Archive for the ‘Climate Change’ Category

ASPO-USA World Oil Conference: Day 1 Report

Posted by wastedenergy on October 8, 2010

Day 1 of ASPO-USA’s conference was an enlightening perspective from a good number of viewpoints on a variety of environmental and energy matters concerning us today and tomorrow. It was a great privilege to attend a meeting of so many minds today, but I do have to say, I was a little disappointed in the turnout. Very few public officials seemed to feel the matter of peak oil and energy and resource security matters deserved their attention on this first day of the conference, and only a handful of media were on hand to record today’s proceedings.

I felt a real diversity in the audience and speakers was lacking as well. As I scanned over the audience and listened to today’s questions (didn’t manage to get myself called on today, but we’ll see if I can get the moderator’s attention at Arthur Berman’s session tomorrow) there was certainly a diversity of intellectual viewpoints expressed, but it was disappointing to look out onto a sea of mostly white, middle-aged faces. It is our younger generation that holds the greatest stake in the critical resource and environmental challenges of tomorrow, and we must begin to speak out for ourselves and our own interests in these issues that will define our future and the fate of the world in the century and more to come. Just as importantly, it is imperative that the voices of communities of color be heard, who have very often been and are still today disproportionately affected by many of the environmental and public health hazards created by our modern, industrial-energy-based society. To consider a path forward on energy without paying heed to environmental justice matters is to ignore the very most pressing problems of environmental health, the toxic byproduct from communities handed the privilege of outsourcing their ecological footprint to someone else’s backyard.

While the conference provided a great deal of analysis on the availability of oil and other fossil fuels, another matter needing attention that was scarcely discussed was the impending and critical shortage of many other mineral resources, perhaps most importantly including rare earth minerals, and the urgent need to develop practical and environmentally sound ways of developing supply chains for not just energy, but all the minerals we take for granted that have become so important to such modern luxuries as radar systems, hard drives, cellular phones, hybrid car batteries, gearless wind turbines, and of course, oil refining catalysts. A presentation providing an update on rare earth and other critical material issues would certainly be more than appropriate considering the subject matter dealt with at this event (Hint: ASPO, I’d be more than happy to fill this role for you or moderate such a session if needed at next year’s conference, and may or may not know one or two other people who could talk about it too, unless the shortage hits before October 2011 and spells The End Of The World As We Know It).

HIGHLIGHT: Catching a Cheseapeake Energy employee making an offhand remark to the woman sitting next to her about the climate change sessions being “balderdash.” Very professional, and bonus points for using a word seldom heard since the 18th century. Her comment went a long way toward showing just how much the natural gas companies really care about building climate-friendly bridges to the future, or whether they are really just interested in making a quick buck off those who might otherwise make an actual difference and in the process burn down some of those same bridges.

Some of the more memorable sessions I attended today:

Jeffrey Brown, independent petroleum geologist, spoke about the effect of net oil exports on the availability of the petroleum fuels we so take for granted in virtually everything in society that moves. The supply of total world oil production and the amount that is actually exported from the countries producing it, from the standpoint of a country that imports the vast majority of its oil like, say, the United States of America, is actually a lot more important than the effects of the ”global peak” (which, incidentally, already occurred, back in late 2004). The take-home point was that we all need to start thinking about the peak oil issue @ way sooner than right now, and going back to just yesterday won’t even help in the slightest.

Jonathan Callahan informed us that Gas Balancing Alerts were forced three times in the United Kingdom last year, and while he believes overall world production of natural gas will continue to increase, natural gas is of course a regional game, and it is in the very near future (actually, the present) that natural gas and other shortages will begin to rear their ugly heads in the UK and elsewhere. Don’t hold your breath for an explosion in U.S. shale gas availability either, although given the amount of fracking going on over here, you might want to just hold your breath in general.

Oh, and of course, lest you forgot about China’s coal-truck-induced 20-day traffic jams, China is burning a lot of coal. A lot lot lot. India too. Also, the United States and the rest of the world still burn a lot of coal – even more than before, in fact. All told, pretty much more coal all around than anyone in their right mind can possibly imagine, and definitely way more than anyone would ever want to. In fact, we burn so much coal that we may darn well be pretty tootin’ close to doing something a lot of people thought we could never ever do: run out of it.

Quick question I never got to ask Dave Summers, (Heading Out over on TheOilDrum), just to play devil’s advocate: According to Dave, the claim by some recently published research that we have already reached global peak coal production is false because unlike oil, we can directly measure how much coal remains by going underground and looking at the “thickness,” and we know a lot still remains. While some coal reserves have been downgraded to mere resources, he asserts that as the global coal price rises, they will surely be upgraded to reserves again. My question: if the price of coal rises, why the hell are we still mining coal? I thought the only reason we mined it was because it was so cheap, at least until you start actually putting a price on its pollution? And isn’t it a bit of an oversimplification to outright dismiss alternative energy technologies while reducing modern coal mining to “a pick and a shovel”? One could just as easily say solar energy is as simple as planting trees, or that wind energy is as simple as putting up a sail (actually, come to think of it, they are). Unlike a few professed photovoltaic “skeptics” (you can show someone something a billion times and they’ll still be convinced it doesn’t work), we know there are actual alternatives to burning coal to generate what people are actually looking for. Sure, we’ll still have plenty of coal for the future – coal to hopefully make into graphene and activated carbon. We just won’t have enough to burn for energy.

Finally, in what certainly seems to me to be an abuse of the ”net energy” concept and a little graphplay that hopefully wasn’t lost upon an audience that professes not to be innumerate, I’m sure the Dutch will be interested to know that you can’t actually get any energy from the wind (and I guess unlike oil and gas, better technogy doesn’t improve the outlook either). What a shame.

Looking forward to Day 2, and I’ll do my best to be a real thorn in everyone’s side!

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: ASPO-USA 2010, coal, gas, oil, rare earth minerals | Leave a Comment »

Playing With Fire

Posted by wastedenergy on September 11, 2010

By all accounts, 2010 has not been a good year in the press for fossil fuel interests. The media furor surrounding the Deepwater Horizon blowout that killed eleven rig workers and the subsequent release of nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico highlighted some of the risks associated with continued reliance on increasingly remote energy resources in challenging and hostile territory. The coverage has raised the profile of discussions surrounding a host of other incidents that might otherwise be considered unfortunate but rather mundane and un-newsworthy, from major mining accidents around the world to a pair of ruptured pipelines carrying synthetic crude from the Canadian tar sands, and even another, albeit smaller, rig fire in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this month (though no one was injured and, so far as anyone has been able to tell, no additional oil has been released as a result of this particular incident). Meanwhile, the rhetoric in public discussions over how to manage the problem of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels heated up along with the weather this summer, with Bill McKibben’s F-bombs speaking for many other advocates for change as the U.S. Senate deferred action on the issue and the EPA assured industry leaders that its regulatory approach would not be too tough on business.

If public scrutiny of fossil fuel businesses goes back at least to the days of Standard Oil, the lines recited by business and government leaders to deflect criticism and assure the public that they are working on the problem and that everything will soon get back to normal certainly come across as old hat as well. Oil companies’ methods of demonstrating their commitment to our collective energy future and to the development of renewable alternatives and energy efficiency are tried and true, since they perfected the art of appearing profoundly concerned during the oil shocks of the 1970′s that followed the peak in U.S. Lower 48 oil production and OPEC’s subsequent assumption of control of the world supply of oil. So it is hardly unfair for critics to view as insincere the token commitments we see today, with utilities like Southern Company touting their “common sense” approach to energy (hint: common sense involves an awful lot of coal) and oil majors Exxon-Mobil, Shell and BP investing large-sounding sums, though never quite enough to threaten the viability of their oil business, in development of algal biodiesel, energy efficiency technologies, and solar panels.

One oil billionaire in particular has been making the rounds on the media and public speaking circuit for the past couple of years, talking up a big game about what his umbrella company, BP Capital Management, has been doing to help save America from its energy crisis by investing in gas, gas, gas, more gas, and, on a particularly breezy day, wind power (although only if the price of gas is not too low). In case you forgot about the other BP, here he is:

The Gasman Cometh: Is the wildcatter and corporate raider ready to fight for a clean energy future?

With some players in the energy business going as far as to claim that the U.S. will become “the next Saudi Arabia of energy” with its vast resource of shale gas, with many businesses and potential leaseholders eager to cash in on a potential drilling boom, and with politicians and industry groups clamoring to proclaim natural gas as “the cleanest fossil fuel,” “a transition fuel,” and “a bridge to America’s Clean Energy Future,” the race is on to tap into sources of gas north, south, east and west.

Unfortunately, making that transition hasn’t been quite as much of a gas as some of the rhetoric might suggest. For one thing, Pickens and some of the electric utilities have been a bit wishy-washy on making the transition move past the gas phase: with gas prices so low, they say, there isn’t really much point in dealing with all the hassle of actually doing the renewable part, as it’s just not competitive. The part you don’t hear about as much is that with gas prices so low, natural gas isn’t really terribly competitive either: the limited field experience with shale gas suggests that the short shelf life of gas wells may not be enough to recoup the investment in more expensive horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology, at least not at today’s prices of $4 or 5 per thousand cubic feet. The high costs of drilling and widespread reports of contamination of water supplies from drilling fluids also raise questions about the long-term viability of shale gas as an energy source. And the quantity of oil consumed and pollution generated by trucks carrying drilling fluid and equipment to and from drilling and disposal sites places in doubt many of the potential benefits of gas for cutting consumption of imported oil and cutting pollution from dirtier fossil fuels. At the very least, companies involved in gas drilling will soon face an additional cost of complying with EPA’s request for information on chemicals used in fracturing fluid, although as per the 2005 U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act, fluid disposal sites will still not be required to comply with the same clean water regulations applied to other industries.

With so much potential resource available, both conventional and unconventional natural gas are sure to continue playing a role in the U.S. energy mix, as they have for decades. But even the ”cleanest” fossil fuel is hardly as unproblematic or as secure in its long-term supply as its promoters suggest, for both economic and ecological reasons. And unfortunately, the recent spike in hydraulic fracturing (and, from time to time, in the chemical oxygen demand of the municipal water supply) isn’t the only boom associated with natural gas. With most of the U.S. reliant on natural gas for heating, we’ve most all become accustomed to inviting the gas man into our homes, but what might really make some of the problems with dependence on any fossil fuel hit home are the big accidents, like the gas pipeline explosion last week in California that left four Bay Area residents dead and turned the surrounding area into a hollow burnt-out shell. And of course, it was the gas flowing from the Macondo well that ignited aboard the Deepwater Horizon and caused the rig to catch fire and sink on that fateful day in April. What these accidents and the steady accumulation of hydraulic fracturing horror stories reveal is that in the end, dependence on any finite energy resource means you’re playing the same game: depletion, risks from an ever-expanding network of infrastructure, and continually increasing costs both at the wellhead and to the environment and public health.

Play with fire, and you’re bound to get burned eventually.

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption | Tagged: California pipeline explosion, hydraulic fracturing, natural gas, t. boone pickens | Leave a Comment »

Training Wheels

Posted by wastedenergy on September 8, 2010

What has four wheels and flies? If you guessed “an automobile culture that’s rotten to its core,” you may be onto something. But what can be done to make it right?

We can start by looking at what makes it wrong, a big part of which is reliance on polluting liquid fuels that just don’t come as easy as they once did. We already know that a dependence on fossil fuels harms the environment and will make life increasingly difficult for more and more people as we progress into the twenty-first century. The fuels that remain in the ground are expensive, hard to reach, and often of very low quality, and even those fuels that will be made available will require massive diversions of capital and resources to enormous new production facilities and transportation infrastructure, reprepresenting ever-growing network of Deepwater Horizons waiting to happen and an escalating assault on the stable climate systems upon which human civilization has been precariously built. But imagine life with no vehicles, no motorized transport at all, and the consequences are also far more dire than a cancelled vacation here and there. The inability to maintain efficient networks of transportation and delivery easily means the end of economic growth, and even beyond that, the total collapse of markets, prospects of not just wars but world wars for remaining supplies, and perhaps even the utter end of technological humankind as we know it. Some people believe it is already too late to do anything about it and that our current economic troubles represent merely the beginning of a much longer, inexorable descent into chaos and societal collapse. They may be right, and it is a sobering thought indeed. They are even more likely to be right if we do little to nothing to change our energy consumption patterns in advance of what lies over the horizon.

Clearly, the consequences of an imminent and possibly quite steep decline in supplies of motor fuels are vastly more far-reaching than a few more cents, or even dollars, per gallon. And yet most of us think nothing of burning a few gallons of the stuff every day taking the kids to soccer practice, or more than a few lifting a giant chunk of metal into the sky to carry us across paltry distances, albeit only after spending an hour or two checking in. Meanwhile, the political aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon has focused less on viable alternatives and long-term planning and more on meaningless bickering over a moratorium on deepwater drilling, as if that even addressed the issue at hand. Imagine what it takes to keep pumping a few billion gallons every single day year in and year out, and you get a sense of just how irrelevant any new drilling and any new discoveries will be in prolonging the fantasy of happy motoring. And it’s not just cars, either: without oil, we can’t run all manner of planes, trains and automobiles, from the tractors working the fields to the trucks that deliver food to the grocery, to all the aircraft packed with fresh off-season produce flown in daily from the other half of the world, never mind all those plastics and industrial materials from fungicide to hand soap. So regardless of how one might feel about new drilling and pipelines filled with synthetic tar sand crude, it would seem to be a no-brainer to support infrastructure needed to actually get OFF oil in a few areas, and at the very least save what remains for where it is really needed. Right?

Wrong. Here you can find yet another case proving that you don’t have to know the first thing about how the world actually works to get a business degree, or even to teach business. For one thing, it demonstrates the kind of paralytic thinking on investments for the future and myopic focus on immediate short-term matters that has for so long held back economists from adequately performing their charge of helping society make good decisions in allocation of resources, the same sort of thinking that got us to the point of crisis in the first place and now threatens any hope of a real and lasting economic recovery. Forget the proven track record of high-speed rail in Europe and the fact that China is now making laps around the United States in becoming the technological leader of the new century. Conveniently ignore that austerity measures help nobody, that no infrastructure project has ever succeeded without the support of government institutions, and that it was the abandonment of government support for critical infrastructure, under the misleading banner of reducing debt, that caused the Great Depression to sink to its lowest depths in the late 1930′s. Continually call for delay and cancellation of the transition to sustainable transportation infrastructure by reiterating the self-fulfilling prophecy that jobs in manufacturing will be added elsewhere rather than at home. And never mind the casual sidestepping of the job creation benefits and economic revitalization along new rail corridors in a state like California suffering under staggering unemployment. It is the following sentence that is especially telling, and troubling, in indicating where we stand on addressing matters of energy and our collective future:

“California doesn’t need high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles: With 10 airports and six competing airlines, we don’t have to worry about one strike or terrorist shutting down the whole system.”

Does anything about the above statement seem a bit odd in light of the physical reality of fossil fuels and the crushing effects of oil dependence upon the economy? Do the authors truly believe that a terrorist attack is the only thing that could cause a systemic failure in such a transportation network?

It is the total ignorance on matters of natural resources and ecology of today’s business and political leaders, the voices speaking loudest on matters of how to best address, or rather ignore, our economic crisis, that should truly raise alarms. If leading “thinkers” like these have their way, you can forget about any kind of smooth transition away from the fossil fuel economy. Theirs is a prescription to crash and burn, and yet they cannot even see the stakes at hand because the very ideology embedded in their academic and professional training does not allow them to understand or even acknowledge the physical limitations of business-as-usual, as set by immutable geological and ecological principles. With this level of thinking on economic matters, you can be sure we’ve crossed the bridge to nowhere and are now headed full bore off the cliff and into the sea. We’d better start laying down some track turning us back around in the opposite direction, and fast.

At long last, it’s time to leave the past behind…

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Urban Planning | Tagged: aviation, electric rail, high-speed rail, infrastructure, jobs, peak oil, transportation | Leave a Comment »

Kochheads

Posted by wastedenergy on September 6, 2010

Well now. If you missed this one, you might want to go back and have a look real quick. In what amounts to a rather unsurprising turn of events, the number one historical benefactor of climate change denial “science” and one of the largest air pollution violators in the United States, the conglomerate Koch Industries, turns out also to be behind more than a few astroturfing efforts today to seed anti-government vitriol among the general populace. And, frighteningly enough, it seems to be working. Over half of Americans today either don’t believe climate change is real or don’t believe human activity is causing it, a surprising change from just a few short years ago considering all it takes to see how the climate has changed is a quick glance at this summer’s headlines and a short trip out the front door. And an anti-government populist sentiment seems to have taken hold over the electorate as well, with fringe candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky making inroads right and, well, right.

Atlas Farted

If the effects of such a populist libertarian movement are rather unpredictable and could be far-reaching in producing a moment of political psychosis for the United States, the causes are quite evident and have a lot to do with this pair of Dubious Brothers. Of course, you might say, this sentiment couldn’t possibly be based entirely on political astroturfing, right? Aren’t people just agreeing with the standard talking points in support of neoliberal economics, as conveniently provided by the also-Koch-funded-and-founded Mercatus and Cato Institutes?

I had heard a little bit about the new exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum funded by Koch money, the Hall of Human Origins, and so I decided to check it out over the weekend. Curiously, the exhibit opens with a statement about adaptability to changing climate conditions, as if that were the number one defining characteristic of human evolution. A visitor unfamiliar with the Koch ideological vision might be surprised by this front-and-center emphasis on the matter of climate change, perhaps wondering why a public institution like the Smithsonian might stick its neck out in support of the claim that today’s climate changes are not really so bad (after all, we can always just adapt by building underground cities and evolving curved spines, right?). Other gems included a graph showing global average temperature over the past ten million years (cold was up and warm was down, for some reason), to conveniently obscure the rapid changes of the past century or so as a small and steeply downward-sloping blip at the end of the graph. With so much variation in the past, how could anyone possibly worry about the changes we are undergoing today? Never mind that the pace of change is much faster today than any paleo-climate records show and that the causes can be more or less entirely ascribed to human-induced changes to the composition of the atmosphere from activities like Koch Industries’ lucrative oil refining operations. Why do anything to change course when adaptation is clearly so easy? I’m sure that twenty million Pakistanis displaced by flooding this summer would agree.

The latest Koch effort to fund “science” in the private interest comes in the form of $1 million in support of Proposition 23, a referendum that would suspend Assembly Bill 32, the California cap on greenhouse gas emissions. And, predictably, the Koch-funded Tea Party plans to hold a rally in California on September 12 in support of Prop. 23. Sure, that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Tea Partiers care deeply about individual autonomy and states’ rights, after all, and they don’t want interference from outsiders. Unless, of course, those outsiders happen to represent Texas oil money. Remember, Big Government telling you what to do is Bad; Big Business is a universal Good. Unless, of course, those big businesses happen to be a part of California’s homegrown clean energy industry that threatens to provide competition to status quo energy conglomerates and make the United States a meaningful player in the renewable energy economy of the future. That would also be Bad.

Of course, stronger hurricanes and heat waves and more frequent droughts and floods are not the only ways the climate is changing. With anti-government populism taking a strong foothold in American politics and threatening to overturn the Democratic majority in Congress, changes in the political climate are becoming increasingly difficult to deny as well. Sooner or later, however, no amount of money poured into the political coffers of right-wing fringe political candidates will be enough to deny the urgency of government action on climate change. When that happens, and it looks increasingly like it has already begun, we’ll be glad California took the lead in adopting greenhouse gas emissions caps and promoting the development of clean energy technologies, so that we have the options we need to cope. Unless, of course, those caps are overturned and we have no plan going forward except to continue depending upon the increasingly dirty, expensive, and unreliable technologies supplied by Koch and the like.

But that is exactly what they had in mind, isn’t it?

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged: follow the money trail, liars, lies, lying liars | Leave a Comment »

Breaking Down Clean Coal

Posted by wastedenergy on August 18, 2010

This piece is a revised version of an article originally posted in April 2010.

Breaking Down “Clean Coal”

Jeremy Abramowitz, April 2010 (Revised August 2010)

Coal, the fuel that helped spark the Industrial Revolution, remains the primary fuel for electricity generation worldwide as well as in the United States today. However, in recent years, the problem of global climate change has attained political salience, potentially limiting the role that this fuel can play under a future scenario of greenhouse gas regulations. Meanwhile, the polluting effects of coal mining and combustion on the air, water and soil remain as significant a challenge today, with coal providing such a large fraction of global primary energy, as they did during the early ages of coal use. With both U.S. and worldwide supplies of coal in relative abundance compared to oil and gas, a number of concepts have been proposed to continue taking advantage of this inexpensive and comparatively widespread resource while minimizing the environmental impacts associated with its use. Rather than a single technology, the idea of “clean coal” may be better understood as a collection of different technologies, each with its own benefits and drawbacks.

In this article, I explore a number of technological concepts that fall under the umbrella of “clean coal,” including co-firing with renewable biomass, installation of air pollution control equipment, and more innovative ideas such as carbon capture and gasification of coal for use in combined cycle plants similar in design to today’s natural gas-fired power plants. I also examine the viability of producing synthetic liquid fuels from coal as a wedge against petroleum depletion. In each case, I examine the potential economic and environmental benefits of each option, as well as the disadvantages and obstacles to their implementation. While some of these concepts are fully proven from a technical standpoint, the available evidence suggests that no single technology or combination of technologies is capable of addressing all of the environmental or economic challenges likely to arise from continued dependence on coal as a major source of energy in the coming decades, underscoring the importance of building viable alternatives to address these challenges over the long run.

Biomass Co-Firing

One of the most effective ways of reducing pollution associated with burning coal for electricity is to directly replace it with a renewable fuel of similar quality, usually wood. Out of all the fossil fuels, coal contains the highest ash (inorganic) content and produces the most climate-altering greenhouse gases, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, heavy metal emissions, and waste to be disposed. It also produces more of these pollutants than wood, a relatively similar solid fuel whose physical and chemical properties make it a decent replacement for coal in generating base load power, at least up to a point.[1] While wood is less energy dense than higher quality coals, it is also renewable, produces lower quantities of most air emissions, avoids waste and damage to the landscape associated with mining coal, and is carbon neutral assuming the sources of biomass are sustainably managed.[2] Since wood is physically similar to coal and is comparable to lower-quality coals such as lignite in energy density, the two fuels can burn in the same furnaces at the same time so long as certain constraints are met.

While direct co-firing of biomass with coal can be effective as a way of reducing harmful emissions, there are limitations to this practice as well. The lower energy content of wood compared to most coal used in electricity generation today renders long-distance transport inconvenient. To maintain positive net energy and avoid exorbitant costs, wood-fired plants, including plants where it is co-fired with coal, must be located within a certain radius of sources of harvestable wood, determined by the fuel’s growth rate and energy content. This limitation places a practical size limit on direct-fired biomass power plants, typically 50-150 megawatts of electric power.[3] This size is much smaller than the gigawatt-plus size typical of coal-fired power stations. There is also a limit to how much wood can be practically burned in a coal furnace due to the fuels’ differing requirements for emissions control; for instance, wood produces fewer total particulates, but they tend to be of a larger size than coal particulate emissions, resulting in a greater overall mass of particulate emissions.[4] Wood also has different ash handling requirements, since it primarily generates bottom ash that remains in the furnace, while coal ash is lighter, higher in metal content, and is more likely to be entrained in flue gases exiting the furnace. While wood can make a useful substitute for some of the coal used in power generation, the physical properties of the fuel prevent it from being a fully acceptable replacement for all uses.

While wood and other biomass can substitute for some quantity of coal-fired generation, physical differences in the two fuels as well as insufficient total energy resources in sustainably managed biomass make it an insufficient replacement to match the raw power and infrastructure in place for coal-fired utility generation.

“Conventional” Clean Coal: Air Pollution Control and Clean Combustion

Out of all the approaches to “clean coal” being developed today, the most “conventional” and least revolutionary in its concept is also one that, perhaps not coincidentally, can also achieve some of the most significant and measurable benefits in terms of energy efficiency and air quality. Rather than designing entirely new plant concepts from scratch, this concept instead works to optimize standard coal combustion plants to maximize efficiency and energy recovery and minimize the production and release of pollutants. The idea is to take “the devil we know” of combustion of coal to generate power, something we already know is technically feasible, and make it work in a way that is more environmentally benign. In this case, improvements have been realized and progress continues to be made in three main areas: clean combustion, flue gas purification, and increased efficiency.

Clean combustion refers to optimizing the process of burning coal, or other fuels, to release more useful heat and generate fewer harmful pollutants from the outset, prior to the effects of any pollution control exhaust post-treatment. While the combustion process itself has little effect on the release of certain pollutants intrinsic to the physical material of coal on a per-unit-combusted basis, such as mercury, arsenic, lead or antimony present in coal ash, it can have a significant impact on the formation of pollutants that form due to combustion itself, such as smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) as well as carbon monoxide (CO) and other incomplete combustion byproducts such as volatile organic compounds (VOC’s) and black carbon (soot). One of the challenges of designing an optimized combustion system is that soot, VOC and CO emissions tend to form due to insufficient oxygen supply or insufficient mixing of fuel and air in the combustion chamber and are primarily eliminated through a more “complete” combustion, whereas NOx tends to form due to an overabundance of oxygen and forms preferentially at higher temperatures typically associated with more complete combustion.[5] Combustion system improvements must therefore balance NOx control with formation of pollutants resulting from incomplete burning like CO or, in the case of waste combustors, dioxins and furans. The preferred method today is to promote more complete combustion to avoid the formation of a wide range of organic pollutants, then to reduce NOx through a combination of effective control over combustion temperature and exhaust post-treatment with ammonia or other chemicals to dissociate NOx particles into benign atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen.

Flue gas purification, or air pollution control (APC), refers to technologies used to condition a power plant’s emissions after the combustion of fuel but before the release of gaseous and suspended particulate combustion byproducts into the atmosphere. Each device or system corresponds to a given pollutant or category of pollutants to be removed from the flue gas stream. Reducing chemicals such as ammonia or urea, along with catalysts in the case of selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems, are used to treat the exhaust to remove NOx. Slaked or slurried lime is used to neutralize acid gases such as sulfur dioxide. Packed beds or spray injection of activated carbon, with its high surface area to volume ratio, are used to adsorb heavy metals and other particulate fly ash. Electrostatic precipitators and fabric filters remove adsorbed and residual particulates entrained in the flue gases as well as reagents from other APC processes. Most APC devices are applied on the “cold side” of the heat exchangers once the heat used to do work has been transferred to the boiler fluid. The main exception is in NOx control, wherein the reducing agents ammonia and its precursor urea are typically added on the hot side to eliminate NOx in order to meet the temperature range requirements for the reduction reaction.

Efficiency improvements of conventional solid coal combustion plants can take a number of forms, and each reduces the environmental footprint of a power plant’s output work by using rather than wasting more of the energy contained in coal’s chemical bonds and released when it is burned. Technical improvements that fall into this category include improved furnace and boiler design to keep heat inside the power generation cycle rather than releasing it through ash quenching and condensing of steam, reductions in parasitic load demand from pumps, induced draft fans, and other plant components, and improved efficiency of the steam turbines used to transform heat energy into electricity. The advancements that have been achieved in conventional coal plant performance demonstrate significant promise and room for further improvements; however, they also demonstrate the limitations of existing technology, as coal combustion and turbine design have been continually improving for many years, yet power generation from this source still generates considerable pollution. Potential areas of further improvement are being exhausted. “Conventional clean coal” offers promise for the future, perhaps more so than any other form of coal power, but it is still far from unproblematic. Analogous and in some cases greater improvements are likely to occur in alternative energy sources as well, as has certainly been the case with wind power and other renewable energy sources over the past decade, and coal may not remain the winner in pure economic terms that it is today with many of the changes listed above as fuel prices and capital costs of new plants and retrofits continue to increase.

Carbon Capture and Sequestration

Carbon Capture and Sequestration, also known as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), is the “clean coal” concept being promoted the most heavily by utilities today. If successful, the concept would offer a way to continue burning coal for electricity while avoiding major costs expected under greenhouse gas emission regulations. Such regulations appear likely over the long run, whether they take the form of energy and climate legislation passed by Congress or command-and-control style regulations promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is authorized to regulate the emissions under its Clean Air Act authority based on the Massachusetts vs. EPA Supreme Court decision should Congress fail to provide a legislative framework for curbing emissions. The concept in any plant with CCS is to pump the carbon dioxide emissions that are the chief byproduct of coal combustion underground or into some other permanent or semi-permanent reservoir rather than directly into the atmosphere.

Two main technical approaches have been proposed for development under the umbrella of CCS: underground storage and enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Underground storage involves diverting CO2 emissions into underground caverns or other storage areas either directly or using pipelines, where the gases remain indefinitely. This method has proven reasonably effective for plants that happen to be located adjacent to such caverns; however, the majority of plants do not fall into this category, and constructing new plants with CCS in geologically suitable locations is likely to dramatically increase costs of transmission, as well as potentially increasing other balance-of-plant costs, for new generation. It is possible that enough economically, environmentally, and geologically acceptable sites for these plants simply do not exist. EOR involves scaling up proven technology to pump CO2 into depleting oil fields where injection of gas reduces the viscosity and improves the pumping qualities of heavier, more difficult-to-recover oils.

The largest advantage of the EOR approach is that it makes use of a proven method in the oil industry to create a potentially viable market for what would otherwise be a source of pollution and could help reduce imports of oil, albeit by a small amount.[6] The disadvantages are the small overall volume of CO2 that can be repurposed in this manner compared to the total emissions of coal plants due to the requirement to transport exhaust gases over the long distance between power generation facilities and oilfields that would benefit from EOR, as well as the tradeoff in greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the production of additional fossil fuels. In the cases of both underground storage and EOR, a great deal of uncertainty remains regarding the permanence of CO2 storage in reservoirs and scaling issues, and no long-term testing has yet been conducted to confirm the long-term viability of carbon storage, particularly as the technology moves from experimental to commercial scales. A few alternative approaches have been proposed, such as capturing flue gases through photosynthesis using tanks of algae known as “photobioreactors,” but none of these approaches have a strong enough theoretical or experimental basis to be considered viable at this time.

CCS concepts have some problem areas that have seen relatively little improvement over the years as CCS has begun to move beyond conceptual infancy and into the testing stages. First, removing a significant quantity of CO2 emissions from the flue gas stream requires a significant parasitic expenditure of energy itself, with as much as a quarter or more of the plant’s gross electric output being dedicated solely to pumping the flue gases underground or through pipelines.[7] Such parasitic loading could exacerbate future supply problems as more regions of the world begin to deplete their indigenous coal reserves and the price of coal increases. Second, in spite of several decades of research and development and heavy promotion of CCS technology by the coal industry, no commercial-scale power plant utilizing CCS has ever been built, and investors and banks will be unlikely to provide the extensive capital needed to scale up the technology until they see a proven track record of success. Finally, the sheer scale required to make a dent in coal’s contribution to climate warming pollution is daunting enough that CCS is unlikely to provide a readily available near-term wedge against climate change and may exacerbate other environmental problems associated with coal use due to the energy inefficiency of the process and therefore greater quantity of coal required.

Integrated Gasification-Combined Cycle

Integrated Gasification-Combined Cycle (IGCC) is another approach to reducing the environmental footprint of coal power. IGCC is distinct from CCS, although it could potentially be combined with CCS technologies should they become commercially proven in the future in order to achieve greater environmental benefits than either method alone, albeit at great expense. Gasification, or incomplete combustion in an oxygen-poor environment, produces an intermediate gaseous fuel known as synthesis gas, or syngas for short, composed mainly of the combustible gases hydrogen (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO). Coal gasification was used to produce the gas burned to light the streets of Paris and a number of other cities beginning in the late 1800′s, as well as in the first step of the Fischer-Tropsch process used to produce substitute liquid fuels in Nazi Germany when the war effort strained that country’s energy supplies to the breaking point. The usual combustion byproducts of water and CO2 ultimately form when syngas is burned as well.

The theoretical advantage an IGCC plant has over a conventional coal plant is in the higher system efficiency of the “combined cycle,” a concept originally developed for natural gas-fired plants and used in many such plants used to meet intermediate and peak loads today. Combined cycle power generation, as the name suggests, uses a multi-stage process to generate electricity. The first stage involves the recovery of energy released by a gas as it burns and expands inside a combustion turbine using the Brayton cycle; the second stage involves the transfer of heat from flue gases to a working fluid, typically water in a boiler, used to turn a steam turbine as in a conventional power plant using the Rankine cycle. Because the first cycle takes place at extremely high temperatures needed to rapidly expand gas to do work in the combustion turbine, the flue gas still contains enough heat at the end of the cycle to make additional energy recovery feasible using heat exchangers. The net power output from the two power generating cycles is combined and fed into the grid. The most obvious disadvantage of generating power this way is the far higher capital cost of constructing an IGCC plant compared to conventional generation facilities.

While the overall combined cycle is more efficient than conventional pulverized coal plants, energy losses do occur in the transformation of coal into a gaseous fuel, mostly due to the heat input needed for gasification. As a result of the added gasification process needed for combined cycle systems using coal, the IGCC process is less efficient than the same combined power generation cycle run on a fuel that does not require pre-treatment such as natural gas or fuel oils. As a result, most estimates place the efficiency of full-size IGCC plants at around 45% of the total energy released from burning coal converted into usable electric power, an improvement over the 30-40% efficiencies achievable in conventional plants but still considerably lower than the 60% electric efficiency achievable in today’s most advanced combined cycle plants.

Additionally, the use of a gasification process generates additional environmental problems distinct from those of conventional coal-fired generation. One of the challenges of designing IGCC plants is management of slag, the semi-liquid byproduct that forms from trace elements in coal that do not gasify such as silicon, aluminum, and other metals. Slag, like combustion ash, contains a high proportion of heavy metals and other contaminants, but in the more potentially hazardous form of wastewater rather than relatively inert solids, and the limited field experience with IGCC such as in Indiana’s Wabash River plant has demonstrated significant potential for creating water quality problems.[8] When taking into account the added challenges of managing these unique byproducts from the gasification reaction, as well as the dramatically increased capital costs of IGCC plants relative to conventional coal plants, the theoretical environmental benefits that could be gained by achieving a higher plant efficiency and thereby conserving a still relatively inexpensive fuel appear less attractive.

Liquefaction

While the use of coal as a feedstock to produce liquids to replace petroleum-derived fuels does not technically fall under the same “clean coal” umbrella as CCS or IGCC, it is similar enough to these concepts as an alternative use of coal and ties into related concerns of oil and gas supply problems enough that the possibility of doing so merits some discussion here. A number of processes have been proposed to produce liquid fuels from coal, most of which are claimed to become cost-competitive at sustained oil prices over $35 per barrel, and almost all of which are very similar to the gasification stage of IGCC plants described above (when the product of incomplete combustion is a liquid rather than a gas, the process is called “pyrolysis” rather than “gasification,” but the mechanisms are very similar).[9] South Africa has built commercial-scale coal liquefaction plants, but no successful projects exist today in North America, at least in part because the process generates significant quantities of air and water pollution as well as greenhouse gas emissions, giving the technology rather dim prospects under air and water quality protections. Costs of coal-to-liquid technologies also increase as lower-quality coals from more remote mines are exploited in the later stages of a coal-based economy, as is occurring in South Africa today.[10]

As production of oil and gas, more versatile and energy-dense resources than coal, peaks and then declines, increased dependence on relatively more abundant but lower-quality solid fuels appears likely in the absence of greenhouse gas emission constraints. While coal, oil and gas are all viable fuels for electricity generation, many other energy-using technologies such as internal combustion engines require higher quality liquid or gaseous fuels and cannot run on coal in its native form. Since it is a solid fuel and has a lower energy content than oil or gas, coal cannot serve as a direct replacement for the myriad uses of liquid fuel today without first being converted into a liquid itself, and it is difficult to envision a scenario in which such large-scale substitution could take place without creating a major source of pollution and wasting large quantities of energy, exacerbating regional and possibly even global coal shortages in the future.

Conclusions

While a number of concepts exist today to continue using coal, the cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel, in more environmentally benign ways, only a few of these methods have demonstrated commercial viability and cost-competitiveness. Unfortunately, the most significant environmental problem associated with the use of coal for energy also appears to be the most intractable: the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide from coal combustion and associated changes to the Earth’s climate system due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. The most promising “clean coal” technology today in terms of cost-benefit ratio is simply adding more scrubbers and other air pollution control equipment to existing plants or constructing new conventional plants with these devices in place, which does not address the issue of climate change. Other technologies geared toward reducing coal’s climate impacts or alleviating supply problems with liquid fuels suffer from a host of technical and economic feasibility problems that range from scale-up issues to the major up-front capital costs of technologies not yet proven for commercial electricity generation. In some cases, such as in the production of higher-grade liquid and gaseous fuels for use in internal combustion engines and combined-cycle plants, the processes involved in conversion can create additional sources of air and water pollution, and in the case of liquefaction may worsen climate change effects as well due to the lower energy efficiency and higher greenhouse gas emissions of the process compared to both conventional pulverized coal-fired power plants and production of conventional oil and gas. No single technology or combination of technologies is capable of managing all of these problems at once, suggesting that the age of coal as a reliable and abundant fuel for industrial societies may be nearing its twilight.

[1] U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), “Direct Fired Biomass”, 1997, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/ba/pba/pdfs/direct_fire_bio.pdf, pp. 3-4

[2] U.S. DOE, “Biomass Co-Firing,” 2002, http://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/pdfs/fta_biomass_cofiring.pdf, p. 1

[3] U.S. DOE 1997, p.10

[4] U.S. DOE 2002, p. 12

[5] Srivastava, Ravi et al., “Nitrogen Oxides Emission Control Options for Coal-Fired Electric Utility Boilers,” http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/ewr/pubs/NOx%20control%20Lani%20AWMA%200905.pdf, September 2005

[6] Mannes, Robert, “CO2 Reductions Through Technology: Enhanced Oil Recovery and CCS,” presentation to Prairie Climate Stewardship Conference, 2008, http://www.prairiestewardship.org/Resources/Robert%20Mannes.pdf

[7] “CO2 Capture and Storage: The Energy Costs,” http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2733, 2007

[8] U.S. DOE, “Wabash River Coal Gasification Repowering Project: DOE Assessment,” 2002, http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/cctc/resources/pdfs/wabsh/netl1164.pdf, p. 8

[9] Cobal Alternative Fuels USA, “Coal to Liquid,” 2008, http://www.cobal-usa.com/coal_to_liquid.html

[10] Heinberg, Richard, Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis, 2008, pp. 93-98.

Posted in Air, Climate Change, Energy Production | Tagged: air pollution control, biomass, CCS, clean coal, coal, coal-to-liquids, IGCC | 1 Comment »

Window of Opportunity

Posted by wastedenergy on August 17, 2010

If you listen carefully, you can hear something rising above the noise of the traffic. Beyond the day-to-day ups and downs of the stock market, the oil market, and the job market, something bigger is happening. I like to call this phenomenon “the winds of change.”

I’ll give you an example of what I mean: a few days ago, the New York Times published an article that, taken to its logical conclusion, ought to make the promoters of the endless growth myth tremble in their boots. It told the story of a woman who took a daring leap of faith to escape from what she called “the work-spend treadmill,” challenging the widely held, or at least widely followed, belief that a strong relationship exists between the money we earn and spend and the fulfillment we ultimately find in life. In addition to the anecdotal evidence, the article cited a number of recent scientific studies confirming that, in fact, not only can you not take it with you, a lot of it isn’t even all that helpful here in the first place. Among the conclusions:

“While the current round of stinginess may simply be a response to the economic downturn, some analysts say consumers may also be permanently adjusting their spending based on what they’ve discovered about what truly makes them happy or fulfilled.”

If that doesn’t cut directly to the heart of the Western sell-the-world mentality that seeks to prop up its primacy through backwards thinking on questions of consumption and resources, I don’t know what would. And that wasn’t the only gem from the Times’ recent portfolio of work. It turns out scientists have begun to study not just the problem of “can money buy happiness?” (hint: no) but also the question of “is it good to get outside and clear your head a little bit sometimes instead of spending all your time in a little box worrying about the next stage in the tiny hyper-specialized corner of the universe known as ‘your career?’” As it turns out, yes, it is in fact good for your mental (not to mention physical) state to take in a little natural splendor from time to time and get away from the daily grind.

Not only that, but the paper is finally getting around to talking about the changes we have seen in our climate on the front page.

About time.

A Mighty Wind

Here is another item that graced the headlines recently, not to be lost in a cascade of sour news about the economy and the damage we have done to the Earth’s climate system. In case you missed it, we just broke ground on the largest wind farm – ever, by nearly a factor of three and perhaps even more once additional phases of the project are completed.

Who cares if wind power growth stalled from its five-year epic entrance into the big time just a little bit in the first half of 2010? In case you forgot, just about everything else slowed down too. The long term outlook for wind power is that it is going to keep growing for a long time to come, and we still have a long way to go. Of course, the longer we delay and adopt backwards policies that ignore the externalized costs of fossil fuels as well as both the environmental and economic benefits of renewable energy, the more difficult and painful the transition will be. Is it any wonder that Portugal, Germany and Spain, which is even leading the way in snatching up the market for renewable energy customers over on this side of the pond, are light-years ahead of the United States already in adoption of clean energy technology, from solar to wind to household trash combustion? They have had the correct policies in place for decades, policies that tax pollution and waste and reward conservation and investment in technologies that deliver over the long run. Europe even has its own internal cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. How are we doing over on this continent?

We seem to have so many skeptics here who think we’ll never be able to get away from fossil fuels (or can only get there by reopening the can of nuclear squirms). Do these people really think we couldn’t do a whole heck of a lot more to take advantage of the world’s best wind resource, both on- and offshore? Boy, do they have a lot to learn!

These are not final solutions, unlike what proponents of “clean coal” believe it is and what it still might become if we fail to use this potentially transformational moment wisely. But the small changes we are seeing today could be the beginning of a systemic shift in our ways of thinking about consumption of energy and resources, ways of thinking about living. And you’d better believe we need to change our ways and start consuming a lot less, and fast; if you thought living in a $147-a-barrel world was tough cookies, just wait until we arrive in $500-a-barrel country (and don’t think it won’t happen, or something much, much worse).

There may be no hope for business-as-usual, and perhaps there shouldn’t be. But there is hope for humanity. From culture to technology, from sea to shining sea, the seeds of change have been planted, and if you look closely, you can even see the first few sprouts coming up.

Amidst the chaotic storm, a glimmer of hope in the sunlight?

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change, Energy Consumption, Energy Production, Solid Waste, The Ether, Urban Planning, Water and Soil | Tagged: everything | Leave a Comment »

Bridge to Nowhere

Posted by wastedenergy on August 15, 2010

Drill, baby, drill? It’s been said that U.S. energy policy exists in two modes, complacency and panic. And the speed with which we move from one to the other, and back again, is truly astonishing. If the Deepwater Horizon incident was supposed to be our wake-up call, our politicians seem all too ready to hit the snooze button. And if our energy policy today doesn’t make you question whose interests our government truly serves, well, it probably means you haven’t really been paying attention. In fact, the phrase “energy policy” itself is probably far too generous. A more accurate phrase might be “policy of returning to business-as-usual as expeditiously as possible, and damn the consequences.” What our leaders all too conveniently ignore, and at everyone’s peril, is that business-as-usual is already over, and the only thing propping it up for the time being is politics-as-usual.

Costs a lot, but gets you nowhere in the end.

Drill Here, Drill Now. It’s a siren call we’ve all heard, and its appeal is not terribly difficult to understand, particularly when spoken by political sirens to the masses who see little beyond today’s costs at the pump. After all, for a nation almost wholly dependent on imports for its primary source of primary energy, an aggressive new program of domestic drilling might seem to make sense. But it won’t make dollars, nor will it make much of a dent in our imports as we fritter away ever larger and larger amounts of our earnings to compete in the international arena for ever smaller and smaller amounts of oil, whether that means relying on imports from the Middle East or imports from vast multinational corporations with little interest in the long-term well-being of our communities. We ignore fundamental geological and ecological constraints at our peril. We forget that when you’ve already dug yourself into a deep hole, drilling further down won’t get you out of it; your only real option is to climb out of it.

The chances that another big oilfield the size of Ghawar or Cantarell, or even the size of Alaska’s North Slope fields, remains to be found just around the corner are slim to none, and slim just left the building. We can drill all the way to China if we want, and it won’t make a bit of difference; anyway, they’re busily extracting their last remaining drops of oil as well. When you’re falling off a net energy cliff, opening a parachute is a lot more helpful than tying yourself to a piece of drilling equipment the size of an aircraft carrier, and unless we somehow manage to disconnect ourselves from it, that parachute won’t do us much good either. No amount of drilling will bring us back to an age of happy motoring nor do anything but delay an inevitable transition to less energy-intensive systems of living based on renewable resources, while the inertia of our built infrastructure and already-invested capital represents just one more chip in the pile we have already wagered away in a losing bet against the forces of nature in pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein

There is another matter we seem to be ignoring at our peril as well, and that is the ominous cloud now hanging over our future thanks to decades of relentlessly pursuing shortsighted energy goals without giving proper attention to longer-term needs. We can say with some certainty what the future holds for oil production, and it’s not a pretty picture. What is far more uncertain is whether we will be able to live in the world to come at all. Climate change represents the largest unpaid externality and embedded cost of present systems of production, and we and the rest of the world are already paying the price, yet we persist in the cultural myth that fossil energy is somehow cheaper than its alternatives in spite of the mountain of evidence telling us no course of action could be more expensive to our planetary economic and ecological health.

One more point made by proponents of the energy status quo must be addressed. “Drilling creates jobs,” we are told, and we can’t afford to make the kinds of sacrifices demanded by policies like placing a moratorium on new drilling at least until we can figure out how to make our rigs stop exploding. But we are already sacrificing, as the embedded costs of extracting and consuming fossil energy to the economy and to living systems becomes greater and greater. The jobs that matter, the jobs that are needed, are those that ensure we will be resilient and find the energy we need in a world of scarcity; digging in deeper by creating more jobs in the unsustainability industry makes the jobs we truly need harder to create and harder in turn to find for those who actually wish to help in building alternatives. Creating new jobs drilling for oil is no different from creating new jobs building a bridge to nowhere; they won’t last long, and nobody benefits in the end.

And a policy of pursuing short-term goals and avoiding dealing with long-term consequences is sure to get us nowhere indeed. The only way new drilling can be considered remotely acceptable is if it is enacted consciously as a component of a comprehensive, system-wide transformative policy to remedy our dependence on unsustainable sources of energy, a policy that includes paying the full costs of our dependence today. Are our politicians’ calls to resume drilling embedded in such a long view of the energy needs of our nation and the world? Or have we trapped ourselves by building a business culture incapable of looking beyond quarterly balance sheets and a political culture incapable of looking beyond the campaign contributions needed to protect the status quo through one more election cycle?

“I see no changes.” – Tupac Shakur

If you honestly believe today’s political and business leaders have taken the long view we need, you would give them far more credit than I do, and I would argue that such a position ignores the facts on the ground, like the abject failure to tackle or even acknowledge the matter of catastrophic climate change looming just over the horizon. If we want to believe our leaders have truly considered our best long-term interests, then we, like the good people of Missouri, must demand that they show us that is the case before we throw our support behind them. We must demand that they adopt an ecological mindset and a language that reflects it, and that they acknowledge that an economy based upon unsustainable sources of energy, by definition, cannot be sustained. Any new extraction of unsustainable energy resources must be taken in the context of building a sustainable energy future, and based on the actions of our leaders, it appears they do not even begin to understand this context, let alone understand what it would mean to act on it.

It’s long past time we got beyond the short-term outlook and started building the bridges to the future we really need.

We once had the technology. Can we rebuild it?

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Production | Tagged: business-as-usual, climate bill fail, drilling moratorium, energy policy, happy motoring, jobs | 1 Comment »

Smoke Signals

Posted by wastedenergy on August 9, 2010

A pattern is emerging from the oceans of data. And it’s not pretty. Those who have been following the news this week have seen some of the surest signs yet that we have truly entered a brave new world, and nobody can say for certain what comes next.

Wildfires in Russia are nothing new. In fact, by this time last year, more acreage had actually been consumed by fire. But this time, something is different. The fires are smaller, but greater in number, and they are taking place closer to highly populated areas, which is why Moscow has suddenly filled with a choking smoke, and concentrations of airborne toxins have risen to unprecedented and potentially lethal levels. What changed that these fires became so much more serious this time around?

In short, what changed was the worst heat waves and droughts in over a hundred years. And, as is always the case with these matters, “nobody can prove this happened because of global warming. But then again, nobody can prove it didn’t either.” Sounds like good enough reason for inaction to me.

In any case, the forests are drying up and the fields are parched, and what that means is that populated areas in particular become more at risk of raging wildfires, caused by the casual flicking of a cigarette butt out a car window or tossing grill cinders off the porch. And one of the largest and most economically significant victims of the heat, blazes and droughts has been Russia’s wheat harvest, usually the largest in the world. In response, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin declared a ban on any further exports, putting millions of people in the Third World dependent on imports of Russian grain at risk of food insecurity. And unless rains come soon, forget about a second grain harvest this season. The government of Egypt, which gets fifty percent of its wheat from Russia, claims it has several months of stockpiles and plans to buy grain from other sources. But what about everyone else who wants to buy the rest of the world’s grain to feed people, let alone commodity futures traders? Is it possible the poor will be outbid by Goldman Sachs yet again? We won’t know for certain what the consequences will be of the failed Russian harvest this year until many months down the road, once the growing season in the vast majority of the Earth’s landmass lying in the northern hemisphere is long past and shortages have the potential to become critical.

It’s not just wheat that has been put at risk by the fires. Russia, as we all know, was at one time part of the largest nuclear superpower the world had ever seen, and is still speckled with nuclear weapons silos, research facilities, and power stations. And as we all know again, the country has always taken great care of them, to make sure nothing ever goes wrong. So when the wildfires started getting close to Russia’s nuclear facilities, its leaders were quick to act to contain the flames encroaching on two nuclear facilities. Nobody was terribly thrilled about the prospect of another Chernobyl or the catastrophic failure of critical infrastructure. But risks still remain. These facilities, particularly commercial power plants, require vast quantities of water for cooling in order to prevent meltdowns, the same water needed to fight the fires, the same water that hasn’t been falling from the sky for months…

This is supposed to be the answer to global warming?

Fires in Russia are not the only signals telling us it may already be too late to turn back. Throughout Asia, catastrophic flooding has been the rule all summer. Most of the news has been about China, but particularly of note is what is happening in Pakistan, which is facing its worst floods ever. Millions have lost their homes and many face critical food shortages, which will surely be exacerbated by Russia’s failed harvest and the strain that will be placed on international food aid already. Meanwhile, here in the United States, record high temperatures are the norm. We languish in our air-conditioned homes and offices, going about our business and trying our best to filter out the news telling us that the world we once knew no longer exists. We seem fine with it. The U.S. Senate just decided climate change was of no consequence, and our only real option is to go about our business as usual. Will we feel the same way once the heat gets so bad that we are cooking the grandkids?

These are the sort of events that makes you wonder just how far we have to go down the path of irreversible, catastrophic climate change before we finally get around to deciding it’s worth our time to actually do something about it.

Posted in Agriculture and Food, Air, Climate Change | Tagged: Asian flooding, food security, Russian nuclear stations, Russian wildfires, smog, wheat | Leave a Comment »

Rock Out

Posted by wastedenergy on August 6, 2010

Has anyone noticed that for something so cheap and reliable, the world’s number one fallback energy source is terribly expensive? We know coal is plenty polluting and costs a lot more than we see on our utility bills, particularly in the health of people and their environment and the seemingly intractable issue of climate change, but also in subsidies to support a wheezy old industry. But aside from the question of pollution and other externalities: how much coal do we even really have? And is there any limit at all to our seemingly insatiable appetite for the stuff as a species, even though we know how bad for us it is?

Just can’t get enough.

Most of the conventional wisdom on the subject, like “reserve” estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Agency and the International Energy Agency, will tell you something like “200 to 500 years at present rates of consumption,” never mind that there is a big difference between two and five hundred in any case. But based on present growth rates in global coal consumption, the steady decline in coal’s net energy content, confusion between resources and reserves and the considerable quantity of coal left behind in abandoned mines (and the hazards associated with going back to get it), some experts like the ecological economist Dr. Albert Bartlett, have estimated that remaining demonstrable coal supply is a mere thirty to forty years. That is quite a sobering thought, considering that before coal runs out, extraction must peak, at which point the supply will no longer be able to meet demand, and we don’t even have a very good sense of when that will happen. It may already be happening, as China is set to consume half of the world’s supply of coal produced in 2010, with no end to its growth in sight, yet the country is already at the breaking point for its domestic reserves and faces critical, expensive, and time-consuming fixes to its infrastructural bottlenecks in developing any additional domestic coal. Is the world prepared to face the consequences of a Chinese energy crunch?

None of this makes sense, of course. Coal should be treated as a scarce resource and a polluting energy source, priced and its use policed accordingly. Right? Isn’t the whole idea behind a capitalist system that everyone pays the costs of transactions, so it doesn’t end up on everyone else’s tax bill or worse, just plain wrecking everyone’s lives? But if the recent run-up in wheat prices, with futures climbing by eighty percent in just a month, demonstrates anything, it is that our present mode of capitalism has resulted in an abject failure to anticipate or account for supply crises of any kind, as well as other critical externalities like the steady erosion of our soil and our stable climate system. And the effects of even just a Chinese coal supply crunch would resonate throughout the global economy, with the country producing fully half of the world’s consumer goods today and its tremendous purchasing power with which it could command the international coal trade. While it might seem easy to point the finger at China for burning up the remainder of the world’s coal and all its ensuing consequences, we all bear a share of the responsibility, as it is we who have demanded the cheap goods and cheap labor that have in turn demanded cheap coal for China. The only people who can truly claim to be victims of either climate change or an energy supply crunch are the people of the Third and Fourth Worlds who never saw their share of the pie from late capitalism.

Global coal consumption, from theoildrum.com

The number one obstacle to preventing catastrophic alterations to the climate and developing research and investment in alternatives to coal, like firmed wind and solar energy or advanced geothermal or ocean energy systems, is something that costs a mere three cents per kilowatt-hour to produce from our existing fleet of power plants, mines, distribution and transmission infrastructure: power. That power is plainly manifest in the small army of lobbyists patrolling the streets of Washington, DC, where the eight cents of profit the utilities make selling three-cent power back to you in exchange for destroying your environment allow the purchase of politicians for what truly amounts to no more than pennies off their backs. And somehow they succeed in convincing us that our future actually lies in smoking more and more rocks all the time - for if we were unconvinced, would we not do something else instead?

The fact that those we allow ourselves to be sold for such a pittance is what amazes me about the coal predicament more than any other single factor.

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Production | Tagged: china, coal zombies | Leave a Comment »

The Peanut Gallery

Posted by wastedenergy on August 6, 2010

Everyone’s got an opinion on the state of our home planet these days, and, as tends to happen, it seems like those who know the least have the most to say. Even worse, the most outspoken voices on the subjects of environmentalism and limits to growth today belong not to environmentalists, nor even to those who are merely misinformed, but to those who actively seek to sow confusion and public distrust of science even (or especially) where the evidence is plain as day before our very eyes.

Can there be any question as to why the public seems so confused on the largest environmental question of our times, the matter of the planet being cooked alive in hot oil, the phenomenon some might call “global warming?” After all, with the signal to noise ratio on the issue so low in the media, is it any wonder that the following is the kind of commentary you typically find from a public just about evenly divided on the question of whether humans have altered the planet’s climate? This gem was taken from the comments section of the New York Times’ “Dot Earth” blog, and just the fact that this blog is found in the “Opinion” section should, by itself, tell you how seriously the media have taken the matter of climate change.

Girma

Perth, Australia

August 3rd, 2010

10:14 pm

“And the science pointing to big, long-lasting consequences for the world from the buildup of greenhouse gases continues to accumulate.”

Not at all!

Human emission of CO2 has NO effect on global temperature as demonstrated in the following article:

http://wattsupwiththat.com…

Are you holding your face in your palm yet? Yes, that’s right, Girma is saying CO2, a greenhouse gas, doesn’t actually cause any greenhouse effect, which is why, you know, our planet has an atmosphere that retains no heat and surface temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius. Human emissions of any additional greenhouse gases therefore have no effect on the global climate system.

Well, we haven’t gotten to the best part yet: where exactly are these all-too-vocal “skeptics” getting their evidence? (Sidebar: better to just call them deniers, since that is what they are - the word “skeptic” implies a questioning mind, seeking of knowledge, and attempting to find out answers for yourself, which is what scientists do. Climate change deniers, on the other hand, get their info straight from the mouths of moneyed interests invested in the continued burning of fossil fuels.)

As you are probably aware, one of the most popular, and indeed salient, criticisms of climate change “skepticism” is that “it’s not supported by peer reviewed science.” While it is not necessarily fair to dismiss all criticisms of catastrophic climate change theory as unscientific – there are, after all, peer reviewed papers that come to slightly different conclusions, though they do not question the fundamental mechanisms at play nor the fact that the Earth is warming – what is entirely fair is to say that a large and ever-growing body of evidence demonstrates that humans have, in fact, already altered climate systems at planetary scales through the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and climate change pollutants, and it is even fair to say that there is a scientific “consensus” behind the matter of climate change. So you’d better believe that when these “skeptics” think they have a scientist on their side, they are going to roll him out in front of the public as much as possible.

Meet Richard. He’s an ordinary, hardworking American just like you and me, minus the monthly check from Exxon-Mobil.

Richard Lindzen doing what he does best; note his sponsor’s product placement in the background.

Richard’s favorite activities are denying the link between smoking and lung cancer, and making up what he says as he goes along in order to fit his preconceived ideas about how the climate works. While you might at first be inclined to listen to what the man has to say, given his credentials as “MIT Professor” (and especially since the media’s idea of “equal time” is to have this guy debate Bill Nye on CNN, instead of, you know, another climate scientist), it is worth noting that he has earned a good deal of cred with a few other organizations as well. Namely, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (sponsored by Exxon), OPEC, and Western Fuels, all of which have either funded his “research” or paid his way to travel and speak at conferences, and whichever fossil fuel interests are paying $2500 on any given day for the “consulting” services he offers. Well gee whiz, I wonder why he seems so intent on starting from the conclusion that humans can’t possibly be causing global warming! I mean, isn’t that what scientists do? You start with a conclusion, fish for data to support it, then change your story to find a different way of supporting your original conclusion when the data refuse to comply, right?

Here is an example of what I mean (from SEED Magazine):

In 2001, Lindzen published a paper speculating that as the Earth warmed, water vapor would decrease in the upper atmosphere, allowing heat to escape back into space more efficiently, and thereby reducing overall temperature. The paper met with vigorous criticism. Eventually, he disavowed the idea. “That was an old view,” Lindzen said about his five-year-old hypothesis. “I find it insane that I am still forced to explain this.”

Well, gosh, Richard, I don’t know, maybe the reason you’re continually asked to explain this matter is that when you form a theory about how a natural system like the climate works based on a given mechanism, and then base your conclusions about how that system might change on the effects of that mechanism, and then newer and better evidence comes along and shows that you were completely wrong, it might tend to discredit your theory a little bit, no?

These are called “ice cores,” also known as “where real scientists not sponsored by oil companies get their paleo-climate data.”

So, among those who have bothered with ice cores and other, you know, data, what kind of results have been found? Surely there must be enough ambiguity, enough uncertainty in the data to justify some sort of skepticism, right? Surely it’s not just the fear that any effective attempts to regulate the emissions causing climate change would disrupt some limitless growth fantasy, or at least the profits of coal and oil interests? There couldn’t be anything to what the rest of the climate scientists are saying when they renunciate the views of Lindzen, et al., right? Guess again…

Is this certain enough for you?

Anyway, it is one thing to proclaim uncertainty on a matter where one is ignorant or where the necessary facts are simply not available. It is an entirely different matter to prognosticate endlessly, from a false standpoint of credibility, intentionally muddying the waters and taking advantage of widespread public ignorance on matters of science to deny a sense of urgency to an issue that truly deserves it. And that is why, Richard Lindzen, there is a special place reserved for you once you finally finish expounding upon this issue, whether due to lung cancer or emphysema. Just don’t let the heat get to you once you arrive!

Posted in Climate Change | Tagged: "skeptics", denialism, follow the money trail, heads in the sand, Richard Lindzen | 2 Comments »

« Previous Entries

Next Entries »

WastedEnergy

Topics on Energy, Resources, Waste and Culture

Categories

Archives

Ecosystems and Resources

Ether

Solid Waste and Consumption

Useful Energy Sites

Meta

Subscribe