Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

[Yesterday, my page views hit a peak -- 35,000. I take that as a sign readers are very interested in this subject. Here I present calculations I haven't seen anywhere else, and since different sources provide different numbers, please view this as a crude estimates. I welcome corrections.]

The goal of this post is to explore how peak oil and, yes, peak coal might affect the world’s effort to stabilize CO2 concentrations.

At recent growth rates for oil consumption, we are all but certain to peak in oil production within two decades — and if we follow the recent trend-line for coal use (and for coal reserves), we could hit peak coal within three decades. It looks like it simply isn’t possible for oil and coal use to sustain for decades the trends that led CO2 emissions to rise 3% per year since 2000, if the analysis below is roughly correct. That would be a very good piece of news.

OIL: I have already written at length on oil (see “Peak Oil? Bring it on!”, longer version here). In 2006, the world consumed about 85 million barrels a day (MMBD) of oil. Oil use had been rising about 2% per year, though the recent price jump may have slowed things a tad. And, for the first time, not just the “peakists” but the CEOs of major oil companies think we have a big, big problem.

The CEO of Royal Dutch/Shell emailed his employees, “Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.” The CEO of French oil company Total S.A., said that production of even 100 million barrels a day by 2030 will be “difficult.” The CEO of ConocoPhillips said, “I don’t think we are going to see the supply going over 100 million barrels a day.”

COAL: World coal consumption and production in 2006 was about 6 billion metric tons according to the World Coal Institute. World recoverable reserves at the end of 2005 vary by source, but the World Energy Council puts them at 850 billion metric tons, which seems to be a relatively typical figure. Thus, global coal reserves would last some 140 years, at current rates of production and consumption. That said, global coal reserve estimates are of “poor quality” and may be lower than we think, as one recent German study noted (here). The U.S. National Academy of Sciences made a similar point about U.S. reserves last year (here):

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Probably the least understood major climate solution is the simultaneous generation of electricity and heat, called cogeneration, combined heat and power (CHP) or recyled energy. You can read the basics here.

I have proposed one “stabilization wedge” of CHP (here). Some people, like my friend Tom Casten of Recycled Energy, think it could be multiple wedges. He is probably right — when you consider that the energy now lost as waste heat just from U.S. power generation exceeds the energy used by Japan for all purposes.

Casten, in an interview I urge all readers to watch (here) or read the transcript of (here and below), asserts that in this country alone:

We could take the 42 percent of carbon dioxide that comes from electricity and cut it in half and save $70 billion.

By generating electricity and capturing the waste heat in a cogen system, we can avoid the energy wasted by generating electricity and heat separately. Overall system efficiencies can exceed 80 percent. Since cogen typically generates its power near the end user, powerline losses, which can easily reach 7% to 8% of the delivered electricity, can be all but eliminated. Total greenhouse gas emissions can be cut in sharply.

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[Warning: This post has lots of numbers in it and isn't short. But I hope this will be a "Eureka! I finally get it" post for those who read it to the end, as I'm going to unlock the final mystery of the wedges.]

I’d like to thank (!) Roger Pielke for his post, “Joe Romm’s Fuzzy Math.” Not because his analysis is correct — it isn’t. Not because of the tone — he says my climate solution is “fantastically delusional,” which better not be the case or our children and the next 50 generations are screwed. No, I’m thanking him because explaining why he isn’t correct will illuminate two key points in the climate solutions debate:

1. Princeton’s Socolow and Pacala make an important but surprising assumption in their wedges analysis (here) that few people realize. Anyone who wants to come up with their own 14 wedges (as opposed to accepting my solution laid out in Part 2), must understand what they did.
2. When you understand what Princeton did, then you’ll understand why Pielke’s critique is fundamentally wrong, and then I think you can understand at a more intuitive level why his Nature article is wrong, too.

THE WEDGES’ FUZZY MATH

Let’s start with what looks to be a major analytical mistake in the Princeton analysis. Recall that one wedge is a climate strategy that ultimately saves 1 billion tons of carbon a year or 1 GtC/year.

If you look at the original paper (here), they identify a typical wedge (#9 on their list) as “Nuclear power for coal power.” That “would require 700 GW of nuclear power with the same 90% capacity factor assumed for the coal plants” [which means the plant delivers power 90% of the time, or 8760 hours/yr x 0.9 = ~7900 hours/yr.]

But wait, you say, everybody knows a typical coal plant has a carbon intensity of 290 kilograms per Megawatt-hour. Or at least everyone who reads page 9 of the online Supplemental material (available here with subscription), much of which is now on their website, wedge by wedge, here. As they explain in the “efficient baseload coal plant” wedge (here), citing the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, 2002:

Year 2000 carbon in and electricity out for coal-based power plants were, respectively, 1712 MtC/y and 5989 TWh/y, resulting in a carbon intensity of 290 gC/kWh.

I have always preferred to use tons per MW-hr, so 290 gC/kWh = 290 kgC/MWh = 0.32 tC/MWh.

[For those who prefer CO2, that is ~1.2 tons/MWh for a typical coal plant -- which, by the way, is a handy number to keep in your head for back-of-the-envelope calculations.]

But wait. If the 700 GW (= 700,000 MW) of nukes are replacing 700,000 MW of coal running 7900 hours a year and spewing out 0.32 tons of carbon per MWh, then this wedge yields 700,000 MW x 7900 hrs x 0.32 tC/MWh = 1.77 billion tons of carbon.

Oops. Isn’t a wedge 1 billion tons of carbon? This would seem to be a big mistake. Ah, but you didn’t read the fine print:

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In this post I will lay out “the solution” to global warming, focusing primarily on the 14 “stabilization wedges.”

Part 1 argued that stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 ppm is not politically possible today, but that it is certainly achievable from an economic and technological perspective. It would require some 14 of Princeton’s “stabilization wedges” — strategies and/or technologies that over a period of a few decades each reduce global carbon emissions by one billion metric tons per year from projected levels (see technical paper here, less technical one here). The reason that we need twice as many wedges as Princeton’s Pacala and Socolow have said we need was explained in Part 1.

I agree with the IPCC, which concluded last year that “The range of stabilization levels assessed can be achieved by deployment of a portfolio of technologies that are currently available and those that are expected to be commercialised in coming decades.” The technologies they say can beat 450 ppm are here. Technology Review, one of the nation’s leading technology magazines, also argued in a cover story two years ago, “It’s Not Too Late,” that “Catastrophic climate change is not inevitable. We possess the technologies that could forestall global warming.”

I do believe only “one” solution exists in this sense — We must deploy every conceivable energy-efficient and low carbon technology that we have today as fast as we can. Princeton’s Pacala and Socolow proposed that this could be done over 50 years, but that is almost certainly too slow.

We’re at 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year — rising 3.3% per year — and we have to average below 18 billion tons a year for the entire century if we’re going to stabilize at 450 ppm. We need to peak around 2015 to 2020 at the latest, then drop at least 60% by 2050 to 15 billion tons (4 billion tons of carbon), and then go to near zero net carbon emissions by 2100.

That’s why a sober guy like IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, said in November: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Or as I told Technology Review, “The point is, whatever technology we’ve got now — that’s what we are stuck with to avoid catastrophic warming.”

If we could do the 14 wedges in four decades, we should be able to keep CO2 concentrations to under 450 ppm. If we could do them faster, concentrations could stay even lower. We’d probably need to do this by 2030 to have a shot at getting back to 350 this century. [And yes, like Princeton, I agree we need to do some R&D now to ensure a steady flow of technologies to make the even deeper emissions reductions needed in the second half of the century.]

I am not going to focus on the politics, policies, market factors, or mindset needed to achieve these 14 wedges. That will be the subject of Part 4. But, needless to say, none of this can happen without a serious price for carbon dioxide and a very aggressive technology deployment effort.

So here is the basic solution. I have thrown in a couple extra wedges since I have no doubt that everybody will find something objectionable in at least 2 of these wedges. This is what the entire planet must achieve:

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Traditional photovoltaic (PV) is typically installed on rooftops and competes with retail electricity. Over 40% of the cost of a system can be in the installation, which must be customized to every rooftop. So technologies that dramatically lower PV cost end up having a less dramatic impact on total residential system cost. So it is natural that the next generation technologies, such as thin films of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) printed as ink on conductive substrates need to look at non-rooftop applications, where the installation of a large solar farm is fairly turnkey.

Nanosolar, a thin-film PV startup, has just announced their vision in their blog and newsletter. They see the best fit for solar being municipal solar plants of 2-10MW in size and suggest such plants can be done in 12 months, providing a significant advantage over coal or nuclear. Martin Roscheisen, Nanosolar’s CEO, writes

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