Power Hungry (26 page)

The problem of how to make such drastic cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions has led some of the world's leading thinkers on climate and science to question the conventional wisdom. In 2006, Roger Pielke Jr., a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado, made a concise statement about climate change.
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In testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform, Pielke said: “Even if society takes immediate and drastic action on emissions, there can be no scientifically valid argument that such actions will lead to a perceptibly better climate in the coming decades. For the foreseeable future the most effective policy responses to climate-related impacts (e.g., such as hurricanes and other disasters or diseases such as malaria) will necessarily be adaptive.”

Pielke went on, making it clear that he wasn't arguing that the United States should ignore the problem: “The point of this analysis is not to throw up our hands and do nothing about mitigation,” he said. But “if meaningful action is to occur on mitigation we must think about different strategies, and in particular policy options that have more symmetry between the timing of costs and benefits.”
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Other analysts are coming to the same conclusion. In February 2009, Britain's Institution of Mechanical Engineers issued a report, “Climate Change: Adapting to the Inevitable?” which pointed out that the Kyoto Protocol has been “a near total failure with emissions levels continuing to rise substantially.”
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Given the continuing use of hydrocarbons, and carbon dioxide levels, the British engineering group, which has some 75,000 members in 120 countries, determined that adaptation to changing weather patterns will be an essential strategy for the countries of the world.
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The report said, “We are unlikely to be far more successful at curbing our carbon dioxide emissions
in the near future than we have been over the past decade or so. And even with vigorous mitigation effort, we will continue to use fossil fuel reserves until they are exhausted.”
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Instead of focusing on emissions, governments should “invest significantly more effort in adaptation for the long term, which enables each nation to undertake the necessary steps to ensure its future prosperity and survival.” It went on to say that although efforts to curb emissions are “vital,” those efforts have “questionable” efficacy. Therefore, “It is a duty of government to embrace adaptation and protect the nation against the potential risks of a ‘business as usual' outcome.”
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When the report was released, the institution's point person on climate change issues, Tim Fox, said that too much time was being spent considering how to reduce carbon emissions and too little on how to cope with climatic changes. “But by researching and developing adaptation strategies we have a chance to cope with what is around the corner,” he explained.
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About the same time that the Institution of Mechanical Engineers released its report, the National Academy of Sciences released a similar report that came to similar conclusions: “We must consider how climate change research should evolve in the United States. A federal science program is needed to comprehend the nature and extent of the climate change threat, to quantify the magnitude of the impacts, and to provide a data and knowledge foundation for identifying effective adaptation and mitigation options.”
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My thinking about the science of climate change is not that we should do nothing with regard to carbon dioxide emissions. The United States, even in the absence of any Kyoto-style mandates to reduce carbon emissions, has made substantial reductions in its carbon dioxide emissions. And global carbon emissions are getting a big nudge downward thanks to the sorry state of the U.S. and world economies. In August 2009, the Energy Information Administration predicted that 2009 emissions would fall by about 6 percent from 2008. And that follows a drop of about 3 percent in 2008.
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Those are sizable reductions, but they are still light-years away from the 80 percent reduction by 2050 that Obama claims should be a U.S. goal. The sad but true state of carbon politics is that the only realistic way to achieve that goal would be for the United States to intentionally destroy its economy and the jobs that go with it. Of course, no savvy
politician will say that the goal should be a weak economy. So politicos and environmentalists are advocating another approach to the carbon dioxide emissions issue, one that will allow the United States to continue using large amounts of coal while also making huge volumes of carbon dioxide simply disappear.

But as I mentioned in the introduction, we must remember Jim Collins's admonition that “facts are better than dreams.” And when it comes to carbon capture and sequestration, Americans are hearing lots of dreams and precious few facts.

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is the Holy Grail of carbon strategies. Given the right technologies, CCS will be a key part of the solution to the world's ever-increasing quantities of carbon dioxide emissions, or at least that's what the promoters have been telling us. And there are plenty of promoters. In 2008, David Hawkins, the head of the climate change program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that “burying billions of tons of carbon dioxide is a huge job, but that is not necessarily an argument against CCS. You can't solve a big problem without a big effort.”
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In February 2009, Fred Krupp, the head of the Environmental Defense Fund, one of America's biggest environmental groups (the group's annual budget is about $100 million), said that carbon capture provides “a future for coal” and that “it will be an important technology for reducing carbon dioxide emissions because it offers the possibility of retrofitting some of the existing power plants.”
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At about that same time, a research engineer at the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Howard Herzog, said that, given the fact that coal-fired power plants will be around for a long time, CCS is “the only real alternative”: “Therefore, we have to make CCS work.”
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Herzog was repeating some of the findings of a 2007 report done at MIT called “The Future of Coal: Options for a Carbon-Constrained World,” which concluded that coal was going to be part of the world's generation mix for a long time to come. “Coal use will increase under any foreseeable scenario because it is cheap and abundant,” said the authors of the interdisciplinary study. “Coal can provide usable energy at a
cost of between $1 and $2 per MMBtu [million Btu] compared to $6 to $12 per MMBtu for oil and natural gas.”
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The report also claimed that CCS was “the critical enabling technology that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world's pressing energy needs.
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In March 2009, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar told the
New York Times
that his agency was investigating the potential for using public lands for carbon capture and storage. The U.S. Geological Survey, he said, had recently produced a report designed to help find the best areas for CCS.
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In May 2009, Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, called CCS a “vital” technology for greenhouse gas control “that will be needed to make power generation and heavy industry sustainable.”
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About that same time, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu gave a speech in Rome in which he declared that “we need to capture the carbon” and sequester the emissions “safely,” adding, “and we have to do this in an economically viable way.”
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In August 2009, David Sandalow, an assistant secretary of energy, testifying before the Senate, declared that “it is technically feasible, through retrofitting and new construction, to ensure that the entire US coal fleet employs CCS by 2035.”
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Note that Sandalow said CCS is “technically feasible.” He didn't say it made economic sense. And that's the rub: No one knows how to do CCS in an economically viable way. The idea of CCS is simple: Capture carbon dioxide from the flue of a power plant and then inject that gas (after it has been compressed and cooled) into a geologic formation. And while the idea is simple, making it into a reality on a large scale is extremely tricky. That point was made clear by the Congressional Research Service in December 2008: “Developing technology to capture CO
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in an environmentally, economically, and operationally acceptable manner—especially from coal-fired power plants—has been an ongoing interest of the federal government for a decade. Nonetheless, the technology on the whole is still under development: no commercial device is currently available to capture carbon from coal plants.”
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That's not to say there's no money available. Shortly before Chu gave his speech in Rome, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it
was going to provide $2.4 billion in funding for CCS projects. That money was made available from the massive stimulus package passed by Congress known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
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The European Union is also throwing huge amounts of money at CCS. In mid-2009, the European Commission announced that it was providing about $1.4 billion to thirteen CCS projects across Europe. Europe believes it will be able to collect large amounts of money to support additional CCS projects through the auctioning of carbon credits.
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But here's the reality: No matter how much money the United States and the European Union throw at CCS, it won't work. The volumes of carbon dioxide are too large, and the technical problems—and therefore the costs—associated with sequestering that much gas are just too big.

Only a handful of energy projects are now using CCS. The most familiar of those is one being done by the Norwegian oil giant, StatoilHydro, in the North Sea at the company's Sleipner platform. Since 1996, StatoilHydro has been capturing, compressing, and reinjecting about 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year into a formation under the ocean.
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(The carbon dioxide is stripped out of the natural gas the company is producing at the site.) But Sleipner is tiny compared to overall global emissions. And as author and journalist Jeff Goodell pointed out in a 2008 article on CCS, it would take ten Sleipner-sized projects to offset the emissions from just one large coal-fired power plant .
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The environmental group Greenpeace raises a number of valid points about the problems of CCS, including the length of time needed to deploy it, the additional energy required to fuel the CCS process, the viability of underground storage, cost issues, and long-term liability questions.
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Greenpeace's criticisms are valid, and they are all essentially related to the problem of scale. The volume of global carbon dioxide emissions is staggering. In 2006, global carbon dioxide emissions totaled 29.1 billion tons.
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Let's assume that policymakers mandate a program requiring the annual sequestration of 10 percent—about 3 billion tons—of global carbon dioxide emissions. That figure is a reasonable starting point, and it's equal to about one-half of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, which totaled 5.9 billion tons in 2006.
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But how can we get our minds around that figure? Three billion tons is a difficult number to comprehend, especially when it represents something
that is widely dispersed the way carbon emissions are in the atmosphere. According to calculations done by Vaclav Smil, if that amount of carbon dioxide (remember, it's just 10 percent of global annual carbon dioxide emissions) were compressed to about 1,000 pounds per square inch, it would have about the same volume as the total volume of global annual oil production.
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In other words, the volume of that highly pressurized gas would be approximately equal to the volume of
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of the oil produced around the world in a year. Of course, since no one has ever seen all the world's annual oil production stacked up in one spot, that amount of material is still too large to be understandable. We can bring it into sharper focus by cutting it down to daily figures.

In 2008, global oil production was about 82 million barrels per day.
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Thus, 10 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions in one day would be approximately equal to the daily volume of global oil production. So here's the punch line: Getting rid of just 10 percent of global carbon dioxide per day would mean filling the equivalent of forty-one VLCC supertankers every day. (Each VLCC, or very large crude carrier, holds about 2 million barrels.)
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Given that huge volume of carbon dioxide, the immediate questions are obvious: Where will we put it? And how will we put it there?