A friend of ours, a retired vice-chairman of a very large oil company and I were at dinner with him last week. He volunteered:
- efficiency is #1
- forget about hydrogen

albeit at much greater length.

Wrong. We never have to go zero to stabilize CO2 levels, they will decay lower at zero emissions. In fact, since sinks absorb about 50% of emissions, any reduction lower than 50% would get us to minimal growth.

And what would be the point of going lower than status quo of 380ppm?
cooling may do more harm than good.

See today’s Xian Science Monitor for an interesting story on the Swedes, green at home but jetting all over for vacations …

This silliness again. Why 10- Yucca mountains, when nuclear used fuel is moslty kept onsite and is doing just fine? When Yucca isnt even open, let alone full? When used nuclear fuel is 95% actinides that are recyclable fuel? Keep 1 Yucca mountain and *recycle* the fuel to MOX. boom, problem solved and we can expand nuclear power generation by a factor of 20 on the *same* amount of uranium mined with status quo.

That means you can have 4-6 wedges of nuclear power.
2800 GW of nuclear energy. Over 50 years, it is only $50 billion/yr, doable, and it will cost much less (and use up much less space) than this:
3 of concentrated solar thermal – ~5000 GW peak.

It also way outcompetes coal+CCS economically.

even this “We would need to average 100 GW/year through 2050.” commitment on wind is ‘overblown’. 100,000 turbines or so built a year?
That alone will cost $200/billion a year or more.

All such options should be considered, by treated on an even-playing-field basis.

However many wedges you attribute to it, CSP with storage should be pushed to the front of the policy agenda if we are serious about phasing out coal plants.

One quick question (and one the applies to the Princeton work as well), what is the time-line of implementing a wedge? If we start on wedges in 2010, when does a wedge have to be fully in place by to be effective?

Sorry if I’m missing something.

JMG: I haven’t left out aviation — some of the biofuels will no doubt be used by jets.

Patrick: I am simply using the Keystone analysis, which everyone on both sides of the debate tells me is the fairest analysis out there. You tell me where their assumptions are wrong. It is hard to see how nuclear could be the low-cost option. At current rates of construction and usage, the cost of the plants and the uranium have shot through the roof. I just don’t see how nuclear will complete with CSP or with wind for plug ins. “Recycling” as you put it has serious nonproliferation implications if we are going to build thousands of plants. Heck even hundreds more will be problematic.

The biofuels potential is much larger than the one wedge you assigned. Very much larger world-wide, even leaving out the improvements in algial production of biofuels.

While that will take many decades, so there is plenty of time for research, discussion and policy-setting, here are two pieces of data, boht from the Swiss alpine glaciers:

(1) In 1850 CE, with CO2 at 288 ppm, the glaciers were still slowly advancing;

(2) By 1958 CE, with CO2 at 315 ppm, the glaciers were retreating at about 4 m/y.

So based on just this, somewhere in between these two values appears best to me.

Joe, I don’t understand the reasoning behind this statement of yours. Granted, we must begin right away with everything we have in order to slow the additional release of greenhouse gases. But isn’t it reasonable to assume that new technologies may well be developed in the coming decades that could economically extract large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere?

You wrote in the post ‘And yes, the scale is staggering.’ It sure is, with a million 2MW wind turbines for power and another million for all those plug-in vehicles. And 5000 GW of concentrated solar thermal. But aren’t all those wind turbines and CSP plants just substitutes for other power plants, mostly what would be coal plants.

A few days ago you posted this;

http://climateprogress.org/ 2008/ 04/ 21/ time-gets-the-net-cost-of-climate-action-wrong-by-a-factor-of-twenty/

which mentioned that we don’t have to have to talk about absorbing 2 to 3 percent of GDP to low and non carbon energy, but just redirecting that 2 to 3 percent of GDP from high carbon energy sources.

To mention one million 2 MW wind turbines as one wedge, I say holy crap, that’s a lot of wind turbines. But isn’t that wedge just a substitute from putting in some hundreds or thousands of coal plants that will be burning millions of tons of coal. I think that the one million 2 MW wind turbines will look less staggering if it’s mentioned how many coal plants don’t have to be built. Because it seems that people are going to demand their energy, it would just be better if they were supplied with low and non carbon energy.

So if we were to calculate the cost of the one million 2 MW wind turbines wedge, we’d add up the cost of that minus the cost of all those coal plants and coal. Also then all the cars at 60 MPG would have to be minus all those oil refineries that wouldn’t have to be built because the fuel mileage was better.

I don’t remember a discussion on that in other articles I’ve read on stabilization wedges and I was wondering if I was wrong thinking that would be helpful. Because if people read just the one million wind turbines, they just might forget about all that coal and coal plants.

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/ prometheus/ archives/ energy_policy/ 001406joe_romms_fuzzy_mat.html

Maybe, but while working 10 years in an R&D organization whose historical record for breakthroughs is pretty good, we had a mantra:

“Never schedule breakthroughs” because *we* couldn’t.

Some things we thought were, were not [bubble memories, photonic computing], while others were relatively minor when they first happened [transistors, modern PV cells, lasers]. A huge number of things were tried that didn’t work out, but of course, the trick was to manage an R&D portfolio the right way, with progressive commitment, rather than just throwing money at things. There were a few projects where people did the latter, and they were disasters.

Do you have something in mind? Needless to say, such technology would be one of the world’s most important breakthoughs this cenury, along with much-improved batteries.

In a way, this is the party line of the Nuclear Energy Institute and most pro-nuclear politicians, CEO’s, labor unions, etc etc.

I find this strange. If the advantages of nuclear power outway all other forms (debatable, obviously: economics, effects on carbon effluent, reliability, availability, etc etc) then I’m not sure why it is deemed to have only one, reluctant, “wedge” in the climate change solution model?

If the US built another 100 NPPs over and above the ones on line now, it would reduce *specifcally* over 1/5, and more like 1/4 of ALL the CO2 (not to mention scads of partulate) by being able to shut down KW-per-KW of coal. NO other non-CO2 emitting power source can make this claim. The cost would be less than we’ve spent on the war in Iraq fighting for someones elses oil. About 300 billion bucks. *Probably less* since they actually get cheaper as you build more of ‘em.

If we were to start, along with this scenerio to transition into the LFTRs that Kirk mentions, not only would costs plummet (because they use about 1/3 the material, fuel costs are almost non-existent and waste is about 1/35 the amount from current LWRs) we could go over to a completely thorium economy and no worry about wind turbines or closing off the deserts to mirror-farms. We could end ALL electrical generation caused CO2 emissions and start, with the LFTRs to produce non-carbon liquid fuels.

David Walters

It has been demonstrated decades ago and is a solution tens to hundreds of times better and more sophisticated than existing nuclear power - and infinitely better than coal.

Of particular interest is a chapter titled “My Biggest Mistake.” Morgan was increasingly concerned about the newly developed liquid metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR). He was convinced that the (liquid-fluoride thorium reactor [LFTR]), that had been developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), provided a safer and more acceptable means of producing nuclear power.

Morgan then states: “Here, I made the biggest mistake of my life. I reasoned that if I fought the issue and hundreds of people in Oak Ridge lost their jobs, I would be one of them–I would lose not only my job, but also the retirement benefits I had labored over a quarter of a century to obtain. I feared that powerful elements within ORNL management would destroy my reputation in the scientific community. . . . Red-faced, I bowed my head and described the risks of plutonium exposure, but without mentioning the (LFTR) or the LMFBR.” When I returned to ORNL, my fellow employees, disgusted with management, deplored the incident. W. S. Snyder, my assistant director, said it constituted censorship. Snyder was right. I should have stood my ground regardless of the consequences. Had I done so, perhaps the world would never have had reactors such as those at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.“

There’s a reason we don’t have wedges of thorium available right now–a conscious, concerted effort to make it so.

Just wondering. Regulation served a very important function for the tobacco industry in delaying any regulation on second hand smoke, and I’m wondering if the sponsor for their climate change articles might be Exxon Mobil.

I might point out that the original technology fairy fan, Newt Gingrich, appears to have jilted the creature, or at least is not going out with her as much.

The facts are that even if you believe in technology fairies or ponies, the longer we delay on policies such as Joe Romm outlines, the more the fairy is going to have to deliver. There are serious procrastination penalties associated with non-action on climate change, and a large cliff that our grandchildren will fall off of.

And thank you for your post. I probably should have elaborated on this issue already — so I’ll just do it in a new post, which will take me a few hours to put together.

As you’ll see, there actually isn’t a gap in my math — there is a gap in Socolow’s and Pacala’s math that most people (you included) miss. Stay tuned.

I would also focus on the boreal forests as much or more as on the tropical forests — they hold more carbon, for starters.

But these comments are just noise … the real issue, as you’ve so admirably laid out, is to push on multiple (all?) fronts as hard as we can, recognizing that some things won’t pan out. And yes, BI, let’s do research, but let’s not use it as an excuse to do nothing now, and for god’s sake, let’s not bet the ranch — or the Earth — on it.

Thom, Roger has never accepted money from any corporate interest. He is a university professor. He has long called not only for mitigation but also for immediate deployment of existing technologies. So please, disagree with him, but stop the personal attacks.

Same for you, Eli Rabett. This is disgusting: “Roger, where would we be if we adopted his lay back and enjoy it while praying to the technology fairy policies.” The phrase “lay back and enjoy it” is an allusion to rape.

Joe, respectfully, I’d ask you to call on your readers to keep the tone civil. That was my effort with my last long comment (under your post on Kristof). I’d say the tone is improving, slowly and steadily, and we’d all do well to prevent a backsliding here.

Sincerely,

Michael

[[And the estimates — mainly from Bureau of Mines publications — were optimistic. Shale oil, coal gasification, and eventually the breeder reactor would satisfy our energy needs at not-too-high prices when the conventional oil ran out.

None of it happened. OK, Athabasca tar sands have finally become a significant oil source, but even there it’s much more expensive — and environmentally destructive — than anyone seemed to envision in the early 70s.

You might say that this is my answer to those who cheerfully assert that human ingenuity and technological progress will solve all our problems. For the last 35 years, progress on energy technologies has consistently fallen below expectations.

I’d actually suggest that this is true not just for energy but for our ability to manipulate the physical world in general: 2001 didn’t look much like (the movie) 2001, and in general material life has been relatively static. (How do the changes in the way we live between 1958 and 2008 compare with the changes between 1908 and 1958? I think the answer is obvious.)

But anyway, while the Limits to Growth stuff of the 1970s was a mess, the history of energy technology doesn’t support extreme optimism, either.]]
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2008/ 04/ 22/ limits-to-growth-and-related-stuff/

Yes, I agree with you that the MSRE does not represent a prototype LFTR. Not even close actually. But what is really interesting about the MSRE is just how much the technology was advanced for what was essentially pocket-change for the AEC in the early 1960s. They took a revolutionary technology to the point where they demonstrated its safety and versatility for very little money.

I think that terrified the AEC, who saw how much LFTR technology threatened their plans to build weapons-grade-plutonium-fueled liquid-metal fast breeders, and until the heavy hand of Milton Shaw they moved to can Dr. Alvin Weinberg of ORNL, discredit the reactor research there, and terminate further work in fluoride reactors and thorium.

I cannot help matching the “pocket change” comment up with with the cost of decommissioning it (they may still be working on it, since years ago they didn’t expect to finish until 2009). One of the things I worry about is the decommissioning any nuclear reactor will end up being a tab picked up by the public. I very much doubt the funds supposedly set aside for this purpose will prove adequate.

Next, how long do you project it will take for the investment you advocate to yield new clean energy cheaper than new dirty energy? How do we prevent new dirty energy from being built during this interregnum? What level do you project GHGs reaching by the time clean energy is clean enough to dethrone dirty energy through cost alone?

The biggest mistake they made when they shut MSRE down in 1969 was not to fluorinate the fuel to remove the uranium. They had done this previously (right before fueling MSRE with U-233) and it only took a few days. But when they shut down in 1969 they hoped that more AEC funding would be right around the corner, and at the time defueling the reactor didn’t seem like a good idea.

Well, we know now that the AEC was moving to kill the technology, which they finished doing by 1974. Without funding, the money wasn’t there to do anything, and all the expertise in fluoride reactors drifted away from ORNL. They reasoned that because the salt was chemically stable, things would be fine. Well, over time the decay of the fission products led the salt to get cooler and cooler until it finally froze in the drain tanks. Years passed and the decay of fission products led the salt to get cooler still. When uranium-bearing fluoride salt gets below 150C, free fluorine can actually stay as free fluorine rather than chemically recombining. And that’s not a good idea.

So radiation from the fuel caused radiolytic fluorine gas to be generated. That fluorine gas (F2) reacted with UF4 in the salt to form UF6, which is gaseous (and is the basis of uranium enrichment). That UF6 was now mobile enough to get out of the drain tank and move through the lines of the reactor. Where it accumulated and condensed was unknown, but in the 90s people began to realize (as the gas pressure went up in the lines) that fluorine gas and UF6 was in there.

Long story short, the remediation has been a mess because they’ve spent an enormous amount of time trying to find out where the UF6 is in the system. The whole reason it got out in the first place was because they let the fuel salt sit there for 20 years without doing anything. Thanks, Milt Shaw!

At any rate, any LFTR would be defueled easily at shutdown by removing uranium by fluorination. That would easily prevent a repeat of this problem, which took many years of neglect to materialize.

If we would simply take the $300M we’re spending on remediation and use it for fluoride reactor development, we would be much closer to LFTR technology readiness, and we could fold the whole remediation task into it. Last year I visited the MSRE and talked to some of the chemical engineers working there. Each of them told me that when they started working on the remediation project, they didn’t know about fluoride reactors and thought the MSRE was some dumb old reactor experiment gone awry. But after studying the design intensely, each of them told me that we should be restarting the MSRE rather than remediating it! They said, “this reactor is the future and no one even knows about it.”

The question further occurs, that since one cannot guarantee success of any research program what actions should we take now to limit emissions now and in the future.

It makes you look like a guy suffering from historical scientific amnesia. I suggest you acquaint yourself with federal regulations covering disclosures of financial interest that regulate scientists who receiving funding from the NIH and NSF.

Otherwise, you’ll make yourself look like a dope.

Mr. Pielke, back to you. Please disclose how much money you were paid by Cato to write for Regulation. And please, pontificate on why they hired you to write for them and not someone like Jim Hansen.

Joe, again I would ask you to call on you readers to stop with the slander. If you want this to be a community, then there has to be some respect for civility.

Eli: Get your facts straight. Ted and I have consistently called for deployment of existing technologies, a price for carbon, and large sums of money for RD&D. If you’ve got some complaint with Ted’s uncle, take it up with him, not with me.

Earl: Thanks for your thoughtful questions. This discussion has been focused overwhelmingly on policy, and yet it is politics that will determine which policy options get implemented. Honestly, after today’s news in the Times about Europe turning back to coal, I felt pretty despairing. Whether you accept the numbers put forward by Romm or Pielke et al., it’s a pretty gargantuan task. While we are certain that a major government investment in RD&D, as well as deployment and procurement, is needed, I am less certain about your other questions. I’ll attempt to answer them, but the farther into the future, the more the uncertainty grows, so I offer that caveat.

It is conceivable that we will build enough CCS to constitute a single wedge, as Romm proposes, or far more, as others have suggested. Perhaps Keith and Lackner will succeed in driving down the price of air capture. I am becoming increasingly skeptical that humans will leave much if any coal in the ground, and thus see those two technologies as crucial.

I also think a new global compact is required, one focused around global development and energy technology innovation, primarily motivated by economic and national security concerns domestically, that results in both driving down the price of clean energy and establishing a price for carbon. I’m not optimistic about a global optimized carbon price; that seems rather utopian, or at least very, very distant. But if the G-8 could bring China and India into such a compact, and the developed world investment were somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion a year, I could see China and India embracing some kind of price for carbon, especially if a decent portion of the investment went into modernizing their energy infrastructures and thus creating jobs and increasing their energy security.

The key is that it be a win-win so that when Lou Dobbs goes on TV to complain about U.S. taxpayer money going to build energy infrastructure in India and China, most Americans roll their eyes because they support the core value proposition, not the demagogic Dobbs.

You asked about price. Tech innovation and adoption — think of the nonlinear s-curve — is notoriously unpredictable. We’ve never suggested “waiting for breakthroughs,” and we explictly criticize market fundamentalists, who suggest that “getting the incentives right” is all that matters.

Obviously, tech learnings come from doing, so getting the doing going as quickly as possible is imperative. I don’t have much confidence that a price on carbon will have that impact. I think the history of tech innovation shows that governments play a leading role, and that private firms follow, not the other way around.

We’ve been reluctant to make lists of wedges and policies or prices and suggest that the latter will necessarily lead to the former. And I don’t think we need to. What we need is a politics that mobilizes the public to support a large investment — larger, perhaps, than we suggested in our book — something on the order of $50 - $80 billion per year, starting immediately and continuing into the future, to scale up the new energy technologies and bring down their price as quickly as possible, not just here but also in other G-8 countries, in China and India, and eventually throughout the developing world.

This is some of the best discussion on the topic I’ve seen in … well just I’ve seen.

I do like the idea of LFTRs as a big wedge, and I certainly like any of the current generation of nuclear plants to any of the current generation of coal or gas plants, at least, in those countries where a sufficiently robust regulatory regime plus a grid is in place. CCS is simply inferior on almost every ground. If people are worried about storing nuclear waste, what should they make of storing liquified CO2 until the end of days? Are there anything like the storage reserves one would need to do this? Apparently, Australia alone turns out about 1 cubic km of CO2 (assuming the kind of pressure that would be used) every 2 years and 9 months, and yet, China is building an entire Australia-sized capacity every six months. Apparently, CCS reduces EROEI by about 20-25% and presumes a carbon cost of about $100 per tonne.

I do think sunk cost is an issue which will slow down the roll out of new technologies, particularly given the breakneck spped with which new coal-fired capacity and new ICE vehicles are being rolled out.

I also like the idea of using pumped sea water storage in concert with intermittent power sources (or even non-intermittent ones to replace spinning reserve). This could allow sources like wind and wave and tidal to operate as true baseload and in places where potable water was short, you could choose between stored power and potable water, thus saving you the cost of an energy hungry desal plant.

On biofuels, I think algae is the key. Let’s get going on that, bigtime.

Fran

“Wrong. We never have to go zero to stabilize CO2 levels, they will decay lower at zero emissions. In fact, since sinks absorb about 50% of emissions, any reduction lower than 50% would get us to minimal growth.”

Your assumption is mistaken, because it’s based on the sinks continuing to operate at 50%, but what if the sinks reach saturation? What if they start declining for any reason — e.g. ocean acidity, continuing UV through the thinned ozone layer, warming of the upper thermal ocean cline etc. What happens when warming accelerates decomposition on forest floors and when drying conditions change the composition of plants?

We are currently increasing CO2 at about 2.4PPM per annum and rising. The perturbation associated with that is going to be about for hundreds of years. We need to cut savagely and quick. 450 PPM or better yet 400 PPM by 2050 should be where we aim and declining to about 1850 levels by about 2150.

Interestingly, CH4 also went up this year for the first time since 1998 — that’s the sleeper in all this. What’s happening to that permafrost?

Patrick Says:

“And what would be the point of going lower than status quo of 380ppm?
cooling may do more harm than good.”

It might, but the margin for error would be nice and acid seas are a huge problem. At 280 PPM, humanity survived modestly well despite primitive technology. Today, we’d be a lot better off.

It’s also a lot easier to keep warm with minimal energy than fend off the heat.

Fran

Again, it shows that you still do not grasp the concept. Whether such money has affected Pielke Jr.s’ science is a completely different issue from whether or not he took the money.

Again, please acquaint yourself with federal regulations covering NIH and NSF grantees. You might also try reading a new book by David Michaels titled, “Doubt is Their Product.”

Roger Pielke Jr., how much money were you paid by Cato to write for Regulation?

The same with you and Ted Nordhaus. You have had a lot of press. If you accept the premise, it is incumbent upon you to convey the urgency of the problem, that we will have to ameliorate (my new favorite word) damage from climate change and that includes mitigation, research and adaptation, and that adaptation only buys time and there is no guarantee on research.

Building a firewall against criticism in a footnote in an obscure journal (yeah I exaggerate, but how much) will not buy you credibility. Fundamentally, as Roger has long recognized, public awareness is built and manipulated through the mass media, and now the internet.

I’ve heard that LiFePO4 batteries from China cost about 500/kWh in hobbyist quantities. A123 says they see that price soon too (and I like what I hear from Bill Dube about A123’s qualify, safety, and performance).

Also, I never asked about breakthroughs. (You sort of responded as if I had.) I have deliberately avoided the word, and instead concentrated on the language on your webpage (under “Ideas”) about investing in clean energy to reduce its price. You said the same sort of thing in your response above (last paragraph).

Your stated goal, both on your webpage and your response is to “Bring the real price of clean energy down as quickly as possible.” Does “down” mean below the cost of dirty energy?

I believe you believe that this policy is necessary, but I would like you to answer whether you believe this policy is sufficient? If it is not sufficient, what other policies are necessary? Your last paragraph in your response above seems to suggest that R&D investment in cheap energy is sufficient, but I would like to be more sure that this is what you intend (much confusion has resulting from reading too much into tea leaves in this discussion). Let’s remove the uncertainty if possible.

How many years do you think the investment program on your webpage will take to make new clean energy cheaper than new dirty energy? (Not a firm number, just an educated estimate.)

What do you think the world should do about GHG between now and then? What level of GHG do you think Earth will experience in this timeframe?

Is the investment program on your webpage also targeted at reducing the cost of new clean energy to less than cost of old (paid-off) dirty energy? If so, how long is this likely to take? If not, does BI have a proposal to shut down existing dirty energy plants, since you suggest carbon pricing is unlikely? If we don’t shut down existing dirty energy plants, how do we prevent reaching disastrous GHG levels in the atmosphere?

bunny et al, when pricing carbon globally, for generating adaptomitigational revenue, forget not historic carbon, for yea has this translated to GDP per capita and thus unto capability to pay-to-replace.

Thanks. That probably would be ABAT for the Chinese lithium iron phosphate. As to A123, I understand that they work better when you avoid running the motorcycle into a wall.

jc

(have you read lester brown’s book?)

just ?’s for thought. i am not sure of the answers

CSP is typically located in the desert, and so little needs to be cut down. Desert is of course habitat too, so it is important to use as little as possible. NREL’s Fuel from the Sky report estimated 0.5% of the land in the areas they looked at could provide 2098 TWh per year of power. That is why efficiency is so important. Efficiency could reduce the U.S. power needs by over 40% (proven by states that have done it). The land use impacts are an important reason not to waste energy by storing it as hydrogen (that wastes a factor of 2-4 of the the energy).

Wind is typically located in open areas, or offshore. It can coexist with farming and grazing land, which are typically already cleared.