Future of natural gas hinges on stanching methane leaks

Future of natural gas hinges on stanching methane leaks
New York Times, 11 July 2016, by Clifford Krauss
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/business/energy-environment/future-of-natural-gas-hinges-on-stanching-methane-leaks.html

It probably won't come as news to readers here that methane leaks are a major issue with natural gas. This article discusses how that realization has dawned over the whole industry.  As we shift from coal toward natural gas and renewables, the methane emitted as a byproduct of natural gas production and distribution has increased as well; the oil and gas industry may now be the biggest source of methane in the U.S.  The short-term climate impact of this leaked methane is huge: equivalent to about 240 coal-fired plants, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.  As a result, the EPA is getting more serious (and more rigorous) about measuring methane leaks, the BLM is working on rules to reduce methane leaks on public lands, and federal regulators are getting involved.  Methane leaks call into question whether natural gas can play the role of a "bridge" while we wait for renewable energy production to spool up. Some companies are co-operating – reducing their emissions voluntarily, and trying to shape regulations in a way that works for them.  Others are stonewalling and protesting that higher regulatory costs will put them out of business and push the country back toward coal.  The viability of the natural gas industry, and the future of climate change, hangs in the balance.

My take: This is all true, although it would have been nice to see the NYT talking more about it back when the fracking boom was still young and regulation could have nipped the problem in the bud.  And it would be nice to see them talking about it a bit more bluntly even now.  For example, they fail to mention that the EPA has recently admitted that all of its methane leak estimates have been much too low in the past, and should all be revised upwards drastically; that is a major scandal that is strangely omitted from the article.  Similarly, they fail to mention the huge methane leak in California recently – the largest in U.S. history! – which was a major embarrassment for the industry that called into question, for many, whether we will ever be able to trust the industry to act responsibly.  The article also says that although an industry group aspires to hold leaks to 1% of total natural gas production, "some estimates put the current amount at nearly twice that level or more"; while that is literally true, since "twice that level or more" is open-ended, it fails to really convey two uncomfortable facts.  One, our data collection on methane leakage has been so abysmally bad that nobody really has any precise idea how much is leaked, and credible estimates vary by nearly an order of magnitude; and two, some credible estimates put the leakage rate much higher than "nearly" 2%, with the IPCC, I believe, stating a median consensus of 2-3% (but again, nobody really has good enough data to know).  All in all, then, this article strikes me as a softball.  I personally think methane leakage is a manageable problem with better regulation (although I'm opposed to natural gas as a bridge fuel for other reasons); but we won't get that better regulation if we fail to take the issue seriously and fully acknowledge how badly we've handled it thus far.

Another inconvenient truth: It's hard to agree how to fight climate change

Another inconvenient truth: It's hard to agree how to fight climate change
New York Times, 11 July 2016, by John Schwartz
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/science/climate-change-movement.html

As realization of the importance and urgency of climate change has spread, the environmental movement has splintered, as this article details.  Being an environmentalist used to be simple: oppose pollution, support natural reserves, protect endangered species, hug trees.  Now it's complicated.  Should you be for nuclear power or against it?  On the one hand, it's carbon-neutral and non-polluting (apart from that pesky nuclear waste); on the other hand, it entails risks that are frightening and hard to quantify, and is linked to proliferation of nuclear weapons.  Similarly: is natural gas a good thing, at least as a "bridge", because it has a much lower carbon footprint than coal – or is it a bad thing, because it just puts off the necessary shift to carbon-neutral energy technologies (not to mention problems with methane leaks, aquifer pollution, and earthquakes)?  Should we attack fossil fuel companies, divest from them, and essentially try to shut them down, or should we engage with them and try to shift them toward greener, more responsible policies through actions such as shareholder activism?  Will effective action on climate change necessitate the dismantling of capitalism and a reversion of humanity to a simpler and more sustainable way of life, or is capitalism a necessary part of the solution because it provides us with price mechanisms and institutions we can manipulate to incentivize change?  The debate on these difficult questions has become sharply polarized, and name-calling has become common.  At the same time, the movement is becoming broader, with greater participation from conservatives, Republicans, religious groups, and corporations, leading to an even wider range of opinions and ideas.  There's a lot to sort out, and it's hard to know which claims are evidence-based and which are propaganda.  The article ends with quotes from Al Gore to the effect that such schisms in growing movements are typical and natural, and that perhaps these debates will soon settled by economics: the plunging cost of renewables will make debates over nuclear, natural gas, etc., irrelevant as solar and wind take over the energy market.

My take: The article makes no attempt to adjudicate these various debates – probably wise, since they are all very difficult questions with no easy answers.  But the glaring hole in the article is that it barely mentions the concept of putting a price on carbon; it comes up only as an example of the nasty infighting between different environmentalists, as a battleground between the anti-capitalists like Naomi Klein and the pro-capitalists like Bill McKibben (although I'm not sure he would embrace quite that label).  I wish I shared Al Gore's optimism that low prices for renewables will solve all our problems and make all these debates irrelevant; but I don't think it's that simple.  We will need more than solar and wind to solve climate change (as I will look at a bit in some reviews coming up soon in my queue), and we will need a price on carbon to do it, too, I think; so the article's failure to really engage with that as one of the core debates in environmentalism today is disappointing to say the least.  In the end, this is a pretty empty piece; it's not long enough to really get into the meat of any of the questions it raises, and its implicit endorsement of Gore's opinion that the debates are unimportant because solar and wind are about to solve everything is a simplistic cop-out.  In fact, these debates are crucially important; we need to get all of these questions right or we will probably fail to avoid catastrophic climate change.  The vitriol and partisanship may be unpleasant, but I'll take unpleasant, vitriolic debate any day over the past several decades of the media failing to delve any deeper into all this than "Is climate change real or not?  Let's give equal time to both sides."  The fact that we are arguing publicly now about details – science and evidence and policy and models and risk assessment and economics – that fact represents progress, and it gives me hope.

Exxon touts carbon tax to oil industry

Exxon touts carbon tax to oil industry
Wall St. Journal, 30 June 2016, by Amy Harder and Bradley Olson
http://www.wsj.com/articles/exxon-touts-carbon-tax-to-oil-industry-1467279004

This article (paywalled, unfortunately, but the WSJ has limited free access for 24 hours) discusses a recent shift in Exxon's public stance on climate change, from tacit support for a revenue-neutral carbon tax (since in their view other climate policy actions would be even worse) to actual public advocacy of such a tax, both on Capital Hill and in trade associations.  The article notes that Exxon is under strong pressure to show more positive action regarding climate change, since it is under investigation for conspiring to cover up scientific research related to climate change.  It also mentions that Exxon has a financial motive for supporting a carbon tax, since such a tax would hurt coal even more than oil and natural gas.  In any case, with this shift Exxon joins European energy companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and BP that have been advocating for a price on carbon for some years, whereas other U.S. energy companies, such as Chevron, continue to publicly oppose a carbon tax.

My take: As the article notes (and it is nice to see this sort of balanced coverage in the WSJ), this shift actually serves Exxon's interests in various ways; it is not likely that Exxon has suddenly decided to value the fate of humanity over its own bottom line.  However, I think this angle could be taken considerably further.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has been fighting Exxon tooth and nail, as detailed on their blog (http://blog.ucsusa.org/tag/exxonclimatescandal), and Exxon has by no means given up the fight.  At the same time that Exxon is talking a good game regarding carbon taxation, it continues to fund misinformation on climate change and to deny its past coverups of climate science (http://blog.ucsusa.org/gretchen-goldman/as-congress-calls-out-fossil-fuel-deception-exxonmobil-continues-to-fund-climate-science-denial).  So it is difficult to see these shifts and maneuvers by Exxon as anything but self-interested greenwashing.

Last week's Democratic platform vote was a win for carbon taxes

Last week's Democratic platform vote was a win for carbon taxes
Carbon Tax Center, 29 July 2016, by Charles Komanoff
http://www.carbontax.org/blog/2016/06/29/last-weeks-democratic-platform-vote-was-a-win-for-carbon-taxes/

This missive from the glass-is-half-full camp claims that the Democratic Party's failure to adopt carbon taxation as a plank in its platform should actually be seen as a "win".  The plank, proposed and drafted by activist Bill McKibben of 350.org, stated that CO2 and other greenhouse gases should be taxed at "a rate high enough" to allow the Paris 2015 climate goals to be reached.  Although the plank was voted down, the article sees this as a positive development overall because (1) it got discussed by the party at all, (2) it lost by only a 7-6 vote, and (3) it was explicitly about a carbon tax, rather than just the more vague "price on carbon" that leaves the door open for carbon cap-and-trade schemes that the author feels are undesirable.   All these things show that the idea of carbon taxation is entering the political mainstream.

My take: I actually agree with the article that it is surprising and heartening to see carbon taxation being taken so seriously by politicians.  This is an unprecedented development, and we can certainly hope that it is a harbinger of things to come.  However, since I am more of the glass-is-half-empty persuasion, let me just note a few contrary points.  One, getting "fringe" ideas into a party platform is much easier than getting politicians to actually take action on those ideas.  The party platform is, in the end, just talk; it's an opportunity for politicians to talk a good game without having to actually write legislation, make difficult votes, or buck big-money donors.  Two, the plank, while well-meant, is rather strategically vague in its call for "a rate high enough" to achieve climate goals, with no hint as to what that rate might be – doubtless because the tax rate that would actually be necessary would be uncomfortably high, which even in the anodyne setting of the party platform would make it difficult for politicians to sign on.  And three, if we can't get it into the platform even in this "perfect storm" election year, with record-breaking temperatures spurred by El Niño plus the Bernie surge and his pressure on the platform process, what hope do we have to pass it later – especially since Clinton's camp opposed this plank, as McKibben has described?  But OK; I apologize for raining on the parade.

Canadian company turns air into fuel in climate change fight

Canadian company turns air into fuel in climate change fight
Huffington Post, 5 July 2016, by Dominique Mosbergen
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/carbon-capture-fuel_us_577a177ae4b0a629c1aa7669

Continuing in the vein of my recent posts about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), this article discusses current efforts to capture CO2 directly out of the air, often called "direct air capture".  This technology could be used to pressurize CO2 and store it underground (thereby taking it out of the atmosphere permanently, assuming it doesn't leak back out), or it could be used to turn the CO2 into fuel that can then be burned (a carbon-neutral process, in theory, since all the CO2 released by burning the fuel was originally captured from the air).  In particular, the article touts a firm called Carbon Engineering that is taking the second approach.  Carbon Engineering claims that it can capture CO2 for about $100/ton in its process, which involves splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, then combining the hydrogen with CO2 to produce fuel that they will ultimately sell at a profit for "about $4 to $6 a gallon".  They claim that their process is scalable and could play a major role in combating climate change.  They have the backing of Bill Gates and some other deep-pocketed individuals, and are presently building a pilot plant that they say will produce about 1000 barrels of fuel per day, while removing 100,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year (equivalent to the carbon footprint of about 25,000 vehicles, they say).

My take: Color me skeptical.  Direct air capture has been discussed for decades, but it has always been way, way too expensive to be cost-effective, and nothing in this article convinces me that Carbon Engineering has cracked that problem.  Even capturing CO2 directly from the emissions streams of coal and gas plants, where the CO2 is extremely concentrated, is very difficult to do efficiently and cost-effectively (as shown by the failure of the Kemper plant that I discussed in my previous post).  Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere, where its concentration is only about 0.04%, is much more difficult still.  The fact that Gates is putting his money behind this tempers my skepticism somewhat – Gates is a smart man, whatever one might think of him – but since the article provides no technical details whatsoever regarding how Carbon Engineering has managed to cut the cost of direct air capture by an order of magnitude compared to previous attempts... well, I'm not betting on this technology being successful.  I would also note that at $4-$6 per gallon and $100/ton CO2, even if their technology works they will have trouble selling it unless governments put a high price on carbon emissions.  A carbon fee-and-dividend scheme would allow projects like this to be economically viable – if the technology actually works, that is.

Piles of dirty secrets behind a model "clean coal" project

Piles of dirty secrets behind a model "clean coal" project
New York Times, 5 July 2016, by Ian Urbina
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/science/kemper-coal-mississippi.html

This is a sad story of failure and fraud at the frontiers of clean energy research: the Kemper "clean coal" plant in Mississippi.  The Kemper plant was supposed to capture the CO2 emitted from the combustion of coal, preventing its release into the atmosphere.  The captured CO2 would then be pressurized, piped to oilfields, and pumped underground to facilitate the extraction of oil while simultaneously sequestering the CO2 underground (permanently, it is hoped).  The plant was the U.S.'s big exploratory investment in this technology, called "carbon capture and sequestration" (CCS), and has been talked about as a "central piece" of Obama's plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  However, the plant is now more than $4 billion over budget, two years behind schedule, and is being sued for fraud by ratepayers and investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission – and all this before it has even started operations.  The Times has done some good investigative journalism here, detailing the saga in all its sordidness, including reviews of extensive documents provided by a whistleblower and interviews with many people on all sides of the situation.   There is plenty of blame to be shared: corporate executives, government officials, and regulators all had a hand in mismanaging the plant and covering up the problems.  Meanwhile, work on the plant continues, and ratepayers and taxpayers continue to foot the bill.

My take: This article serves as a counterpoint to the previous article I reviewed, on a carbon sequestration project in Iceland that appears to be wildly successful.  This article illustrates the flip side of that: carbon sequestration is hard, most of our attempts at it have failed, it remains very expensive, and although the benefits of success in this arena would be immense (and thus we ought to keep trying), we cannot afford to assume that we will succeed.  "Clean coal" has been a favorite mantra of the Obama administration, since it provides the possibility to have our cake and eat it too by being able to continue burning fossil fuels while avoiding the climate impact of the resulting CO2.  But the failure of the Kemper plant underlines the unresolved problems with this technology, and the importance of developing alternatives for baseline power.  This article also illustrates for me why having the government "pick winners" in energy and climate policy is dangerous.  The amounts of money involved, and the political pressures at work, are staggeringly large, and so when a "winner" is picked by the government, the result is often – as with Kemper – regulatory capture, mismanagement, coverups, and ultimately bailouts.  A carbon fee-and-divided scheme avoids these problems by changing the incentive structure (by incorporating the negative externalities of CO2 emissions into the price structure) and then allowing free market competition to arrive at the winners, whatever technologies they might be.  Lots of important lessons to be learned here.

In a first, Iceland power plant turns carbon emissions to stone

In a first, Iceland power plant turns carbon emissions to stone
Phys.org, 9 June 2016, no author given
http://phys.org/news/2016-06-climate-mitigation-co2.html

This is a report of ground-breaking – literally! – research recently published in the journal Science, claiming that pressurized CO2 pumped into basalt formations underground is rapidly absorbed, transforming the basalt into carbonate minerals that permanently lock the carbon into place.  If true, this finding would substantially change the picture regarding “carbon capture and sequestration” (CCS), the storage of carbon dioxide emissions underground to prevent climate change.  CCS is believed by many (such as the IPCC, in their latest report) to be crucial if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.  This advance would allay fears that CO2 sequestered underground might leak back out into the atmosphere over time, since the CO2 would be tightly locked into permanent mineral structures.  However, this technology requires large amounts of water to be pumped down as well – 25 tons of water per ton CO2, although seawater can be used.  It is also possible that the carbonate minerals might get munched by bacteria that would release methane, perhaps completely reversing the benefits of CCS (or worse).

My take: This has the potential to be revolutionary, but it is important to take these kinds of early scientific results with a big grain of salt; a great deal more research is needed.  Nevertheless, it is big news.  It’s hard to see a path toward sustainability that does not involve CCS, since we rely so heavily on fossil fuels.  It will be difficult to shift off of them completely; even if we manage to reach, say, 80% renewable energy (a very aggressive goal, for technical reasons such as intermittency), the remaining 20% use of fossil fuels would continue to drive atmospheric CO2 ever upward unless we master CCS.  Indeed, the recent Paris Accord negotiations essentially assumed that some form of CCS would be used to offset a large fraction of future emissions.  The problems with this new technology remain large, however.  We presently emit about 40 billion tons of CO2 per year; this technology would thus require burying 1 trillion tons of water, which is 1000 cubic kilometers of water.  Which is a lot of water, although it is only 0.000074% of the total volume of the ocean, if I have done my math right.  The article also mentions the issue of cost, but not prominently enough, I think.  Cost is the big problem that has plagued CCS for decades, because it takes a lot of energy to separate, compress, and inject waste CO2 underground.  It is not clear that the new method improves on that, and so the cost of CCS may remain prohibitive even with this advance – unless, that is, some form of carbon taxation shifts the cost-benefit analysis by increasing the cost to companies of simply releasing waste CO2 into the atmosphere.  But the cost of CCS may be even higher than the “social cost of carbon”, and so even with this technology a carbon tax might have to be set “too high” – higher than the actual damage done by CO2 – before CCS would start to make economic sense.  So, in short: be excited, but remain calm.