Carbon-Nation couldn’t pass up the teach-able moment inherent in Valentine’s Day. Only New Year’s competes with February 14th’s love affair with champagne, and champagne would be unthinkable without carbon dioxide.
Check out my latest connect-the-dots photo montage for MSN Green, “The Troubles in the Bubbles”, to see how champagne is both contributing to – and at the whim of – a changing environment.
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Going forward, some of Carbon-Nation’s posts will now be copublished via IEEE Spectrum’s Tech Talk blog, beginning with this report on California plug-in mania: “Plug-in hybrids win big in ZEV tweaks” (full text follows)
Plug-in mania has an influential new fan: the California Air Resources Board, which looks set to elevate plug-ins several notches in its zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandate.
The ZEV directive requires car manufacturers to market ultraclean and emissions-free vehicles (or buy credits earned by others making such vehicles). The California Air Resources Board unleashed intense lobbying this winter among battery EV start-ups, major automakers, hydrogen fuel-cell developers, and coalitions promoting plug‑in hybrids when it promised to tweak the level of credits earned by various technologies. From the Air Resources Board staff proposal released late last week, plug-ins appear to be the big winners.
Presently the ZEV credit ratios favor fuel cells and offer relatively little help for plug-ins. The staff proposal would change this by enabling manufacturers to meet most of their ZEV requirements through 2014 with plug-in hybrids and hydrogen combustion vehicles. While not pure ZEVs like battery EVs and fuel cell vehicles, the California regulators bet that manufacture of plug-ins will yield components and infrastructure that will hasten the day when the pure EVs go mainstream.
“The goal continues to be to accelerate the development of pure ZEVs,” says Air Resources Board member Daniel Sperling, director of the University of California, Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies. Sperling says promoting plug-in hybrids is the “only realistic way” to push car makers forward in light of the continued high cost of batteries and fuel cells.
Sperling and his fellow Air Resources Board members will take up the staff proposal after a public hearing in Sacramento scheduled for March 27-28.
Meanwhile, Arizona regulators seem to be feeling considerably more bullish about the viability of pure electrics. The Arizona Republic reports that Airzona’s Department of Environmental Quality has drafted rules mandating that 11 percent of all cars sold in the state must be ZEVs from the 2011 model year. In 2018 the mandate would jump to 16 percent.
This post was created for Tech Talk – Insights into tomorrow’s technology from the editors of IEEE Spectrum.
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My informed knee-jerk on the U.S. Department of Energy’s decision to bag FutureGen — the poster child for its clean coal program — endures with followup reporting. That’s what I’m asserting today on TechReview.com in “The Future of Clean Coal” with its deck: “The DOE’s decision to abandon FutureGen could accelerate clean-coal technology.” The bottom line is that over 50 commercial projects using coal gasification put the lie to DOE and the coal industry’s earlier suggestion, through FutureGen, that carbon capture represents next-generation technology.
That said, FutureGen would not be without value. It sought to improve the integration of coal gasification and carbon capture and thus reduce the “energy penalty” associated with carbon capture.
Today’s coal gasification power plants–so-called IGCC plants–cut the energy penalty relative to conventional coal plants roughly in half, cutting the cost of carbon capture from about $40/metric ton to about $20/m.t. (See Table 3.5 in MIT’s 2007 Future of Coal report for representative stats.) FutureGen’s goal was to test novel equipment such as hydrogen-burning turbines to deliver as much as possible on DOE’s clean coal target: $10/m.t.
Reducing the cost of carbon capture would speed up adoption of the technology. However, as Carbon-Nation has argued before, it isn’t a precondition for cleaning up coal. Carbon capture from coal already pays its way regardless. Carbon reductions are trading at close to $30/m.t. under Europe’s carbon cap and trade program (50% higher than the cost of carbon capture from today’s IGCC technology). And the estimated cost of electricity from IGCC with carbon capture–about 6.5 cents/kilowatt-hour according to the MIT report–is well below the average price for electricity in the U.S.
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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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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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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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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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