People who have dealt with the realities of worldwide energy use for their entire working lives, (like geologists) understand the absurdity of thinking that the so-called renewable sources of energy can or are going to replace oil, gas, and coal in the near future. The following article published in "The Wall Street Journal" explains the reasons for this absurdity very clearly.
The Obama Administration and the Democrats in Congress do not seem to understand this. The science, math, and economics are very clear and simple. It makes one wonder what their real objectives are. They are out to control energy, meaning the oil, coal, and gas industry with their proposed taxes and cap and trade scheme. However, think about it. If we shut down the oil, gas, and coal industry, where is the government going to get the money to finance all their other grand projects? To shut down fossil fuels in the name of stopping global warming is a particularly vile and cruel lie. This is becoming more clear on a daily basis.
Peter
MARCH 4, 2009, 11:18 P.M. ET
Let's Get Real About Renewable Energy
We can double the output of solar and wind, and double it again. We'll still depend on hydrocarbons.
By ROBERT BRYCE (source)
During his address to Congress last week, President Barack Obama declared, "We will double this nation's supply of renewable energy in the next three years."
While that statement -- along with his pledge to impose a "cap on carbon pollution" -- drew applause, let's slow down for a moment and get realistic about this country's energy future. Consider two factors that are too-often overlooked: George W. Bush's record on renewables, and the problem of scale.
By promising to double our supply of renewables, Mr. Obama is only trying to keep pace with his predecessor. Yes, that's right: From 2005 to 2007, the former Texas oil man oversaw a near-doubling of the electrical output from solar and wind power. And between 2007 and 2008, output from those sources grew by another 30%.
Mr. Bush's record aside, the key problem facing Mr. Obama, and anyone else advocating a rapid transition away from the hydrocarbons that have dominated the world's energy mix since the dawn of the Industrial Age, is the same issue that dogs every alternative energy idea: scale.
Let's start by deciphering exactly what Mr. Obama includes in his definition of "renewable" energy. If he's including hydropower, which now provides about 2.4% of America's total primary energy needs, then the president clearly has no concept of what he is promising. Hydro now provides more than 16 times as much energy as wind and solar power combined. Yet more dams are being dismantled than built. Since 1999, more than 200 dams in the U.S. have been removed.
If Mr. Obama is only counting wind power and solar power as renewables, then his promise is clearly doable. But the unfortunate truth is that even if he matches Mr. Bush's effort by doubling wind and solar output by 2012, the contribution of those two sources to America's overall energy needs will still be almost inconsequential.
Here's why. The latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that total solar and wind output for 2008 will likely be about 45,493,000 megawatt-hours. That sounds significant until you consider this number: 4,118,198,000 megawatt-hours. That's the total amount of electricity generated during the rolling 12-month period that ended last November. Solar and wind, in other words, produce about 1.1% of America's total electricity consumption.
Of course, you might respond that renewables need to start somewhere. True enough -- and to be clear, I'm not opposed to renewables. ( And neither am I, Peter) I have solar panels on the roof of my house here in Texas that generate 3,200 watts. And those panels (which were heavily subsidized by Austin Energy, the city-owned utility) provide about one-third of the electricity my family of five consumes. Better still, solar panel producers like First Solar Inc. are lowering the cost of solar cells. On the day of Mr. Obama's speech, the company announced that it is now producing solar cells for $0.98 per watt, thereby breaking the important $1-per-watt price barrier.
And yet, while price reductions are important, the wind is intermittent, and so are sunny days. That means they cannot provide the baseload power, i.e., the amount of electricity required to meet minimum demand, that Americans want.
That issue aside, the scale problem persists. For the sake of convenience, let's convert the energy produced by U.S. wind and solar installations into oil equivalents.
The conversion of electricity into oil terms is straightforward: one barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 1.64 megawatt-hours of electricity. Thus, 45,493,000 megawatt-hours divided by 1.64 megawatt-hours per barrel of oil equals 27.7 million barrels of oil equivalent from solar and wind for all of 2008.
Now divide that 27.7 million barrels by 365 days and you find that solar and wind sources are providing the equivalent of 76,000 barrels of oil per day. America's total primary energy use is about 47.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.
Of that 47.4 million barrels of oil equivalent, oil itself has the biggest share -- we consume about 19 million barrels per day. Natural gas is the second-biggest contributor, supplying the equivalent of 11.9 million barrels of oil, while coal provides the equivalent of 11.5 million barrels of oil per day. The balance comes from nuclear power (about 3.8 million barrels per day), and hydropower (about 1.1 million barrels), with smaller contributions coming from wind, solar, geothermal, wood waste, and other sources.
Here's another way to consider the 76,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day that come from solar and wind: It's approximately equal to the raw energy output of one average-sized coal mine.
During his address to Congress, Mr. Obama did not mention coal -- the fuel that provides nearly a quarter of total primary energy and about half of America's electricity -- except to say that the U.S. should develop "clean coal."
He didn't mention nuclear power, only "nuclear proliferation," even though nuclear power is likely the best long-term solution to policy makers' desire to cut U.S. carbon emissions.
He didn't mention natural gas, even though it provides about 25% of America's total primary energy needs. Furthermore, the U.S. has huge quantities of gas, and it's the only fuel source that can provide the stand-by generation capacity needed for wind and solar installations. Finally, he didn't mention oil, the backbone fuel of the world transportation sector, except to say that the U.S. imports too much of it.
Perhaps the president's omissions are understandable. America has an intense love-hate relationship with hydrocarbons in general, and with coal and oil in particular. And with increasing political pressure to cut carbon-dioxide emissions, that love-hate relationship has only gotten more complicated. (Carbon dioxide emissions being related to the global warming scare. Peter)
But the problem of scale means that these hydrocarbons just won't go away. Sure, Mr. Obama can double the output from solar and wind. And then double it again. And again. And again. But getting from 76,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day to something close to the 47.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day needed to keep the U.S. economy running is going to take a long, long time. It would be refreshing if the president or perhaps a few of the Democrats on Capitol Hill would admit that fact.
Mr. Bryce is the managing editor of Energy Tribune. His latest book is "Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Energy Independence'"(Public Affairs, 2008).
Showing posts with label coal gasification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coal gasification. Show all posts
Friday, March 6, 2009
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
"Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil", by David Goodstein
Here is what sounds like another excellent book about our impending energy crises. This (to me) is a far greater danger than "global warming". See also the following review from Amazon.com
Peter
Out of Gas: The End of the Age Of Oil (Paperback) by David Goodstein (Author) $13.95
Price:
$11.16 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save:
$2.79 (20%)
Availability: In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
September 10, 2006
By
Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews For those of you who are just getting interested in the subject, David Goodstein's Out of Gas is the book you want to read first. I have read several books on the impending energy crisis, including:
Deffeyes, Kenneth S. Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak (2005)
Heinberg, Richard. The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2nd Ed., 2005)
Huber, Peter W. and Mark P. Mills. The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (2005)
Leeb, Stephen and Donna Leeb. The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself--and Profit--from the Coming Energy Crisis (2005)
Simmons, Matthew R. Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (2005)
and I can say that Professor Goodstein's modest, short and very much to the point book is as good as, if not better than, any of those five. He introduces the subject in a clear and no nonsense way and includes a lot of background information essential to understanding how energy works and why we are about to face a crisis. For readers who are expert on the physics and technology of heat engines and entropy, this book will be a little too basic in part. But even for such experts, Goodstein is essential reading because not only does he understand the science of the energy crisis, he understands the politics. Especially edifying is the material in the Postscript.
Let me reference a few ideas: OPEC (a cartel, as Goodstein explains, patterned after the Texas Railroad Commission which was the cartel that controlled oil production in the US before our supply peaked) likes to maintain prices within a range, "partly in order not to discourage demand for oil, but also to prevent investment in alternative fuels." This we know, of course. But Goodstein adds, "The implied threat is, if you invest money to develop a competitor to oil, we will flood the market with cheap oil and wipe out your investment." (pp. 126-127) This explains in part why we have been so slow to develop alternative sources. Investors are afraid. However, as Goodstein explains, if OPEC no longer has "excess pumping capacity" to flood the market, theirs becomes an empty threat.
Notice another point here: not only are OPEC countries tempted to overstate capacity so that by OPEC rules they are allowed to pump more oil, they are induced to lie about their reserves to scare potential investors away from alternative energy sources. In fact the entire oil industry itself "has a very strong incentive to deny any looming shortage of oil." In other words, to overstate their reserves. Another reason they overstate their reserves "is to keep down the price of oil properties they would like to acquire." (p. 127) Goodstein also explains why "reserves to production" (R/P) numbers have stayed about the same for many decades and why many experts say we still have forty years of oil left, same as we have had for most of the twentieth century.
Quite simply "proven" reserves are reported as "whatever fits the current needs" of the company. (p. 128) It used to be the case that under-reporting was good since it kept the price of oil from plummeting. Now the real danger is to acknowledge that a company doesn't have much oil left. This will cause their stock price to plunge, which is what happened to the Royal Dutch Shell Group "when it was forced by outside auditors to reduce its claims of proven reserves..." (p. 129)
Goodstein's take on the various alternatives to oil, including coal, shale oil, nuclear energy, renewables, etc. is very much in concert with the opinions of other experts. We will be using more coal, dirty as it is, and more nuclear energy, and natural gas. These are the three main alternatives. Not long after we run out of oil we will run out of natural gas and then coal and then even nuclear power plants will grow cold for lack of uranium, which if used to supply energy at the current rate of consumption will be depleted in five to twenty-five years. (p. 106)
Goodstein explores wind and solar and makes it clear that in the long run--if we and civilization are going to make it to the long run--we will have to develop the technology to exploit these renewable sources. This will require a huge investment. We will need the political leadership and will to make the kind of commitment that President Kennedy made in putting a man on the moon.
Goodstein believes that solving the energy problem will require the same sort of formidable and creative technology as did the space program. He adds that "Unfortunately, our present national and international leadership is reluctant even to acknowledge that there is a problem." (p. 123) It is essential that we make the commitment to develop alternatives fuels and we make that commitment NOW because (1) we will need the oil we have left to make the thousands of petrochemical products we will continue to use; (2) we need to free ourselves from dependence on the oil producing countries; and (3) there is an outside danger that the continued burning of fossils fuels will trigger a runaway greenhouse catastrophe that could lead to sterilizing the earth as has happened on Venus.
Note well this horrific downside--far worse than any "nuclear winter"--and note too we could go past the point of no return without even realizing it, and be left with no way to stop the meltdown. Bottom line: "The challenge is enormous but the stakes are even larger. If future generations are to thrive, we who have consumed Earth's legacy of cheap oil must now provide for a world without it." (p. 131)
Peter
Out of Gas: The End of the Age Of Oil (Paperback) by David Goodstein (Author) $13.95
Price:
$11.16 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save:
$2.79 (20%)
Availability: In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
September 10, 2006
By
Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews For those of you who are just getting interested in the subject, David Goodstein's Out of Gas is the book you want to read first. I have read several books on the impending energy crisis, including:
Deffeyes, Kenneth S. Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak (2005)
Heinberg, Richard. The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2nd Ed., 2005)
Huber, Peter W. and Mark P. Mills. The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (2005)
Leeb, Stephen and Donna Leeb. The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself--and Profit--from the Coming Energy Crisis (2005)
Simmons, Matthew R. Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (2005)
and I can say that Professor Goodstein's modest, short and very much to the point book is as good as, if not better than, any of those five. He introduces the subject in a clear and no nonsense way and includes a lot of background information essential to understanding how energy works and why we are about to face a crisis. For readers who are expert on the physics and technology of heat engines and entropy, this book will be a little too basic in part. But even for such experts, Goodstein is essential reading because not only does he understand the science of the energy crisis, he understands the politics. Especially edifying is the material in the Postscript.
Let me reference a few ideas: OPEC (a cartel, as Goodstein explains, patterned after the Texas Railroad Commission which was the cartel that controlled oil production in the US before our supply peaked) likes to maintain prices within a range, "partly in order not to discourage demand for oil, but also to prevent investment in alternative fuels." This we know, of course. But Goodstein adds, "The implied threat is, if you invest money to develop a competitor to oil, we will flood the market with cheap oil and wipe out your investment." (pp. 126-127) This explains in part why we have been so slow to develop alternative sources. Investors are afraid. However, as Goodstein explains, if OPEC no longer has "excess pumping capacity" to flood the market, theirs becomes an empty threat.
Notice another point here: not only are OPEC countries tempted to overstate capacity so that by OPEC rules they are allowed to pump more oil, they are induced to lie about their reserves to scare potential investors away from alternative energy sources. In fact the entire oil industry itself "has a very strong incentive to deny any looming shortage of oil." In other words, to overstate their reserves. Another reason they overstate their reserves "is to keep down the price of oil properties they would like to acquire." (p. 127) Goodstein also explains why "reserves to production" (R/P) numbers have stayed about the same for many decades and why many experts say we still have forty years of oil left, same as we have had for most of the twentieth century.
Quite simply "proven" reserves are reported as "whatever fits the current needs" of the company. (p. 128) It used to be the case that under-reporting was good since it kept the price of oil from plummeting. Now the real danger is to acknowledge that a company doesn't have much oil left. This will cause their stock price to plunge, which is what happened to the Royal Dutch Shell Group "when it was forced by outside auditors to reduce its claims of proven reserves..." (p. 129)
Goodstein's take on the various alternatives to oil, including coal, shale oil, nuclear energy, renewables, etc. is very much in concert with the opinions of other experts. We will be using more coal, dirty as it is, and more nuclear energy, and natural gas. These are the three main alternatives. Not long after we run out of oil we will run out of natural gas and then coal and then even nuclear power plants will grow cold for lack of uranium, which if used to supply energy at the current rate of consumption will be depleted in five to twenty-five years. (p. 106)
Goodstein explores wind and solar and makes it clear that in the long run--if we and civilization are going to make it to the long run--we will have to develop the technology to exploit these renewable sources. This will require a huge investment. We will need the political leadership and will to make the kind of commitment that President Kennedy made in putting a man on the moon.
Goodstein believes that solving the energy problem will require the same sort of formidable and creative technology as did the space program. He adds that "Unfortunately, our present national and international leadership is reluctant even to acknowledge that there is a problem." (p. 123) It is essential that we make the commitment to develop alternatives fuels and we make that commitment NOW because (1) we will need the oil we have left to make the thousands of petrochemical products we will continue to use; (2) we need to free ourselves from dependence on the oil producing countries; and (3) there is an outside danger that the continued burning of fossils fuels will trigger a runaway greenhouse catastrophe that could lead to sterilizing the earth as has happened on Venus.
Note well this horrific downside--far worse than any "nuclear winter"--and note too we could go past the point of no return without even realizing it, and be left with no way to stop the meltdown. Bottom line: "The challenge is enormous but the stakes are even larger. If future generations are to thrive, we who have consumed Earth's legacy of cheap oil must now provide for a world without it." (p. 131)
Monday, June 4, 2007
Global Meltdown, By Andrew Revkin
This article published at AARP's Website summarizes the conventional wisdom involved in the current debate over "carbon emissions", global warming, climate change, energy supplies, alternative energy sources, and world politics. He offers no new insight, but this is worth reading as a kind of primer on the subject.
Peter
From: http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/global_meltdown.html
Global Meltdown
By Andrew Revkin, July & August 2007
It’s becoming a legacy issue for older Americans: what type of planet are we leaving our children? One of the nation’s top reporters on the environment reveals the latest science behind climate change
KANGERLUSSUAQ, GREENLAND
I’m staring up at the crumbling edge of the frozen white cap cloaking most of this vast Arctic island. The ice is thousands of years old, yet melting relentlessly in the bright May sunshine, sending a torrent of gray water to the sea. With me is Joe McConnell, a snow scientist who just spent three weeks drilling samples from the ice sheet, which extends over an area four times the size of California and is almost two miles high at its peak.
McConnell, 49, an expert on the world’s frozen places, is from—of all places—the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. That incongruity isn’t so jarring when he explains that many of the world’s driest communities, from the Andes to the American Southwest, are home to the billion-plus people who get much of their water from mountain snow and glaciers.
The ice-gouged, U-shaped valleys around us, now covered with lichens and shrubs, show that the earth’s climate has changed naturally for billions of years, ever since there’s been an atmosphere. Great warmings and coolings have sent ocean levels rising and falling as enormous amounts of water were locked in glaciers or released like the flows we see here in Greenland.
But the current warming trend is happening much faster than previous hot spells, says McConnell, and none of the forces that usually affect climate—such as variations in the sun’s strength—are in sync with this recent change. Should these patterns continue, he believes, the consequences are clear. “If Greenland melted, it’d raise sea levels by twenty feet,” he explains. “There goes most of the Mississippi embayment. There go the islands in the South Pacific. Bangladesh is obliterated. Manhattan would have to put up dikes.” A similar amount of ice is vulnerable in western Antarctica, another focus of McConnell’s work. While this would most likely be a slow-motion sea change taking many centuries, gases being pumped into the atmosphere by cars, planes, factories, and power plants could raise the odds of such a shift.
“There’s definitely a lot of melting going on,” McConnell says, flinching as a crack echoes from the warming white ice cliff above and a towering slab tilts.
Welcome to life on the frontlines of climate change.
For nearly 20 years I’ve been reporting on the extraordinary idea that humans, mainly by burning billions of tons of fossil fuels, are nudging the planet’s thermostat by adding to the atmosphere’s see-through blanket of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” which traps some of the sun’s energy. This quest has taken me from the shrinking sea ice at the North Pole to the burning forests of the Amazon, from the fraught political battlegrounds of Washington to the tenuous sands of the Maldives, a string of islets in the Indian Ocean where a sea level rise of a couple of feet—a real prospect in a warming century—could render the country uninhabitable. In all my time covering this issue, I’ve never seen the debate as heated as it is now, with talk show hosts, politicians, moviemakers, and novelists alternately claiming human-caused warming is a planetary emergency or a hoax.
But beneath the volleys of sound bites are real people with real concerns. When I give talks on global warming, quite a few of my over-50 peers in the audience remark that this is, at its heart, an issue of legacy. It is our children’s climate, and our grandchildren’s, that is being shaped by the building greenhouse effect. One disturbing part of that legacy is this: while half the gas billowing from smokestacks and tailpipes is typically absorbed by the oceans or plants each year, the rest remains stashed in the air for a century or longer, building like unpaid credit card debt.
NEW YORK CITY
In the intellectual equivalent of a pro-wrestling “smackdown,” two teams of combatants enter a plush, packed auditorium on the Upper East Side for a debate titled “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis,” staged by a group called Intelligence Squared U.S.
The climate-change debunkers include Richard S. Lindzen, 67, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who claims that human-caused warming is inconsequential, and Michael Crichton, 64, the novelist and moviemaker. Crichton stirred the climate debate with a 2004 novel, State of Fear, in which the bad guys were radical environmentalists trying to scare the world about global warming in order to line their pockets. Opposed are three climate scientists: one from NASA, one from a leading university, and one from a private group called the Union of Concerned Scientists. Most of the night focuses on their differences, mainly concerning the value of quick, aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Richard C.J. Somerville, 66, a veteran University of California, San Diego, climatologist, attacks the “not a crisis” position. “[A crisis] does not mean catastrophe or alarmism,” he says. “It means a crucial or decisive moment, a turning point, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent. Our task tonight is to persuade you that global warming is indeed a crisis in exactly that sense. The science warns us that continuing to fuel the world using present technology will bring dangerous and possibly surprising climate changes by the end of this century, if not sooner.”
But Crichton insists that pressing real-time problems trump an iffy, long-term one. “Every day 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty,” he tells the crowd. “A third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water. We have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don’t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what’s going on now.”
What’s largely lost in the sparring—Crichton’s team prevails in an audience vote—is that the debate has not been about whether humans are contributing to rising temperatures. Crichton and Lindzen, both of whom consider former vice president Al Gore and his allies alarmists, readily agree that human-generated greenhouse gases warm the earth. Indeed, the list of people accepting the need to cut these gases includes former foes of environmentalists. One convert is evangelist Pat Robertson, who said on his 700 Club TV program last year that “it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.… We really need to do something on fossil fuels.” Another conservative taking warming seriously is former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. “The evidence is sufficient,” he said in April, “that we should move toward the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading of the atmosphere.”
What’s driving the change in attitudes is a steadily growing body of scientific evidence on human activities and warming. A report released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—made up of hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts—said with 90 percent certainty that most of the warming since 1950 has been driven by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The report concluded with “high confidence” that human-caused climate change was already affecting regional conditions from the poles to the Tropics, and that hundreds of millions of people could be harmed by coastal flooding, dwindling water supplies, and shifting weather patterns within a few decades. The changes could also drive many species toward extinction, particularly those with rapidly shrinking habitats, such as polar bears. Warming in this century, by many estimates, could be between three and eight times the warming in the 20th century, when the planet’s average temperature rose just over one degree Fahrenheit in all. The United States was among 113 countries that endorsed the report.
The new report also predicts a mix of consequences, not all bad. More rainfall and longer growing seasons will likely benefit higher latitudes for decades, while less rainfall and harsher droughts are likely in some of the world’s poorest places—most notably, Africa. An open-water Arctic Ocean in summers, while posing a threat to polar bears, could create new intercontinental shipping lanes thousands of miles shorter than existing ones.
What the debate comes down to is not whether changes are coming but when they’ll occur—and how severe they’ll be. There is serious scientific disagreement about such vital questions as how fast and far temperatures, seas, and storm strength could rise. Warmer waters, for example, could lead to more Katrina-strength hurricanes. Yet new studies find that hurricanes might be torn apart by wind conditions associated with, yes, rising temperatures. This uncertainty is not humanity’s friend, experts say, especially as the global population crests in coming decades, putting ever more people at risk of flooding, famine, and other climate-driven threats.
“We’re altering the environment far faster than we can possibly predict the consequences,” says Stephen H. Schneider, 62, a Stanford University climatologist who has been working on the puzzle of humans and climate for more than half his life.
Schneider has long believed that responding to the greenhouse challenge is as much about hedging against uncertain risks as it is about dealing with what is clearly known. And the risks, as he sees it, are clear: there is a real chance things could be much worse than the midrange projections of a few degrees of warming in this century—and any thought that more science will magically clarify what lies ahead is probably wishful thinking.
When he lectures about global warming these days, Schneider often asks listeners about a more familiar risk. “How many of you have had a serious fire in your home?” he begins. In a crowd of 300 or so, usually three or four hands rise.
His next question: “How many of you buy fire insurance?”
Hundreds of hands go up.
For Schneider that pattern shows how well people deal with uncertain but potentially calamitous risks in their daily lives. The trick lies in transferring that same behavior to dealing with a risk facing our common home—the planet itself.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
I’m standing in a cramped lab at the California Institute of Technology, squinting at a blinding light. It’s visible through a small glass port in the side of a metal furnace where scientists are cooking up a new kind of device for turning sunlight into electricity. Inside, atoms of metals are being deposited onto minute rods in ways that could someday boost the efficiency of solar panels.
Solar power is widely seen as the sole alternative energy source that is abundant enough—and someday could be cheap enough—to eventually supplant fossil fuels. Windmills, while effective in certain conditions, face problems at large scale. In Texas, for example, the hottest days—which prompt the biggest surge in power use—tend to be the least windy. Nuclear power, while producing few emissions, has its own problem of scale. Princeton experts recently estimated that the world would need nearly 900 new nuclear power plants in the next 45 years just to reduce the expected carbon dioxide release by 10 percent in that time.
And so research sites like this one in Pasadena are the critical, yet largely overlooked, battlefronts in the global warming war. In the mist-draped hills of New Haven, West Virginia, engineers and scientists have drilled more than 9,000 feet beneath one of the country’s giant coal-fired power plants to see whether layers of rock can provide a repository for vast amounts of CO2 released as the coal burns. In the “biology building” at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory outside Denver, special strains of algae slosh like pea soup in racks of beakers under bright lights. In certain conditions these algae can generate bubbles of hydrogen, a tantalizing substitute for fossil fuels if it can be produced cheaply and cleanly. So far, the gas has been produced in teacup amounts.
The gulf between such embryonic efforts and what’s needed to avoid a buildup of greenhouse gases remains wide, despite statements by politicians of both parties about solving U.S. energy and climate problems. Funding for such research peaked in the United States and abroad during the oil shocks of the 1970s, then dwindled. It has never grown since—only Japan has sustained investment in such research. Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory were heartened when $34 million of new money was included in their latest science budget last year. But Arthur J. Nozik, 71, a chemical physicist there, notes that this is roughly the cost of one F-18 jetfighter. In the end, only $8 million was authorized by Congress in 2007.
The challenge of shifting to new energy options is made vastly more difficult because the world’s existing energy system—85 percent based on coal, oil, and other fossil fuels—is so integrated into modern life. “We already have electricity coming out of everybody’s wall socket,” says Nathan S. Lewis, 51, a chemistry professor who codirects the Powering the Planet project at Caltech. “This is not a new function we’re seeking. It’s a substitution. It’s not like NASA sending a man to the moon. It’s like finding a new way to send a man to the moon when Southwest Airlines is already flying there every hour handing out peanuts.”
Numerous experts say the only way to propel such a change is with taxes on fuels that produce the most greenhouse gases, or new emission-reduction treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States did not ratify), or bills—like many being discussed on Capitol Hill—that require emissions reductions. But there are major political impediments, both globally and domestically. And do Americans have the stomach for higher taxes and heating bills? Perhaps, says Peter Schwartz, 61, who analyzes risks for corporations and the government, if we see global warming as a security threat—one that could create calamities ranging from large-scale migrations to conflicts over food and water.
With or without new laws or taxes, the need for technological advances is vital, says Martin I. Hoffert, 69, a physics professor at New York University. Hoffert has testified repeatedly before Congress about the lack of investment in energy research—efforts that could help avoid oil wars, lower energy costs, and help poorer countries advance without overheating the planet. “Technology evolution is like biological evolution,” he says. “Most mutations, like most innovative technologies, don’t survive. But without mutations, evolution stops. It only takes one transistor to change the world.” And it won’t necessarily cost a fortune: John Holdren, 63, an energy and climate expert at Harvard, says that a rise in the federal gas tax of 2.5 cents a gallon would triple the federal energy-research budget.
Meanwhile, the demand for energy worldwide is increasing, and not only in such countries as India and China. Two billion people still cook meals on firewood or dried dung, and more than 1.5 million of those—mainly women and children—die young from breathing clouds of indoor smoke. In a world heading toward 9 billion or more people by 2042 who either are born into—or dream of—our plugged-in, air-conditioned, frequent-flier lifestyle, revolutionary new energy sources are needed.
It may be that what we face is less a climate crisis than an energy challenge. Many experts believe the key to limiting climate risks and solving a host of momentous problems—including the end of abundant oil—is to begin an ambitious quest for new ways to conserve, harvest, and store energy without creating pollution.
Harnessing the power of the sun remains the Holy Grail of most energy experts. But research on solar technologies remains tiny in scale, though the potential has been clear for decades. Consider this incredibly prescient quote: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
The year? 1931. The speaker? Thomas Edison.
“The biggest challenge is how to get people to wake up and realize this is a one-shot deal,” says Caltech’s solar guru, Lewis. “If we fail, we are witting participants in the biggest experiment that humans have ever done: moving CO2 levels to more than twice their value in the past 670,000 years and hoping it turns out okay for generations to come.”
Andrew Revkin is a reporter with The New York Times and the author of The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), the first book on global climate change written for both children and adults. His stories on global warming can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/revkin
What are you doing to help?
Are you leading a climate-friendly life? Tell us how, and share your thoughts about global warming on this article's message board.
Online Extra: Check out our global warming photo gallery narrated by Andrew Revkin.
Peter
From: http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/global_meltdown.html
Global Meltdown
By Andrew Revkin, July & August 2007
It’s becoming a legacy issue for older Americans: what type of planet are we leaving our children? One of the nation’s top reporters on the environment reveals the latest science behind climate change
KANGERLUSSUAQ, GREENLAND
I’m staring up at the crumbling edge of the frozen white cap cloaking most of this vast Arctic island. The ice is thousands of years old, yet melting relentlessly in the bright May sunshine, sending a torrent of gray water to the sea. With me is Joe McConnell, a snow scientist who just spent three weeks drilling samples from the ice sheet, which extends over an area four times the size of California and is almost two miles high at its peak.
McConnell, 49, an expert on the world’s frozen places, is from—of all places—the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. That incongruity isn’t so jarring when he explains that many of the world’s driest communities, from the Andes to the American Southwest, are home to the billion-plus people who get much of their water from mountain snow and glaciers.
The ice-gouged, U-shaped valleys around us, now covered with lichens and shrubs, show that the earth’s climate has changed naturally for billions of years, ever since there’s been an atmosphere. Great warmings and coolings have sent ocean levels rising and falling as enormous amounts of water were locked in glaciers or released like the flows we see here in Greenland.
But the current warming trend is happening much faster than previous hot spells, says McConnell, and none of the forces that usually affect climate—such as variations in the sun’s strength—are in sync with this recent change. Should these patterns continue, he believes, the consequences are clear. “If Greenland melted, it’d raise sea levels by twenty feet,” he explains. “There goes most of the Mississippi embayment. There go the islands in the South Pacific. Bangladesh is obliterated. Manhattan would have to put up dikes.” A similar amount of ice is vulnerable in western Antarctica, another focus of McConnell’s work. While this would most likely be a slow-motion sea change taking many centuries, gases being pumped into the atmosphere by cars, planes, factories, and power plants could raise the odds of such a shift.
“There’s definitely a lot of melting going on,” McConnell says, flinching as a crack echoes from the warming white ice cliff above and a towering slab tilts.
Welcome to life on the frontlines of climate change.
For nearly 20 years I’ve been reporting on the extraordinary idea that humans, mainly by burning billions of tons of fossil fuels, are nudging the planet’s thermostat by adding to the atmosphere’s see-through blanket of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” which traps some of the sun’s energy. This quest has taken me from the shrinking sea ice at the North Pole to the burning forests of the Amazon, from the fraught political battlegrounds of Washington to the tenuous sands of the Maldives, a string of islets in the Indian Ocean where a sea level rise of a couple of feet—a real prospect in a warming century—could render the country uninhabitable. In all my time covering this issue, I’ve never seen the debate as heated as it is now, with talk show hosts, politicians, moviemakers, and novelists alternately claiming human-caused warming is a planetary emergency or a hoax.
But beneath the volleys of sound bites are real people with real concerns. When I give talks on global warming, quite a few of my over-50 peers in the audience remark that this is, at its heart, an issue of legacy. It is our children’s climate, and our grandchildren’s, that is being shaped by the building greenhouse effect. One disturbing part of that legacy is this: while half the gas billowing from smokestacks and tailpipes is typically absorbed by the oceans or plants each year, the rest remains stashed in the air for a century or longer, building like unpaid credit card debt.
NEW YORK CITY
In the intellectual equivalent of a pro-wrestling “smackdown,” two teams of combatants enter a plush, packed auditorium on the Upper East Side for a debate titled “Global Warming Is Not a Crisis,” staged by a group called Intelligence Squared U.S.
The climate-change debunkers include Richard S. Lindzen, 67, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who claims that human-caused warming is inconsequential, and Michael Crichton, 64, the novelist and moviemaker. Crichton stirred the climate debate with a 2004 novel, State of Fear, in which the bad guys were radical environmentalists trying to scare the world about global warming in order to line their pockets. Opposed are three climate scientists: one from NASA, one from a leading university, and one from a private group called the Union of Concerned Scientists. Most of the night focuses on their differences, mainly concerning the value of quick, aggressive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Richard C.J. Somerville, 66, a veteran University of California, San Diego, climatologist, attacks the “not a crisis” position. “[A crisis] does not mean catastrophe or alarmism,” he says. “It means a crucial or decisive moment, a turning point, a state of affairs in which a decisive change for better or worse is imminent. Our task tonight is to persuade you that global warming is indeed a crisis in exactly that sense. The science warns us that continuing to fuel the world using present technology will bring dangerous and possibly surprising climate changes by the end of this century, if not sooner.”
But Crichton insists that pressing real-time problems trump an iffy, long-term one. “Every day 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty,” he tells the crowd. “A third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water. We have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don’t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what’s going on now.”
What’s largely lost in the sparring—Crichton’s team prevails in an audience vote—is that the debate has not been about whether humans are contributing to rising temperatures. Crichton and Lindzen, both of whom consider former vice president Al Gore and his allies alarmists, readily agree that human-generated greenhouse gases warm the earth. Indeed, the list of people accepting the need to cut these gases includes former foes of environmentalists. One convert is evangelist Pat Robertson, who said on his 700 Club TV program last year that “it is getting hotter and the ice caps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air.… We really need to do something on fossil fuels.” Another conservative taking warming seriously is former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. “The evidence is sufficient,” he said in April, “that we should move toward the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading of the atmosphere.”
What’s driving the change in attitudes is a steadily growing body of scientific evidence on human activities and warming. A report released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—made up of hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts—said with 90 percent certainty that most of the warming since 1950 has been driven by the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The report concluded with “high confidence” that human-caused climate change was already affecting regional conditions from the poles to the Tropics, and that hundreds of millions of people could be harmed by coastal flooding, dwindling water supplies, and shifting weather patterns within a few decades. The changes could also drive many species toward extinction, particularly those with rapidly shrinking habitats, such as polar bears. Warming in this century, by many estimates, could be between three and eight times the warming in the 20th century, when the planet’s average temperature rose just over one degree Fahrenheit in all. The United States was among 113 countries that endorsed the report.
The new report also predicts a mix of consequences, not all bad. More rainfall and longer growing seasons will likely benefit higher latitudes for decades, while less rainfall and harsher droughts are likely in some of the world’s poorest places—most notably, Africa. An open-water Arctic Ocean in summers, while posing a threat to polar bears, could create new intercontinental shipping lanes thousands of miles shorter than existing ones.
What the debate comes down to is not whether changes are coming but when they’ll occur—and how severe they’ll be. There is serious scientific disagreement about such vital questions as how fast and far temperatures, seas, and storm strength could rise. Warmer waters, for example, could lead to more Katrina-strength hurricanes. Yet new studies find that hurricanes might be torn apart by wind conditions associated with, yes, rising temperatures. This uncertainty is not humanity’s friend, experts say, especially as the global population crests in coming decades, putting ever more people at risk of flooding, famine, and other climate-driven threats.
“We’re altering the environment far faster than we can possibly predict the consequences,” says Stephen H. Schneider, 62, a Stanford University climatologist who has been working on the puzzle of humans and climate for more than half his life.
Schneider has long believed that responding to the greenhouse challenge is as much about hedging against uncertain risks as it is about dealing with what is clearly known. And the risks, as he sees it, are clear: there is a real chance things could be much worse than the midrange projections of a few degrees of warming in this century—and any thought that more science will magically clarify what lies ahead is probably wishful thinking.
When he lectures about global warming these days, Schneider often asks listeners about a more familiar risk. “How many of you have had a serious fire in your home?” he begins. In a crowd of 300 or so, usually three or four hands rise.
His next question: “How many of you buy fire insurance?”
Hundreds of hands go up.
For Schneider that pattern shows how well people deal with uncertain but potentially calamitous risks in their daily lives. The trick lies in transferring that same behavior to dealing with a risk facing our common home—the planet itself.
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
I’m standing in a cramped lab at the California Institute of Technology, squinting at a blinding light. It’s visible through a small glass port in the side of a metal furnace where scientists are cooking up a new kind of device for turning sunlight into electricity. Inside, atoms of metals are being deposited onto minute rods in ways that could someday boost the efficiency of solar panels.
Solar power is widely seen as the sole alternative energy source that is abundant enough—and someday could be cheap enough—to eventually supplant fossil fuels. Windmills, while effective in certain conditions, face problems at large scale. In Texas, for example, the hottest days—which prompt the biggest surge in power use—tend to be the least windy. Nuclear power, while producing few emissions, has its own problem of scale. Princeton experts recently estimated that the world would need nearly 900 new nuclear power plants in the next 45 years just to reduce the expected carbon dioxide release by 10 percent in that time.
And so research sites like this one in Pasadena are the critical, yet largely overlooked, battlefronts in the global warming war. In the mist-draped hills of New Haven, West Virginia, engineers and scientists have drilled more than 9,000 feet beneath one of the country’s giant coal-fired power plants to see whether layers of rock can provide a repository for vast amounts of CO2 released as the coal burns. In the “biology building” at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory outside Denver, special strains of algae slosh like pea soup in racks of beakers under bright lights. In certain conditions these algae can generate bubbles of hydrogen, a tantalizing substitute for fossil fuels if it can be produced cheaply and cleanly. So far, the gas has been produced in teacup amounts.
The gulf between such embryonic efforts and what’s needed to avoid a buildup of greenhouse gases remains wide, despite statements by politicians of both parties about solving U.S. energy and climate problems. Funding for such research peaked in the United States and abroad during the oil shocks of the 1970s, then dwindled. It has never grown since—only Japan has sustained investment in such research. Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory were heartened when $34 million of new money was included in their latest science budget last year. But Arthur J. Nozik, 71, a chemical physicist there, notes that this is roughly the cost of one F-18 jetfighter. In the end, only $8 million was authorized by Congress in 2007.
The challenge of shifting to new energy options is made vastly more difficult because the world’s existing energy system—85 percent based on coal, oil, and other fossil fuels—is so integrated into modern life. “We already have electricity coming out of everybody’s wall socket,” says Nathan S. Lewis, 51, a chemistry professor who codirects the Powering the Planet project at Caltech. “This is not a new function we’re seeking. It’s a substitution. It’s not like NASA sending a man to the moon. It’s like finding a new way to send a man to the moon when Southwest Airlines is already flying there every hour handing out peanuts.”
Numerous experts say the only way to propel such a change is with taxes on fuels that produce the most greenhouse gases, or new emission-reduction treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol (which the United States did not ratify), or bills—like many being discussed on Capitol Hill—that require emissions reductions. But there are major political impediments, both globally and domestically. And do Americans have the stomach for higher taxes and heating bills? Perhaps, says Peter Schwartz, 61, who analyzes risks for corporations and the government, if we see global warming as a security threat—one that could create calamities ranging from large-scale migrations to conflicts over food and water.
With or without new laws or taxes, the need for technological advances is vital, says Martin I. Hoffert, 69, a physics professor at New York University. Hoffert has testified repeatedly before Congress about the lack of investment in energy research—efforts that could help avoid oil wars, lower energy costs, and help poorer countries advance without overheating the planet. “Technology evolution is like biological evolution,” he says. “Most mutations, like most innovative technologies, don’t survive. But without mutations, evolution stops. It only takes one transistor to change the world.” And it won’t necessarily cost a fortune: John Holdren, 63, an energy and climate expert at Harvard, says that a rise in the federal gas tax of 2.5 cents a gallon would triple the federal energy-research budget.
Meanwhile, the demand for energy worldwide is increasing, and not only in such countries as India and China. Two billion people still cook meals on firewood or dried dung, and more than 1.5 million of those—mainly women and children—die young from breathing clouds of indoor smoke. In a world heading toward 9 billion or more people by 2042 who either are born into—or dream of—our plugged-in, air-conditioned, frequent-flier lifestyle, revolutionary new energy sources are needed.
It may be that what we face is less a climate crisis than an energy challenge. Many experts believe the key to limiting climate risks and solving a host of momentous problems—including the end of abundant oil—is to begin an ambitious quest for new ways to conserve, harvest, and store energy without creating pollution.
Harnessing the power of the sun remains the Holy Grail of most energy experts. But research on solar technologies remains tiny in scale, though the potential has been clear for decades. Consider this incredibly prescient quote: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
The year? 1931. The speaker? Thomas Edison.
“The biggest challenge is how to get people to wake up and realize this is a one-shot deal,” says Caltech’s solar guru, Lewis. “If we fail, we are witting participants in the biggest experiment that humans have ever done: moving CO2 levels to more than twice their value in the past 670,000 years and hoping it turns out okay for generations to come.”
Andrew Revkin is a reporter with The New York Times and the author of The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), the first book on global climate change written for both children and adults. His stories on global warming can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/revkin
What are you doing to help?
Are you leading a climate-friendly life? Tell us how, and share your thoughts about global warming on this article's message board.
Online Extra: Check out our global warming photo gallery narrated by Andrew Revkin.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
A Predictable Push For More Government Subsidies
With the currently popular rush to rein in "carbon emissions" (really meaning carbon dioxide) to curb the "disastrous" effects of global warming and climate change, lawmakers are seeking billions of dollars in subsidies to coal companies, power generating companies, and companies that build the plants that generate this supposedly "cleaner" form of power. Why is this not a surprise.
First intense fear is created among the people about global warming, then when voters have been thoroughly brainwashed, bills proposing more federal subsidies are proposed, and our lawmakers go along with popular opinion. The result? Taxpayers get screwed again.
Read the following article and see what you think. Is it any wonder so many big corporations are "going green"?
Peter
Lawmakers Push for Big Subsidies for Coal Process
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: May 29, 2007
WASHINGTON, May 28 — Even as Congressional leaders draft legislation to reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming, a powerful roster of Democrats and Republicans is pushing to subsidize coal as the king of alternative fuels.
Mike Mergen/Bloomberg News
Richard A. Gephardt, a former Democratic House majority leader, has been hired by Peabody Energy to help make the case for liquefied coal.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, is drafting a bill to promote renewable fuels, but not liquefied coal, for electricity.
Prodded by intense lobbying from the coal industry, lawmakers from coal states are proposing that taxpayers guarantee billions of dollars in construction loans for coal-to-liquid production plants, guarantee minimum prices for the new fuel, and guarantee big government purchases for the next 25 years.
With both House and Senate Democrats hoping to pass “energy independence” bills by mid-July, coal supporters argue that coal-based fuels are more American than gasoline and potentially greener than ethanol.
“For so many, filthy coal is a dirty four-letter word,” said Representative Nick V. Rahall, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. “These individuals, I tell you, have their heads buried in the sand.”
Environmental groups are adamantly opposed, warning that coal-based diesel fuels would at best do little to slow global warming and at worst would produce almost twice as much of the greenhouse gases tied to global warming as petroleum.
Coal companies are hardly alone in asking taxpayers to underwrite alternative fuels in the name of energy independence and reduced global warming. But the scale of proposed subsidies for coal could exceed those for any alternative fuel, including corn-based ethanol.
Among the proposed inducements winding through House and Senate committees: loan guarantees for six to 10 major coal-to-liquid plants, each likely to cost at least $3 billion; a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of coal-based fuel sold through 2020; automatic subsidies if oil prices drop below $40 a barrel; and permission for the Air Force to sign 25-year contracts for almost a billion gallons a year of coal-based jet fuel.
Coal companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying on the issue, and have marshaled allies in organized labor, the Air Force and fuel-burning industries like the airlines. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest coal company, urged in a recent advertising campaign that people “imagine a world where our country runs on energy from Middle America instead of the Middle East.”
Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat whose district is dominated by coal mining, is writing key sections of the House energy bill. In the Senate, champions of coal-to-liquid fuels include Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Larry Craig of Wyoming, both Republicans.
President Bush has not weighed in on specific incentives, but he has often stressed the importance of coal as an alternative to foreign oil. In calling for a 20 percent cut in projected gasoline consumption by 2017, he has carefully referred to the need for “alternative” fuels rather than “renewable” fuels. Administration officials say that was specifically to make room for coal.
The political momentum to subsidize coal fuels is in odd juxtaposition to simultaneous efforts by Democrats to draft global-warming bills that would place new restrictions on coal-fired electric power plants.
The move reflects a tension, which many lawmakers gloss over, between slowing global warming and reducing dependence on foreign oil.
Many analysts say the huge coal reserves of the United States could indeed provide a substitute for foreign oil.
The technology to convert coal into liquid fuel is well-established, and the fuel can be used in conventional diesel cars and trucks, as well as jet engines, boats and ships. Industry executives contend that the fuels can compete against gasoline if oil prices are about $50 a barrel or higher.
But coal-to-liquid fuels produce almost twice the volume of greenhouse gases as ordinary diesel. In addition to the carbon dioxide emitted while using the fuel, the production process creates almost a ton of carbon dioxide for every barrel of liquid fuel.
Coal industry executives insist their fuel can actually be cleaner than oil, because they would capture the gas produced as the liquid fuel is being made and store it underground. Some could be injected into oil fields to push oil to the surface.
Several aspiring coal-to-liquid companies say that they would reduce greenhouse emissions even further by using renewable fuels for part of the process. But none of that has been done at commercial volumes, and many analysts say the economic issues are far from settled.
“There are many uncertainties,” said James T. Bartis, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, who testified last week before the Senate Energy Committee. “We don’t even know what the costs are yet.”
First intense fear is created among the people about global warming, then when voters have been thoroughly brainwashed, bills proposing more federal subsidies are proposed, and our lawmakers go along with popular opinion. The result? Taxpayers get screwed again.
Read the following article and see what you think. Is it any wonder so many big corporations are "going green"?
Peter
Lawmakers Push for Big Subsidies for Coal Process
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: May 29, 2007
WASHINGTON, May 28 — Even as Congressional leaders draft legislation to reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming, a powerful roster of Democrats and Republicans is pushing to subsidize coal as the king of alternative fuels.
Mike Mergen/Bloomberg News
Richard A. Gephardt, a former Democratic House majority leader, has been hired by Peabody Energy to help make the case for liquefied coal.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, is drafting a bill to promote renewable fuels, but not liquefied coal, for electricity.
Prodded by intense lobbying from the coal industry, lawmakers from coal states are proposing that taxpayers guarantee billions of dollars in construction loans for coal-to-liquid production plants, guarantee minimum prices for the new fuel, and guarantee big government purchases for the next 25 years.
With both House and Senate Democrats hoping to pass “energy independence” bills by mid-July, coal supporters argue that coal-based fuels are more American than gasoline and potentially greener than ethanol.
“For so many, filthy coal is a dirty four-letter word,” said Representative Nick V. Rahall, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. “These individuals, I tell you, have their heads buried in the sand.”
Environmental groups are adamantly opposed, warning that coal-based diesel fuels would at best do little to slow global warming and at worst would produce almost twice as much of the greenhouse gases tied to global warming as petroleum.
Coal companies are hardly alone in asking taxpayers to underwrite alternative fuels in the name of energy independence and reduced global warming. But the scale of proposed subsidies for coal could exceed those for any alternative fuel, including corn-based ethanol.
Among the proposed inducements winding through House and Senate committees: loan guarantees for six to 10 major coal-to-liquid plants, each likely to cost at least $3 billion; a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of coal-based fuel sold through 2020; automatic subsidies if oil prices drop below $40 a barrel; and permission for the Air Force to sign 25-year contracts for almost a billion gallons a year of coal-based jet fuel.
Coal companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying on the issue, and have marshaled allies in organized labor, the Air Force and fuel-burning industries like the airlines. Peabody Energy, the world’s biggest coal company, urged in a recent advertising campaign that people “imagine a world where our country runs on energy from Middle America instead of the Middle East.”
Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat whose district is dominated by coal mining, is writing key sections of the House energy bill. In the Senate, champions of coal-to-liquid fuels include Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Larry Craig of Wyoming, both Republicans.
President Bush has not weighed in on specific incentives, but he has often stressed the importance of coal as an alternative to foreign oil. In calling for a 20 percent cut in projected gasoline consumption by 2017, he has carefully referred to the need for “alternative” fuels rather than “renewable” fuels. Administration officials say that was specifically to make room for coal.
The political momentum to subsidize coal fuels is in odd juxtaposition to simultaneous efforts by Democrats to draft global-warming bills that would place new restrictions on coal-fired electric power plants.
The move reflects a tension, which many lawmakers gloss over, between slowing global warming and reducing dependence on foreign oil.
Many analysts say the huge coal reserves of the United States could indeed provide a substitute for foreign oil.
The technology to convert coal into liquid fuel is well-established, and the fuel can be used in conventional diesel cars and trucks, as well as jet engines, boats and ships. Industry executives contend that the fuels can compete against gasoline if oil prices are about $50 a barrel or higher.
But coal-to-liquid fuels produce almost twice the volume of greenhouse gases as ordinary diesel. In addition to the carbon dioxide emitted while using the fuel, the production process creates almost a ton of carbon dioxide for every barrel of liquid fuel.
Coal industry executives insist their fuel can actually be cleaner than oil, because they would capture the gas produced as the liquid fuel is being made and store it underground. Some could be injected into oil fields to push oil to the surface.
Several aspiring coal-to-liquid companies say that they would reduce greenhouse emissions even further by using renewable fuels for part of the process. But none of that has been done at commercial volumes, and many analysts say the economic issues are far from settled.
“There are many uncertainties,” said James T. Bartis, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, who testified last week before the Senate Energy Committee. “We don’t even know what the costs are yet.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)