battery life by up to 20% and improve battery safety by providing stability at high temperatures. With more battery power, drivers can travel farther on a single charge and accelerate more quickly and safely. For automobile and battery manufacturers, more battery power can reduce the number of batteries typically required in today’s hybrid and electric vehicles.

While the initial uses for the separator are in hybrid and electric vehicle batteries, the technology also will be targeted for batteries in renewable energy, grid applications and specialty consumer applications, including laptops, cell phones and power tools. Other products made using DuPont’s proprietary nanofiber technology will target a broad range of liquid filtration applications for the biopharmaceutical, microelectronics, and food and beverage industries, offering superior retention, filter life and flow resistance.

DuPont has begun construction on a facility in Chesterfield County, Va. (U.S.), to manufacture product for development and commercial sale. The new facility is expected to start up in the first quarter of 2011 and will initially be able to provide enough material to supply up to 20% of today’s hybrid and electric vehicle needs.

Assuming all that glossy corporate-speak didn’t cause you to bazooka barf all over your screen, this really is a big deal. Let’s run some numbers…

A Leaf-like EV gets about 5 miles per kWh of energy. For a 100-mile range that’s a 20 kWh battery pack. And at a price of roughly $400/kWh[1], that’s an $8,000 battery. For the sake of example, assume that adding DuPont’s Energain to a Leaf battery would decrease the cost/kWh by the quoted 15-30%. Yes, I’m hand waving the cost of Energain, which I strongly suspect DuPont won’t give away, but I’m also not including any other battery advances, so this is likely a very conservative view of the situation. So, Nissan or whoever builds the same size battery for the same cost that delivers greater range, or builds a smaller battery at reduced cost that delivers the same range.

In the first case, we still have an $8,000 battery, but it delivers enough energy to drive the car from 115 to 130 miles instead of the original 100. In the second case, the battery still gives you 100 miles/charge, but it costs from about $6,100 to $6,900, which reduces the cost to Nissan by $1,100 to $1,900. It won’t be long before nearly all of that cost savings is passed on to consumers, given the way the EV market is heating up. And unless there’s a dramatic turnaround in the economy, a roughly one to two thousand dollar drop in the price of an EV could make a big difference.

You could do a similar calculation for the battery in plain old hybrids, like the Prius, or plug-in hybrids, like the Volt. Because those cars have much smaller batteries than a full-blown EV they would see proportionately smaller savings, but who would argue against a lower price on the $41,000 Volt?

The key point here is that transportation emissions and oil consumption are huge chunks of our problem, so we can’t electrify transportation quickly enough.

Another potential use for improved batteries, as mentioned in the press release, is in “grid applications”. That means things like buffering the delivery of electrons from nondispatchable sources, like wind and solar, to meet the consumption cycles of society. Again, lower cost, even by 15 to 30%, is a huge win and it has potentially broad implications.

I’m not at all surprised to see such announcements about battery breakthroughs. I’m far from alone in figuring out how important batteries are, and therefore how large a mountain of money some inventor or company could make by developing the killer app. So I suspect there are dozens, maybe hundreds of companies working on ways to get more miles/dollar out of electrified transportation alternatives. Most of them won’t amount to anything, of course — that’s the way new technology is — but we don’t need all of them to work, just a few that will combine to drive the cost per kWh of storage down to something like $50 to $100. That would change the entire car industry more and quicker than 99% of the people buying and driving cars today realizes is even possible.

Just to be clear, such a turn of events would not be a silver bullet. We’d still be faced with the gargantuan task of cleaning up the worldwide electricity supply, and that’s such an immense challenge that I honestly don’t know how we’ll manage it when the US can’t so much as pass a law that says, “we [heart] Earth”, and China and India are both on paths to consume more energy and emit more CO2 for the next several years to a decade.

[1] The cost of auto-scale batteries is very hard to pin down. I’ve seen reports all over the map, including some much higher than $400, and one claiming that Nissan is making Leaf packs for $375/kWh. I pulled $400/kWh out of my hat as an example.

One of the most fascinating things about technological developments is watching them make it to market as real world products and services available to consumers. This process is almost always slower than we’d like (everything looks simpler to those of us who don’t have to do the work to make it happen, after all), and sometimes it takes some surprising twists along the way.

Plug-in hybrids and full EVs are good examples of both the delay and the labyrinthine route from laboratory to retail availability. I’ve been saying for longer than I (or my wife) care to think that electrified personal transportation will represent an immensely disruptive moment for the car business. The two main hurdles for companies are (1) getting battery prices low enough to make the vehicles more than niche products, and (2) getting would-be buyers to expand their comfort zone beyond the strengths and weaknesses of petroleum fueled vehicles.

I’ve long argued that the first hurdle is by far the bigger issue; if the battery in your 100-mile EV costs $30,000, I guarantee that you won’t sell many copies. Luckily, we’ve seen from the pricing of the Nissan Leaf and the Mitsubishi iMiEV that the car companies have made great strides in reducing battery costs.

The second hurdle, customer acceptance, is to a large extent a figment of the imagination of some overly cautious auto execs and hydrogen car proponents. The idea that people will only buy a vehicle if they can drive at least 250 or 400 or however many miles between fill ups/rechargings is ridiculous. Once again, I say all you have to do is look at the US and see how many households have a convenient place to plug in a vehicle overnight and have at least one car that’s driven less than 100 miles/day by a comfortable margin. This still represents a potential market for millions of vehicles, even before businesses, government offices, airports, etc. are festooned with recharging stations. Given the slow initial production volume of PHEVs and EVs, we have years to get the infrastructure up to speed, unlike hydrogen, which demands that we have a refueling infrastructure in place on day one in any local area where one expects to sell HFCVs.

When disruptive events hit markets, there are two ways companies can react: They can leap into the fray, embrace the change, and basically gamble that being on the bleeding edge will pay off in the long run. Obviously this can be very risky in motor vehicles, computers, or any other technology-driven market. Call this the “no balls, no blue chips/bet the house” option. The other approach is to be far more cautious and see how the market plays out, and hope consumers don’t remember or care that you weren’t an innovator. This is the “let someone else jump first/we’re Microsoft, we don’t need no stinkin’ innovation” option.

It’s been clear for a while that among the major car companies, Nissan was taking option one. They saw the coming electrification of vehicles as an opportunity. They’re pushing hard on the Leaf, and so far it looks like the bet is going to pay off. Barring any major surprises, I expect to see them become a much more visible brand in the US, for example.

I’ve been disappointed in the reluctance of Honda and Toyota to leap into the EV space. Honda was the first to market a hybrid (the original Insight) and Toyota made the electric RAV4, the darling of the “who killed the electric car and got my dog pregnant” camp.

It seems that my disappointment was a bit premature, given the news that’s erupted recently:

• Report: Honda to announce plans for upcoming plug-in hybrid, EV
• Green Car Congress: Honda Introducing BEV and PHEV to US and Japan in 2012; Demonstration Programs in US Begin This Year
• Green Car Congress: VW Chairman Outlines E-Mobility Vehicle Launches In the US During Visit to Palo Alto Electronic Research Laboratory; Hybrids in 2010 and 2012, Full EV in 2013
• Toyota, Tesla Resurrect the Electric RAV4

Plus, Ford was already on board with a Focus EV set for production in 2011. (Honestly, I’m not sure what GM and Chrysler are up to on EVs.)

I think we’ve now progressed to the point where consumer surveys and Nissan’s early order program for the Leaf have convinced other companies that it’s safe to take the EV leap. I’d guess that these projects fro Toyota, Honda, and VW were in the works for a while, but moving them from a secret internal effort to a publicly announced product is a gigantic commitment.

This is all very good news, as electrification is the main step the US will take to reduce our oil imports and also our transportation-related CO2 emissions.[1] And it can’t begin too soon.

[1] I know that the people who hate the US’ car-centric culture will decry how we’re making a major transition but not fixing the core problem, namely the number of miles we drive. We should be reconfiguring our residential areas so that people can travel less and make much greater use of mass transit, bicycles, and walking, they say. My response is that I think that’s always been a pipe dream. While it’s undeniable that one can sit down with a clean sheet of paper and come up with plans that would, in fact, dramatically reduce miles driven and improve residents’ overall quality of life, the one thing I never see addressed is a general plan for how one manages to acquire enough clean sheets of paper and the funds to implement those plans, not to mention finds residents to move into them. Creating a few localized areas that follow a much more intelligent plan is one thing; coming up with a way to apply it to enough of a highly suburbanized country of over 300 million people to make a significant difference in our oil consumption and CO2 emissions is a whole different ballgame.

Love it or hate it, the US is locked into car-centrism for a long time, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to find ways for people to do the “wrong” thing better instead of waiting until we can convince (or force) them to do the “right” thing.

Researcher extraordinaire and e-friend Sheila pointed me to an interesting report that I had somehow missed in my virtual travels. The document is Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.5: Effects of Climate Change on Energy Production and Use in the United States, and it’s from the US Climate Change Research Program. Normally we’re obsessed with the impacts of energy use on the climate, but this document turns the situation around looks at the impacts on our energy production, distribution, and use in the US.

The home page for the report is here, and you can access the 20 other climate change-related reports from the same source via a menu on that same page, as well as this particular report as single PDF or individual chapters.

Sheila brought one part of this document to my attention in particular, namely “Chapter 3: Effects of Climate Change on Energy Production and Distribution in the United States”. This chapter is pretty much what you would expect from the title — an examination of the climate impacts on the supply side of most forms of energy in the US. About the only such effects I’ve talked about on this site are the ones most obviously connected to the energy/water nexus — getting enough water to cool thermoelectric plants as well as drive hydroelectric plants. Chapter 3 goes into much more detail and talks about the efficiency of thermo plants as a function of ambient air temperature, the impact on energy facilities (many of which are in coastal areas) from sea level rise, weather impacts on the transportation of fuels by barge or pipeline or the growing of biofuel crops, etc.

Highly recommended.

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.

TreeHugger has some lighting news that should be greeted with raucous cheers from anyone who’s concerned about energy and climate issues:

Late last year we reported that the US Federal Trade Commission proposed a new label for compact fluorescent lightbulbs that would show vital statistics like mercury content and the light output in terms of lumens rather than watts, which would make the brightness of CFLs, LEDs and other lighting technology more comparable among consumers. Well word has just hit that the new system has been approved and we’ll soon see nutrition-facts-style labels on our lights.

EarthTechling gave us a heads up about the new label, pointing us to the announcement from the FTC.

The FTC states, “Under direction from Congress to re-examine the current labels, the FTC is announcing a final rule that will require the new labels on light bulb packages. For the first time, the label on the front of the package will emphasize the bulbs’ brightness as measured in lumens, rather than a measurement of watts. The new front-of-package labels also will include the estimated yearly energy cost for the particular type of bulb.”

Why is this such a big deal?

All of my fellow geeks here on this site don’t need those labels when buying light bulbs, but for the non-geeks out there, they will help a lot. Not only will the new labels make it easier for consumers to do A/B/C comparisons, but it will also make it abundantly clear just how much energy they can save by changing light bulbs.[1] In general, this kind of small, cheap education can have a much greater positive impact for individuals and society as a whole.

I also like this regulation because it’s a terrific example of the right kind of government intervention in the “free” market. And anything that jabs the “All government is evil, let the Free Market Rule All!!!” clowns in the eye with a sharp stick, metaphorically speaking, of course, is simply terrific.

[1] I’m amazed by how often strangers in the lighting aisle at Lowe’s will look at me with a CFL blister pack in one hand and say, “Do these things really work?” Whenever this happens I give the bulbs an enthusiastic thumbs up, of course, and tell people I save around $5/month by using them. I still haven’t figured out why so many strangers talk to me in Lowe’s and other stores, though…

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.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think EVs will be a huge success in the mass market, especially in the US. Apparently somewhat less than the entire world agrees with me, so let me take one more run at this.

I start with the post on Autoblog Green, Ward’s: Nissan Leaf is a multi-billion dollar gamble that faces risky odds:

If the Nissan Leaf was a glitzy casino game inside a Las Vegas hot spot, Ward’s Auto suggests that few people would be willing to place their bets in hopes of hitting the jackpot. The odds for the Leaf would, in typical Vegas fashion, be in the house’s favor. Stepping away from the lights of Sin City and back into reality, Ward’s, like Forbes before it, believes the Leaf is Nissan’s multi-billion dollar investment that may end up going down as a great effort that never pays off.

What are the odds of success for the Leaf? It’s hard to say exactly, but if hybrids and their success (or lack thereof) is any indication, the Leaf has quite a challenge ahead. As Ward’s guest commentator John McElroy points out, after a decade on the market, hybrids have captured only a marginal amount of sales – just 2.5 percent. That’s ten years, seven brands and 20 different hybrids, yet only a minor fraction of total sales. McElroy adds that electric vehicles (EVs) are expected to face an even more difficult time cracking the market. But, even if you assume that EVs can match hybrids, the Leaf’s impact appears minor, especially when you consider that other electric vehicles will compete for their piece of the pie.

Here’s our take on it. Renault-Nissan has poured $6 billion into electric vehicle development and will likely hold the biggest chunk of that 2.5 percent. But a big piece of 2.5 percent is still mighty small. Leading us to wonder if Nissan is placing a risky bet on future success or just intent on using the vehicle as a marketing tool to show off just how “green” it is. If it’s the latter, $6 billion is quite the chunk of change to get a point across. Still, the Leaf could lead to an electric future with the odds strongly in Nissan’s favor – and that’s a gamble worth taking.

Click through and read the comments on that post (9 as I write this), and you’ll see they very strongly reject the notion that this is a risky gamble for Nissan.

My argument for the impending success of EVs is pretty simple:

• The per-mile fuel cost for electricity vs. gasoline is already very favorable–about 2 cents/mile compared to 10. As the price of oil and gasoline rise in the next few years, this disparity will only grow, even if electricity prices rise due to the up-front cost of decarbonizing our electricity generation.
• The cars are already coming in cheaper than expected, and I doubt we’ll see a decline in federal and state incentives. If anything, I would expect those incentives to increase as more states offer them. (I think that only California and Georgia offer incentives currently; if I’m wrong, someone please correct me.) And batteries will only get cheaper.
• Never underestimate the marginal utility of telling the oil companies and oil exporting nations to go screw themselves. Among Americans, this is a very powerful emotional factor.[1]
• Never underestimate the “greener than thou” factor. We saw that in spades with the Prius, and we’ll see it raised to a whole new level with EVs. Every one could ship with a bumper sticker pre-applied that says, “Driving this proves I’m a better person than you are. Deal with it.”, and most people would gladly leave it in place.
• The lack of a public recharging infrastructure won’t mean zip to the early adopters. Take just those people who have a garage, can use the car as a commuter/local errand vehicle (so 100 miles/charge won’t be an issue), and are susceptible to the above inducements, and you’re still talking about a potential market of several million vehicles in the US alone.
• Many fleet operators will love EVs, from cars to the Ford Transit minivans.

And no, I didn’t put down a $99 deposit on a Leaf today, although it was mighty tempting. I will likely get another two years out of Space Wart, my trusty Scion xA before I buy a second-gen EV.

[1] Yes, I know, the US imports more oil from Canada than from any other country. But the average US citizen doesn’t know that; they think we buy most of it from Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.

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?

Drought paralyzes power supply:

The severe drought in Southwest China has caused a drop in Yunnan province’s electricity supply, as about 70 percent of the power in the province is from hydropower stations, media has reported.

The drought has also paralyzed 90 percent of hydropower stations in the neighboring Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the Guangzhou Daily reported on Tuesday.

The water level of the upper reaches of the Baise multipurpose dam in Guangxi has dropped to a historical low, and the supply to the middle and lower reaches of the Pearl River has been halted, the report said.

“The normal water level should be at 228 meters and the dam paralyzes at a water level of 203 meters. Now the water level is even lower than 190 meters,” the report quoted an unnamed dam worker as saying.

Officials at China Southern Power Grid, which takes care of the power supply for five provinces and autonomous regions, including Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou, admitted in a recent statement that it is an “arduous task” to ensure the supply in the region.

…

The severe drought has affected 51 million Chinese and left more than 16 million people and 11 million livestock with water shortages, according to the State Disaster Relief Commission.

The drought has incurred 19.02 billion yuan ($2.79 billion) in direct economic losses, statistics from the commission showed.

A few interesting items on the EV front today…

• Green Car Congress: North American Grid Operators Study Concludes 1M Plug-in Electric Vehicles May Be On the Road by 2020; Staggered Charging Can Reduce Potential Negative Impact on Grid
• Electric Vehicles Charge Ahead in US
• Another cost of going electric: Installing home charging gear
• 2011 Nissan Leaf Lease Pricing will Rival Toyota Prius, Honda Accord
• Five myths about electric cars

The last item above says:

5. Electric vehicles aren’t really clean because they use electricity from coal plants. This one is undoubtedly true, in that battery cars are not “zero emission” on a “well to wheels” basis. Coal power is indeed dirty power. But, all things considered, EVs are still much better for our planet than gasoline cars. According to Sherry Boschert, author of the book Plug-In Hybrids: The Cars that Will Recharge America (New Society), EVs reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 11 to 100 percent (depending on the type of power plant) compared to internal-combustion cars, and 24 to 54 percent compared to hybrid cars. Even if all our plants burned coal, we’d still reduce CO2 by as much as 59 percent with people driving only EVs. Boschert’s primary source was a study by the federal Argonne National Laboratories.

There’s a timing and intersection issue that this overlooks–we have no choice but to nearly decarbonize our electricity supply. That will make electric vehicles already on the road get cleaner automatically.

And as for the issue raised in another link above about the cost of adding a big-buck EV charger, I’m not at all convinced this is a big deal. At 1,500 watts, which is easily doable with a 110 volt line and standard wiring, you get 12,000 Wh in 8 hours, which is enough to drive 60 miles. And to be honest, many people park their cars for much more than 8 hours on a typical night–a more realistic average for a typical workday is more like 12, which would give you 18,000 Wh and 90 miles of driving range, nearly a full charge.

Again, tell American consumers they can drive for a fuel cost of under 3 cents/mile and flip the bird at the oil companies and oil exporting nations at the same time, at a lease price close to that of an Accord or Prius, and they’ll practically stampede the nearest dealer. Unless there’s some very nasty surprise, like the Leaf, iMiEV, et al. costing $75,000, the initial demand for EVs will make buying one very difficult; expect to see “market adjustment factors” on price stickers and waiting lists.

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.

Earlier today, Wal-Mart announced an initiative to reduce the life cycle carbon footprint of products they sell. (See TreeHugger’s coverage, including Walmart’s SVP of Sustainability Fills in a Few More Details on Their 20 Million Ton GHG Reduction Plan, and TNR’s article, Can Wal-Mart Use Its Power For Good?.)

Basically, they’re looking at cutting 20 million metric tons of CO2 emissions from their merchandise by 2015. (And no, it’s not entirely clear if that’s the total between now and 2015 or savings that ramp up to that figure by 2015.)

Given that it’s Wal-Mart, and given that we’re talking about millions of metric tons of CO2 emissions, and given that those emissions will be counted by who knows how many different entities, this one will be seen as either a total waste of time and a PR stunt to a brave new step into a new world of corporate responsibility.

Of course, it’s a little of both and not a lot of either. So let the food fight begin.

I think it’s clear that modern industrialized nations are sliding sideways into a grudging acceptance that we will have to pay much more attention to things like CO2 emissions of the things we make and consume. That will be a mix of voluntary efforts and some mandated by law. It would be wonderful if we didn’t find ourselves in this mess and therefore didn’t have to take such steps. I would even gladly trade our current situation for one with the same urgency, but with the Magic Marketplace working as well as it does in the free marketeers’ erotic dreams and fixing the problem without the need for government intervention. But it’s painfully clear those options are off the table.

Make no mistake about how Wal-Mart will “enforce” these cuts: They have such immense buying power that they can very easily leverage suppliers against each other. Do you think Nike would risk losing sales to Wal-Mart, knowing that Reebok is waiting in the wings, audited CO2 emissions statements clutched in one hand, eager to swoop (or swoosh, as the case may be) in and grab those foregone sales?

The issues of Wal-Mart fostering a car-centric lifestyle and suburban development are, in my opinion, moot. We are where we are, and nothing will magically make the suburbs or the US’ car-centrism go away, at least not on a scale to make a significant difference. The costs of urbanizing families are far too large and the time is too short; our residential infrastructure is the boulder in the middle of the stream that everything else has to flow around, no matter how much anyone might hate it.

I would argue that this is another case of being focused on the wrong detail, much like the people who think they’ve found some profound, deep truth by pointing out that the electricity you use to recharge your EV or PHEV is made by burning fossil fuels. For one, thing, that’s not always true. For another, it’s critical that we start building the social infrastructure for using electrified cars as soon as possible, if only to get people adjusted to them. And guess what? The US electricity system has to get much cleaner, and quickly, whether we adopt plug-in vehicles in massive numbers or not, so all those electrified cars will automagically get much cleaner when the electricity supply is decarbonized.

Similarly, as transportation is cleaned up, something that absolutely must happen quickly, then it won’t matter if someone is driving an EV (recharged with clean electrons) 10 miles to Wal-Mart or taking public transportation or riding a bike or walking two miles to some non-Wal-Mart retail outlet. Wal-Mart and car lovers will rejoice at one solution, Wal-Mart haters and car aters will rejoice at the other. As long as we reduce our CO2 emissions enough and on the right schedule, I could not care less who “wins”.

Put another way, when you see the big picture and take into account the things that must or might or can’t happen in various time frames, we come back to the same few points in the US: Our electricity supply is way too dirty, our transportation is way too dirty, and not much else that we can reasonably change in the face of a need to cut CO2 80% by 2050 really matters.

OK, the energy/enviro geekosphere is going nuts over the fluff piece 60 Minutes aired on the Bloom Box the other night and today’s canine-and-equine show, so I feel obliged to chime in. For those who missed it, here’s the full 60 Minutes piece:

The best summary of this situation I’ve seen to date is The Economics of the Bloom Box:

Todd Woody, writing for the NYTimes GreenInc blog, has some details on the design of the Bloom Box solid oxide fuel cells from his look inside the Bloom Energy facilities this week. And Lux Research has this post looking at the economics of the Bloom Box, which is a good read.

It appears that the unsubsidized price of the Bloom Box is about $7-8,000/kW so their 100 kW units cost $700,000-800,000 without subsidy. As a fuel cell, it also needs fuel to run, in this case natural gas or another source of methane (such as landfill gas or biogas from anaerobic digesters).

After federal subsidies for fuel cells (they can claim the same 30% investment tax credit that solar gets) and a $2,500 California rebate, and assuming $7/mmBTU price for natural gas, a 100 kW Bloom Box unit generates electricity at 8-10 cents/kWh.

…

Unsubsidized cost would be 13-14 cents/kWh, with about 9 cents/kWh from the capital costs of the Bloom box and 5 cents/kWh from natural gas costs, according to Luz Research.

…

As far as climate benefits, supposedly it generates electricity at 50-55% conversion efficiency. CO2 emissions when running on natural gas would be just under 0.8 pounds/kWh, which compares favorably to electricity from central station coal-fired plants (2 lbs/kWh) or natural gas plants (roughly 1.3 lbs/kWh), but still not a zero emissions tech, unless it runs on landfill gas or biogas or hydrogen from electrolysis fueled by zero-carbon electricity (which would be much more expensive as you have to add cost of electrolysis unit, higher cost electricity, and about 30% conversion losses in electrolysis)…

At the risk of being tagged Captain Obvious, let me stress a few things here:

• We have no idea if this will have a major impact on the market.
• The claimed lifespan of the fuel cells is 10 years, and I wouldn’t go near buying one of these for my home or any building I was in charge of unless I was very sure the fuel cells would last that long or I had a full parts and labor replacement warranty for the entire 10 years.
• We don’t really know what it will cost. In a real world installation we’re looking at the fuel cells, an inverter (to turn the FC’s DC into household friendly AC), plus all the installation details, like hooking it up to a natural gas source, wiring it into the breaker box, venting the exhaust gas, and dealing with the (supposedly high) levels of heat the FC’s produce. (Think any local municipalities will pass laws regarding that constitutes a safe installation?) Don’t be surprised if the bottom line cost of a home-size Bloom Box is 30% to 50% higher than the cost of just the naked fuel cells.
• On a purely environmental basis, I’m not impressed. The kind of emissions reductions we need–roughly 80% by 2050–plus the share of total US emissions from electricity (40%) plus the difficulty of cleaning up transportation all mean that we need bigger savings from the electricity sector than the numbers above show.
• Running these fuel cells on biogas or landfill gas would be nice, and a much better deal environmentally, but there’s simply not enough of that kind of gas to fuel a major portion of our electricity generation. And don’t get me started on hydrogen from electrolysis again.

Please don’t misunderstand. I really want to see something like this come along and reshape the energy/environmental universe, and in a positive way. And I don’t care an iota if it comes from Bloom Box or GE or Weird Al Yankovic. But right now this seems to be yet another way to tie ourselves to a fossil fuel via questionable economics, without achieving the kind of emissions reductions that science says we must.

I hope I’m very wrong on this one, and there’s some way the Bloom Box really can do what we need. But until I see evidence that it can, I will leave it in the “wait and see” category.

Putting data centers on a low-energy diet (emphasis added):

A holistic approach to data centers could result in millions of dollars of savings and a far smaller carbon footprint for the ever-expanding universe of information technology.

That’s the promise of research conducted by Binghamton University colleagues Kanad Ghose, a professor of computer science, and Bahgat Sammakia, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the University’s New York State Center of Excellence in Small Scale Systems Packaging and Integration, or S3IP.

“The amount of energy we spend on running our data centers in the U.S. is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure,” Ghose said. “That doesn’t sound like a big number, but it’s enough to power a couple of good-sized cities for most of the year.”

…

Most of the facilities use chilled water, and it takes some time to lower or raise the temperature of the water by 5 degrees. New York state alone spends close to $600 million on utility costs for running its data centers. Half goes to power the computers; the other half is spent on cooling. And utility costs continue to rise.

Most researchers focus on smart workload management when they talk about “green” data centers, but Ghose and Sammakia say that’s not enough. They’re looking for a comprehensive solution. That will mean finding a way to spread the workload across all the machines, planning in advance for the workload allocation and the cooling budget. Ultimately, it means exercising cooling activities and workload activities synergistically.

Just-in-time provisioning of IT resources and just-in-time cooling are the keys here, said Ghose, who expects to set up an experimental data center with Sammakia and other collaborators soon. Companies such as Emerson Network Power and IBM have already expressed interest in the project.

Notice the part I bolded. This is one of those “little” details that people who don’t work with data centers seldom know about, the high energy cost of cooling. It’s also why I keep saying that advances in making chips, hard drives, and other components more energy efficient is such a big deal. The energy they consume basically all winds up as heat in a data center, and every watt saved there is another watt that can potentially be saved in cooling. Combine those continual advances with better software and management practices, as detailed above, and we suddenly have a chance to save a non-trivial amount of elctricity and the ensuing environmental impact.

From Green Car Congress comes the article, Study Finds On-Road Transportation Sector the Greatest Net Contributor to Atmospheric Warming Now and in Mid-Term; Power Sector Takes the Lead by 2050:

A new study by led by Nadine Unger at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) that analyzes the net climate impacts of emissions from economic sectors rather than by individual chemical species has found that on-road transportatation is and will be the greatest net contributor to atmospheric warming now and in the near term.

…

Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it. In contrast, the industrial and power sectors release many of the same gases—with a larger contribution to radiative forcing—but they also emit sulfates and other aerosols that cause cooling by reflecting light and altering clouds.

Unger et al. used a climate model to analyze the effects of a wide range of chemical species, including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, organic carbon, black carbon, nitrate, sulfate, and ozone, from 13 sectors of the economy from 2000 to 2100. They based their calculations on real-world inventories of emissions collected by scientists around the world, and they assumed that those emissions would stay relatively constant in the future.

In their analysis, motor vehicles emerged as the greatest net contributor to atmospheric warming now and in the near term, with a total radiative forcing of 199 mWm-2 in 2020. The researchers found that the burning of household biofuels—primarily wood and animal dung for home heating and cooking—contribute the second most warming. And raising livestock, particularly methane-producing cattle, contribute the third most.

The industrial sector releases such a high proportion of sulfates and other cooling aerosols that it actually contributes a significant amount of cooling to the system. And biomass burning—which occurs mainly as a result of tropical forest fires, deforestation, savannah and shrub fires—emits large amounts of organic carbon particles that block solar radiation.

Due to the health problems caused by aerosols, many developed countries have been reducing aerosol emissions by industry. But such efforts are also eliminating some of the cooling effect of such pollution, eliminating a form of inadvertent geoengineering that has likely counteracted global warming in recent decades.

By 2050, electric power generation overtakes road transportation as the biggest promoter of warming, according to the study. By the year 2100, the study’s projections suggest that power maintains the lead spot with radiative forcing of 554 mWm-2, followed by on-road transportation at 417 mWm-2, and then the industrial sector with 283 mWm-2.

The paper is here [PDF].

Note the mention of what I;’ve been calling the “aerosol whiplash effect”–we figure out that aerosols are bad for health reasons, or we figure out that we need to burn much less coal (a fossil fuel that produces a lot of cooling aerosols), so we change our ways, only to find out that because those aerosols drop out of the atmosphere very quickly, but the CO2 from that fuel use stays up there for a very long time, we'’re in a catch-22. Honestly, you couldn’t make up something this perverse and far-reaching without the aid of recreational chemistry.

I haven’t had a chance to read the paper yet and play with its numbers, but I will get to it soon, since this kind of sector analysis is something I’m particularly interested in. I will likely post again about this article once I, you know, know what it actually says.