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Avoiding Harmful Solutions (to Our Climate and Energy Problems)
Posted by Glenn on October 28, 2007 - 9:00pm in The Oil Drum: Local
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: global warming, local, solutions, sulfur emissions, sustainability [list all tags]
We are starting to get a number of submissions for TOD:LOCAL and we thank all of you for submitting them; keep them coming! This one is by Nelson Harvey of The Wild Green Yonder, a blog about grassroots urban sustainability, alternative economics, and ecological design.
Arguments for rapid action on global warming are often framed in terms of the precautionary principle: given the potentially catastrophic consequences of the problem, we're better off taking action to prevent them, even if some uncertainty remains about just how bad they'll be. But in thinking about the legislation and technologies intended to combat global warming, it's important to remember that even the most attractive solutions will likely have problems of their own.
Of course, global warming itself is an unintended consequence. The large-scale adoption of petroleum-based fuels in the 19th century was viewed at the time as a remarkable example of progress, enhancing personal mobility, manufacturing, and basic living standards in ways that hugely benefited the human race. Given the spell of of technological innovation that pervaded that period, any doomday projections about petroleum causing a global environmental crisis would likely have been dismissed out of hand.
It's arguable whether science at the time of the industrial revolution could have even suggested how severe a problem global warming would eventully become, or whether economics could have predicted the oligopolistic oil markets of today. But the basic tendency, letting excitement about a solution blind us to it's potential risks, is one that continues to manifest itself in many forms. Cass Sunstein, a legal theorist and professor at the University of Chicago, discusses the issue eloquently in his 2005 essay "Cost Benefit Analysis and the Environment."
Sunstein evokes the controversial case of the ban on DDT, the harmful neurotoxin contained in some pesticides that Rachel Carson railed against in her seminal book "Silent Spring." While the health effects of the ban in wealthy countries have almost certainly been positive, it may be a different picture in poor countries, where the chemical was one of the most widely-used treatments for malaria. Sunstein also brings up opposition to genetically modified foods. He claims that that banning them based on concerns about human health could have the perverse effect of eliminating their potential to improve global food security.
These are both fiercely debated issues, but another contemporary example is the effect of the Clean Air Act on powerplant efficiency. This famous piece of environmental legislation has had a hugely postive effect on air pollution in the U.S., reducing emissions of pollutants like nitrous oxide and particulate matter by at least 30 percent since 1970. Much of this reduction has come because of requirements in the act that oil coal-fired powerplants feature new emissions reduction technology when they are renovated. The downside of this, though, is that it decreases the plants' overall efficiency, requiring it to burn more coal than they previously would have, and thus emit more carbon dioxide.
How do we minimize our exposure to such unintended consequences, while still taking the steps necessary to deal with current problems? It's a tall order. One potential starting place was outlined in a recent post over at the Wild Green Yonder: let's do all we can to implement ecological solutions that rely on mechanisms we understand.
The risk of complex technological schemes is that a malfunction could give us far more than we bargained for. Ideas like injecting sulfur particles into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation (proposed in today's NYT), or seeding the oceans with iron to increase their uptake of carbon dioxide, carry huge burdens of risk and uncertainty to match their potential payoffs. By focusing on what we know first, at least we can be sure that our "solutions" don't leave us worse off than the problem we intended to solve.
It's called the "precautionary principle". Unfortunately, it is pretty much a moot point now, since we have already reached the point of no return.
How did we do it? By putting a price on everyone's head through capitalistic Blind Faith. We always end up with the accountants making the decisions about who lives (has a job) and who dies (the family farmer, the African bushman) simply through scratching some numbers on a piece of paper.
Religions assisted them with the Manifest Destiny lie: that humans are separate from Nature and that some humans are more important than other humans, determined by how much power or money they have.
Nature doesn't negotiate.
I'm sorry, but there just isn't a solution that anyone is going to like, so you're on your own now. Nature will force us into Descent through starvation, disease, competition, and exposure. Billions of people will be soon looking for a place to live that isn't under water. Billions more will be trying to protect their places and their food.
I hope everyone is enjoying their cars and roads and cushy chairs. M. King Hubbert told you so 50 years ago, so don't blame me for spelling it out.
There are only individual solutions now. There is no possible way (known to current peer-reviewed science) of providing resources to continue the lifestyles we have enjoyed. Not just because the resources are running out, but because any mitigating actions involve descent and recession, while the entire psychological future of TWAWKI is based upon investment, which is based upon perceived growth in production of crap that nobody needs (try explaining 'insurance' to a woodchuck). There is no more growth possible without a miracle from Area 51 that will allow us to go to another planet. Since that is improbable at best, you should just get used to the fact that "Calling All Pets" on NPR is going to become "Cooking All Pets".
Gee I hope not. I couldn't do that any more than cook my own kids. We have 4 dogs and 80 birds (yes eighty), my cockatoo is my best friend. No way I'm eating them. I'll eat my dead neighbours first.
Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
You may not be able to eat your pets but your hungry neighbors wouldn't hesitate and maybe throw you in the pot if you try to stop them.
Although many energy / climate change solutions have problems and unintended consequences, there is a rather unknown technology that needs to get more exposure with those of us considering these issues. The process starts with the pyrolysis of biomass, uses the volatile gas and its condensates as a fuel source, then recycles the remaining biochar back into the soil.
Pyrolysis is the process of heating of organic matter in the absence of oxygen until the material is thermally degraded and gasses are driven off. The gaseous products, typically hydrogen and volatile hydrocarbons, can be burned directly as an energy source, or can be processed further into a liquid bio-oil. What remains after the gasses have been driven off is almost pure carbon biochar. The biochar could also be burned as a fuel, but the new thinking is that it is much better to recycle the biochar back into the soil.
Returning biochar to the soil has been shown to significantly improve soil fertility and structure. Although the black carbon is not itself a required nutrient for plants, presence of the biochar improves the availability of existing nutrients. The carbon also reduces leaching of nutrients from the soil. The result is that biochar generates higher yields and makes conventional fertilizers go further and last longer.
Biochar is highly persistent in the soil. Unlike other forms of soil organic matter such as compost, leaf mold, and manures which are completely degraded by soil microorganisms in a few years, biochar remains largely intact for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. For a bio-fuels operation, this means that every time crops are harvested and processed, a good fraction (up to 40%) of the carbon that the plants took from CO2 in the atmosphere will end up buried in the soil for many hundreds of years.
So we have a process that builds soil, generates energy, and remove CO2 from the air. Just about any type of biomass can be used as a feed stock for pyrolysis, so an obvious place to start is with agricultural and forest waste products.
There is much research still to be done, but there is very good reason to look carefully at processes that return biochar to the soil. Much of the motivation for current research comes from the realization that ancient Amazonian civilizations built their sustainable agriculture by making their own soil with copious amendments of biochar.
For further study, check out the Terra Preta web site and information clearing house:
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
A recent article on the potential carbon negative bio-energy by Cornell professor Johannes Lehmann is found here:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/FrontiersEcolEnv%205,%20...
An article on the potential for carbon sequestration with this approach is here: http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/MitAdaptStratGlobChange%...
One of the more interesting approaches for making the biochar into an actual fertilizer is being done by Danny Day at http://www.eprida.com
If you look in some of the old books, it's called "Wood Gas Generators".
The problem is that the biogas is highly volatile and toxic. Several long-chain molecules, etc etc. Great stuff if you want to start a chemical company.
Also great once the population goes down to about half a billion people in the world, then the biosphere can absorb the unburned bits.
Heres a flight into pre-history....{tongue firmly in cheek}
Around 20,000 years ago,the atlantians found themselves in a bind,their energy source,which had allowed them to reach the same effective level of civilization as we enjoy today,produced carbon dioxide,just as we do.Their scientist,found the same way of pulling carbon from the atmosphere as we have,though biochar.This began the process of trapping the carbon in the soils,and acting as a enriching process of the poor jungle soils
Although the rest of their civilization collapsed,the use by pre-historic tribes in the amazonian forest of biochar,allowed a "new"way of life to develope...and new civilizations,and the great wheel turned again...
Thanks Sonny. Nice story. Would those be the Atlantic Atlantians, The Sunken Isle west of Wales Atlantians, The Aztalan Atlantians, The Minoan Atlantians, or the UFO Atlantians?
"If you want Change, keep it in your pocket. Your money is your only real vote."
My vote is the Minoans had it the best. All those others were so ersatz; they probably happened after the Minoans spread their version of Fox News around the globe.
I, for one, am skeptical of biochar. It seems like a troublesome way of achieving approximately the same affect as leaving crops or crop residue in place.
To me, this seems like a great example of the problem the story outlines. Although Tera Preta may be an ancient technology, it's sustainability has yet to be critically evaluated. The fact that the technique can be used to generate useful gases and charcoal may seem wonderful, but the other side of the balance sheet is missing. You still have to move the dry the biomass, move it around, burn it, capture the gas, and move the charcoal back to the fields. Frankly, I see some real issues for loss of nutrients. The bio-mass doesn't just contain carbon, but that's all that is being returned to the soil. For the same reason, pollution from the bi-products of burning bio-gas also concern me.
Biochar may be worth a look, but a critical review also seems necessary.
Do you really think that potassium, phosphorus and other nutrients are destroyed by carbonization? Just about everything save nitrogen remains in the solids, and we can always fix more nitrogen.
You don't have to dry the biomass much; it's just a question of how much you have to burn to drive the process. You don't have to move it much either; the process works very well at a small scale, maybe right at the field. You don't have to capture the gas (though condensing the liquids may be economically worthwhile). And it sequesters carbon on a scale of thousands of years, in a form that won't be oxidized away because someone came at it with a plow.
Biochar is definitely a silver BB.
And thats wher all problems started
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vFqbTP-BqUw
ONLY one thing which establishment cares about is themselves
The average Joe doesn't understand how deep up our own delusional anuses we have pushed our ostrich heads.
Everything is about making the "numbers" work so that the enterprise shows a quarterly "profit". This is so deep a dogma in our Western civilization that it is impossible to converse with anyone in other terms.
And yet Nature is not going to care whether our version of economics shows a profit or a loss.
Nature has its own version of "eco-no-mocks".
(He who mocks Nature, mocks ecology, goes the way of the dodo bird.)
I blame it on the income tax code and it's ridiculous complexity. Everyone ends up at the mercy of Those Who Know The Loopholes.
Just as people are reluctant to visit the idea that our cheap energy illusion is about to end, they are equally reluctant to consider that the tax code and the patent system are both designed to accelerate the wasting of resources for no sustainable purpose.
They do, however, serve well to maintain control over knowledge and money.
"Do not let them eat from the tree of knowledge.."
Where have we heard that before?
Yes, these are some weak tongue-in-cheek links, but when philosophizing about where we should go from here, everything should be questioned for it's direct and indirect consequences.
Hi Anti-grav:
You & I probably part ways when it comes to understanding the concepts of "blame" or "patent law".
Let's not go there because it takes us way off topic from the basic issues of Peak Oil and evolving our society into one that can react positively to the problem rather than one which insists on building more Moa heads and chopping down more trees.
I don't "blame" Accountants or IRS agents or "Those Who Know Loopholes" because for the most part, they are just unthinking cogs in the machinery.
Accountants do what they do because they were brainwashing in so-called Business-as-usual School (GAAP) into accepting the status quo as the "normal". Ditto for IRS agents who were trained in doing the Master's biddings and lawyers who were trained in doing the Master's biddings.
No different than "janitors" who are expected to clean up the mess and make life conveniently convenient for those in power.
(BTW, over the weekend I saw this new George Clooney movie, Michael Clayton which takes an unnerving look at lawyers, ethics and becoming the person who no longer fits into the convenient pigeon holes.
It's not a movie for everyone. It may appeal to Peak Oilers who see themselves as no longer fitting in with conventional thinking. If you're the kind of person who enjoys critical thinking and asking yourself, what would I do in his shoes, then the movie is an interesting frolic into those kinds of things.)
I don't blame them personally, either. I blame the Blind Faith in systems and procedures which created the prevalence of them. Keeping track of money/things is important. Using the tracking system to decide the value of a person's potential is wrong. Life is abstract, yet we allow people with things like laws and dollars to decide that abstractions aren't important enough to consider in decision making processes.
The people who perform these functions are just as much to blame as those of us who let them and pay them.
In the abstract sense, you cannot go 'off topic' when it comes to peak oil because peak oil represents Peak Humanity at this point, and we have to consider all the things we do that have brought us to a precarious peak, rather than a stable sustainability.
Today's IRS agent is tomorrow's IRS director. Today's new trinket application is tomorrow's landfill fodder.
Kunstler says, "It's All Good."
I say, "It's All Peaked."
From what you said about "Michael Clayton", you will probably like the book "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The more we read the news, the less we know.
Another quote for the day!!!
If we are talking about population levels, then I agree, PO does represent peak human population because we need the energy and fertilizers to continue defying the gravity of Malthus's inescapable logic.
(I get so frustrated when people I know laugh and assert that Malthus was wrong. That's like them laughing at Newton and saying rocks can be thrown to infinite heights --and before you object consider friction from the atmosphere-- a rock is not a rocket.)
As for Black Swan --have seen interviews with Taleb but not sure if the book will have any greater insights beyond what he has discussed publicly. Certainly for most of humanity, PO will be a Black Swan.
Auntiegrav,
I hope you had a good nights sleep and woke up in a better mood. I figure the chance of a collapse into anarchy and sarvation and the chances of technological advances that preserve our "American way of life" as equal-no chance at all. The Pornmeister of Doom view that you have adopted leaves no room for human creativity and adaptivity-and we squeeze through tight places like rats. Many areas of the globe are already at very high population densities with little modern agriculture-notably India and China, and both of them are improving the general lot of the citizens in spite of a lack of resources except human capital.
Those that rely on the Invisible Hand to replace our wastefull ways without effort are as touching in their faith as those that rely on the Holy Spirit to replace our dependence on fossil fuel with some kind of magic. They've forgotten the old American Methodist saying that praying for a good corn crop works a lot better when you do it with a hoe in your hand.
I think avoiding a crash is worth effort and personal sacrifice. Alan Drake's vision the day before yesterday is also supplemented with the plans for acheiving Electrification of Transportation that he has been working on with the Millenium Institute, and that's a practical dream. Its based on technology that we already have and can rapidly put together because its relatively inexpensive and can be shows practical benefits almost immediately. So Lets do it! Bob Ebersole
There is only one 'solution' and that is to redistribute global wealth to ensure the poor have access to security: clean water, medicine, healthy food, education, and a safe and loving future. Then perhaps we and they will see each other for the first time as friends and neighbors instead of 'The Enemy.' When this happens folks will embrace each other and the world community of humans, and stop forever the dream of a personal family empire. Population will drop and all will be peace.
fat chance hey?
This is the best sarconol-perfumed essay I have read on TOD in a very long time.
I am not sure if we're just pulling up to the beach, the boat's in the water, our skis are on, being pulled behind the boat, or looking over the animal below, but the Oil Drum, much like the fate of its cousin, Energy Resources, feels like it wants to "jump the shark" into the realm of philosophical ramblings instead of sticking with facts, numbers, and reality-based theory.
It starts with something as simple as "Best Hopes..." that means little or nothing, except to give yourself a warm fuzzy inside. It culminates in new-age, "kumbaya," Deepak Chopra espousings.
But, that's entropy for you, always fouling up good things.
Philip Mullins
You do understand that I was using sarcasm against the post I commented on? That in fact I don't think it was posted as sarcasm but was intended as truthful(the post I replied to)...and perhaps you mistook my sarcasm against other supposed sarcasm as truth also....
And now I am not sure if yours is sarcasm itself...hard then to read between the lines on this stuff.
Not sure either of what 'jumping the shark' means. Never heard that term. But yes,,I agree 'Best Hopes' is schtick nonsense.
And if one looks at the faces currently portrayed of citizens all the MSM shows us is happy, happy, happy, shiny , shiny faces. Its like no one ever has a bad moment and is really really f**king pissed off....you see they are controlling us so minutely that they can even show the fools outside the plate glass windows at Fox and CBS or whereever the Morning Show is occurring and the bimboboys and bimboettes can look over their shoulders at these people making faces and holding up signs and say to themselves "oh look at the monkeys,,and we are far superior to them' and feel good about it...when they are the ones creating those ignorant faces..full of happiness and shininess.
When we should be screaming at them and calling them filthy names. But.......won't happen..not for a shot on national TV.
I've seen it before but not gone out to find out.
Now curiosity got the better of me.
When in doubt, wiki it out: wiki answer
If you still oogle for an answer, then google is your huckleberry dancer: google results
http://science.reddit.com/info/5z8sk/comments/
thank you for your support...
I almost changed the subtitle to this to say "(or, Hasn't Anyone Seen Highlander 2?)"
But I didn't.
They write like they are from Zeist, but they resemble casualties in training more then Immortals.
I attended an Energy Symposium at Georgia Tech last week. It sounded to me as though another consequence of the emission requirements on power plants is to render some of the older coal plants obsolete. Sometimes it is difficult to retrofit the old plants with the required new equipment; sometimes the new equipment causes the cost of production to become too high. (Most likely the latter is because more coal needs to be burned, sending CO2 up, as you point out.)
At any rate, more and more of these older plants end up being closed. In some ways this is good, but we are lacking good alternatives to replace the energy that is lost. Getting new coal plants permitted is a problem because of CO2. Nuclear is expensive to build and requires a long time frame, if regulatory authorities will approve new plants. Wind is not an option here in the Southeast, because there is very little wind on land, and hurricane insurance is not available at reasonable cost for offshore wind. There is clearly not enough gas to install new gas powered plants. I am wondering whether total installed electrical capacity will start to decline, in not too many years.
The predominance of old coal plant in the US South East stems from the EPA's 'New Source Rule' a political compromise lobbied for by the power plant industry, to allow old plants 'that would be phased out' to escape emission controls.
Of course, what they then did was 'repair' old power plants, so you have power plants which are 50 years old, which are still being 'repaired'.
A consequence is that many of these plants are running thermal efficiencies of sub 30%, when the best coal plants run high 30s-- a 10% gap in efficiency, or one third more efficiency (depending on how you look at it).
Beware Southern Company's caterwhailing on this. AES and Duke Power sing a different tune. Yes some plants are obsolete but they would be obsolete anyhow as the price of coal has risen, worldwide, and so have freight charges. The difference in efficiency between new coal and old coal is quite large.
The issue is clarity about future rules, rather than the rules themselves.
The CEO of Duke Power, one of the nation's largest utilities, is head of an industry lobbying group which has asked Congress to pass legislation regarding greenhouse gases, so that the industry can commit to solutions.
The Bush Energy Act has provided for that regulatory streamlining, and large subsidies to new nuclear power plants. The issues are:
- Wall Street doesn't like new nuclear construction, because of horrible past experience
- no one has found a solution to the waste problem, and no utility wants to be stuck with a 100 or 1000 year waste obligation it can't deal with
The problem of hurricane insurance can be solved, because it is being solved in other parts of the world. The offshore oil industry works further offshore in hurricane conditions. Insurance is just another market, and market problems can be solved.
You'll be interested to know exactly the same objections wer e raised by the industry when Acid Rain restrictions were brought in. 15 years later, SO2 emissions are less than half, and the total cost of abatement was much lower than anticipated-- the pollution trading rights scheme works well.
The reality is CO2 capture technology exists and is used in the oil and chemical industry. The argument that somehow the power industry is unique is nonsensical. The pieces of the puzzle, and the choice between post combustion and pre combustion (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle) has to be made, and to do that, we need to build the full plants (the plants exist, we need to integrate the Capture and Storage systems).
www.amazon.com/Big-Coal-Secret-Behind-Americas/dp/0618319409
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/7/13/231330/588
Power utility engineers can crack this thing. What they need are marching orders.
http://web.mit.edu/coal/
Yes, the power industry is "different".
The difference is cost and infrastructure. CCS will require enormous upfront investment in equipment and infrastructure to separate, compress and pump the CO2. The existing power plants were not built with CO2 capture in mind and as a consequence the energy and infrastructure costs to "refit them" will be clearly prohibitive. Somewhere I saw something like 25-30% in energy costs only - so the question is how do you coerce a power plant owner to reduce the output of his power plant from 1000MW to 700MW, while increasing his variable costs (to maintain all the new equipment) and investing some extra billion upfront on top of it? The answer - there is no way to do it, because he'll have to double or triple his sales price and certainly go out of business.
Compared to this, installing scrubbers is peanuts. They cost in the order of tens of million and take just a minor percentage off the plant efficiency. Despite that it took forever to make utilities install them, because again, it is hard to justify such costs. Now think again how long will it take for CCS to be put in place... a century?
Hi
We've been round the nuclear thing so many times on this Forum I doubt we have anything new to say. I note that the costs for the Finnish reactor have soared, with the delays. The UK is very much in a similar situation, with an absence of the key skills. The world reactor industry cannot scale that fast even if new nukes are a good idea (I think they are somewhat inevitable, but really only as a placeholder: ie the total nuclear share, outside emerging markets, is very unlikely to grow, it simply might stop shrinking, with new capacity replacing retired capacity, and growing by about as much as the power sector).
Wishing nimby away doesn't mean it will go away. Advanced developed countries all have their nimbyism, to some extent. The United States is not another France ('freedom fries' anyone? ;-).
On your economics:
- no the distribution margin is not determined by the wholesale price. Higher wholesale price does not create a higher distribution margin. The distribution margin will stay the same-- that's how the regulation works. In almost every country, the network return is regulated based on assets employed and an allowed return on capital on those assets.
- 30% is too high. Sub 20% is more likely. Remember in the case of IGCC, neatly, the extra energy costs are almost exactly offset by the higher efficiencies of operation.
- if everyone faces a price for carbon/CO2 emission regulation, everyone will adopt a CO2-reducing technology. No one will 'go out of business' because of it. Electricity prices will rise, but the downstream impact will only be significant on a handful of industries (primarily aluminium smelting).
It's worth reflecting that the costs of pollution abatement, long term, have always been overestimated in advance by a factor of 2 or more, in every major case. Once we figure out how to do something, we are adept at driving the costs down.
We 'coerced' car manufacturers to achieve 90%+ falls in most pollutant categories. We 'coerced' power plant owners to reduce SO2 emissions by over 50% (and Nox, and particulates, and someday mercury). It's called the law, and it's about the economic externality which is present: the environmental cost to society as a whole of the polluting activity, which the polluter doesn't pay.
- on the timescale we are talking for new coal which is 20-30 years to replace the world's suite of coal plants, IGCC will be there. There are already 6 commercial scale plants running in the world. Whether it will be the best or most cost efficient technology remains to be seen.
An important side benefit of IGCC is a pure stream of hydrogen: on a medium term view, that hydrogen is likely to become quite valuable in vehicle propulsion, fuel cells etc.
"Once we learn how to do it, then"... that sums it all.
We have not learnt how to do it on the large scale. We have not even tried to do it on a large existing plant which was never projected with CCS in mind. Who will cover the R&D costs for this to be shown to work? Who will cover the costs during the high learning curve until this is scaled up and mass produced?
It is unfair to compare CCS with scrubbing. Scrubbing requires little more than installing a certain already developed and standardized set of equipment. Costs ~ tens of million.
CCS - equipment - largely unknown; costs - unknown, infrastructure - to be built... by whom, at what cost? If you drew the map of CPPs in the coutry and transpose it with a map of sites where CO2 will be pumped in - could you estimate how much pipelines, pumping stations etc. would be needed? The volume of the CO2 we are talking about (liquified) far exceeds the volume of oil we use in the country. Now compare the value of the oil we use with the value of the coal we burn... it's maybe 10:1.
The bottom line is that the problem will be infrastructure plus the the initial R&D and who will take care of it. Governments are inefficient and have largely retreated from the market, and competition and deregulation are forcing utilities to bring upfront investments to the absolute minimum as possible.
As for the problems with nuclear in Finland and elsewhere, the problem is of the same nature as CCS (not enough maturity of a new design or of a industry). Streamlined designs and industries in France, Russia, China or Japan are doing pretty good.
You can't even compare it to where CCS currently stands at, which for all practical purposes is nowhere. Again we need to see a large new demonstration plant plus a large randomly picked retrofitted plant and look at the costs. How long until we have those? 20-30 years?
As for NIMBY I think we will soon see government action to address the problem which also hinders wind and other industries. Once shortages hit it will become inconceivable to continue foregoing public good because of the perceived interests of narrow and most often poorly informed local groups.
It's not the utility's problem. The US government has declared that it is the government's problem (however tied up in politics it may be), and all the utility has to do is put the spent fuel in dry casks and cede them to Washington to be rid of the matter. It then becomes Washington's problem to get it to Yucca Mountain or wherever.
I question whether new emission requirements of the last 30 years have much reduced the energy efficiency of coal fired plants. When I attended the U of Missouri's engineering school in late 1970's and early 1980's I remember that coal fired plants were typically 39% energy efficient in turning the chemical energy of coal into electrical power. Today the most efficient plants are 42% efficient as noted by Heading Out in his post reporting the presentations at the latest ASPO meeting. But maybe current plants would be higher than 42% without environmental controls.
One factor in reducing emmisions has been the burning of low sulfur (western US) soft coal which has a lower BTU content per pound. I am not an expert on coal fired plants but my impression from talking to people that work at a modern plant is that the greatest drawback to the clean technology is with the additional capital cost of building and maintaining cleaner burning power plants.
Mark in St Louis, USA
Mark
First my apologies if I was intemperate earlier-- see my other post.
I don't think current environmental controls account for more than 2-3% efficiency loss. You are really only talking about the costs of running scrubbers, which aren't huge.
European and Japanese utilities, where coal prices are higher, are prepared to build and operate what are called (from memory) 'ultra super critical coal' plants, which run efficiencies several percent higher than the average US plant.
Yes the big switch has been to lower BTU Wyoming Basin coal, rather than Appalachian coal, because of its lower sulphur content. However that is partly because US utilities resisted building SO2 scrubbers.
IGCC (gasification) power plants are relatively rare beasts. The Wabash plant was a great success, and built more or less to budget. Costs for an IGCC are 10-40% more, over the long run expected to be at the lower end of that as the learning curve progresses. You get about a 10% increase in plant efficiency (*that* is where the 42% comes from I think, I think the best current pulverised coal plants are c. 35%) which offsets that to some extent in the long run. By contrast, combined cycle gas fired stations are running at c. 57-58%.
The utilities have used the 'New Source Rule' to fight, tooth and nail, new emission controls or plant replacement.
Then you have the question of the cost of capture and sequestration. Both the IPCC and the MIT reports (see my links) make big efforts to estimate that. Much depends on whether we go with post combustion capture or gasification.
The best guess we can make is that if the wholesale price of electricity from coal fired generation, *new* coal fired generation, is 5 cents/kwhr now (remembering that the price of building a power plant has risen at least 50% in the last 3-4 years, and capital cost is all in building any plant but a gas fired one), then the cost of electricity with full CCS is 8-10 cents/ kwhr.
If your utility is paying 5 cents/kwhr for electricity, you as the homeowner will be paying 10 cents. So if it goes to 8-10 cents (which is incidentally about the cost coming from new nuclear and/or wind power) then you will be paying 15 cents. People paying less than that now are doing so because electricity is being generated by old kit, plants which were written off long ago.
We have all the pieces of the puzzle. CO2 extraction, transmission, injection. What we haven't done is put them together in a working commercial power plant. And it's not (yet) clear whether post combustion capture (and conventional coal fired stations) is the way to go, or pre capture (ie gasification).
Clearly you would have to rely on post-cumbustion CCS for the foreseeble future. IGCC are still not regarded as proven or reliable technology and nobody is going to rebuild the old plants or those currently on the line - it would just be prohibitively expensive to start it over.
And if the wholesale price goes from 5c to 8-10c I would expect retail prices to rise accordingly percentagewise - that is 16-20c/kwth. In addition CSS is a new and unproven technology, factoring in R&D, unexpected technical difficulties and costs for "retrofitting" existing plants should bring real-world costs to yet-unknown-heights. Is it coincidence that even the small demonstration projects currently built are not able to come on time and on budget?
Another thing that worries me is for how long carbon storages will be enough. Will they last for the 50-60 years CPPs are typically projected for?
There has not been new nuclear as of yet in the US or in the West, so I don't see your basis for the 8-10c/kwth price. AFAIK new nuclear in China, South Korea or Japan gets well below 5c/kwth. But they don't have NIMBY and maybe that's the difference...