Oil Is Not the Climate Change Culprit — It's All About Coal

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/oil-not-the-cli.html

Oil Is Not the Climate Change Culprit — It's All About Coal

By Alexis Madrigal EmailDecember 17, 2008 | 2:54:30 PM

SAN FRANCISCO — Maybe your old truck isn't responsible for destroying the planet after all.

New climate change scenarios quantify the idea that oil is only a small component of the total global warming problem — the real problem is coal.

If the world replaced all of its oil usage with carbon-neutral energy sources, ecologist Kenneth Caldeira of Stanford University calculated that it would only buy us about 10 years before coal emissions warmed the planet to what many scientists consider dangerous levels.

"There's an order of magnitude more coal than oil. So, whether there is a little more oil or a little less oil will change the details in, say, when we reach two degrees warming, but it doesn't change the overall picture," Caldeira said Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting.

…

"Oil and gas by themselves don't have enough carbon to keep us in the dangerous zone for very long," said Pushker Kharecha, a scientist and colleague of Hansen at NASA GISS.

…

[FreakinDJ]

1. Thank you China - 1 new Coal fired power plant EVERY WEEK

[TheWraith]

2. No shit. It's why some of us loudly agitate against coal as much as possible.

It's also why the coal companies put a lot of effort into pretending that they're just one little part of the problem, and the real issue is cars. So long as everybody is talking about oil, mileage, etcetera, nobody's really talking about the 48% of our power that's driven by coal.

What we really need is a crash program to replace every coal-fired plant in the United States. It would cost about $500 billion or so.

[kristopher]

3. Where do you get that price? nt

[bananas]

4. It would only cost $400 billion

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

<snip>

The technology is ready. On the following pages we present a grand plan that could provide 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (which includes transportation) with solar power by 2050. We project that this energy could be sold to consumers at rates equivalent to today’s rates for conventional power sources, about five cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). If wind, biomass and geothermal sources were also developed, renewable energy could provide 100 percent of the nation’s electricity and 90 percent of its energy by 2100.

The federal government would have to invest more than $400 billion over the next 40 years to complete the 2050 plan. That investment is substantial, but the payoff is greater. Solar plants consume little or no fuel, saving billions of dollars year after year. The infrastructure would displace 300 large coal-fired power plants and 300 more large natural gas plants and all the fuels they consume. The plan would effectively eliminate all imported oil, fundamentally cutting U.S. trade deficits and easing political tension in the Middle East and elsewhere. Because solar technologies are almost pollution-free, the plan would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by 1.7 billion tons a year, and another 1.9 billion tons from gasoline vehicles would be displaced by plug-in hybrids refueled by the solar power grid. In 2050 U.S. carbon dioxide emissions would be 62 percent below 2005 levels, putting a major brake on global warming.

<snip>

[TheWraith]

6. I think that we need to be shooting for sooner than 2050 or 2100.

Mine is more like a 2020 plan.

[kristopher]

9. I think the total costs would be about $4 trillion

At least, that is what Gore cites. Most of that (3/4 - 4/5?), however, would be in the form of redirecting the money now being spent on fossil fuels.

[Laelth]

11. Thanks for that link.

What Gore said about nuclear energy is interesting:

While I am not opposed to nuclear power and expect to see some modest increased use of nuclear reactors, I doubt that they will play a significant role in most countries as a new source of electricity. The main reason for my skepticism about nuclear power playing a much larger role in the world’s energy future is not the problem of waste disposal or the danger of reactor operator error, or the vulnerability to terrorist attack. Let’s assume for the moment that all three of these problems can be solved. That still leaves two serious issues that are more difficult constraints. The first is economics; the current generation of reactors is expensive, take a long time to build, and only come in one size - extra large. In a time of great uncertainty over energy prices, utilities must count on great uncertainty in electricity demand - and that uncertainty causes them to strongly prefer smaller incremental additions to their generating capacity that are each less expensive and quicker to build than are large 1000 megawatt light water reactors. Newer, more scalable and affordable reactor designs may eventually become available, but not soon. Secondly, if the world as a whole chose nuclear power as the option of choice to replace coal-fired generating plants, we would face a dramatic increase in the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation. During my 8 years in the White House, every nuclear weapons proliferation issue we dealt with was connected to a nuclear reactor program. Today, the dangerous weapons programs in both Iran and North Korea are linked to their civilian reactor programs. Moreover, proposals to separate the ownership of reactors from the ownership of the fuel supply process have met with stiff resistance from developing countries who want reactors. As a result of all these problems, I believe that nuclear reactors will only play a limited role.

It's strange that we're more frightened of the idea that Venezuela might get nukes than we are of climate change.

The United States is a LIBERAL Country.

:dem:

-Laelth

[TheWraith]

5. My own rough calculations. Math to follow.

The $500 billion figure is assuming a mixture of the two most expandable clean energy technologies: wind and nuclear. If some of the current ideas for tapping hydroelectricity from currents pan out, that would help, or the Polywell would be a godsend, but for right know I'm talking about known quantities, methods which are in the bank in terms of being able to build and deploy.

Standard price (installed) for 1 megawatt of wind power (actual production, not nameplate capacity) is $3 million dollars. Standard pricing for 1 MW of nuclear power is about $1.5 millon (installed).

Total US electrical production for 2007 was 4,159,514 gigawatt-hours. Divided up, that means that our average generating capacity at any given time is roughly 476 gigawatts. Coal is 48% of that, or 228.5 gigawatts. Thus we could replace all coal-fired plants in the US with roughly 114 average nuclear plants, or 685,500 average wind turbines.

(I'm assuming 1 megawatt nameplate capacity with an average load on the turbines of ~33%. Most non-ideal land sites won't get that, but I'm figuring optimistically, and also presuming that we can find good sites. Offshore turbines would produce better, but would also be a lot more expensive to build, closer to $5-15 million per megawatt actual capacity.)

At the costs outlined earlier, we would pay about $343 billion for those nuclear plants, or $685 billion for those turbines. Neither of those numbers is entirely accurate though, because they assume that there would be no cost to ramping up the kind of industrial capacity such a job would need. There's too many variables in that to account for, so I'm just going to go ahead and use 10% as a planning figure for the overhead.

Now assuming that we split the job, and did half with wind and half with nuclear, the "raw" pricetag would be $512 billion. Add in the 10% for the expected unexpected, and you've got the complete replacement of coal in the United States for around $553 billion dollars.

It's an incredibly rough estimate, of course, but the basic math is there. It's not a problem of logistics, just of scale.

[Citizen Number 9]

7. $343 billion? $685 billion? $553 billion?

Doesn't anyone read the news? That's not even big money anymore.

I say write the check. It'll provide jobs. Maybe Obama will take us there.

[kristopher]

8. Distribution?

There are about 1200-1300 coal fired generating plants operating in the US with a nameplate capacity of +-380GW. In 2006 they burned 1,026,000,000 short tons of coal at an average efficiency of 28%.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav2/html_tables/epav2t23p1.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav2/html_tables/epav2t45p1.html

I agree with the difficulty of predicting wind costs, but I don't think CF is the main point if we are determined to transition. That's because we would design policies to get most of the wind power from either offshore (CF 44%) or in the wind corridor that Pickens likes to talk about where a CF of 33% is valid. The variability of the cost of wind would be whether demand for commodity prices would exceed the benefits of economy of scale manufacturing. Your cost figures probably should also include government support offering preferred financing for these projects. Fossil fuel and nuclear have enjoyed this benefit for a long time, and it is long overdue for consistent application to renewable technologies.

I'd like very much to see you support the price you've used for nuclear.

[TheWraith]

10. Admittedly I looked at actual generated power rather than nameplate capacity.

Actually, I think that the load is very important when you're talking wind, as it controls what the real price per megawatt generated is. Offshore wind is ~50% more load, sure, but at 3x to 5x the cost, land based construction makes more sense if you're talking about rapid deployment at a reasonable pricetag.

The subject of government preferred financing is kind of irrelevant, I think. What we're talking about is raw costs, within the context of what would probably happen if the government signed a big check. Privately financed deployment would be vastly slower--and also more expensive, since there would be regulatory hurdles to jump through, and a lot of opposition from landowners. I live in wind turbine country, and a lot of people really do have a fit about them. The government could streamline the process considerably if they were the ones running it, and thus had complete transparency both to the regulatory agencies and the public. That applies to both wind and nuclear.

Re: nuclear cost, it's based on rough figures for mass production of the Westinghouse AP1000. It's currently rated at $1.79 million per megawatt, but they're just starting up production, with the first four going up over the next few years. Dumping an order for 100 more on them would likely result in an increase in assembly line style production efficiency. Not to mention, I don't know if they're amortizing R&D costs into that $1.79 figure.

Even if you ran with the existing cost of the AP1000, though, you'd be talking only a 10% increase in the cost, or roughly that same "unexpected" percentage I allowed for. Even tacking that on again, you're talking $600 billion.