Hello, Hard Core; Goodbye, Annex I

An overview of “integration” research

Robert Socolow Princeton University

socolow@princeton.edu

Ninth Annual Meeting

Carbon Mitigation Initiative

February 9, 2010

Talk Outline

I. Hello, Hard CoreEngineers and scientists respond to planetary alarmA. Nuclear PowerB. 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

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.

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 Nuclear power will not benefit climate change if its contribution is withdrawn a decade or two after global scale-up begins, as a result of the coupling of nuclear power to nuclear weapons.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.

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 RegimentationRenewables Competing uses of land“Clean coal” Mining: worker and land impactsNuclear power Nuclear warGeoengineering 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) studyAmerican Physical Society

Robert Socolow (Princeton), co-chairMichael Desmond (BP), co-chair, since Oct 2009

William Brinkman (co-chair, start - 3/09), now Director of the Office of Science, DOEArun 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.”)

At In Salah, Algeria, natural gas purification by CO2 removal plus CO2 pressurization for nearby injection

Separation at amine contactor towers

Industrial-scale capture with amines creates the reference system

In Salah gas field, Algeria.

Early demonstrations are invaluable!

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

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).

Tight binding, expensive retrieval

Fas

t bi

ndin

gNaOH

MEA

Ideal

Goodbye, Annex I

AQUILA MATH: At Aquila last summer the G-8 announced two percentage-reduction 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

LI Jie’s map shows the five provinces of China with largest emissions reduction assignments in a scheme based on “high-emitting individuals.”

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).

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

Source: IEA WEO 2007

Per-capita fossil-fuel CO2 emissions, 2005

1-

World emissions: 27 billion tons CO2

STABILIZATION

AVERAGE TODAY

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

Bracket units: tCO2/person-year. Shown: global population, CO2 emissions only from fossil fuels. Dark: value in 2003. Light: added, 2003 to 2030.

4.3 billion “low emitters,”8% of emissions.

“High emitters”

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

Included: Fossil fuels and most deforestationNot included: All non-CO2 greenhouse gases and pre-1950 non-Annex1 deforestation emissions (150 GtCO2, or 20 tCO2/capita)

540x109 tCO2

7.5x109 people

The ECPC Scheme at work:Compensating Emissions for the 1850-2100 Interval

Every additional ton of future Annex1 CO2 emissions legitimates five tons of future CO2 emissions from the NonAnnex1 countries.

A1 falls to zero in 2050

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).