Climate Progress

[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):

(more…)

The news from NOAA (here) is that all our dawdling on climate action this decade is having real impact on the atmosphere:

• Concentrations of CO2 jumped 2.4 ppm in 2007, taking us to 385 ppm (preindustrial levels hovered around 280 through 1850).
• That is an increase of 0.6% (or 19 billion tons). If we stay at that growth rate, we’ll be at 465 ppm by 2050 — and that assumes (improbably) that the various carbon sinks don’t keep saturating (see here and here).
• Levels of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) rose last year for the first time since 1998, perhaps an early indication of thawing permafrost.

Why this recent jump in methane? NOAA says:

(more…)

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.

(more…)

[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:

(more…)

Okay, I didn’t make their Top 50 Eco Blogs post, but in honour of Earth Day, they created “an extra helping of eco blogs — this time compiled from your suggestions on Green Central.” So thank all of you who wrote in for me!

The new list is here. Climate Progress is under “The big picture”:

Climate Progress - Former energy advisor to the Clinton administration Joseph Romm’s blog; tool up on insider eco knowledge.

Here are the other nine:

(more…)

[Another post by Ken Levenson.]

UPDATE: Links should be fixed — very weird glitch!

If you’ve recovered from your hangover you may recall that the President made a “major” speech on global warming last week. While it was frighteningly predictable in content or lack thereof, some of the reactions were eye opening. Let’s start with

The Bush Administration itself: Because if anyone can understand what the President is saying, they can:

Bush’s chief adviser on climate change, Jim Connaughton, defended the U.S. position. “It was a speech directed at domestic audiences,” he said of the president’s address. Bush’s aides said it was aimed at heading off a “train wreck” of varying emissions legislation in the U.S. Congress.

For a domestic audience? While the Paris conference he set up is underway? The Administration cares even less about international opinion than they do that of Americans. Perhaps obvious but you’d think with American’s approval at below 30% he’d try to find refuge somewhere other than the Saudi Royal Family.

And what’s this about heading off a legislative train wreck? Of course there is the Lieberman-Warner Bill - named for the well known lefties John Warner Republican of Virginia and Joseph Lieberman Independent of Connecticut - seeking more than a 50% cut in US GHG emissions by 2050. Is there another climate/energy bill seriously contending for passage? Where’s the potential train wreck? Oh, right Bush doesn’t want ANY meaningful legislation. Another Bush alternate reality foisted upon us. A potential “first step” transfigured into train wreck (read temper tantrum)- these guys have no shame. Because if you don’t take a first step there can be no second step … brilliant.

New York Times Hydra starting with the Editorial Page: Nada. Really, for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 days. Then on the 6th day, Earth Day, the editorial page weighed in, concluding:

It is hard to find anything redeeming in this speech, though it contains two obvious truths: This president has no intention of addressing climate change. The next president will have no choice but to do better.

We waited six days for this? “DO BETTER.”!? “Do better” is a suicide pact. I wonder if anyone’s told them the planet’s on fire? Andrew, when you’re done blogging on the plankton please yell upstairs to the editorial desk - would ya? If they don’t know what the heck is going on maybe it’s not surprising the public isn’t so informed either.

(more…)

Robert M. Sussman of the Center for American Progress takes on the latest White House red herring:

As the Senate prepares to consider global warming legislation in early June, a new diversionary tactic has emerged from the White House–a steady drumbeat of warnings that a regulatory train wreck is on the horizon because courts are interpreting existing environmental laws to apply to climate change. Stated in increasingly shrill tones, the implication is that Congress has the wrong priorities because it is focused on passing a new law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rather than on changing existing laws so they can’t (yes, can’t) be used to address global warming.

You can read the whole article here, but I will reprint it below because I think this is an important issue. Remember, depending on how the presidential election turns out, we could end up in a few years with conservative court majority that reinterpret existing laws and make it much more complicated to write legislation that reduce greenhouse gas emissions (see here). The Sussman article continues:

(more…)

Over my (relatively mild) objection, the copyeditor of the Salon piece on renaming Earth Day (here) changed one letter in the final paragraph:

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worst comes to worst, at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

I had sent in “if worse comes to worst.” Salon said they were following their style book. Fine. Can’t argue with that. But I had looked it up online at The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, which says (quite reasonably, I think):

(more…)

The “Car of the Future,” starring the “Car Talk” guys, is tonight. More info and links to my clips are here.

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:

(more…)