Half the reason I wrote this post was to respond to this article, and then I forgot to mention it. Check this out:
Developing commercially viable carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technology should be a major priority for companies and governments all over the world because renewable energy sources will not be able to replace oil and gas quickly enough, a senior executive at Royal Dutch Shell PLC said Tuesday.
"Without CCS, fossil fuel use would have to be cut by more than half," Malcolm Brinded, Executive Director of Exploration and Production at the Anglo-Dutch company, said at the Offshore Europe conference in Aberdeen.
"Nuclear would have to grow twice as fast ... thousands more wind turbines would be needed. And a new vehicle fleet would have to run largely on biofuels and electricity, with petrol and diesel fuel almost completely phased out," he said.
A change this drastic would be very difficult to achieve quickly, so CCS -- which could reduce emissions from major industrial sources of carbon dioxide such as power stations by up to 90% -- is necessary to smooth the transition to more widespread renewable energy, he said.
My god, fossil fuel cut by half? Thousands of new wind turbines? A vehicle fleet running on biofuels and electricity? Spare us this awful fate, CCS!
But seriously. This analysis only makes sense if developing and widely deploying CCS takes substantially less time and costs substantially less money than the renewable options Brinded acknowledges are inevitable either way.
If your transition-smoothing option costs as much and takes as long as the option to which you are transitioning, you are not "smoothing the transition," you are delaying it -- perhaps in order to squeeze more profit out of the fossil fuel business model, though one hesitates to speculate about motives.
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Comments
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:29 am
10 Sep 2007
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samircmi Posted 2:56 am
10 Sep 2007
Today's high natural gas prices coupled with long lead times for nuclear means that coal is coming back in a big way whether we like it or not. A carbon management regime may mitigate this in the future, but CCS is a technology that should be pursued aggressively today together with every other option on the table.
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David Roberts Posted 3:04 am
10 Sep 2007
I realize that's conventional wisdom, but it's still deeply f*cked up.
grist.org
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samircmi Posted 3:38 am
10 Sep 2007
1 Socolow, R., 2005: Can we bury global warming?, Scientific American, pp. 49-55, July
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:41 am
10 Sep 2007
Obviously for CTL fuels, and because the undersea aquifers that they'd be pumping it into are owned by oil companies. Hell, they could even use it for enhanced oil recovery (Even though thats kinda worthless from an environmental standpoint).
More or less the idea is, Oil companies want us to subsidize an industry that will give profits directly and exclusively to them.
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:43 am
10 Sep 2007
No. No it's not.
Not after the current US Clean Air Act compliance laws went into effect.
And especially not if you include sequestration. It's actually ludicrously expensive.
_
If the argument is "We have to use it because its THERE". Then why are we using all the vast renewable resources that are there for the taking?
http://greyfalcon.net/greenenergy.png
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:45 am
10 Sep 2007
What makes you think they will voluntarily put carbon capture on their coal plants?
Especially what makes you think they will use expensive IGCC coal plants capable of CCS?
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David Roberts Posted 3:54 am
10 Sep 2007
So if we "led" on CCS, what exactly would we be demonstrating to China? "You too can create extremely expensive electricity if you voluntarily clean up your coal." I fail to see how our demonstration of expensive energy would induce them to choose expensive energy.
What strikes me as much more plausible is the U.S. demonstrating that a combination of efficiency, renewables, and sensible regulation can power a world-class economy. Show that in aggregate, a renewable-driven economy -- free of respiratory diseases and peasant riots -- is cheaper than a fossil-driven economy.
That's something I can see affecting China's behavior.
grist.org
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samircmi Posted 3:58 am
10 Sep 2007
Regading the possibliity of China pursuing IGCC with CCS - all I can say is that buying down the costs of the technology can only make it easier to promote adoption of the technology. There are already plans for huge increases in wind capacity in China (last year was astonishing in terms of growth rate), but its not putting any brakes on the expansion of conventional coal. Making the alternative cheaper may not be enough, but it may be a step in the right direction. Perhaps this combined with CDM-type instruments and international pressure....
I'm open to all possibilities at this point. I'm just saying don't rule out CCS just because it requires an equivalent carbon price of $30/tCO2 today
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samircmi Posted 4:17 am
10 Sep 2007
I agree, I agree, I agree. Lets do all of it!
But if CCS gives a way to make climate change mitigation easier, then lets take look at it. The carbon price needed to bring in CCS for power generation (~$30/tCO2) is equivalent to about 25¢/gal of gasoline. Is that really that much? And even if it is, thats not a reason to ignore it as a potential solution given the urgency of the problem. Any technology that has the potential to get us off of "business as usual" in a significant way and quickly is worth pursuing.
I'm just going throw this out again because its worth repeating - when I saw if the first time it really conveyed the urgency of this issue to me:
Base on current trends (BAU), the emissions from coal plants in the 2003-2030 time period will be comparable to all the carbon emitted from coal plants over the past 250 years
(Socolow, R., 2005: Can we bury global warming?, Scientific American, pp. 49-55, July)
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trock Posted 4:30 am
10 Sep 2007
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samircmi Posted 5:03 am
10 Sep 2007
The coal industry does not lack a place at any table in US politics. I agree that carbon policy moves forward faster if more constituencies see it in their best interest (e.g. converting closing GM plants into wind turbine manufacturing facilities) but framing CCS as a way to preserve an industry is exactly the wrong approach.
Once viable technologies are established, there's ways forward that take into consideration all stockholders, but we can't define the future by what came before. Especially when it comes to allocating money for research, development and demonstration plants.
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse." - Henry Ford
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wiscidea Posted 5:14 am
10 Sep 2007
Very sad. Very very sad.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/4/123247/9991/#40 ...
Forward!
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:01 am
10 Sep 2007
I'm saying that coal is expensive when you take into account the existing laws on the books.
Coal used to be $1000/KW a few years ago.
Now new coal is $2200/KW.
Thats a huge difference.
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:05 am
10 Sep 2007
Thats easily another 100% increase or more in marginal cost.
China, thats the flipside.
Coal is very cheap if you don't give a crap about air pollution, low sulfur coal, IGCC, or CCS.
The costs really begin to stack up to the point that coal is no longer "cheap", no matter how you slice it.
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eriqa Posted 6:27 am
10 Sep 2007
The coal industry might be financing research into sequestration to keep coal alive, but is that any reason to think that the results of that research couldn't be adapted to other fuel sources?
(I'm asking sincerely - I don't know enough about the science of CCS to tell.)
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sunflower Posted 6:54 am
10 Sep 2007
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Sean Casten Posted 7:29 am
10 Sep 2007
This simply isn't true, at least in the US where they have to be Clean Air Act compliant. While old, grandfathered coal plants have made money by competing on the margin with gas, building new plants require so much to pay off their capital that no one is in fact building them until they first get someone (read: utility commissions and/or state legislatures) to guarantee their capital recovery. Which is why we have so much talk about coal lately - the industry is working hard to convince us that we need it in the public media, but then working behind the scenes to get laws passed to guarantee their capital recovery. It is exactly not like a competitive market. Adding CCS to the capex (and opex) only makes the bogey that much higher.
And to David's point, if we accept the increase in power cots to justify the guaranteed recovery of capital in coal plants (with or without CCS) we will suddenly find ourselves in a regime where lots of much more cost-effective carbon control approaches make sense - begging the question of why we don't start with those better ideas instead of just throwing dumb money at coal.
Bottom line is that carbon is fundamentally different than other pollutions. End of pipe controls are conceivable as ways to lower the pollution of relatively dilute pollutants like SOx and NOx. But the only economically responsible way to lower carbon emissions is to lower the amount of carbon in the input fuel. No matter how you slice it, that logic is incompatible with coal - unless you're willing to massively overpay for electricity.
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justlou Posted 10:07 am
10 Sep 2007
= continuation of the ratcheting up of
technology
= continuation of the ratcheting up of
complexity
= continuation of centralized power
= continuation of the unsustainable
= continuation of faith in the unproven
and yet to be discovered -- the transition
to the next transition
= continuation of growth as economic
panacea
= continuation of our failure to build a
lasting vision of how to live on earth
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Nucbuddy Posted 11:53 am
10 Sep 2007
How expensive is absurdly expensive -- 7.5 cents per kWh?
enerdynamics.com/documents/Insider72406.pdf
David Roberts wrote: what exactly would we be demonstrating to China? [...] I fail to see how our demonstration of expensive energy would induce them to choose expensive energy.
What would induce any nation to make an individually-harmful/collectively-beneficial choice is a world carbon-tax imposed by a world-government equipped with its own military power. This is how familes work. This is how cities work. This is how counties work. This is how states work. This is how nations work. In each of these cases, a single collective power resolves conflicts-of-interest among its constituent members.
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Colin Wright Posted 4:44 am
11 Sep 2007
I'm in agreement with him, too, that governments and companies must make CCS a priority. Surely a few government CCS demonstration projects plus a requirement that all new coal plants sequester their coal is good policy.
And, more importantly in my view, and echoing DR, in addition we will need massive government intervention to ramp up the renewables industry as fast as possible. I don't have much faith that CCS will be particularly effective -- it's an untested technology, still decades away from wide deployment.
Peak oil could be just a few years away (or already plateauing). The pressure for CTL will be intense. Meanwhile the outlook for liquid natural gas is grim.
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