Carbon Emissions
March 09, 2010 |
Largest Container Ship Operator Pledges To Cut CO2 Emissions by 20%
by Christopher DeMorro Container ships straddle a fine line between ultra-efficient and ultra-polluters. They can carry thousands of 20-ft containers across thousands of miles of ocean in relatively short time, but they also burn sulfur-laden heavy oil fuels. Each ship can emit over 150,000 tons of CO2 every year, 5,000 tons of sulfur, and other harmful particulates attributed to death and disease along heavily populated coastlines.
A.P. Moller Maersk AS operates the world’s largest container ship fleet. For the first time in 106 years, they lost money due to the economic downturn. How much money? $1.3 billion. Ouch. But they’ve also pledged to reduce their CO2 output by 20% by 2017. How nice would that be?
The Maersk Alabama was a ship captured by Somali pirates last year, which may be why the name is familiar to you. As recently as 2007, many shipping companies were placing orders for huge, $100 million dollar container ships that could hold thousands of containers. In this sense, these ships are incredibly efficient, requiring crews that often number under two-dozen. Sometimes over 1,000 feet long, they are monsters in every sense of the word, especially when it comes to emissions.
Green Car Congress reports that 12% of the world’s shipping fleet is idled right now. Not exactly good for the economy… but better for the environment. But perhaps more importantly, Maersk is also saying that they will cut their CO2 emissions by 20% by 2017. Maersk operates a fleet of over 500 ships, ranging from small boats like the Alabama that can carry a little over 1,000 containers to the Emma, which has an unofficial capacity of about 15,000 containers. If they truly did cut their emissions by 20%, that would be a huge dent in the global emissions equation. They are currently experimenting with a 5-7% biofuel blend. But perhaps even more shocking is their vocal support for a carbon tax on shipping.
I still say bring back sails. But what do I know?
Reprinted with permission from Gas 2.0
Brazil’s 10 Millionth Ethanol Flex-Fuel Vehicle Hits the Road
by Nick Chambers In the world of alternative fuels, Brazilians are lucky. They have some of the best land and climate in the world with which to grow sugarcane–which they have proven is an excellent feedstock for first generation ethanol production.
Not only is it incredibly easy to convert the cane sugar into ethanol through fermentation, they can power much of their ethanol production by burning the material leftover after harvesting and crushing the sugarcane to extract the sweet liquid.
Years ago the Brazilian government realized the potential in this system and started encouraging a major shift to a transportation sector capable of running mostly on ethanol. And now the fruits of their labor are being borne out: The 10 millionth ethanol flex-fuel capable vehicle has been delivered in Brazil.
Almost all vehicles sold in Brazil are flex-fuel capable (up to 85% ethanol blends, E85) and some are even compatible with 100% ethanol (E100). Every gas station in the country sells E85 and almost all sell E100. This has all been accomplished without government subsidies. As the Brazilian sugarcane organization, UNICA, likes to boast, the industry is completely self sustaining at this point.
I’ve written about all this in the past, but as a recap, Brazil’s ethanol success is documented in these statistics:
- All fuel sold in Brazil contains a minimum 20-25% blend of ethanol
- The unsubsidized Brazilian ethanol industry offers a fuel that is on average $1 below the price of gas - Virtually all 33,000 Brazilian gas pumps offer E100 - Just 1% of the arable land in Brazil is being used to produce sugarcane ethanol - 45% of Brazilian fuel for cars is from sugarcane - The food industry is growing faster than the ethanol industry, disproving the food vs. fuel arguments in Brazil - 90% of all new automobiles sold are flex-fuel automobiles - 100% of GM vehicles produced in Brazil are flex-fuel - More than 20% of all cars on the road in Brazil are flex-fuel vehicles todayThis all lies in stark contrast to the US where decades of contradictory and unsteady biofuels policy has led to a situation where our fledgling ethanol industry is dominated by heavily-subsidized corn ethanol and uber-powerful agri-lobbies in DC—who most often have government-funded corporate profits clearly in their sights, and couldn’t care less about doing what’s right for the people or the environment.
With the new Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS2) just released by the EPA and the Obama administration, the US now has the clearest roadmap it has ever had to building the US ethanol industry into what it could be, but we will still be subsidizing ethanol production heavily even as we move towards a future where cellulosic and algae ethanol promise a subsidy-free, self-sustaining ethanol industry.
As the Detroit Bureau points out, our current biofuels policy is so tortured with ideology, protectionism, and backasswards thinking that we have essentially prohibited the importation of sustainable Brazilian sugarcane ethanol into this country. We apply an insane amount of taxes and tariffs to any incoming ethanol from foreign countries while we simultaneously dump about 45 cents of taxpayer money into subsidizing every gallon of US made ethanol.
Now, I’m not a big proponent of shipping fuels all over the world… that’s something we should really be getting away from in the long term, no? However, if we have a neighboring country that is friendly to us and has a resource they are more than willing to sell that is cheaper and more ecologically sound than anything we could make at the moment, why are we pricing it out of the market? Does that make sense? It’s not right for the people of the US and it’s not right for the environment.
Even though the common sense in this argument seems to favor Brazilian ethanol being sold here, I certainly have very little hope that it will ever be so.
Reprinted with permission from Gas 2.0
The Maldives Buys a New Island – That Floats
by Susan Kraemer Sea level rise creates new business opportunity and “green jobs” that we’ll see more of, borne from the effects of climate change, as sea levels rise. The first floating island has just been commissioned this week by the sinking island nation of the Maldives, from Dutch Docklands, whose past work includes part of the artificial islands comprising The World off the coast of Dubai.
Humanity is faced with possibly its worst problem in all of its history, in climate change. It takes political imagination to make the changes needed to turn around the disaster bearing down on us. Half of us have an IQ under 100, so making this change and convincing all of us that we can do it (by switching to renewable energy sources) will be very much harder than just inventing fire was (perhaps our last comparable climate change challenge).
Perhaps we can’t save ourselves, and adaptation may be our only chance. Dutch Docklands is predicated on solving one result of this failure; rising sea levels – by inventing and engineering floating islands. Like inventing imitation glaciers, it’s an example of the kind of lateral thinking that we’ll need more of.
The company specializes in solutions for places where sea levels are rising, land is sinking or where sand shortages make traditional erosion control reclamation prohibitively expensive.
Underneath one of its artificial islands, marine life can adhere to the floating platform. The floating island can be moored to land so that it is somewhat stable. In very rough seas (like when there’s cyclones) there would be some movement but most of the time it would feel like a solid island, not like being on a boat covered in sand.
The beach is completely floating and just as comfortable as a normal beach, ecologically sound and erosion free. Under the sand would be a foam and concrete platform, gradually sloping down underwater, that to some extent cups the sand in the container shape. The company tries to use methods and procedures that reduce impact on underwater life and minimize changes to coastal morphology.
Dutch Docklands claims to be able to retain the natural interconnection between tides, waves and current intact while creating miles of new beaches for permanent coastal expansion.
The CEO Paul van de Camp moved to Dubai from Holland because of the “anything is possible” spirit in Dubai, where he engineered the Australasian section of The World. The design for the floating beach design is essentially the same as for some new floating islands Dutch Docklands is building to indulge the sheik in Dubai, in the shape of a rather cryptic phrase in Arabic.
By the end of the century, quite a bit of Dubai itself will also be underwater due to rising sea levels as a result of climate change. The floating island commissioned by the Sheik should ensure the survival of a home for the 22nd century princely offspring.
But for the Maldives, replacing its land is already a matter of life or death.
Reprinted with permission from Cleantechnica
Researchers Find Arctic Methane Is Beginning to Vent
The research results, published today in the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."
Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material (which contains carbon) stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under anaerobic conditions, gradually releases methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova's research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source, releasing 7 teragrams of methane yearly, which is as much as is emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.
"Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already," she said. "If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger."
Shakhova notes that the Earth's geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth's history. During the Earth's coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.
"It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen," Shakhova said. "Nobody considered this huge area."
"This study is a testament to sustained, careful observations and to international cooperation in research," said Henrietta Edmonds of the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the study. "The Arctic is a difficult place to get to and to work in, but it is important that we do so in order to understand its role in global climate and its response and contribution to ongoing environmental change. It is important to understand the size of the reservoir--the amount of trapped methane that potentially could be released--as well as the processes that have kept it "trapped" and those that control the release. Work like this helps us to understand and document these processes."
Earlier studies in Siberia focused on methane escaping from thawing terrestrial permafrost. Semiletov's work during the 1990s showed, among other things, that the amount of methane being emitted from terrestrial sources decreased at higher latitudes. But those studies stopped at the coast. Starting in the fall of 2003, Shakhova, Semiletov and the rest of their team took the studies offshore. From 2003 through 2008, they took annual research cruises throughout the shelf and sampled seawater at various depths and the air 10 meters above the ocean. In September 2006, they flew a helicopter over the same area, taking air samples at up to 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) in the atmosphere. In April 2007, they conducted a winter expedition on the sea ice.
They found that more than 80% of the deep water and more than 50% of surface water had methane levels more than eight times that of normal seawater. In some areas, the saturation levels reached more than 250 times that of background levels in the summer and 1,400 times higher in the winter. They found corresponding results in the air directly above the ocean surface. Methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hotspots. This, combined with winter expedition results that found methane gas trapped under and in the sea ice, showed the team that the methane was not only being dissolved in the water, it was bubbling out into the atmosphere.
These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8% to 10% higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5% to 10% higher than the already elevated Arctic levels.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn't have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.
"The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times," Shakhova said. "The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict."
Shakhova, Semiletov and collaborators from 12 institutions in five countries plan to continue their studies in the region, tracking the source of the methane emissions and drilling into the seafloor in an effort to estimate how much methane is stored there.
Reprinted with permission from Sustainable Business
"Power to Save the World": An Environmentalist Converts to Nuclear Power
by Jonathan Williams There is an often-vicious debate occurring within the environmental community about nuclear energy. While there are those like Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, who are arguing in support of nuclear power, there are still many others against it.
Gwyneth Cravens is one environmentalist participating in this debate who supports nuclear energy and wrote Power to Save the World in favor of this energy source. Cravens wasn't always a nuclear energy supporter. In fact, she once helped support initiatives that prevented a nuclear power plant from being completed in Long Island, where she currently lives.
However, this book shows how she went from being firmly anti-nuclear to believing that nuclear energy is actually environmentally friendly while at the same time following the life cycle of nuclear fuel from extraction to use to storage.
Unlike other books about nuclear energy, this book is written in an easily understandable and readable narrative fashion. Using this format, Cravens weaves a story that doesn't sound like she is just spouting off facts about nuclear energy. Instead, Cravens teaches the reader about the nuclear process through interesting and witty anecdotes that she learns from the researchers, scientists, and technicians she interviews.
While written in narrative form, the little under 400-page book is jam-packed with facts about every aspect of nuclear energy. Two facts that are brought up multiple times in the book deal with the amount of energy a unit of nuclear material contains and the ambient levels of background radiation.
One point that Cravens tries to drive home with the reader is the amount of energy a unit of uranium contains. For example, a nuclear fuel pellet weighing just .0007 pounds produces roughly the same amount of electricity as 1,780 pounds of coal or 149 gallons of oil. This point is highlighted in the book by the fact that the annual waste for a 846-megawatt nuclear reactor can fit into the bed of a pickup truck while one 500-megawatt coal plant produces an annual waste volume equivalent to a six story building.
The other point that Cravens brings up multiple times in her book is that people receive much more radiation from natural and medical sources then they would ever receive from a nuclear power plant. For example, Americans receive on average 360 millirems of radiation year, with the majority of it coming from natural sources like radon.
According to EPA regulations, nuclear plants cannot expose someone to more than 15 millirems a year if that person lived, breathed, and ate everything right on the border fence of the nuclear plant. This hypothetical “fencepost man” does not exist and if he did this amount is extremely small when you consider that a single dentist x-ray can expose you to 39 millirems. In fact, if you live within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor in the United States, you’d get an estimated trace exposure of 0.009 millirem a year, an amount smaller in size than eating one banana, which contains the radioactive isotope potassium-40.
In addition to those two points, Cravens does an excellent job outlining the various security and safety features that the nuclear plants incorporate to ensure that every single gram of nuclear material is accounted for and cannot escape into the environment.
However, for those that are still worried about the effects nuclear energy may have on the environment, Cravens points out that every source of energy is going to have environmental costs; we just need to find a source that helps mitigate those costs. She points out that even wind power has its downsides considering that it would take 94 to 200 square miles to produce 1,000 megawatts of power, an amount that a nuclear plant could produce on just 1/3 square mile of land.
Overall, Cravens does an excellent job in her book addressing many of the environmental concerns about nuclear power as well as highlighting the industry's environmental benefits. While some who read this article may dismiss these claims outright, I would challenge them to read her book for themselves. Energy issues are only going to increase in the future and nuclear power offers a solution that can minimize environmental impacts while maximizing economic benefits.
Reprinted with permission from Celsias
Utilities Increase Energy Efficiency Spending by 43%
U.S. utilities increased their spending on energy efficiency programs by 43% in 2009, according to a new report from the nonprofit Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE), which represents energy efficiency program administrators from across the United States and Canada. U.S. utility spending on energy efficiency programs reached $5.3 billion, including $4.4 billion for electric energy efficiency programs and $930 million for natural gas programs. Spending on natural gas programs increased the most, at 79%, while electric programs increased by 38%.
Electric energy efficiency programs focus a majority of their spending on commercial and industrial facilities, while natural gas programs are skewed more toward residential customers.
Utility energy efficiency programs also expanded geographically, as such programs are now offered in 46 states, compared to only 37 states in 2008. The CEE report notes that electric energy efficiency spending grew the fastest in the Southeast and South Central states, with a 76% increase to $800 million in 2009. For instance, new legislation in Maryland increased electric energy efficiency spending by a factor of 13, while Kentucky increased its spending by an order of magnitude and Tennessee's spending increased by a factor of 5.
Such energy efficiency programs are expected to keep U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in check over the next 20 years, but long-term costs have been underestimated, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Even in the absence of new carbon reduction policies, the market research firm predicts that the United States will exploit readily available residential and industrial efficiency gains to achieve a 2% drop in GHG emissions by 2030. But once those simpler options are used up, the cost for further cuts will rise more steeply than previously thought.
To achieve the Obama Administration's goal of a 17% cut by 2020 would require more fundamental changes to the power and transport sectors, but costs can still be held to less than $1 per day per U.S. household, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The report calls for new, more aggressive policies by the United States to help speed energy technology improvements and lower the long-term costs of cutting GHG emissions.
Utilities Survey
Despite the popularity of renewable resources like wind and solar, the utilities industry chose nuclear power as its preferred "environmentally friendly" technology in a recent survy conducted by Black & Veatch.
In addition, more than 75% of the 329 executives who participated in the survey said there is a future for coal-fired power plants.
On the up side, 79% and 73% said wind power and solar power projects respectively are underway or planned within the next five years. And a majority said they expect some form of carbon legislation to be in place by 2012, though more than 70% oppose cap-and-trade.
Read additional coverage at the link below.
Website: www.upi.com/Science_News/Resource-Wars/2010/02/19/Electric-power-execs-lean-toward-nuclear/UPI-43921266600764/
Reprinted with permission from Sustainable Business
CO2 Capture and Storage Gains a Growing Foothold
by David Biello The drive to extract and store CO2 from coal-fired power plants is gaining momentum, with the Obama administration backing the technology and the world’s first capture and sequestration project now operating in the U.S. Two questions loom: Will carbon capture and storage be affordable? And will it be safe?
On a placid bend of the Ohio River in West Virginia sit two coal-fired power plants. The Philip Sporn Plant boasts four boilers from the 1950s, surrounded by mountains of coal and a series of man-made lakes to contain the toxic residue of its coal-burning. A faint haze emanates from its main smokestack, the only visible sign of the thousands of tons of acid-rain-forming sulfur dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen oxides, and climate-warming carbon dioxide it emits each day, a consequence of the plant’s complete lack of pollution-control technologies. The 1,100 megawatts of electricity it produces will never benefit from such controls, as they are too expensive to install on the multiple small boilers, according to the plant’s owner, American Electric Power.
But just beyond Sporn’s waste ponds stands the steaming cooling tower of American Electric’s Mountaineer Power Plant, which burns 12,000 tons of coal a day to produce steam in a single massive boiler and generate up to 1,300 megawatts of electricity. Roiling white water vapor billows out of its 100-story smokestack, a visible sign of the scrubbers and other technology that remove as much as 98 percent of the plant’s sulfur dioxide emissions and 90 percent of its nitrogen oxides.
And to top it off, since October, an oversized chemistry set employs baker’s ammonia (ammonium carbonate) to strip more than 90 percent of the CO2 from a small portion of the Mountaineer plant’s waste gas and turn it into ammonium bicarbonate. Heat and pressure in another part of the carbon-capture machine turn that back into baker’s ammonia, delivering a nearly pure stream of CO2 gas that is compressed into a liquid and pumped into two wells that drop 1.5 miles beneath the earth. There, the captured CO2 is stored permanently between grains of rock.
If Sporn represents the dirty past of coal-fired electricity generation, Mountaineer is the future — the first power plant in the world to both capture and store underground any part of its CO2 emissions. At this point, Mountaineer stores less than 2 percent of the more than 500,000 metric tons of CO2 pumped out each month by the power plant, which generates enough electricity for 1 million American homes.
So does Mountaineer mean that coal has a future?
President Barack Obama seems to think so, even as he continues to push for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by more than 80 percent by mid-century. To meet that goal, Obama said during his State of the Union address in January, the U.S. must not only develop renewable sources of energy but must also invest in clean coal technologies. A week later, the Obama administration created an interagency task force to develop a federal strategy by August for carbon capture and storage (CCS), the underlying principle of so-called “clean coal.” The goal is to make carbon capture and storage widespread within a decade.
In fact, the administration wants at least five demonstration projects to be in operation by 2016. After all, the U.S. gets more than 50 percent of its electricity from burning coal. “If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future,” Obama said in a speech to the nation’s governors on Feb. 3.
The technology exists to extract CO2 at coal-burning power plants. The main questions now are cost and safety. Storing liquid CO2 far below the ground provokes a deep unease in some people, who worry that a sudden release could end in asphyxiation as the liquid turns to gas when it rises to the surface. It’s also not necessarily easy to find a geologic formation — or abandoned oil and gas wells — that will safely store the greenhouse gas.
And, ultimately, CCS will do one thing for sure: raise electric bills. In some regions, adding today’s CCS technology would double the cost of electricity and stretch the financial resources of utilities.
Mountaineer's chilled ammonia unit collects about 1.5 percent of the plant's flue gas and runs it through a chemical process to capture more than 90 percent of the carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, Mountaineer represents the first small-scale demonstration project to integrate both carbon capture and storage, and American Electric Power may receive $334 million in federal funds to scale up the project to capture 20 percent of the plant’s CO2 emissions.
The Obama administration also has resurrected a planned CCS project known as Futuregen, abandoned by the Bush administration in 2008. A consortium of countries, utilities, and companies with an interest in CCS — ranging from China to coal giant Peabody Energy — has pledged $400 million to build the plant in Mattoon, Ill., with the federal government covering the rest of the $1.5 billion cost.
The proposed plant would first turn coal into gas, and the gas combusted to spin a turbine to produce electricity. The result of this technology — known as integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) — is expected to be the removal of roughly 90 percent of the CO2 and almost all of the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from the power plant’s emissions.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that such an IGCC plant would produce electricity at a cost of $103 per megawatt-hour, compared to just $63 per megawatt hour for a pulverized coal-fired power plant without CO2 capture. That math would change if the U.S. Congress one day places a price on carbon dioxide. Various U.S. national laboratories and research universities — as well as the companies commercializing the technology — are striving to reduce that cost further, to as low as just $10 per metric ton of CO2 captured, says CO2 sequestration project leader Rajesh Pawar of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Despite the costs, utilities are moving forward with carbon capture and storage at existing and new coal-fired power plants. The primary driver seems to be the reality of governments eventually placing a cost on carbon dioxide emissions, both in the U.S. and throughout the world. Duke Energy has partnered with China’s Huaneng Group to develop carbon capture and storage technology and is considering a plan to capture 18 percent of the CO2 from its planned 630 megawatt, $2.35 billion IGCC plant in Edwardsport, Ind. Carbon capture and storage “is going to cost us money,” says Monte Atwell, general manager of General Electric’s gasification group, which designed the IGCC technology at Edwardsport. But, he added, “That plant is going to work. Failure is not an option.”
Oklahoma-based Tenaska aims to build a $3.5 billion IGCC power plant in Taylorsville, Ill. that would capture 50 percent of its CO2 emissions, and the Erora Group is planning a similar power plant in Henderson County, Ky. Existing power plants are also getting into the act, including the Southern Company, which plans to add its own chemistry set — known as amine scrubbers, which employ a different compound to capture the CO2 — to a power plant near Mobile, Ala.
CCS projects also are moving ahead in Europe. In the vineyards of Jurancon in southeastern France, a project to integrate both CO2 capture and storage is now complete. Last month, an old oil-fired boiler there was converted to burn natural gas in pure oxygen — so-called oxyfuel — and thereby create a relatively pure stream of CO2 that can be siphoned off and stored. The Lacq project will transport roughly 60,000 metric tons of CO2 per year 17 miles to a depleted natural gas field for storage.
The engineering firm, Alstom, which supplied the technology at Lacq, has installed an oxyfuel boiler for a coal-fired power plant in Germany, known as Schwarze Pumpe. That plant also demonstrates, however, one of the main challenges of carbon capture and storage: acceptance from the people who would have to live over the stored CO2. Plans to store the greenhouse gas from Schwarze Pumpe in a nearby natural gas field have foundered on resistance from the local government. A similar CO2 storage effort by Shell in the Netherlands has also been stopped by public resistance from the town of Barendrecht. Residents there fear a leak or declining property values as the ground deep beneath their feet literally fills up with CO2.
Nor are those concerns confined to Europe. “It’s supposed to be better down there than in the air,” says Mayor Scott Hill of the town of Racine, Ohio, directly across the river from the Mountaineer and Sporn power plants. “I wonder what happens long-term... You know, they just tell you what you want to hear.”
Nevertheless, experts from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the International Energy Agency have identified carbon capture and storage as a necessary technology to combat climate change, particularly in developing countries like China, which meets most of its growing demand for electricity by building coal-fired power plants. The Chinese government, for its part, is partnering with its largest coal supplier, Australia, to build several demonstration projects, including one in Beijing that uses an amine scrubber to capture CO2 from a power plant that produces both heat and electricity. And ground has been broken on China’s version of FutureGen, dubbed GreenGen. The 650-megawatt, IGCC power plant is now under construction and could begin storing CO2 in depleted oil fields near the city of Tianjin as soon as 2015.
“Even with the most optimistic [projections] on renewables and nuclear, you still have 60 percent fossil fuels by 2030 with massive emissions,” said Philippe Paelinck, director of CO2 business development at Alstom. “If CCS technology is not accepted by the public, we will not be able to arrive at the necessary levels of emissions — and those are zero for the power sector by 2050.”
After all, the coal-fired power plants already built or planned in just the first 10 years of the 21st century would end up emitting more carbon dioxide in the next 25 years — 660 billion metric tons — than the 524 billion metric tons that have been emitted since the dawn of the Industrial Age in 1751, notes George Peridas of the Natural Resources Defense Council. And the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that a properly selected storage site would safely stow away 99 percent of the CO2 generated by a coal-burning power plant for at least 1,000 years.
But even if all that CO2 is captured and stored, coal will not be entirely clean, whether because of the impacts of the mountaintop removal mining that provides some of the fuel or the toxic ash that burning coal leaves behind. The ash ponds at the Sporn power plant, just over a grassy berm from Mountaineer, have been identified as a “high hazard” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Mountaineer has captured and stored more than 3,000 metric tons of CO2 in the Copper Ridge dolomite formation since Oct. 1, and the company aims to capture as much as 100,000 metric tons a year in the future. “As with any new technology, it’s had its ups and downs,” says Gary Spitznogle, the project’s manager at AEP. “[But] it’s run long enough that we’re confident it works.”
Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360
An Ominous Warning from the Seas
by Carl Zimmer The JOIDES Resolution looks like a bizarre hybrid of an oil rig and a cargo ship. It is, in fact, a research vessel that ocean scientists use to dig up sediment from the sea floor. In 2003, on a voyage to the southeastern Atlantic, scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution brought up a particularly striking haul.
They had drilled down into sediment that had formed on the sea floor over the course of millions of years. The oldest sediment in the drill was white. It had been formed by the calcium carbonate shells of single-celled organisms — the same kind of material that makes up the White Cliffs of Dover. But when the scientists examined the sediment that had formed 55 million years ago, the color changed in a geological blink of an eye.
“In the middle of this white sediment, there’s this big plug of red clay,” says Andy Ridgwell, an earth scientist at the University of Bristol.
In other words, the vast clouds of shelled creatures in the deep oceans had virtually disappeared. Many scientists now agree that this change was caused by a drastic drop of the ocean’s pH level. The seawater became so corrosive that it ate away at the shells, along with other species with calcium carbonate in their bodies. It took hundreds of thousands of years for the oceans to recover from this crisis, and for the sea floor to turn from red back to white.
The clay that the crew of the JOIDES Resolution dredged up may be an ominous warning of what the future has in store. By spewing carbon dioxide into the air, we are now once again making the oceans more acidic.
Today, Ridgwell and Daniela Schmidt, also of the University of Bristol, are publishing a study in the journal Natural Geoscience, comparing what happened in the oceans 55 million years ago to what the oceans are experiencing today. Their research supports what other researchers have long suspected: The acidification of the ocean today is bigger and faster than anything geologists can find in the fossil record over the past 65 million years. Indeed, its speed and strength — Ridgwell estimate that current ocean acidification is taking place at ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago — may spell doom for many marine species, particularly ones that live in the deep ocean.
“This is an almost unprecedented geological event,” says Ridgwell.
When we humans burn fossil fuels, we pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where the gas traps heat. But much of that carbon dioxide does not stay in the air. Instead, it gets sucked into the oceans. If not for the oceans, climate scientists believe that the planet would be much warmer than it is today. Even with the oceans’ massive uptake of CO2, the past decade was still the warmest since modern record-keeping began. But storing carbon dioxide in the oceans may come at a steep cost: It changes the chemistry of seawater.
At the ocean’s surface, seawater typically has a pH of about 8 to 8.3 pH units. For comparison, the pH of pure water is 7, and stomach acid is around 2. The pH level of a liquid is determined by how many positively charged hydrogen atoms are floating around in it. The more hydrogen ions, the lower the pH. When carbon dioxide enters the ocean, it lowers the pH by reacting with water.
The carbon dioxide we have put into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution has lowered the ocean pH level by .1. That may seem tiny, but it’s not. The pH scale is logarithmic, meaning that there are 10 times more hydrogen ions in a pH 5 liquid than one at pH 6, and 100 times more than pH 7. As a result, a drop of just .1 pH units means that the concentration of hydrogen ions in the ocean has gone up by about 30 percent in the past two centuries.
To see how ocean acidification is going to affect life in the ocean, scientists have run laboratory experiments in which they rear organisms at different pH levels. The results have been worrying — particularly for species that build skeletons out of calcium carbonate, such as corals and amoeba-like organisms called foraminifera. The extra hydrogen in low-pH seawater reacts with calcium carbonate, turning it into other compounds that animals can’t use to build their shells.
These results are worrisome, not just for the particular species the scientists study, but for the ecosystems in which they live. Some of these vulnerable species are crucial for entire ecosystems in the ocean. Small shell-building organisms are food for invertebrates, such as mollusks and small fish, which in turn are food for larger predators. Coral reefs create an underwater rain forest, cradling a quarter of the ocean’s biodiversity.
But on their own, lab experiments lasting for a few days or weeks may not tell scientists how ocean acidification will affect the entire planet. “It’s not obvious what these mean in the real world,” says Ridgwell.
One way to get more information is to look at the history of the oceans themselves, which is what Ridgwell and Schmidt have done in their new study. At first glance, that history might suggest we have nothing to worry about. A hundred million years ago, there was over five times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean was .8 pH units lower. Yet there was plenty of calcium carbonate for foraminifera and other species. It was during this period, in fact, that shell-building marine organisms produced the limestone formations that would eventually become the White Cliffs of Dover.
But there’s a crucial difference between the Earth 100 million years ago and today. Back then, carbon dioxide concentrations changed very slowly over millions of years. Those slow changes triggered other slow changes in the Earth’s chemistry. For example, as the planet warmed from more carbon dioxide, the increased rainfall carried more minerals from the mountains into the ocean, where they could alter the chemistry of the sea water. Even at low pH, the ocean contains enough dissolved calcium carbonate for corals and other species to survive.
Today, however, we are flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a rate rarely seen in the history of our planet. The planet’s weathering feedbacks won’t be able to compensate for the sudden drop in pH for hundreds of thousands of years.
Scientists have been scouring the fossil record for periods of history that might offer clues to how the planet will respond to the current carbon jolt. They’ve found that 55 million years ago, the Earth went through a similar change. Lee Kump of Penn State and his colleagues have estimated that roughly 6.8 trillion tons of carbon entered the Earth’s atmosphere over about 10,000 years.
Nobody can say for sure what unleashed all that carbon, but it appeared to have had a drastic effect on the climate. Temperatures rose between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius (9 to 16 Fahrenheit). Many deep-water species became extinct, possibly as the pH of the deep ocean became too low for them to survive.
But this ancient catastrophe (known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM) was not a perfect prequel to what’s happening on Earth today. The temperature was warmer before the carbon bomb went off, and the pH of the oceans was lower. The arrangement of the continents was also different. The winds blew in different patterns as a result, driving the oceans in different directions. All these factors make a big difference on the effect of ocean acidification. For example, the effect that low pH has on skeleton-building organisms depends on the pressure and temperature of the ocean. Below a certain depth in the ocean, the water becomes so cold and the pressure so high that there’s no calcium carbonate left for shell-building organisms. That threshold is known as the saturation horizon.
To make a meaningful comparison between the PETM and today, Ridgwell and Schmidt built large-scale simulations of the ocean at both points of time. They created a virtual version of the Earth 55 million years ago and let the simulation run until it reached a stable state. The pH level of their simulated ocean fell within the range of estimates of the pH of the actual ocean 55 millions years ago. They then built a version of the modern Earth, with today’s arrangements of continents, average temperature, and other variables. They let the modern world reach a stable state and then checked the pH of the ocean. Once again, it matched the real pH found in the oceans today.
Ridgwell and Schmidt then jolted both of these simulated oceans with massive injections of carbon dioxide. They added 6.8 trillion tons of carbon over 10,000 years to their PETM world. Using conservative projections of future carbon emissions, they added 2.1 trillion tons of carbon over just a few centuries to their modern world. Ridgwell and Schmidt then used the model to estimate how easily carbonate would dissolve at different depths of the ocean.
The results were strikingly different. Ridgwell and Schmidt found that ocean acidification is happening about ten times faster today than it did 55 million years ago. And while the saturation horizon rose to 1,500 meters 55 million years ago, it will lurch up to 550 meters on average by 2150, according to the model.
The PETM was powerful enough to trigger widespread extinctions in the deep oceans. Today’s faster, bigger changes to the ocean may well bring a new wave of extinctions. Paleontologists haven’t found signs of major extinctions of corals or other carbonate-based species in surface waters around PETM. But since today’s ocean acidification is so much stronger, it may affect life in shallow water as well. “We can’t say things for sure about impacts on ecosystems, but there is a lot of cause for concern,” says Ridgwell.
Ellen Thomas, a paleoceanographer at Yale University, says that the new paper “is highly significant to our ideas on ocean acidification.” But she points out that life in the ocean was buffeted by more than just a falling pH. “I’m not convinced it’s the whole answer,” she says. The ocean’s temperature rose and oxygen levels dropped. Together, all these changes had complex effects on the ocean’s biology 55 million years ago. Scientists now have to determine what sort of combined effect they will have on the ocean in the future.
Our carbon-fueled civilization is affecting life everywhere on Earth, according to the work of scientists like Ridgwell — even life that dwells thousands of feet underwater. “The reach of our actions can really be quite global,” says Ridgwell. It’s entirely possible that the ocean sediments that form in the next few centuries will change from the white of calcium carbonate back to red clay, as ocean acidification wipes out deep-sea ecosystems.
“It will give people hundreds of millions of years from now something to identify our civilization by,” says Ridgwell.
Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360
Growth of World’s Cities, Global Trade are Driving Deforestation
The rapid expansion of the world’s urban populations and globalized trade — not the growth of small-scale farming in rural areas — have emerged as the primary forces driving tropical deforestation worldwide, according to a new study. In the late 20th century, researchers tied the clearing of the world’s forests to the growth of rural populations and the related building of infrastructure and roadways. But with more people moving to cities in recent years, large industrial farms have expanded into forested areas to meet the demand from surging agricultural markets, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience. “One line of thinking was that concentrating people in cities would leave a lot more room for nature,” said Ruth DeFries, lead author of the study and professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “But those people in cities and the rest of the world need to be fed. That creates a demand for industrial-scale clearing.” The researchers analyzed population and economic trends from 41 nations across Latin America, Africa, and Asia from 2000 to 2005, as well as remote-sensing images of forest cover from the same period. They found that the greatest forest losses were associated with urban growth and increases in agricultural exports.
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