You can thank the Italian moratorium on nuclear power for that one.

Much like corn ethanol, Europe is discovering the law of unintended consequences.

H. Clinton - Yes, I support a moratorium
B. Obama - Yes, I support a moratorium ‘if necessary’
J. McCain - I support a moratorium only if we build enough nuclear plants in exchange, and give the nuclear power industry $100s of billions in pork

While a ban on pulverized coal plants would go a long way, it falls short of what you are advocating in this post I think.

Thanks for this thoughtful post. I’m impressed by your honesty about the limitations of what cap and trade, and a price for carbon, can achieve.

In the next day or two we’ll be posting a long-ish essay of the politics of dealing with global warming, both in light of the McCain-Clinton calls for a tax holiday, your essay, and the potential cap and trade Senate vote next month.

Michael

But don’t take what I think is pretty clear evidence that only a direct government regulation — an emissions standard — can stop new coal plants fast enough, to mean that a cap is pointless. Far from it — the cap/trade allows the market to figure out the most cost-effective substitute for coal.

And remember, since we both want an 80% reduction by 2050, we’re ultimately going to have to shut down a lot of coal plants.

And what I urge you to think hard about it is the fact there is no technology, existing or breakthrough, that has any chance whatsoever of causing somebody to shut down an existing coal plant down — in the absence of a strong cap/price.

Nice post, I fully agree, with two notes:

1) We need to hear people calling as loudly for a moratorium on tar sands and other unconventional oil development as we are for coal. Hansen’s recent paper that suggested we could continue to burn oil if we had a moratorium on coal also assumed no significant exploitation of tar sands (I think he used 2001 production numbers). We are significantly above that now, and investment is streaming into Alberta. Meanwhile pipelines and new refineries are being built south of the border that will lock in this carbon intensive option for a long time. Those fights are now.

2) As you know, its not so much that we can afford to burn all or most of the remaining oil and gas, as its that we can afford (in theory) to emit as much CO2 as is currently in those reserves. But there are values inherent in how we frame that choice. In the US, and in the OECD overall, the dominant source of emissions is oil from transport, and that will likely continue. In many (most) developing countries, its coal, in theory for electrification and energy for many who don’t have it (I say in theory only because too often the reality is new coal plants to power factories manufacturing goods for export…).

So, isn’t it just a bit uncomfortable for us in the North to be insisting on a coal moratorium while we are doing little about our own dominant source of emissions?

None of this should be construed to say we don’t need a moratorium on new coal, particularly in the US and industrialized nations. We absolutely do. But I am concerned that the framing of we can “survive the burning of almost all of the world’s conventional oil and gas” ignores the equity aspect of this argument.

The IPCC clearly calls for limiting carbon dioxide concentrations to below 450 ppm. If you missed that, you haven’t been reading this blog or their reports.

Start here: http://climateprogress.org/ 2007/ 12/ 06/ must-read-bali-climate-declaration-by-scientists/

This is not just the whim of me and Hansen. Please!

Second — we have a clear substitute for new coal here in the states: efficiency plus concentrated solar thermal. New coal is absurdly expensive now. If we had a sensible set of utility regulations, nobody would build a new coal plant simply as a matter of cost- ineffectiveness.

Your points are well taken, which is why I was saying at the end that the West has no credibility to tell others not to use coal until we stop using it. If Paul K were right — if there were not a bunch of plausible affordable alternatives — then it would be game over. Fortunately he isn’t right.

I will be blogging on this later in the series, but clearly we’re going to use all of the natural gas. Peak oil is really the only thing that is going to slow down oil consumption. Yes, the world will have to be adult enough to ban most forms of unconventional oil by, say, 2020.

But everything starts with the moratorium on traditional coal.

I guess what I’m saying is we might find we gain even more credibility by tackling our own biggest source of emissions - oil.

And by 2020, I doubt we’re going to be able to have an adult conversation about the billions in tar sands infrastructure that is being built now that needs to be stranded…”a tremendous waste of capital that should be avoided at all cost.”

Finally, the failure to stop building coal without CCS over the next few years is not fatal to achieving 450 ppm — but it would mean that unless someone comes up with a practical and affordable post-combustion CCS technology, most of those coal plants plants will have to be shut down before the end of their normal lifetime, possibly much soooner.

I’m hearing that the cost of capture for the air capture technologies could be feasible at $50 and maybe even $30/ ton of CO2. Where does air capture fit into your analysis?

If utilities actually had to pay that as a price of emitting CO2, that looks like about enough $$ to put the equivalent amount of carbon back underground.d

Altrnatively, the utilities could just burn the carbonaceous materials produced from biomass and forget about burning coal.

The current coal resurgence is more of a function of the conservative turn in Italian politics and the shamefully short-sighted world-view of most Italians. Climate change is barely discussed in the American presidential race, but in Italy it was a non-issue altogether. Just to give you an idea of how desperate the environmental scene is in Italy, the Greens decided to form a coalition with the communist party and ended up losing more votes than ever, with the neo-fascist and bigoted Lega Nord winning over all of their former populist base.

Where are you hearing that? This would certainly be a welcome “breakthrough” but I find it difficult to fathom that this could be done at scale for that cost. I note that you referring strictly to the “capture” aspect, and not the all-in cost including storage… Obviously capture from ambient air has theoretical advantages, such as the ability to locate the capture points nearby the storage points. But even given that, I still find it hard to believe that we are near achieving those capture costs for ambient air - it’s inevitably much more expensive than capture of removing concentrated carbon emissions at point sources…

Anyhow, I am sure we’d all like to hear more from your sources… it would be a welcome development for sure… it would surprise the hell out of me, but I would love that kind of surprise…

Wow, at this point you might have enough to cover a basketball court.

Congratulations on all your new coal. Sounds like a “smart and progressive policy” to me.

You write: “I’m hearing that the cost of capture for the air capture technologies could be feasible at $50 and maybe even $30/ ton of CO2. Where does air capture fit into your analysis?”

The price you are talking about is what people are putting in PPT projections, nothing more. Yes, it is a technology worth pursuing.

But it is hard to see how pulling CO2 out of the air when it is in concentrations of 385 parts per million could possibly be cheaper than capturing it from a very concentrated 100,000 pppm stream post-combustion, or even higher precombustion.

And where will you put it? One wedge is 3.67 billion tons of CO2 — even liquefied (which takes a lot of energy) it equals, as I noted, the current flow of oil out of the ground.

So one wedge of captured CO2 — no matter how is captured — by 2050 is probably very optimistic. I see air capture as a post-2050 strategy, possibly post-2100. If CO2 storage on a wide scale proves practical and affordable, then IGCC with CCS, or even post-combustion capture at coal plants seems likelier to me.

I am somewhat concerned that some of the technology policy related to CCS is ‘picking winners’. By all means fund RD&D in CCS technologies, but don’t do so at the expense of other technologies. If CCS turns out to be significantly deployable (I personally have my doubts), then coal miners are likely to be significant beneficiaries. Some CCS RD&D should be funded by a levy on coal mined.

By the way, Eli Rabett has a post up noting that yet another Breakthrough Institute scholar has links back to a denialist think tank.

This time, it’s the Marshall Institute. Who would have ever guessed?

For example, improving coal power plant efficiency by 20-30% with cogeneration would be something worth thinking about, especially if the plant could later be retrofitted for capture.

How would this work? Would you move whole towns right next to the coal plant so that they could use waste heat from the plant for hot water and home heating?

With the added benefit that they could breathe the filth of the coal plant up-close-and-personal.

Next you have to build the HVDC network to get the juice from all the CSP plants in the Southwest to the rest of the country where the people are. That’s not going to be cheap or easy. People hate transmission lines.

All said, however, I would greatly favor a ban on new coal plants. Worldwide would be even better, but I’d settle for just the US.

In a recent post, Roger lays out some concerns about it, arguing that bio-char may be more cost effective and easy to implement:

http://thebreakthrough.org/ blog/ 2008/ 05/ elements_of_any_successful_app.shtml#more

There is a simple answer, CO2 capture at the source (fossil fuel power plants, cement kilns) imposes a cost on the fossil fuel industry. Air capture is another Treasury raid (as well as silly, work out the energy and materials cost).