ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

The worsening nuclear crisis in Japan raises questions. What would be the consequences of shutting down nuclear reactors in the U.S.? In light of fresh doubts about the wisdom of nuclear power, is swapping out the U.S. vehicle fleet with all-electric vehicles realistic?

The chart below shows what the U.S. energy mix is today, and what the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects it to be over the next 25 years. The nuclear and coal part of the mix are expected to drop only a bit, coal from 45% to 43% and nuclear from 20% to 17%.

[Note that 43% of 5+ trillion kilowatt hours per year is a lot more than 45% of the 4+ trillion kilowatt hours coal accounts for today - meaning coal consumption in electricity generation is thus expected to increase substantially.  So much for doing anything about global warming.]

The University of California, Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology has published a technical brief which considers three scenarios for “maximum penetration” of electric cars into the market, projecting market share of new cars at 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2030 under differing cost assumptions.

The “market” in the above chart is defined as those likely to buy electric vehicles – 20% of the total market is excluded as not likely to buy electric vehicles.

Under the baseline scenario, 81 million electric vehicles would be on the road by 2030; under the operator-subsidized scenario, 151 million.

The U.C. study calculates that by 2030 the fleet of electric cars is estimated to require between 190 and 350 million megawatt hours of electricity per year. Currently, electricity generation in the U.S. totals around 4 billion megawatt hours per year. Powering an electric car fleet would require that the U.S. increase electricity generating capacity by 4.75%-8.75% by 2030. And that’s assuming no growth in electricity usage elsewhere in the economy, despite population and presumably economic growth.

In 2009, U.S. nuclear plants generated 798.7 billion kilowatt hours (or 7,987 million kilowatt hours) from 104 commercial nuclear generating units; “nuclear generating units” in the U.S. thus average 7.68 megawatt hours per year in output. The 602 coal power plants in the U.S. produce on average ~3.88 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected U.S. electric car fleet would therefore require building 25-46 additional “nuclear generating units” by 2030. Or 50-90 coal-fired power plants.

Renewable sources, including wind and solar, currently account for about 10% of U.S. electricity generation – but two thirds of existing renewable capacity is hydroelectric, which is about tapped out and even under threat of decline. Solar and wind together account for only a little over 2% of renewable electric energy – about 72,000 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected electric fleet from solar and wind alone would require increasing our solar and wind capacity by a factor of 2,500 – 5,000. Just to power electric cars,  nothing else: no growth, no phasing out of nuclear or decommissioning aging plants, no shutting down of CO2-emitting coal plants.

Phasing out nuclear power while we are still able so as to avoid catastrophic accidents, and phasing out coal  to save the planet as we know it, would seem to be of a bit higher priority than powering our go-carts.

Challenging times indeed. Replacing our gasoline-powered cars with electric cars should be about the last thing we should be focusing on.

Expect catastrophic climate change within 50 years.

So says a new study prepared for the British Department for Energy and Climate Change.

Met Office: High End Temperature Change

Comparison of surface temperature projections from the high-end emissions scenario, without carbon cycle feedbacks. Temperature increases between 1961-1990 and 2090-2099, averaged over all high-end members.

That bad news is reiterated in a new report issued by the United Nations Environment Programme, entitled “Climate Change Science Compendium 2009.”

An average global temperature rise of 7.2F (4C) could happen by 2060, causing droughts around the world, sea level rises and the collapse of important ecosystems.

The Arctic could see an increase in temperatures of 28.8F (16C), while parts of sub Saharan Africa and North America would be devastated by an increase in temperature of up to 18F (10C). Britain’s temperature would rise by an average 7.2F (4C).

The study included new figures on increased emissions from fossil fuels and considered the effect global warming will have on the ability of the oceans and rainforests to absorb carbon dioxide.

The global picture shows rainfall could decrease by 20 per cent in Central America, the Mediterranean and parts of coastal Australia, causing mass drought. Temperature rises in the Amazon would cause the rainforests to die, while Alaska and Siberia would see the melting of the permafrost causing more carbon dioxide to be released.

NASA reports we’re already seeing increased atmospheric methane levels due to melting permafrost, caused by global warming. Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic, the burning of tropical forests, and heavy rains in the tropics drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth (the longer periods of rainfall and larger wetland areas resulted in microbes producing more methane). Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide – and it’s more than 20 times as potent.

Both reports stress that it will be possible to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change only if there is immediate, cohesive and decisive action to cut emissions.

But the world’s governments continue to fiddle while Earth burns.

Copenhagen is dead. Not that the talks aimed at improving or replacing the Kyoto Protocol ever amounted to a serious attempt to avert global warming.

As James Hansen keeps pointing out, burning the world’s remaining oil and gas is enough to get us into a dangerous zone for atmospheric carbon dioxide – but not so far that we couldn’t solve the problem. If you add coal and put that carbon in the atmosphere, then there is no practical way to solve the problem. No climate policy is serious if it allows coal to continue to be used and emit the CO2 in the atmosphere.

So you just have to look at the proposed policy and see what it does with coal. No government or intergovernmental organization is proposing to eliminate coal. The World Bank is spending billions on coal-fired power stations. Three countries – the U.S., China and India – are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired plants, which would pump as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce. Waxman-Markey not only assures that we will continue to run existing coal plants, it actually gives approval for additional coal plants.

At the recent G-20 meeting, negotiators were patting themselves on the back for agreeing to the tiny step of eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, claiming this would make a major contribution to curbing energy demand and emissions growth (according to the International Energy Agency, energy subsidies in the 20 largest non-OECD countries amounted to a staggering $310 billion in 2007). The final agreement on fossil-fuel subsidies, naturally, includes no timeline. With no deadline, it won’t happen.

Obama in his address to the UN said he was proud that “the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history.” But not one word about coal, except to boast “we’re investing billions to capture carbon pollution so that we can clean up our coal plants.” Earth is burning, and Obama is singing the siren song of clean coal.

The absence of any talk of banning coal is proof that no country, no intergovernmental organization, is yet taking the climate crisis seriously.

You can bet they won’t. Until it’s too late.

The Sierra Club won a stunning legal victory Thursday (November 13), blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing a permit for a proposed coal-burning power plant in Utah without addressing global warming impacts. The EPA Environmental Appeals Board held that the EPA’s Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide.

The decision may well stop all new coal plant permitting while the EPA rethinks how the Clean Air Act is to be used to control carbon dioxide. That won’t happen until after the next administration takes office. In the meantime, all permits in the pipeline are stymied. The decision could affect permits for oil refinery expansion as well.

The Sierra Club argued that the EPA’s permit decision violated CAA sections 165(a)(4) and 169(3) by failing to apply “BACT,” or best available control technology, to limit carbon dioxide (“CO2”) emissions from the facility. The argument rested on the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the court ruled that CO2 is an “air pollutant” under the Clean Air Act. The Board remanded the permit for the EPA to reconsider whether to impose a CO2 BACT limit and to develop an adequate record for its decision.

A copy of the decision can be found here.

The significance of the Deseret Power Electric Cooperative decision cannot be overstated. As Joseph Romm reiterates at Climate Progress, the single most important policy measure the rich nations must embrace as soon as possible is to stop building coal plants without carbon sequestration. This ruling will accomplish that in the U.S., at least for a while – and it could give the Obama administration the opportunity to get serious climate legislation passed, which is crucial to getting serious international action on climate.

We’re going to have to replace all of the world’s existing coal plants with either CCS plants or zero carbon alternatives – and sooner rather than later – if we’re to get atmospheric CO2 back down to the 350 ppm necessary to minimize the risk of runaway global warming.

The Sierra Club’s press release is below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve pretty much arrived at the point where the reality of climate change is no longer denied. We’re getting to the point where we recognize the imperative to arrest global warming and the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

And we’ve pretty much settled on two alternative approaches to slowing and then reversing the growth in emissions: 1) cap-and-trade schemes (such as the WCI), and 2) carbon taxes. Given the political aversion to any tax increases, all of our political efforts, both domestically and internationally, are now going into devising cap-and-trade schemes.

Both carbon trading and carbon tax solutions are market based. They assume that markets offer the best and most efficient tools to accomplish public policy objectives. But is this true? Are markets the only or even the most effective tools we have?

John Michael Greer in a new post at The Archdruid Report points out that societies are guided by myths – cultural narratives – which are so deeply embedded that we are blind to them. The myth of the market is one of these. The ideology of the market is so deeply embedded in our consciousness that we are not even aware it’s a myth.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kris De Decker has a great article at Low-Tech Magazine taking a hard look at the feasibility of carbon sequestration. His conclusion? Forget it.

Capturing carbon is energy intensive – so sequestration would require that we level even more mountain tops, just to stay even. And power plants aren’t conveniently located near sequestration sites – so shipping CO2 around would require a huge investment in pipeline infrastructure which would sap even more energy. What’s more, storing carbon dioxide in underground reservoirs is risky – we don’t even know that it can be done safely over long periods of time.

He concludes with three questions:

“Why introduce yet another expensive, energy-intensive and risky technology if there are so many other and better ways to solve the energy crisis? . . .

Why not channel the huge amounts of money needed for the development of CCS to countries with tropical rainforests, so that they have a very good reason to protect them fiercely? Stopping deforestation, especially in tropical forests, would contribute more to the fight against global warming than carbon capture technology could ever do. . .

“Why not put into force a regulation that prohibits the construction of any more power plants that burn non-renewable energy sources? . . . want more energy? Build a solar plant or plant a windmill.”

Rio Tinto Group and U.S. utilities are urging the government to subsidize coal by spending $20 billion on carbon sequestration technology. As the Senate today begins debating the first U.S. curbs on greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, coal companies are warning they won’t pony up for capture-and-storage technology.

Rio Tinto Chief Executive Officer for Energy Preston Chiaro cries that “it’s too costly for companies alone to finance.”

Bloomberg reports this quote from an interview with Chiaro: “We can’t do it without government support for the early projects. Shareholders simply won’t stand for it unless there’s a commercial return.”

Next to vehicles, power plants are the world’s biggest source of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. Coal-burning plants supply about half of U.S. power demand.

Bloomberg reports the Lieberman-Warner climate change legislation would provide $15.7 billion for research into carbon capture through 2050 and $307 billion to help coal utilities “transition to the new low-carbon economy.” Nuclear power proponents are not the only ones lining up at the government trough. Taxpayer dollars would be far better spent on reducing greenhouse gases by expanding renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is introducing to the House of Representatives a bill that has the single most important item new climate legislation should have: an emissions standard that stops traditional coal plants from being built.

Joseph Romm reports the bill would provide, starting in 2009, no coal plant can be built that cannot capture and sequester 85% of its carbon dioxide emissions (a grace period of a few years is allowed for plants built after that time to actually find a place to sequestered the carbon).

Relying on “the market” (i.e., cap-and-trade or carbon taxes) rather than regulation would require a very high price for carbon emissions – and that doesn’t look likely. To make the Lieberman-Warner bill an easier political sell, it’s been extensively tweaked gutted. The Wall Street Journal’s blog Environmental Capitol reports a new analysis of the bill  from carbon-market consultants New Carbon Finance says those tweaks should keep the price of carbon below $25 a ton through 2020 – great for selling the scheme, not so great for clean coal.

Gar Lipow at Gristmill does a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and concludes that solar uses far less land than coal.

“Nevada Solar One takes up about 400 acres, mostly for mirrors and heat engines. You would have to mine about 5,300 acres to feed a coal-fired powered plant producing the same amount of electricity.”

His calculations are based on a 20-year period. But the need to mine coal goes on forever, whereas a solar facility can occupy the same footprint forever. And then you have to also consider the environmental impacts.

The “scientific realists” argue that we have to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at 450 ppm to avoid an unacceptable level of risk of runaway, catastrophic global warming. We can probably achieve that goal – even if we burn all the remaining oil and natural gas – if we simply don’t build any additional coal burning power plants (at least without the ever-elusive CCS) and phase out existing coal plants over the next 20 years.

Others- including James Hansen – are now arguing that 450 ppm is much too high. We’ll have to reduceCO2 below its current 385 ppm and get it back down to at most 350 ppm if we are to avoid the “possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.”

The discoveries of a Russian scientist working in the peat bogs, lakes and woodlands that stretch eight time zones along Russia’s north Siberian coastline show why 450 ppm is likely to be extremely dangerous. As Siberia’s permafrost is warming and thawing, greenhouse gases – particularly methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – are being released in a positive feedback loop that could accelerate global warming past a tipping point from which there is no return (at least in a time frame relevant to our civilization).

While a moratorium on and phase-out of coal may be good enough to hit 450 ppm, it may not be good enough to avoid the risk of runaway global warming.