Transcript Slide 1

Hello, Hard Core; Goodbye, Annex I
An overview of “integration” research
Robert Socolow
Princeton University
[email protected]
Ninth Annual Meeting
Carbon Mitigation Initiative
February 9, 2010
Talk Outline
I. Hello, Hard Core
Engineers and scientists respond to planetary alarm
A. Nuclear Power
B. CO2 removal (CDR) from the atmosphere
II. Goodbye, Annex I
Emerging economies are dragged to the table
•
Innovative analyses of China policy (two Ph.D. theses)
•
“One-billion high emitters”: allocating global targets across nations
•
Safe and Fair: Quantifying heritage emissions
Hello, Hard Core
The louder the alarm, the greater the number of
people who will drop what they are doing and try to
help. Some scientists and engineers are urging a
broader agenda:
If the problem is CO2 emissions, surely nuclear
power is part of the solution.
If the problem is planetary, fix the planet.
Nuclear Power
1. Nuclear power could make a significant contribution to climate
change mitigation.
2. A global scale-up of nuclear power is unwise until an international
management regime for nuclear power is in place that makes both
nuclear war and nuclear terrorism less likely with nuclear power
than without it.
3. The next decade is critical. A world considerably safer for nuclear
power could emerge as a co-benefit of the current nuclear
disarmament process.
4. Nuclear power will not benefit climate change if its contribution is
withdrawn a decade or two after global scale-up begins, as a result
of the coupling of nuclear power to nuclear weapons.
5. Making climate change the world’s exclusive priority is dangerous.
New Paper: Robert H. Socolow & Alex Glaser, “Balancing risks: Nuclear
energy & climate change,” Daedalus, Fall 2009, pp. 31-44. Special
issue: The Global Nuclear Future, Volume 1.
Separated plutonium: Bane of global security
Separated plutonium (military and civilian) today; military plutonium in weapons
after reductions of nuclear arsenals.
1500 GW nuclear power by 2050
One view of nuclear expansion to 1,500 GW. 58 countries use nuclear
energy, but only about 40% of the capacity is outside the OECD.
Reference: MIT, The Future of Nuclear Power, 2003
Every strategy can be
implemented well or poorly
Every “solution” has a dark side.
Conservation
Renewables
“Clean coal”
Nuclear power
Geoengineering
Regimentation
Competing uses of land
Mining: worker and land impacts
Nuclear war
Technological hegemony
Risk Management: We must trade the risks of disruption from
climate change against the risks of disruption from mitigation.
We and our children and grandchildren will search for an
optimum pace.
Hippocratic Oath
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all
measures that are required, avoiding
those twin traps of overtreatment and
therapeutic nihilism.*
* Modern version, Louis Lasagna, 1964,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath_modern.html
CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere
Source: David Keith, MIT talk, Sept. 16, 2008
Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) study
American Physical Society
Robert Socolow (Princeton), co-chair
Michael Desmond (BP), co-chair, since Oct 2009
William Brinkman (co-chair, start - 3/09), now Director of the Office of Science, DOE
Arun Majumdar (3/09 – 10/09), now Director of ARPA-E, DOE
Karma Sawyer (UC Berkeley)
Jennifer Wilcox (Stanford)
Roger Aines (LLNL)
Jason Blackstock (IIASA)
Olav Bolland (NTU, Bergen, Norway)
Tina Kaarsberg (Office of Policy, DOE)
Nate Lewis (Cal Tech)
Marco Mazzotti (ETH, Zurich, Switzerland)
Allen Pfeffer (Alstom)
Jeffrey J Siirola (Tennessee Eastman)
Berend Smit (UC Berkeley)
Preliminary conclusions
(personal, not yet the committee’s, and off the record)
It is too soon for policy. The world needs to stay technically focused until
more is understood about the cost:
If direct capture is cheap ($50/tCO2), investment will soon flow.
Diminished resolve to pursue conventional mitigation results.
“Overshoot” emissions trajectories become credible.
If it’s horribly expensive ($5000/tCO2), the world should not be
distracted by it.
Today, we guess that it would cost above $500/tCO2 if deployed at
scale.
Note: Options costing even more than $500/tCO2 influence the optimum
price schedules generated by century-scale integrated assessment
models. (Air capture is a “back-stop technology.”)
Industrial-scale capture with amines
creates the reference system
In Salah gas field,
Algeria.
Early demonstrations
are invaluable!
At In Salah, Algeria, natural gas purification
by CO2 removal plus CO2 pressurization for
nearby injection
Separation at amine contactor towers
A significant impact on climate requires immense storage volume
below ground. Storage was not studied in the POPA report.
A sweet spot for new materials:
Fast kinetics, modest enthalpy of binding
Fast binding
Ideal
NaOH
MEA
Tight binding, expensive retrieval
Box 3.5, Figure 1. Rate constant (M-1s-1) versus the absolute value
of the reaction enthalpy (kJ/mol) for a series of chemical
absorption and adsorption processes.
We may recommend limited, fundamental, materials-focused air capture R&D
“blended into” post-combustion capture R&D. Compare with Obama’s Fossil
Energy budget request, Feb 1, 2010: “Transformational Technologies for
Carbon Capture to identify and focus on innovative carbon capture technology
breakthroughs for point sources and the atmosphere” (my italics).
Goodbye, Annex I
AQUILA MATH: At Aquila last summer the G-8 announced two percentagereduction goals for 2050 (relative to some recent time):
50% reductions in global emissions, and
80% reductions in OECD emissions.
Hardly anyone observed that these two goals require a third, because
almost exactly half of global emissions today come from outside the OECD:
20% reductions in non-OECD emissions
The point isn't the numbers. Rather, it is the manners. The non-OECD was
told. It was not asked.
The same two goals reappeared in Copenhagen.
The post-post-colonial world
Copenhagen was supposed to be the event at which the two-tier world of
the 1992 Rio Convention and the Kyoto follow-on (featuring Annex1 and
NonAnnex1 countries with "common but differentiated responsibilities")
would morph quietly and quickly into a one-tier world of closely coupled
obligations. What astonished me was that anyone was "surprised" that the
task proved difficult.
1992 to 2009: a post-colonial worldview. Former colonial powers feel guilt,
former colonies expect compensation. 2010: the world is seeking to invent
a post-post-colonial world.
Copenhagen brought home that the developing countries will determine
what kind of planet human beings live on. Over the coming century they will
dominate world wealth and consumption, resource depletion, and
environmental damage. Western influence is limited and will wane, yet
Western leadership is essential now.
Innovative analyses of China policy
XU Yuan at a new 600 MW coal
power plant burning high-S coal and
removing 97% of S via scrubbers
(summer 2009, southwest China).
LI Jie’s map shows the five provinces
of China with largest emissions
reduction assignments in a scheme
based on “high-emitting individuals.”
One billion high emitters
New paper: “Sharing global CO2 emission reductions
among one billion high emitters.”
Shoibal Chakravarty, Ananth Chikkatur, Heleen de
Coninck, Stephen Pacala, Robert Socolow, and
Massimo Tavoni.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
July 21, 2009, vol. 106 no. 29, pp. 11884-11888.
Available at: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/29/11884
Per-capita fossil-fuel CO2 emissions, 2005
World emissions: 27 billion tons CO2
AVERAGE TODAY
1-
Source: IEA WEO 2007
STABILIZATION
Beyond per capita
We can’t solve the climate problem without moving
beyond “per capita” – looking inside countries.
1.2 billion “high emitters” in 2030,
60% of global CO2 emissions
>10
0.69
2-10
0.49
“High emitters”
1.92
<2
0.83
3.64
0
1
10.6
2
3
Billions people
4.6
5 25
20
15
10
Billions tCO2
2-10
9.2
4.3 billion “low emitters,”
8% of emissions.
0.65
4
>10
13.6
<2
0.6 2.7
5
Bracket units: tCO2/person-year. Shown: global population, CO2 emissions
only from fossil fuels. Dark: value in 2003. Light: added, 2003 to 2030.
0
Safe and Fair:
Quantifying heritage emissions
It is widely asserted that “fairness” should take history
into account (heritage emissions).
New concept: Cumulative Per Capita Emissions for
some group over some time-interval partially past and
partially ahead. (Use the group’s average population
over the interval.)
Fairness principle: Equal Cumulative Per Capita
(ECPC) emissions for two or more groups and the
same time interval (e.g., 1850-2100).
Cumulative Per Capita Emissions (1850-2005)
990x109 tCO2
1.5x109 people
540x109 tCO2
7.5x109 people
Included: Fossil fuels and most deforestation
Not included: All non-CO2 greenhouse gases and pre-1950 nonAnnex1 deforestation emissions (150 GtCO2, or 20 tCO2/capita)
The ECPC Scheme at work:
Compensating Emissions for the 1850-2100 Interval
A1 falls to
zero in 2050
Every additional ton of future Annex1 CO2 emissions legitimates five tons
of future CO2 emissions from the NonAnnex1 countries.
Approximate 2100 CO2 concentration for
the ECPC scheme and three start-times
780 ppm
680 ppm
560 ppm
How helpful CO2 removal would be! Each 800 GtCO2 removed lowers
concentration by approximately 100 ppm (assuming neutral natural sinks).