A report released today by Climate Central asks a provocative question: Can United States carbon emissions keep falling?
This comes with the year 2050 in mind, by which time climate scientists have said there needs to be a major reduction in greenhouse gas emissions if the worst impacts of climate change are to be avoided. The report by Eric D. Larson from the Energy Systems Analysis Group at Princeton shows that American carbon emissions have dropped by nearly 9 percent since 2005.
The downward trend comes largely as a result of the recession, increased use of natural gas and solar and wind power, and advancements in energy-saving technologies. But the study suggests that the downward trend won’t continue.
Once the economy rebounds, the recession’s restrictive impact on carbon emissions will probably fall away, the report suggests. A stronger economy means greater demand for energy – and when 80 percent of the country’s energy comes from fossil fuels, carbon emissions will probably spike again. Then add in a rising population, which will draw yet more energy. The author says optimistic projections for the future based on the current 9 percent decrease in carbon emissions forget to take these factors into account.
It does list some possible ways to substantially reduce emissions, but that will require a sea change from current consumption practices. One of the report’s suggestions for more emissions reduction is to increase the proportion of electricity derived from natural gas to 44 percent from the current 29 percent over all by 2035, and at the same time, decrease the influence of coal. Others involve fitting coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage capabilities and relying on renewables like wind and solar energy to generate 31 percent of electricity by 2035.
Even the author says it’s a tall order, but an attainable one.
NASA presents a time-lapse animation that tracks the earth’s ocean and sea surface currents over a two-year period. [CNET]
The Environmental Protection Agency again delays issuing final rules on air pollution from natural gas wells drilled through hydraulic fracturing. Under a consent degree, it had faced a Tuesday deadline on rules for emissions from gas wells, compressors, oil storage tanks and other oil-and-gas sector equipment, but the parties agreed on an extension. [The Hill]
Texas ranchers are worried about the expiration of an exemption that allowed them to hunt and trade the scimitar-horned oryx, the addax and the dama gazelle. Without that ability, the ranchers say, they will lose the economic incentive to breed and maintain the herds, efforts which have helped contribute to population rebounds for these species. [The San Antonio Express-News]
F. Brian FergusonCarbon capture is still in its infancy, although it is unfolding in places like the AEP Mountaineer plant in New Haven, W.Va. The government is moving to jump-start research that would limit the energy costs of capture.
The idea, of course, is to reduce the planet-warming capacity of heavy industries that burn fossil fuels (chiefly coal-fired power plants, at this stage) by collecting the carbon dioxide they would ordinarily spew out into the atmosphere and, well, storing it somewhere.
But before society even gets that far, it needs to sort out the capture part. And among the first problems on that side of the equation is that methods currently being explored for capturing carbon dioxide use a lot of energy themselves.
So much, in fact, that adding them to existing, or even new power plants can quickly reduce efficiency and add to the cost of generating power. “These ‘penalties’ can add as much as 80 percent to the cost of electricity for a new pulverized coal plant, and about 35 percent to the cost of electricity for a new advanced gasification plant,” the Department of Energy said Wednesday in announcing a round of federal funding for 10 projects aimed at minimizing the carbon-capture toll. Read more…
Associated PressA Dow Chemical plant in Midland, Mich. Company executives say they are concerned about the long-term supply of natural gas.
Dow Chemical, which uses a lot of energy plus copious amounts of natural gas as an ingredient of the chemicals it manufactures, is sitting pretty for the moment because the price of that fuel is down sharply. Still, it is worried about the future.
It sees vast opportunities for future efficiency gains – but mostly outside the company. Dow says it reduced its energy intensity – the amount of energy used per pound of product – by 38 percent between 2000 and 2009, saving 1.7 quadrillion BTUs. That’s a very large amount – as much energy as all residential buildings in California use in a full year, the company says. The United States consumed about 94.5 quadrillion BTUs last year for all purposes.
Yet although Dow slashed its consumption, it is acutely aware that the price of natural gas, now a little over $4 per million BTUs, was over $10 as recently as 2008. And one move that would drive the price back up would be for Congress to impose a price on emissions of carbon dioxide, which could lead utilities to cut emissions by running their natural gas-fired generators more and their coal plants less.
That would increase demand for natural gas, but not the supply, said Peter A. Molinaro, Dow’s vice president for federal and state government affairs. “We’re really good at legislating demand,’’ he said. “We’re not so good at legislating supply.’’ Read more…
Bill Clinton weighs in on shutting down BP’s blown-out well: he says it “may become necessary” for the Navy to use explosives on the seafloor.
Slow but steady leaks could badly undermine carbon capture and storage projects, a study finds.
Speakers at an international forestry conference link deforestation in Africa to climate change and globalization. “We need to show, financially, that trees are worth more alive than dead,” says Kamalesh Sharma, secretary general of the Commonwealth of Nations.
As another set of international climate negotiations creeps closer, leaders say passage of even a watered-down climate bill in the United States would be a positive step. “It would give a psychological push to the negotiations,” the European Union’s climate commissioner tells Reuters.
Millions of wildebeest, zebras and antelopes begin a spectacular migration north, from Serengeti in Tanzania to the Masai Mara in Kenya.
A.J. Mast for The New York Times Workers staging concrete pipe last year at a Duke Energy coal plant under construction in Edwardsport, Ind. It was designed to allow for the possibility of carbon dioxide capture.
Given the dicey odds for congressional approval of climate legislation, at least in the near term, a company that sells equipment for reducing carbon dioxide emissions is promoting a new strategy: federal money for tactical planning.
That company would be General Electric, which makes equipment that removes carbon dioxide from coal through a gasification process and stores it underground, preventing it from entering the atmosphere. Coal is the most carbon-rich fuel in common use.
The technology is expensive and will remain that way until several commercial-scale projects have been built, said Monte Atwell, general manager of gasification at G.E. But few emitters in the United States will deploy the capture equipment until there is a government mandate to do so or a charge for carbon dioxide emissions, the thinking goes. By that time, the world may be in a big hurry to slash carbon dioxide emissions, Mr. Atwell said in a meeting with reporters.
G.E.’s proposal? Have the federal government provide money for the planning work on carbon capture and storage, such as the drafting of designs and the drilling of wells to gauge the ability of rock deep beneath the surface of coal plants to hold carbon dioxide. The idea is to speed things up. Read more…
In recent months, American legislators and energy experts have lavished attention on a carbon capture and storage project in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where millions of tons of carbon dioxide from a North Dakota coal gasification plant are pumped into a large oil field to recover hard-to-reach pockets of fuel.
But in Fort Nelson in northern British Columbia, the natural gas giant Spectra Energy has been quietly investigating an alternative approach to carbon capture, one that can produce clean electricity and won’t involve pumping more fossil fuel to the surface.
“The idea is to produce green natural gas,” says Gary Weilinger, vice president of strategic development and external affairs for Spectra’s transmission unit in Calgary.
Unlike oil refineries, natural gas plants strip out carbon dioxide as part of the purification process. Some 230,000 tonnes are sequestered annually at eight of Spectra’s smaller British Columbia facilities, including one deemed to be among the largest such operations in the world by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Since 2008, however, Spectra and three government agencies have been looking to retrofit the Fort Nelson plant to allow it to sequester up to 2 million tonnes per year (equivalent to removing about 400,000 cars from the road) in a “saline formation” roughly one mile beneath the surface, not far from the plant.
C.I.R.I.Cook Inlet Region, Inc., an Alaska Native corporation, is pursuing an underground coal gasification project on corporation land near Anchorage. The technology could offer a way to harness coal resources without the environmental impacts of mining and burning coal.
When developers approached Cook Inlet Region Inc., an energy and resource development company in Anchorage, Alaska, with the idea of using underground coal gasification to tap into a huge coal field nearby, officials thought the plan sounded too good to be true.
A well would be drilled into a coal seam deep underground. Oxygen or air would be injected to start a combustion process, and the resulting synthesis gas, or syngas, would be produced through a second well.
Carbon dioxide could be stripped out before burning the syngas to make electricity.
“The more we learned, the more we thought, well, maybe it will work,” said Jim Jager, C.I.R.I.’s director of communications. After turning down proposals to mine coal at the site – Mr. Jager cited a desire not to “destroy” the land – the company recently announced plans to develop an underground coal gasification project with a 100-megawatt power plant and carbon capture and sequestration technology.
As the nation looks for ways to burn coal without producing so much carbon dioxide, developers, researchers, and environmentalists are all approaching underground coal gasification, or U.C.G., with cautious optimism.
“The technology is promising,” said George Peridas of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s at a stage where we need additional research and development and pilot projects. We are watching closely, and we hope that it succeeds.”
Researchers have identified a number of potential geologic formations that could be used to store CO2 emitted by China’s coal power plants and other industries. (Click to enlarge.)
China has vast underground repositories that could store more than a century’s worth of carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities, according to a report to be released by the United States Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The study, conducted with scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that the geologic formations are in close to a large percentage of the country’s power plants.
That could permit “the continued use of cheap, domestic coal within China while supporting CO2 emissions reductions via the capture and geologic storage of the associated CO2,” according to an eight-page summary of the study [pdf].
The full report will be released in November.
“A lot of the policy dialogue and technical discussions have this really sharp dichotomy — either you use coal and bad things happen to the environment, or you forgo coal and bad things happen to the economy,” James Dooley, a scientist at the laboratory and an author of the report, said in an interview. “We’re trying to say maybe there’s a third way here.”
The European Commission this week introduced an open-access online tool to monitor the development of about a dozen low-carbon technologies in the trade bloc.
The commission said its Strategic Energy Technology Plan Information System, offered ways for citizens, researchers, investors and policy makers to map funding for projects in areas including hydropower, wind, photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, wave, geothermal, bioenergy, carbon capture and storage, smart grids, nuclear fission and fusion, hydrogen and fuel cells.
Earthquakes and other unexpected events could be catastrophic, a study suggests.
In the face of mounting support for clean coal and the billions being invested in carbon capture and storage, or C.C.S., technology, a new assessment from the University of Toronto’s Munk Center for International Studies has a stern warning for policy-makers: there could be dramatic unintended environmental consequences to sequestering huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the earth’s mantle.
The push for C.C.S. is largely based on the energy industry’s experience with enhanced oil recovery, a technique for pumping carbon dioxide into dwindling oil wells in to force out the remaining crude.
One major got under way at a West Virginia coal-fired power plant last Thursday.
But the paper’s author, Graham Thomson, a journalist at The Edmonton Journal, argues that there’s a unproven leap between enhanced oil recovery projects and long-term, large-scale carbon capture and storage.
“The politicians are saying we can do this, and the scientists are saying, ‘we don’t know,’” says Mr. Thomson, who covers provincial politics.
Among the potential hurdles — and hazards — that the technology faces, according to Mr. Thomson:
Kevin Riddell for The New York TimesThe pumping station for the underground injection of carbon dioxide at American Electric Power’s Mountaineer plant, which began pumping the gas underground on Thursday.
Technicians at a West Virginia coal-fired power facility began injecting carbon dioxide captured from the plant into rock deep underground on Thursday evening, in an experiment to determine the costs and technical feasibility of carbon capture and storage.
The chemical plant has been running for weeks, but it was leaving too much water in the carbon dioxide, a combination that produces acid that can corrode the piping.
But at 6:50 p.m. Thursday, after some tinkering, the flow was judged dry enough to run through compressors and into the ground, to a layer of rock about a mile and a half down. The carbon dioxide, compressed to liquid form, was injected at a rate of a little more than five tons an hour.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, investors can invest in emissions-reduction projects in the developing world exchange for valuable credits.
ShutterstockShould it earn carbon credits?
The system, called the Clean Development Mechanism, is supposed to transform energy systems in poorer countries and allow richer countries to offset their own emissions.
Projects have included cleaning up factories in China, capturing methane from landfill sites in India, and distributing energy-efficient light bulbs in parts of Africa.
So what about projects to build nuclear power stations, which produce no greenhouse gases while generating electricity? Or technologies that could capture and store carbon dioxide released from factories and from coal and gas plants?
Are nuclear and carbon capture sufficiently clean to earn the same kinds of credits?
The Department of Energy announced $27.6 million in research grants on Monday, for projects intended to simulate the underground storage of carbon dioxide.
The 19 awards, to be distributed over four years, will be supplemented by $8.2 million paid by the recipients, which are predominantly universities.
Carbon capture and storage technology — or C.C.S. — is especially important for coal-fired power plants, which account for close to half of the country’s electricity use and a substantial portion of its carbon emissions.
“People think the elephant in the room is coal and what we’re going to do with coal,” said Michael Webber, an energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Basically,” Mr. Webber said, “this deals with the elephant in the room.” He also said that the government outlays appeared generous by research grant standards.
An advisory group in Alberta, Canada, is proposing that carbon dioxide captured from large industrial operations could be pumped into dozens of semi-depleted oil fields, with the idea of extracting billions of dollars of uneconomic crude from conventional Alberta reserves.
The Alberta Carbon Capture and Storage Development Council, a federal-provincial group comprised of oil industry veterans, said in a report officially released last week that the combination of carbon sequestration and “enhanced oil recovery” techniques offered long-term opportunities for an industry that bet massively on the oil sands, only to see crude prices plunge to levels that have put the brakes on many large-scale projects.
Pumping carbon dioxide into oil fields to help squeeze out more oil has “great potential,” the report said, but comes with high upfront costs. In general, according to the report, carbon capture and storage “is expensive and currently uneconomic.”
First, the jet stream caused a cold snap by bringing Arctic air farther south than normal, but when it shifted north, it allowed tornado-causing moist air to move into the Midwest.
How are climate change, scarcer resources, population growth and other challenges reshaping society? From science to business to politics to living, our reporters track the high-stakes pursuit of a greener globe in a dialogue with experts and readers.