Energywise

An oil rig in the North Sea is currently spewing huge amounts of gas into the air, prompting the creation of a four-mile exclusion zone around it. The rig, Total's Elgin platform, is located about 150 miles (241 km) from Aberdeen, Scotland.

Officials are struggling to figure out how to stop the leak, whose origin is apparently still a mystery. Along with 238 workers on the Elgin rig, employees on other rigs in the surrounding waters have been evacuated, because of, well, the giant and spreading explosive gas cloud. There are a few options on the table for fixing this, the easiest and happiest being that it stops on its own. If the leak is coming straight from the undersea natural gas reservoir, though, it seems unlikely to simply peter out. The more active options include drilling a relief well or mounting a platform-based "kill" of the leak.

All this probably sounds familiar. The Deepwater Horizon blowout that killed 11 people and eventually spilled almost 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico featured some similar choices. And just like the time frame on that blowout, officials warn that drilling a relief well for the North Sea gas leak could take as long as six months (in the Gulf, the spill was capped after three months and the well was declared completely dead two months later). And also, the elite Hellfighters team that fought the massive fire on the Deepwater Horizon has apparently been called in to Scotland in case that explosive cloud turns into an explosive explosion. If there was one silver lining from the BP blowout, it's that hellfighter-type groups suddenly had a lot more applicants and trainees looking to get ready for the next disaster. The power has been switched off at the Elgin platform to reduce the risk of ignition, but it's good to know there are contingency plans in place.

The rig is far enough from shore that the gas cloud doesn't pose a threat to people on land, but there is also a sheen on the water suggesting it could affect wildlife in the area. And if Deepwater Horizon taught us anything, it's that initial assessments of oil spills and leaks generally don't match up with final damage reports. Hopefully this leak isn't the Next Big Disaster that environmentalists have been warning about for two years now, but just as before, as long as we insist on pulling resources from increasingly hard-to-reach places such accidents are inevitable.

Image via arbyreed

Researchers associated with MIT published a study today assessing how much space would be available if the United States were to start capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fired generation plants. A couple of things need to be said about this right off. First, the study does not actually say what an MIT press release says it says. According to the erroneous MIT release, the study "shows that there is enough capacity in deep saline aquifers in the United States to store at least a century's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the nation's coal-fired power plants."

What the study actually says, according to the article abstract posted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is that "in the United States, if CO₂ production from power generation continues to rise at recent rates, then CCS [carbon capture and storage] can store enough CO₂ to stabilize emissions at current levels for at least 100 years."

Those are quite different statements, obviously. Having enough space to store incremental increases in carbon emitted from fossil generation is not by  a long shot the same thing as having enough space to store all carbon emitted.

But why state estimated CO2 storage capacity in terms of increases in carbon emitted, and why should we content ourselves with merely stabilizing emissions at current rates?  Great strides are being made in green building, as William Pentland points out in a recent blog on the Forbes magazine site, and further energy conservation will result from the introduction of demand-response incentives as the smart grid gets built. So even if the electricity mix were to remain roughly what it has been in past decades, there's no reason why electricity demand necessarily should grow, and no reason therefore why there should be higher fossil emissions.

What is more, however, the generation mix is not remaining the same: The fossil element in the mix already is shrinking. New construction of coal plants has been stopped in its tracks nationwide, and cheap, lower-carbon natural gas is being substituted for coal in electricity generation. That trend is likely to accelerate as coal generation gets more expensive because of tightening clean-air regulation, whether or not a cap-and-trade system puts is a price on carbon. Meanwhile, zero-carbon wind turbines have been the fastest growing new source of generation for years, and zero-carbon nuclear is waiting in the wings.

All those factors help explain why the bloom is off what's gone by the name of clean coal, and that's not to mention the pervasive unease--registering so far mainly in Europe--about the whole idea of storing lots of carbon dioxide underground.

So, while it may be of academic interest to know that there is enough room in the United States to store additional carbon emitted by coal-fired plants in the coming years, it hard not to ask, at risk of being a little rude: so what? Efforts to learn how to capture carbon are stalling here and in Europe, and there are abundant ways of reducing coal generation and carbon emissions without resort to CC&S

For those who take a sporting interest in how the main sources of non-fossil, zero-carbon electricity are doing, it's a good time to take a look at the box score. For all practical purposes, that kind of green energy comes only from wind turbines, photovoltaic and thermal solar installations, and nuclear power plants. So, with numbers coming in for 2011, it's now possible to determine which of them was capable of providing the most energy in 2011 and to discuss the outlook for this year.

Among non-fossil sources of electricity, wind remained comfortably in the lead last year, with 41 gigawatts of capacity installed worldwide. (Allowing for the fact that turbines actually generate electricity only perhaps a quarter of the time, whereas baseload nuclear or fossil fuel plants often produce power 90 percent of the time, 41 gigawatts equates to perhaps 10 to 15 gigawatts of baseload capacity.) China led the world in installations last year, with 18 GW. The European Union came in second, with 9.6 GW; the United States finished third, with 6.8 GW. In terms of total wind capacity added to date, Europe is still far ahead with more than 100 GW. China's 63 GW is good for second, and the United States is in third with 47 GW.

Next came solar. Total 2011 photovoltaic installations added 28.4 GW of installed capacity —the equivalent of 7 to 10 GW of baseload capacity—according to Lux Research. The top ten manufacturers accounted for 44 percent of that total, with the U.S. company First Solar in front of the pack. Chinese PV makers followed closely, with Japanese and Korean manufacturers coming on strong. Lux predicts that Japan and Korea will play an ever larger role in the market, while the European position will continue to deteriorate as government subsidies contract.

Nuclear was still somewhere back in the dust last year. As best I can tell, no new nuclear power plants were commissioned. This year, however, as much as 11.7 GW of new nuclear capacity may come online, says the World Nuclear Association. According to its compilation, three reactors are scheduled to come into operation in China, as well as three in India, three in Canada, two in Korea, and one each in Argentina, Russia, and Iran. Given the history of delays in approving, building, and activating nuclear power plants, 11 to 12 GW of new capacity in 2012 can safely be considered a very optimistic projection. So it seems very likely that both wind and solar will continue to outstrip nuclear for at least another year (wind by a healthy margin) even after making a three- or four-fold adjustment for their lower availability factors.

Though the Cold War is long over and the specter of a global nuclear holocaust no longer uppermost in anybody’s mind, the peaceful atom’s dark side remains worrisome—and not just because of the crisis spots like Iran that happen to be dominating today’s headlines. Plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the stuff of nuclear weapons, produced by means of the same technologies used to make nuclear electricity, continue to be manufactured and stockpiled. And the tasks of reining in that production and reducing the availability of weapons-grade materials continue to be challenging.

Two recent reports assess the current state of affairs, worldwide. One, from the International Panel On Fissile Materials, and co-authored by Zia Mian and Alexander Glaser of Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, was released late last year: It is a tallying and a primer of nuclear weapons and materials production. The other,  “The Nuclear Security Summit: Assessment of National Commitments,” was released this week by the Arms Control Association.

Among the positive news items mentioned in the ACA report: Chile has completely eliminated its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and Ukraine is expected to have done the same by the end of this year; the United States and Russia have signed a protocol obliging each to disposed of 34 metric tons of plutonium (enough for 17,000 new nuclear weapons, according to ACA’s calculations); and Russia has terminated plutonium production. Released in anticipation of the Nuclear Security Summit that will take place in Seoul the week after next, the report finds that 80 percent of 67 national commitments made at the last such summit two years ago have been met.

The Princeton report, Global Fissile Material Report 2011, not only brings us up to date on total and country stocks of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, but also provides useful information on just what you need and how much to build different weapons. It cites official U.S. findings that 4 kg of plutonium suffices to make a contemporary nuclear explosive device (which is roughly consistent with the ACA estimate above), or 12 kg of highly enriched uranium. The report’s basic description of the thermonuclear weapon (or hydrogen bomb) is, simply, the best I’ve seen in 40 years of writing about nuclear weapons and arms control.

According to the report, an h-bomb typically consists of fission trigger or “primary” made of plutonium and a “secondary,” the fusion component, made of uranium, deuterium, and lithium-6 (which converts to tritium and helium under neutron bombardment). Based on known U.S. and Russian deployments of thermonuclear weapons, the average h-bomb contains 4 kg of plutonium and 25 kg of highly enriched uranium.

To put those estimates in a context, take Pakistan, the country that is building up its nuclear arsenal the most aggressively today. It currently has about 100 nuclear bombs but has a stockpile of 1750-3750 kg of highly enriched uranium  and 90-180 kg of plutonium. That’s enough material for Pakistan to make, right now, 167-367 additional atomic (fission) bombs. The number of hydrogen bombs it could make is limited at present by the amount of plutonium it has in hand for the primaries. But it brought a second plutonium-production reactor into operation about two years ago, a third is nearing completion, and work has started on a fourth.

Apparently because of its strategic importance and its delicately balanced political culture, in which the military plays such a key role, Pakistan largely escapes attention as the world's most energetic nuclear proliferator.

Tucked away in a remote corner of a remote campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Sede Boqer, Israel, are several rows of enormous concentrating solar thermal troughs. Next to one row sits a giant dish pointing to the sky, which also generates power from the sun. An experimental vanadium redox battery is housed in a shack in the middle of the complex, and a small wind turbine spins slowly nearby. Photovoltaic panels of various types are scattered around the area.

The Ben-Gurion National Solar Energy Center combines academic research with an industry testing facility. And it's pretty much located in the perfect place: The Negev Desert gets less than four inches of rain per year, and the vast bulk of days are cloudless and sunny (though unfortunately, a windy haze prevailed on the day I visited). Companies bring prototypes and equipment here to test alongside university researchers—a large Siemens sign hangs on the fence next to the first row of solar thermal troughs.

One company spun out of research here is Zenith Solar, which launched in 2006. They make a solar product that is basically a smaller version of the huge dish sitting at the Sede Boqer site. Instead of 400 square meters of reflecting area, these need only 11. Two of these small dishes sit on a dual axis that acts as a heliostat, tracking the sun across the sky (test version at Sede Boqer pictured above). The dish reflects sunlight back toward a small photovoltaic panel and a heat exchanger that then generate both electricity and usable heat. Zenith installed 16 units at a Kibbutz in Israel called Yavne in 2009, and it generates enough power for the 220 residents that the Kibbutz now sell power back to the national grid.

Concentrated photovoltaic technology like this requires less material than traditional PV systems—one tiny solar panel on the Zenith product gives it a 4.5 kilowatt capacity, much greater than that same panel would provide just collecting the sun's light as usual. There is a tradeoff, because photovoltaics lose efficiency as their temperatures rise. Still, combining heat and power makes for an extremely efficient technology; Zenith claims the combined efficiency is 72 percent.

In Israel, though solar power doesn't yet provide much in the way of electricity, 90 percent homes get their hot water from a solar heater on the roof. Still, the country has a long way to go—last summer a renewable energy standard was passed requiring 10 percent of electricity to come from renewables by 2020. The technologies that get them there are likely to come straight out of the desert.

Photo: Dave Levitan

At the end of January 16 scientists and engineers had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, "No Need to Panic about Climate Change." In it, they took issue with mainstream predictions about how fast global warming is taking place, asserting that "even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically."

The 16 signatories included some of the usual suspects among climate skeptics but also some noteworthy individuals relatively new to the debates over global warming: aerospace engineer and SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan; former senator and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt; and American Physical Society fellow Roger Cohen. The 16 took issue in particular with a statement from APS, the world's foremost physics society, that evidence of global warming is "incontrovertible," which they have interpreted, dubiously, as implying that the case for action also is incontrovertible.

Among the evidence the 16 muster is work by William D. Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale and probably the world's leading expert on the economics of carbon reduction policy. Nordhaus delivers a six-point rebuttal of the scientists in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, "Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong." Some of Nordhaus's arguments are open to debate, for example his vigorous claim that greenhouse gases are indeed "pollutants." But it seems safe to say that he's on solid ground when he specifies how the 16 misconstrued and misrepresented his own work.

Nordhaus's concise and to-the-points article can be accessed currently but soon will disappear behind a firewall, so the time to consult it is now.

Meanwhile the 16 climate skeptics have responded to some of their critics, albeit not Nordhaus, in a second Wall Street Journal article. In it, they document convincingly that actual global warming since 1990 has been well short of what the 1990, 1995, and 2001 IPCC reports predicted. They take pains to stress that they are not denying warming as such, only how fast it is and how big the human contribution is. They continue to be very worked up about the APS statement on global warming, which prompted the resignation from APS of Nobelist Ivar Giaever, who shared the prize in 2003 for work he had done at General Electric on tunneling phenomena in solids.

As the debates go on about how serious global warming is and how much needs to be done about it, evidence continues to accumulate that the fundamental premises of climate science and models are sound. One of the latest studies of interest came out of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, where researchers have validated experimentally the premise that the reflectivity of snow diminishes with the deposit of "black carbon" or soot--one of the important feedback phenomena believed to be accelerating warming and ice melt in the Arctic.

That may seem like proving the obvious, but there is more. The researchers found, as a press release put it, that "the greater the grain size of snow, the larger the decrease in its reflectance associated with a fixed amount of soot. Larger-grained snow allows sunlight to travel deeper into the snowpack than smaller-grained snow. Grain size is a proxy for the snow’s age because larger-grained snow is older than smaller-grained snow."

Even as the so-called climate skeptics are quietly conceding that warming is in fact taking place, and that the basic science of warming is sound,  people responsible at the operational level for maintenance of infrastructure increasingly take warming for granted. This week The New York Times science section carried an article saying that a road connecting North Carolina's famed Outer Banks (where the Wright brothers tested their first plane) probably will have to be abandoned in this century. Not only is the road itself harder and harder to service, but some of the islands it connects are expected to disappeared with rising ocean levels. "In 2010, the Times reported, a North Carolina coastal resources panel concluded that a sea level rise of about three feet is likely and should be “adopted as the amount of anticipated rise by 2100, for policy development and planning purposes.”

California-based company Virdia announced yesterday a deal with the Mississippi Development Authority that could lead to the first commercial-scale plant producing the sugars needed to make cellulosic ethanol. The deal includes US $75 million in low-interest loans from the state as well as up to $155 million in tax incentives.

Virdia (formerly HCL CleanTech) has developed a process that converts cellulosic biomass, such as wood chips or grasses, into fermentable sugars and lignin. These products could be used to produce ethanol, along with various other chemicals; to date, there is no large-scale production of cellulosic ethanol going on in the U.S. Virdia also raised $20 million from venture capital firms to support development of a new plant in Mississippi.

Cellulosic ethanol would theoretically remove some of the issues with first generation biofuels like corn ethanol. Instead of using crops that compete for food production land, processes like that Virdia uses involve waste biomass from forests or other non-agricultural lands. Of course, there are concerns that using forests to make fuels could create other issues and again might fail emissions requirements, but Virdia "plans to establish its cellulosic refineries close to sustainable sources of biomass." The sugars and lignin they produce would then be used at existing ethanol refineries to produce the fuel itself.

There is no confirmed location yet for that plant, though Virdia expects to begin production in 2014. The federal Renewable Fuels Standard calls for 36 billion gallons of "renewable fuel" to be blended with traditional fuels by 2022. The vast bulk of this will come from corn ethanol, which has caused substantial controversy in recent years. Analyses suggest that corn ethanol offers little or no greenhouse gas emissions benefit over the petroleum-based fuels they are replacing, which actually violates the RFS. Corn ethanol production has also been blamed for spiking food prices around the world.

Image via Virdia.

In fall 2007, in one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in history, the famed takeover specialists KKR took control of the Texas utility TXU, promising to cancel all but three of eleven planned coal-fired plants and find greener, alternative energy. Involved was a stellar cast of negotiators, facilitators and investors, including former president George H.W. Bush's right-hand man James Baker, the sage of Omaha Warren Buffett, and the very influential and highly remunerated CEO of the Environmental Defense Fund, Fred Krupp.

Now Buffett is calling his investment in TXU, renamed Energy Future Holdings, a "major unforced error."

Even at the time of its closure, however, the deal raised serious questions. IEEE Spectrum editor Susan Hassler wondered whether the deal was as green as advertised, where the replacement energy would come from, and whether professed concerns about climate change might be just a cover to get out of investment commitments that were looking spurious. Soon, TXU disclosed plans for an ambitious program of nuclear construction, which may have been a surprise to some of Krupp's constituents.

By early 2010 it was apparent that another factor was eroding the foundation of the deal, namely plummeting natural gas prices. The main message here is that the revolution in unconventional gas—hydraulic fracturing or "gas fracking"—is proving to be a "disruptive technology" in every possible way. But why is it turning out to be so disruptive to the fortunes of Energy Future Holdings, and why did so many brilliant people not see the iceberg coming?

Ultra-low natural gas prices are increasingly a nightmare for all developers of innovative energy technologies. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, they are a blessing from the perspective of climate change policy: The very parties that have fought hardest against putting a price on carbon, the utilities that rely heavily on coal to make electricity, are now switching to gas-fired generation, keeping U.S. greenhouse gas emissions markedly lower than they otherwise would be.

Seen in the narrower perspective of a profit-maximizing investor-owned utility, surveying prospects at the end of 2007 when gas prices were relatively high, if you happened to be relying mainly on paid-for coal plants that produced inexpensive electricity, then you stood to reap big rewards if you could sell that cheap energy into markets in which the marginal cost of electricity was governed by the higher cost of natural gas. That evidently was the fundamental premise of the TXU takeover.

"The [TXU] deal was announced and closed at $8 gas [per million British thermal units] and now here we are at $3 gas,” an analyst told the Financial Times [subscription required] this week. “The majority of the earnings power is from generation assets and they are inherently long natural gas. Those prices just did not work out for them and the reason is fracking."

But why, considering that the revolution in unconventional gas began in Texas's Barnett Shale [red area in map] , did the luminaries examining the prospective TXU deal not see the possibility of a long-term decline in natural gas prices? Nobody knows or nobody's saying, but it's a clear warning to anybody who thinks they know for sure the world's energy future—even its near future.

A report from the European Commission says that the onshore wind market in Europe is stalling, but that offshore wind installations will greatly increase capacity in coming years.

"The European Union market is wavering between the flagging onshore market and the logistics, technology and industrial preparations for the huge, offshore wind energy market with its rich pickings," the report [PDF] said. Offshore wind installations actually fell in 2011—when 788.1 MW were installed—compared to 2010, with 1139.9 MW installed. There are 18 offshore wind projects, however, that are currently in some phase of construction and should be completed within three years; they will add an amazing 5,285 MW of total capacity.

Production of electricity from wind power is also on the rise, with 172 terawatt-hours produced in 2011. That production accounted for about five percent of the EU's total power requirements. It's also a 15.5 percent increase over 2010, when wind turbines produced 149.1 terawatt-hours. 

Still, there is some cause for concern with regard at least to the onshore wind power market in Europe. According to the report:

"The recession has delayed the granting of a number of loans and led to project commissioning postponements. However the main reason is that heavy intervention is being used to control the development of most of the European Union’s major markets. In these times of crisis, many governments have reduced domestic market growth by slowing down authorization procedures and applying more binding administrative procedures."

In other words, it seems to have gotten too easy for companies to build wind farms. It hardly seems wise from an emissions perspective to try and throttle back on clean energy investment and development; in the U.S., where onshore wind power capacity is closing in on 50 GW but no offshore turbines yet spin, there has been a big push from the Obama Administration to streamline permitting processes. Of course, if the federal Production Tax Credit for wind power is allowed to expire, streamlined permitting won't do much good.

Image via EurObserv'er

The Manhattan Institute, a public policy research outfit with a free-market and somewhat libertarian orientation, has issued a report arguing that renewable energy credits (RECs) represent an excessively expensive way of addressing environmental concerns and promoting green technology. The REC is a device employed by the 29 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico that have adopted renewable portfolio standards, sometimes with special "carve-outs" for solar energy. Grid participants unable to meet mandated targets for renewable generation purchase tradeable credits from those that can, where a single REC represents one MWh of green energy delivered. Thus, the REC is a means of delivering subsidies to producers of green energy that are paid for by producers of dirty energy.

The REC, and even perhaps some of the purposes the REC is meant to serve, is not popular among the kinds of people who write for the Manhattan Institute. As they see it—and arguably they are right—the REC is a poorly concealed substitute for a carbon emissions credit, which in turn is a poorly concealed substitute for a carbon tax. Nevertheless, the Manhattan Institute has a record of producing serious work that is respected by people who do not necessarily share the institute's general point of view. This latest report, "The High Cost of Renewable Energy Mandates," by Robert Bryce, deserves attention as a first stab at assessing the overall costs to consumers of RECs.

Basically Bryce compares the costs of electricity in states that have renewable energy mandates with costs in states that do not and finds that rates have gone up much more in states that do have such mandates. "The gap is particularly striking in coal-dependent states—seven such states with RPS mandates saw their rates soar by an average of 54.2 percent between 2001 and 2010, more than twice the average increase experienced by seven other coal-dependent states without mandates," reports Bryce. Though he devotes detailed attention to certain states such as California, Oregon and Washington, he does not try to disentangle the precise mix of reasons that have produced higher rates in states with portfolio standards, and nor does he claim to.

Bryce notes that tightening regulation of coal generating plants and higher expenditures on power transmission also have been major factors in driving up electricity costs. Citing figures from the Edison Electric Institute, Bryce says that "member companies spent over $55 billion on transmission projects between 2001 and 2009. Another $61 billion will likely be spent on transmission projects from 2010 through 2021."

However superficial, the Manhattan Institute report suggests worryingly that the costs of promoting wind and especially solar energy may start catching up with policy-makers and produce a political backlash, as we have been witnessing in Europe.

PHOTO: this small solar plant on the banks of the Delaware River in Bucks County, Penn., is an example of a facility that would not have been built in the absence of RECs.