Peter Fairley

FutureGen Setback Marks a Win for Carbon Capture

The U.S. Department of Energy has scrapped its support for FutureGen — a public/private partnership that was to build the world’s first carbon-neutral coal-fired power plant. Read the story before you blame coal gasification and carbon capture — the technologies FutureGen was to apply. Rather, DOE has decided that its share of the $1.8 billion FutureGen pricetag is better spent installing carbon capture equipment on commercial coal plants.

Federal funding for carbon capture is needed today because, without the carbon caps or taxes rejected by Washington, there are few instances in which capturing CO2 will pay for itself.

What DOE’s move recognizes is what coal gasification technology providers have been screaming for years: the gasification technology that FutureGen set out to demonstrate is already commercially viable. Your editor quoted one such expert back in 2005 in “Carbon Dioxide for Sale” — a story on carbon capture at the 1970s era Dakota Gasification synthetic fuels plant: “FutureGen is promoting technology that hasn’t even been demonstrated at small pilot plants,” said Dale Simbeck, vice president of technology for SFA Pacific, an energy consultancy based in Mountain View, CA. “But here’s a large-scale operation that’s technically successful and that’s doing all these things that are being talked about.”

Al Lukes, the plant’s chief operating officer, told me he was used to the surprised reactions of international visitors who came to see what was happening in the northern plains: “People look at us and say, ‘My God, you can do that?'”

Now even the U.S. Department of Energy seems to know that gasification and carbon capture exist.

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January 30, 2008February 22, 2008 by pfairley

Straight Talk on Earth-Watching from IPCC Pioneer Jerry Mahlman

As an energy writer I am often frustrated that the low hanging fruit of energy innovations — such as carbon capture and storage — are not being seized, or at least not at the pace that the science suggests is needed to avert major climate impacts in my lifetime. Despite the seeming flood of climate science being reported by the media these days, climate scientists feel a similar frustration that they are not being given the tools they need to really flesh out the climate picture and nail down the myriad uncertainties in climate models. I ran smack into this frustration interviewing Jerry Mahlman, a senior climatologist who created one of the first global climate models and helped to bring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to life.

In my Q&A with Mahlman, which ran today on Earthzine, he decried the sorry state of the Earth observing systems needed to track climate change. As Mahlman, a climate modeler, puts it, “The world must think that we climate modelers are essentially infallible simply because nobody seems to be interested in checking us out by looking at an appropriate and proper dataset. We don’t think of ourselves as infallible but what we’re getting is NASA and NOAA providing pretty seriously inept observational systems.”

The National Academy of Sciences agrees with Mahlman. The scientific body, usually circumspect in its advice to Congress, issued a report last year warning that the U.S. Earth observation satellite programs are “in disarray.”

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January 21, 2008December 9, 2008 by pfairley

Riding the New CAFE Standards To 35 mpg, and Beyond?

Buzz Lightyear would have put an exclamation point on the end, but the new fuel economy targets approved by Congress last month are not quite so dramatic. For sure, bumping up from roughly 25mpg today to 35mpg in 2020 –the first meaningful increase in the CAFE standards since 1984– will make a difference. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates the higher standard will eliminate greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking 28 million of today’s cars and trucks off the road and save consumers at least $22 billion/year (if gasoline at the pump stays above $2.55/gallon).

Greater use of biofuels encouraged by the energy law containining the new CAFE standard could deliver similar energy savings.

But as my story today on TechReview.com and ABC News.com shows, these savings will be largely negated in 2020 by increased driving. Nor will a 40% CAFE boost, on its own, deliver the changes in technology and behavior needed to deliver a truly sustainable transportation system after 2020.

Provisions in the energy law supporting electrification of the automobile could, however, make a difference. Genevieve Cullen, vice president of the Electric Drive Transportation Association, in Washington, DC, promises that her group will be pushing for more. Their top priority now is to secure a tax credit for buyers of plug-in hybrid vehicles that would be similar to those available to buyers of the current hybrids and vehicles that can run on alternative fuels.

Supporters of the oil industry stripped out a plug-in tax credit in last month’s legislation along with provisions that would have eliminated tax breaks for oil and gas producers. “The unbelievable state that we’re in right now is that there are absolutely no consumer incentives for battery electric vehicles-the zero petroleum, zero emissions vehicles,” says Cullen.

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January 15, 2008February 11, 2008 by pfairley

Carbon Capture Deserves Our Support

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) — the idea that CO2 can be collected from smokestacks and stowed away underground — is one of the hottest flashpoints in the politics of climate change. Many environmentalists fought unsuccessfully to strip out CCS incentives from the energy bill signed into law by President Bush this month, arguing that CCS is at best a distraction from a more fundamental shift toward renewable energy sources — if it works at all to keep any CO2 out of the atmosphere. (This may have escaped your notice because the battle over the bill ranged from a historic boost to U.S. fuel efficiency standards –which passed– to a renewable energy mandate stripped out at the last minute.)

I wade into the CCS debate this month in an op-ed for the Earth-observation portal Earthzine arguing that CCS deserves our support. My essay, a response to an Earthzine editorial that knocked CCS, looks back forty years to show that CCS is closer to proven than its critics allow. As for the economics of CCS, I argue that the dirt-cheap cost of coal-fired power provides plenty of room for the extra costs associated with capturing and sequestering CO2.

What is needed for CCS to take off is a way of monetizing the value of carbon capture. The latest energy legislation begins that process, extending tax credits for renewable energy to that produced from coal power plants practising CCS. What’s ultimately needed for both CCS and renewables to become the new normal are energy taxes or carbon trading to put a price on every CO2 molecule released into Earth’s atmosphere.

For another look at how real CCS is today and how nascent carbon markets are suffering out the wait for carbon pricing see “Carbon Capture Moves Ahead”, my story for Technology Review on the efforts of leading U.S. carbon offsets marketer Blue Source to generate and sell carbon credits from CCS projects. The bottom line: It’s a lot harder to innovate when emitting carbon costs $2/ton in the U.S., compared to roughly $30 in Europe.

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December 29, 2007December 9, 2008 by pfairley

Naughty Editor Reveals Hidden Reports on Energy

Over the last month Carbon-Nation went quiet as its editor made noise elsewhere on the web. He should have kept you linked in. Bad editor! Here’s what you missed:

“Cheap Cashmere Sweaters”: A Connect the Dots photo feature on MSN Green tracking cashmere’s environmental footprints –carbon and otherwise– back to the desertified steppes of Central Asia. Bottom line message: The price of that cashmere sweater looks good now, but the cost to the environment will bite you in the end.

Two for IEEE Spectrum Online:

“Power Transmission Without the Power Electronics”: During their low-resolution beginnings digital music and photography delivered a jarring rendition of sounds and images. Today, digital devices used to control electricity flows are making a similar mess on power grids.

“Electric-Car Maker Touts 10-Minute Fill-Up”: Altair Nanotechnologies’ lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles charge up fast. Very fast. One of its 35 kilowatt-hour packs, capable of propelling an EV pickup truck for 160 kilometers, can fully charge in just 10 minutes-a feat that would be downright dangerous with most lithium batteries. But will such rapid-charging prove practical on the street?

And a troika for MIT’s Technology Review website:

“Prospecting for Power”: The ultra-sensitive detection of traces of helium rising from the Earth’s mantle may hold the key to sniffing out sites of hidden geothermal energy.

“Cleaner Nuclear Power?”: Senators representing several Western states are promoting thorium. They say it’s a cleaner-burning fuel for nuclear-power plants, with the potential to cut high-level nuclear-waste volumes in half. Some nuclear watchdogs agree.

“Carbon Capture Moves Ahead”: Carbon offsets marketer Blue Source is building the business case for carbon-capture and storage systems by storing CO2 in oil wells.

December 13, 2007December 13, 2007 by pfairley

IPCC Affirms the Economists: Action Needn’t Terminate Growth

We’ve all read plenty about the IPCC this year as the U.N.-organized scientific body rolled out the tomes that constitute its fourth assessment of climate change research. This weekend the IPCC delivered its summation, and the results are both disturbing and heartening.

Disturbing because it reaffirms that the climate is changing and we are the unwitting drivers. Heartening because its synthesis affirms economic research showing that action against climate change is affordable. The IPCC estimates that aggressive action to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases would, at worst, slim annual global GDP growth by 0.12%.

For a sharp précis of the report, Carbon-Nation recommends you to Joseph Romm on Climate Progress: “Absolute must-read report: IPCC says debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly”

November 18, 2007December 6, 2008 by pfairley

A LowCarb Negawatt Diet for the Planet

We could all get by with a lot less energy. According to a report out today by the Alliance to Save Energy, the Washington-based United Nations Foundation and Dow Chemical, the G8 countries such as Canada, France, Russia and the U.S. could double their current rate of efficiency improvement to 2.5% per year with investments that would pay for themselves over 3-5 years. That would eliminate the need for four-fifths of the new coal-fired power plants that the International Energy Agency estimates will be built between now and 2030.

Today on TechReview.com I profile a simple device to motivate energy efficiency that’s likely to become as common as the thermostat. It’s a glorified glow-lamp called the Joule with the potential stop blackouts and slash energy costs.

In future Carbon-Nation will bring you more energy efficiency opportunities. We’ll also try to massage energy efficiency’s achilles heel: a vicious feedback loop known by economists as the rebound effect whereby high energy prices stimulate energy efficiency improvements so effectively that they reduce demand, undercut energy prices, and stimulate new consumption that offsets the original efficiency gains. The rebound effect is just one of several reasons why potential efficiency gains such as those identified in today’s report fail to translate into longterm reductions in overall energy demand.

Is there a gadget out there to keep us from rebounding?

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November 14, 2007November 15, 2007 by pfairley