Energywise

Tomorrow, Sept. 25, the first U.S. auction of carbon emission permits will take place, with owners of power plants and industrial facilities in six northeastern states participating. Starting at 9 in the morning and running until midnight, it is organized by the 10-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the first mandatory interstate carbon trading system in the United States. Meanwhile, seven states and four Canadian provinces participating in the Western Climate Initiative released a plan yesterday to reduce their collective emissions 15 percent by 2020: taking effect in 2012, it would set annual emissions caps and issue allowances to organizations affected--90 percent of those allowances are to be issued free, only 10 percent auctioned.

Carbon trading got off to a rocky start in Europe, with prices gyrating and much too low, initially, to induce any real corrective action by industry. One might suppose, given the aggressive leadership on climate exercised by countries like the UK and Germany, that the European system would have set emissions caps based on their Kyoto commitments and then ratcheted down the caps each year so as to meet Kyoto targets. But that would have been politically unsellable. What Europe actually does is ask each country to volunteer a cap, which is then modified in negotiations between the EU Commission and the member governments. This of course is a recipe for intense lobbying by industry, with predictable results.

The problem is ongoing. Germany announced this week that it would seek to exempt most of its industry from the proposed next step in ETS, which would involve mandatory auction of emissions allowances in the period 2013-20 (currently the European permits are issued free). Chancellor Merkel, sounding remarkably like President Bush seven years ago, said she "could not support the destruction of German jobs through an ill-advised climate policy."

This morning, Sept. 24, British Energy formally accepted a take-over bid by Electricité de France, which means that France will soon own and operate the bulk of the UK's nuclear power generating industry. It's a measure of how far the processes of electricity deregulation, globalization, and Europeanization have gone that the story gets only secondary treatment in today's French press. It didn't even make Le Monde's online homepage, while on Le Figaro's it ranked 14th, putting it well "below the fold."

Today's deal puts EDF in charge of almost all of the UK's nuclear power plants and gives it control of most attractive sites for building new ones. This is important because the British government advocates an aggressive program of nuclear expansion, and wants to have at least four new plants in operation by 2017.

Unlike the late President Gerald Ford, to recall Lyndon Johnson's denigrating joke, EDF showed this week that it can walk and chew gum at the same time. On Friday it made a last-ditch attempt to boost its stake in Constellation Energy, which it hoped to make its bridgehead for entry into the U.S. nuclear construction industry. But Constellation still preferred to stick with Warren Buffett, who has promised the company a $1 billion cash injection.

In these troubled economic times, evidently, having Buffett's confidence means more than the world's best engineering expertise.

PHOTO CREDIT: CASSANDRA WILLYARD

Earth magazine has a riveting account of the history of the largest oil spill in the U.S., and the cleanup technologies being developed to deal with it. And that oil spill is not where you think it is, unless you're thinking Brooklyn, New York. "The plume -- a toxic concoction of kerosene, fuel oil, gasoline and naptha (a key ingredient in napalm) -- floats at the top of a subterranean aquifer beneath the working-class community of Greenpoint in Brooklyn."

Experts say between 17 and 30 million gallons of oil have been accumulating there since the mid-1800s. Oil companies started the cleanup about 30 years ago, but only 9.5 million gallons of oil have been recovered. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, finishing the job could take another 25 years.

To get the oil out of the ground, ExxonMobil siphons it from the water table using a system similar to skimming fat off the top of a pot of chicken soup (delicious!). So far, the company has pulled about 6 million gallons of oil out of the ground.

For the first time in five year I'm back in Accra, Ghana, the pearl of Angolophone West Africa. The biggest change I see in Ghana's capital city is the proliferation of giant, seven-foot tall air conditioners.

That's right. Accra is the new Houston. Parts of the U.S. -- Vegas, Phoenix, Sacramento -- were only fully domesticated with the advent of relatively effective and efficient air conditioning. Yet the cooling technology that ignited the boom in the Sun Belt came during a long economic expansion in what once was the world's richest country. The arrival of super-duper air conditioners in Accra illustrates widening inequality in a relatively poor African country that is also home to a thin elite that wants creature comforts.

To be sure, Accra is hot, but the giant air conditioners are designed to do more than offer respite from tropical temperatures. The other night I ate dinner in Papaye, a marvelous local chicken-and-rice restaurant in the city's fashionable Osu district. Papaye has a posh clientele; main courses costs upwards of seven U.S. dollars. Five years ago, the restaurant relied on fans and small air conditioners. Now four large wall-size units blast out cool air, so aggressively that napkins blow off tables and hair styles wave in the wind.

The idea isn't to keep people cool but rather to send a message of opulence. These elite diners can afford irrationally powerful air conditioning.

Mega-AC may be limited to the top tier of Accra society, yet these are the very people who lead. By consuming so much electricity in pursuit of status cool, these new African rich are making harder the task of promoting energy efficiency in their countries. And Ghana, as well as most other African countries, face serious shortages of electricity.

There may be other subtle damage from super-cool AC. On Thursday, the day before I visited Papaye, I gave a lecture at the University of Ghana. As students and faculty filed into a long rectangular room, someone switched on the air conditioners. I suddenly felt a cold blast of air. Or rather two of them.

I was, I realized, caught between the crossfire of dueling air conditioners. Freezing,

Before I began my lecture, I asked that the AC go off.

People murmured and squirmed in their seats. There was silence. Then a single intrepid student rose and objected. He wanted to the AC to stay on.

I over-ruled him, the privilege of the visitor lecturer, I insisted.

When he complained again, I made my final comment on the matter. "You will listen more carefully to me if you are hot and sweaty," I said. "Suffering concentrates the mind."

The room erupted in laughter -- nervous laughter.

There's a listen here about how social reality and human invention co-exist, and not always easily.

The Oracle of Omaha has agreed in principle of pay $4.7 for Constellation Energy, whose five reactors produce three fifths of the electricity it generates in the United States. On the eve of the agreement, Electricité de France had been hoping to take a stake in Constellation and use it as a bridgehead into a revived U.S. nuclear energy market. Still hanging fire are EDF's efforts to purchase British Energy, which owns and operates the UK's nuclear reactor fleet.

EDF already is a significant exporter of nuclear electricity to the United Kingdom, but the British are having some trouble digesting the prospect of their nuclear reactor complement--which the government wants to sharply expand to produce carbon-free energy--being owned by France. But what do they have to complain about really? It's a logical result of introducing competition in electricity, a global movement that they largely inspired.

I live in Brooklyn, New York, and the natural gas that heats my home is delivered by Britain's National Grid--that's right, the company that was set up to own and operate the country's electric power system, when the UK restructured the system and separated generation from transmission.

UPDATE BELOW

An article in the Wall Street Journal reports on a technology it says is getting a lot of attention in China, which it--misleadingly, I believe--refers to as underground coal gasification. That makes it sound as if coal is gasified, as in IGCC, creating a syngas that's burned. But actually the technology seems to more closely resemble oxyfiring, a technology Vattenfall is just now demonstrating for the first time at larger-than-laboratory scale at a plant in East Germany. In the approach described in the Journal, coal is ignited underground and fed a piped-down stream of pure oxygen; the combustion yields nitrogen-free gases including carbon dioxide, which can be separated and kept underground.

The Journal says this technology was invented in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and demonstrated at a large scale in Uzbekistan.

Coal combustion in China and India is the biggest single aspect of the long-term climate problem, and was the subject of a two-issue special report in IEEE Spectrum, in November and December 1999.

UPDATE, 9/18/08:

My fellow energy writer and editor Peter Fairley has alerted me to an accuracy in this blog. From the cryptic Wall Street Journal description of the technology, I came away with the impression that it was closely analogous to oxyfiring, where coal is burned in an atmosphere of pure oxygen. Underground coal gasification is in fact more closely analogous to IGCC, inasmuch as a syngas consisting of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is created, as well as methane and carbon dioxide. The combustible gases can be burned at the surface to drive turbines; in some situations at least, the carbon dioxide can be stored in the subsurface voids left by the gasified coal.

A basic description of the process and its variants can be found at:

http://www.coal-ucg.com/publishedarticleonucg.html

There is a curious, even strange and demented, technological trend underway in Ghana, a west African country which recently made a major oil discovery and boasts large hydro-electric resources.

Ghana wants to go nuclear.

The country may be bathed in sunshine. It may even have potential supplies of wind and thermal power. And Ghana can essentially "harvest" enormous amounts of electricity by vastly reducing "transmission losses" from its venerable Volta dam complex.

And yet despite all these energy supplies, real and forecasted, Ghana's government is training hundreds of people in order to staff a planned nuclear-power plant that would be the country's first.

The planned plant would open ten years from now.

But well before 2018, nuclear power could become a serious distraction in Ghana, consuming brains and funds that would better go towards grabbing the "low-hanging" fruit in the country's energy mix.

Ghana isn't the only African country talking up nuclear power. Recently, Nigeria stunned the world when its government announced a desire to install many nuclear-power plants around its densely-populated country. Nigeria went so far as to strike an accord with Iran last month over assistance in developing nuclear power.

The logic behind Nigeria's nuclear embrace is peculiar: The country's broken infrastructure means frequent electricity shortages. Even gasoline pumps often go dry because of the poor condition of the country's refineries.

If Nigeria can't run an oil-refinery, why is the government even contemplating the much more challenging task of running nuclear power plants?

Well, maybe Nigerians are simply jealous of nearby neighbor Ghana. The country has a better record of managing infrastructure than Nigeria. Yet Ghana hardly seems a candidate to join the list of nuclear power countries. Ghana has barely mastered the challenging "arts and crafts" of road-building. Internet communication remains very costly and afflicted by reliability problems. The country is home to perhaps 500 world-class engineers, not enough to meet current needs no less than demand caused by a new nuclear plant.

As it happens, I am in Accra, Ghana's capital, as I write. With a presidential election less than 90 days off in Ghana, the public isn't thinking about nuclear power. In the past, Accra's tiny environmental community has staunchly opposed an African nuclear delusion. From sizing up Accra over the past 10 days, my bet is the opponents will rise again.

Air France-KLM, Europe's leading air carrier, is going electric. Forget about visions of battery-electric airplanes. EV technology has its work cut out just commercializing battery-electric cars, let alone trying to catapult hundreds of passengers into the air. Instead, Air France is recognizing the energy-efficiency and convenience of commuter trains and hitting the rails.

Last week the Paris-based airline launched a joint venture with European bus and train operator Veolia to offer high-speed rail service between London, Paris and Amsterdam beginning in 2010 -- the year that EU laws will open international rail travel to competition. For technology they are eyeing a new generation of high-speed coaches that's nearing completion: the Automotrice â''â'  Grande Vitesse or AGV under development by France's Alstom.

The AGV is faster, more efficient and can haul more passengers than its predecessor, the TGV. In speed tests in 2007 the AGV hit 574.8 kilometers per hour -- within spitting distance of the speed record set by Japan's maglevs. Alstom expects the AGV to cruise at 360 kph in regular service -- about 40 kph above the TGV's limit.

Italy's NTV is building rails for the first AGV's, which are expected to begin rolling there in 2011.

The AGV setting the world speed record for travel on (as opposed to above) rails:

This one is for the geeks. Last week I reported on an article in the latest issue of Physics Today magazine, written by a former senior defense official in close collaboration with a former director of technical intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, reporting that China gave Pakistan the blueprints of the first atomic bomb China had tested in 1966 and helped Pakistan test its own first atomic bomb at the Chinese nuclear test site on May 26, 1990--eight years before Pakistan openly "went nuclear." The article also contained a number of other startling assertions, including the claim that China operated a so-called fast-burst reactor to test bomb radiation effects.

Today, over lunch at the Union Club in New York City, the author of the article, Thomas C. Reed, stood by those allegations and filled in background. Reed, a nuclear physicist who started his career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the 1950s, served as Secretary of the Air Force in the mid-1970s, straddling the Ford and Carter administrations. He also held a number of other high-level national security positions in the Nixon, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush administrations. He was closely allied politically and personally with Reagan.

Reed confirmed that China provided Pakistan bomb information starting in 1982, having itself obtained valuable assistance from the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs during the 1950s, that it let Pakistan do its first test at Lop Nur in 1990, and that it also let France do hydro-nuclear experiments at its test site during the 1990s.

In a hydronuclear test, a bomb containing less than a critical mass of fissile material is detonated, to evaluate the performance of non-nuclear components. Reed says that France conducted such tests in Algeria in the 1950s, in the open, as did the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan; more responsibly, the United States and China did hydronuclear tests in steel containers, to prevent dispersal of radioactive material.

According to Reed's article, Danny Stillman of Los Alamos initially got the attention of the Chinese when he asked them whether they had a fast burst reactor, which they did. The question clearly implied that the United States had such a reactor, which I had not known, even though I've covered nuclear matters for thirty-plus years. I was not even aware that reactors had been designed deliberately to simulate the impact of nuclear explosions on nuclear weapons (although seventeen years ago I published an article in MIT's Technology Review reporting an expert consensus that the basic cause of the Chernobyl catastrophe was a superprompt criticality--in plain English, a nuclear explosion).

How could a reactor be designed to go superprompt critical without actually exploding like a bomb? After all, as the great physicist Hans Bethe observed after Chernobyl, once a reactor goes superprompt critical, no control rod system can react fast enough to prevent an explosion.

Stillman says the general idea was to build a reactor with medium-enriched uranium (say 20 percent), with a void in the middle in which a nuclear weapon could be placed, and a configuration that enabled controllers to literally disassemble the reactor by having parts of it drop down. That way, a runaway criticality could be brought under control--not merely by removing control rods, which would not by itself suffice--but by actually inducing the reactor to fall apart. Even so, when a nuclear weapon was placed in the void and the reactor started to go supercritical, a "pre-scram" would be initiated, so that at just that point control rods already would be dropping and the reactor would be already disassembling. The experiments were very hazardous and had to be timed at a scale of tens of microseconds.

During the 1960s, Stillman says the United States built three such reactors, Kukla, Fran and Super-Kukla, named after a television series (they never got to Ollie). The point of this? To study how an intense radiation burst from enemy weapons would affect the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. In other words, these tests were conducted in the context of nuclear and missile defense efforts.

EnergyBiz, a nicely done and growing trade magazine founded several years ago, features an opinion column in its September-October issue by vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, in which she makes the case for a big new natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the Lower 48--"the biggest construction project in the history of the United States." In particular, Palin explains the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act, which she got enacted immediately upon being elected governor. It established a competitive process for building the pipeline and limited the state's financial liability in the project to $500 million.

Palin may have blinked yesterday when ABC's Charlie Gibson asked her whether she was really ready to be U.S. commander in chief--actually she blinked several times even as she told Gibson the thought did not make her blink--but her role in aggressively reorganizing the Alaska pipeline project arguably is the most substantial item in her resume and her finest moment so far. Though questions have been raised about some aspects of her role in the project, indisputably it's an important project--not merely of huge interest to Alaska, but of vital interest to the whole country.

Not to put a fine point on it, the Lower 48 need all the natural gas they can get. For every amount of electricity produced, natural gas generates half as much carbon as coal; this means that replacing any coal plant with a natural gas plant reduces carbon emissions from that plant by 50 percent. Natural gas also is a very attractive home heating fuel, superior to oil from most technical perspectives (cleaner, lower maintenance). Increasingly natural gas is used to fuel buses and fleet vehicles, from New York to Los Angeles, and as T. Boone Pickens has been pointing out, it can be a very attractive fuel for private cars as well. Not least, if dreams of a "hydrogen economy" ever comes to fruition, natural gas will be needed to feed the fuel cells.

In addition to pitching the pipeline--in an article she obviously wrote well before she had any inkling she might be on the Republican presidential tickety--Palin argues for Congress to "help Americans and Alaskans by streamlining access to [oil and gas] offshore resources." She says that while ANWR may contain 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 10 billion barrels of oil, there are probably 24 billion barrels of oil offshore and perhaps 104 trillion cubic feet of gas. That's enough gas she says to meet the entire U.S. demand for four and a half years.