The carbon intensity of primary energy is rebounding

[GliderGuider]

Despite the increasing penetration of renewables, the amount of CO2 released by our primary energy consumption has climbed since about 2002. That means that the low-carbon advantage of wind has been offset by some other dirtier energy source (which shall remain nameless).

[Dead_Parrot]

1. Oops. Err, fuck.

This isn't a total surprise, but it's dis-heartening to see in a graph. :(

[GliderGuider]

2. And here's why:

The line for coal tells the story.

ETA: In 2009 fossil fuels produced 88% of the world's primary energy. Wind produced 0.25%. That's why renewable advocates always quote electricity generation figures rather than primary energy consumption, even when they're talking about GHG abatement. The primary energy picture is just too damn depressing.

[upi402]

3. Clean coal or cocaine

Which is the REAL big lie?

Sustainable energy will involve many fronts, I think.
Venter's algal lipid substitute for dino oil is hopeful. But there are DER's we can use right now. And if we had an organization that would oppose big oil -in the political arena- we could get off the couch and use them.

The off-the-grid movement will prove too tempting for sidelined investors and will lead the way out. Politics will fight it, even our side. Greed will lead, in this case -I feel. Greed is green when you climb out of the oil sump, and not just the color of money.

[GliderGuider]

4. The Big Lie is

"Sustainability is possible."

Even before you get out of the energy arena of this three-ring circus of a civilization, you're hooped. Sustainability is a chimera, a conscience-salve for the Merlot-sipping set.

[joshcryer]

9. Nah, "sustainablity is possible" is a physical argument, the math, the physics, says it's possible.

But whether or not it's possible in a global capitalist environment is a certain "no." That is, the physics allow it, but the governments and the markets will not and cannot.

[GliderGuider]

12. To me the word "possible" applies only to events with a non-zero probability of actually occurring.

Sustainability is not one of them, regardless of what physics says.

[joshcryer]

16. Eh, if you were a transhumanist you'd believe that it's certainly a non-zero probability.

ie, in 30 years or so we'll have magic AI that knows how to fix all of our pollution problems and it ... does it.

So your assumption implies an inherently negative impact from technology, rather than a neutral impact. I consider technology utilization the determining factor, whether or not it has a wholly negative impact.

I'm not a transhumanist because that's far too optimistic of a position for me to take.

[upi402]

22. To play musical chairs, or do the cake walk?

Or just sit it out as the house burns down.

I agree, this country is over-with. No hope of change. As for the sustainability movement - the consequences are to commit suicide on the installment plan. My human spirit compels me to toss buckets of water on our burning house. If there were enough of us, it would help save much of it.

And if my neighbor the fireman would inform us that steam from water spray can displace the fire-feeding oxygen - it would help loads!

[GliderGuider]

5. Between 1973 and 1990

the proportion of fossil fuels in the global primary energy mix dropped from 94% to 88%. Since then it has remained approximately stable.

That reduction was directly attributable to the nuclear power build-out.

Between 2001 and today the proportion of coal in the mix has gone from 25% to over 29%.

[joshcryer]

8. And don't forget a several GW* of coal is brought online every week around the world.

Fun times ahead.

*GW = gigawatt, not to be confused with the MW figure one might glean from a wind turbine, you'd have to build a thousand wind turbines a week to simply equal the coal build out we're currently experiencing.

[joshcryer]

7. Yep, this sort of shit is why I'm a global warming *alarmist.*

Yes, I said it, I'm a goddamn alarmist. Because look at the fucking numbers. It's fucking tragic.

[XemaSab]

25. The purpose of sounding an alarm is so that the fire department, or the cops

will show up and rescue you.

There's a difference between sounding an alarm and plain freaking out.

Right now I think most of us are just plain freaking out.

[joshcryer]

29. Eh, nah, not really. I just think we're all assholes for not doing something about it.

See, I have a very individualist POV of things. And not the bullshit Libertarian "individualist POV." If I am making a mess, I clean it up. If my actions are affecting you, I attempt to minimize that impact. But this is exactly the opposite of what is happening here. We're polluting the fuck out of our atmosphere and fucking up climate forever.

I'm alarmed that I live in a society that is composed of essentially assholes who aren't doing shit about their messes.

[joshcryer]

6. COP15 was supposed to lower the carbon intensity! Everyone agreed!

[Odin2005]

10. Chinese Coal!

:puke:

[joshcryer]

11. Not just China, the whole developing world is building coal.

India alone is building just as much as China. And westerners have the audacity to bitch about it.

The key is that there exist no projections showing the developed world actually lowering their emissions. Why? Because if the developing world can build coal why can't we keep using it?

[Kolesar]

13. Not a lot of substantive discussion on this thread...eom

[GliderGuider]

14. So, add some...

[joshcryer]

17. The OP is not very controversial.

I know that on E&E non-controversial (ie, don't mention nuclear) topics tend to drop quick and not get a lot of responses.

[XemaSab]

26. You think?

n/t

[GliderGuider]

15. In the last 45 years, the only thing that has ever made a dent in fossil fuel use

is nuclear power.



The combination of fossil fuel and nuclear power has been providing a steady 94% (+/- 0.6%) of the world's primary energy during that entire time. When nuclear power gains market share, fossil fuel loses. When nuclear power loses market share (as it has recently), the use of fossil fuel rebounds.

When we consider humanity's primary energy use patterns, do we really expect the next 45 years to be much different?

CO2 is a global issue. The pattern of primary energy use is a global pattern. Local mitigation isn't making any difference.

It's time to get on with adaptation.

[joshcryer]

18. Now you made it controversial. Interesting that nuclear is the only technology to shut down fossil.

If you started your own topic you'd get pages of rehashed (and dishonest) arguments, while avoiding this data in its entirety.

[kristopher]

19. In the future the use of nuclear power is counterproductive...

...to the goal of the pursuing most cost/time efficient solution to climate change.

YOU and others who like to spend their spare time speaking on behalf of the nuclear industry may like to pretend that garbage like you’ve produced above is somehow "science"; but the real analysts and planners working on the energy component of AGW are quite certain what represents reality - and in the real world the "opportunity costs" of nuclear mean it decidedly inferior to the tier 1 and 2 alternatives as shown in the abstract below.

You, of course, choose to use the metric of "primary consumption" which is a weighting that favors thermal generation like nuclear and coal dramatically since it counts the roughly 70% of energy input into such thermal generation which ends up as waste heat doing nothing but making another contribution to AGW.

Further, since renewable sources other than biomass do not combust fuels to run a steam generator to produce electricity the thermal losses they incur are negligible.

To demonstrate the significance of this misrepresentation, I happen to have the numbers for primary vs. consumed energy for 2002 in the US on hand; of the 92.1 quads of "primary energy" consumed 56.2 quads were wasted while only 35.2 quads were "useful" energy.

It is therefore quite easy to see that distributed energy infrastructure powered by renewables doe not need to replace anywhere near the amount of energy the "primary energy" statistics lead the unwary reader to conclude. Such an "efficiency" move has huge implications for planning.

Stop trying to mislead people.

Abstract here: http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Full article for download here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/revsolglobwarmairpol.htm


Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c

Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

Abstract
This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

From a presentation by John Holdren.

The renewable option: Is it real?

SUNLIGHT: 100,000 TW reaches Earth’s surface (100,000 TWy/year = 3.15 million EJ/yr), 30% on land.
Thus 1% of the land area receives 300 TWy/yr, so converting this to usable forms at 10% efficiency would yield 30 TWy/yr, about twice civilization’s rate of energy use in 2004.

WIND: Solar energy flowing into the wind is ~2,000 TW.
Wind power estimated to be harvestable from windy sites covering 2% of Earth’s land surface is about twice world electricity generation in 2004.

BIOMASS: Solar energy is stored by photosynthesis on land at a rate of about 60 TW.
Energy crops at twice the average terrestrial photosynthetic yield would give 12 TW from 10% of land area (equal to what’s now used for agriculture).
Converted to liquid biofuels at 50% efficiency, this would be 6 TWy/yr, more than world oil use in 2004.

Renewable energy potential is immense. Questions are what it will cost & how much society wants to pay for environmental & security advantages.

What does he say about nuclear?

The nuclear option: size of the challenges

• If world electricity demand grows 2% /year until 2050 and nuclear share of electricity supply is to rise from 1/6 to 1/3...
–nuclear capacity would have to grow from 350 GWe in 2000 to 1700 GWe in 2050;
– this means 1,700 reactors of 1,000 MWe each.

• If these were light-water reactors on the once-through fuel cycle...
---–enrichment of their fuel will require ~250 million Separative Work Units (SWU);
---–diversion of 0.1% of this enrichment to production of HEU from natural uranium would make ~20 gun-type or ~80 implosion-type bombs.

• If half the reactors were recycling their plutonium...
---–the associated flow of separated, directly weapon - usable plutonium would be 170,000 kg per year;
---–diversion of 0.1% of this quantity would make ~30 implosion-type bombs.

• Spent-fuel production in the once-through case would be...
---–34,000 tonnes/yr, a Yucca Mountain every two years.

Conclusion: Expanding nuclear enough to take a modest bite out of the climate problem is conceivable, but doing so will depend on greatly increased seriousness in addressing the waste-management & proliferation challenges.


Mitigation of Human-Caused Climate Change
John P. Holdren

Repeating that conclusion: Expanding nuclear enough to take a modest bite out of the climate problem is conceivable, *but* doing so will depend on greatly increased seriousness in addressing the waste-management & proliferation challenges.

John P. Holdren is advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology,
Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and
Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology...

Holdren was previously the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University,
director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and
Director of the Woods Hole Research Center.<2>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren



Show us the same chart in 2045 after the world has given renewable sources the same support they gave the failed nuclear initiative in the 70s and 80s.

[joshcryer]

20. Since both fossil and nuclear are thermal processes, the argument stands.

Nuclear has in fact been the only technology to put a dent in fossil fuel usage. You can try to handwave, but it remains a fact.

Feel free to give us projections that would not make this the case.

[joshcryer]

21. Even if you use Jacobson's numbers we have a long way to go and $100 trillion to spend.

:shrug:

[upi402]

23. I wish I had a bot

Every time a nukey advocate posts, I want my bot to post;

When they invent 'NukeAway!'... I'll accept nuclear power.
The BP oil spill was fair warning. You have no idea how many people I argued with against off-shore drilling. Same same but different with nukes. You think you can make something idiot-proof, but you have no idea who you're dealing with.

[GliderGuider]

24. Frankly

I don't care what we all decide to do for power in the future. I'm just pointing out what the situation has been up until now. If we choose not to emulate the past, we will live with whatever else we decide to do, whether it's coal or windmills. I'd just prefer we didn't back into the future with our eyes closed, then suddenly one day wake up and say. "Wait a minute, this isn't what I expected!"

[joshcryer]

28. Well, your thesis is perfectly sound. We need solid projections to see whether or not the trend...

...is valid. Certainly if a new technology comes along it may not be valid, but as it stands now the trend is certainly something to consider.

Nuclear has indeed been the only clean energy source to put a dent in to fossil fuels.

[joshcryer]

27. It's called "kristopher." It makes regular repetitive posts in that vein.

See above. ;)

[Nihil]

31. It exists ...

> You think you can make something idiot-proof, but you have no idea
> who you're dealing with.

Wrong. We know exactly which idiots we're dealing with ...


> The BP oil spill was fair warning.

And yet you've opened the oil extraction market back up again.
So much for intelligence eh?

Go choke on your shale gas.
Go drown in your tar-sand oil.
Go eat your hydrocarbon-rich prawns from the Gulf.

You want your "nuclear-free" country? OK, now eat the results of it.

:eyes:

[joshcryer]

30. Kick.