Big Wide Wonderful Wyoming	Sharp End of the Hockey Stick	Surface Coal Mine Near Gillette

	For as far as the eye can see, Our Problem is Obvious

Figure 1: Good while it lasts.

Background

Being a study undertaken jointly by two of our National Laboratories and made part of an official presentation to the United Nations, one might surmise the report’s findings do, in fact, in some sense represent the positions and understanding of the United States federal government, or at least its executive branch.

Limiting the anthropogenic increase in global mean surface temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius will require that global net GHG emissions approach zero by the second half of the 21st century. This Department of Energy Deep Decabonization Pathways study finds that it is technically feasible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 in the United States, and that multiple alternative economic and technology pathways exist to achieve these reductions using commercial or near-commercial technologies. In addition to a business-as-usual baseline reference, four representative pathways were considered: “High Renewables”, (not particularly) “High-Nuclear”, “High-CCS”, and “Mixed”. Importantly, the study includes energy and emissions criteria for all aspects of the United States economy, not just the electricity sector most frequently considered.

It should be noted that while capital outlays for any of these scenarios is on the steep side of pricey – between $30 and $70 billion a year over thirty years – the net cost of some may in fact be negative, depending upon future prices of the fossil fuels (notably petroleum) being displaced.

Excerpts from the 2014 United States Department of Energy Deep Decarbonization Report

From the Abstract:

2.3 Biomass Budget

Page 10. The study’s primary basis for biomass availability and costs is the DOE Billion Ton Study Update (BTS2), which includes resource potential estimates to 2030 for purpose-grown energy crops, agricultural and forest residues, and waste products, with some adjustments:

First, currently used resources in the Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook 2013 (AEO) reference case were removed from the BTS2 estimates. These include fuel wood, mill residues, pulping liquors, and forest waste resources currently used primarily by industry in combined heat and power (CHP), power generation, and direct fuel applications. The PATHWAYS modeling continues to satisfy this current demand and does not make these biomass resources available for other applications in the future.

Second, the quantity of purpose-grown energy crops is constrained to a level (371 MMT, million metric tons) that does not result in indirect land use change GHG emissions... The composition of purpose-grown energy crops nationally is intentionally altered over time in the analysis, transitioning land currently used for corn ethanol production to second-generation energy crops (perennial grasses and woody purpose-grown feedstocks). With the remaining BTS2 biomass resources included, the upper limit on dry biomass supply in this report is 1,081 million metric tons, with a total primary energy value of 18.5 EJ.

Because biomass is a versatile energy feedstock that can displace different kinds of fossil fuel, the amount available with zero or low net lifecycle CO2 emissions, and its allocation to different forms of final energy supply, has a strong impact on other aspects of the energy system. In this study, biomass supply is used primarily for production of renewable gas and liquid fuels. Negative emissions bioenergy-CCS is applied only to bio-refining in the high CCS case.

3.3 Pathway Determinants

Primary energy for electric generation

Page 15. Electricity generation, including that used for production of intermediate energy carriers, becomes the dominant form of delivered energy in all deep decarbonization cases... the effects of generation mix are explored using “corner cases” with high renewables, high nuclear, and high CCS generation portfolios, plus a mixed case includes roughly equivalent generation from all three decarbonized options.

Electric load balancing resources

Page 15. The choice of primary energy for generation strongly affects electricity balancing requirements. For systems with high levels of inflexible generation (e.g., variable wind and solar, conventional baseload nuclear), a variety of balancing strategies are needed to maintain reliable system operation, including regional coordination, natural gas generation, curtailment, energy storage, and flexible loads. In this study, power-to-gas hydrogen and synthetic natural gas production are also used as balancing resources, providing low carbon fuels in the process... While these electric fuels may be inefficient from a primary energy perspective, their ability to operate flexibly reduces curtailment, which represents a system-wide inefficiency caused by large amounts of non-dispatchable generation. When this flexible load reduces curtailment, it can provide significant value as a component of an integrated energy system, despite its potentially high cost when viewed in isolation.

Fuel switching and efficiency

Page 15. Energy efficiency is widely considered the first option to pursue in a low carbon portfolio, with value independent of other pathway determinants. In deep decarbonization cases, coordinating end use choices with the other design choices (e.g., whether CCS exists, how biomass is allocated) is required to make optimal tradeoffs between fuel type and efficiency level from the standpoint of cost and emissions. In this study, significant efficiency improvements come from thermodynamic advantages inherent in certain kinds of fuel switching (e.g., from internal combustion to electric drive train vehicles, from natural gas heat to ground-source heat pumps).

3.4 Four Deep Decarbonization Scenarios

Figure 6: Pathways Determinants: Critical Elements that Determine the Features of a Low Carbon Energy System

Page 16. The four deep decarbonization cases created for this analysis represent a range of pathways that result from significantly different technology choices organized around the three primary energy choices for electricity – renewable energy (High Renewables Case), nuclear (High Nuclear Case), and fossil fuels with CCS (High CCS Case). The Mixed Case includes a balanced mix of all three primary energy resources. All cases have similar strategies for and levels of energy efficiency. The four cases are intended to illustrate a broad suite of consistent, interrelated technology choices, while still remaining tractable for purposes of presentation. They are not intended to be exhaustive.

Figure 7: Four representative deep decarbonization scenarios

Ed’s note:
In the far right Generation Mix column, the upper-left orange region of the Renewables, Nuclear, and CCS scenarios are likely intended to be colored yellow, representing solar fusion energy, rather than orange, which represents uranium fission. And at 45.4% wind+sun and 40.3% uranium, “High Nuclear” isn’t particularly high compared (for instance) with modern-day France, which today gets about 75% of her electric power from fission. This realistically high nuclear case was not considered in this (representative but non-exhaustive) report.

4.4 Cost

Incremental energy system costs – incremental capital costs plus net energy costs – exhibit a broad range in 2050, reflecting the significant uncertainty in technology costs and fossil fuel prices over such a long timeframe. Under base assumptions of technology costs and fossil fuel prices, the median value of incremental costs ranges from $160 billion (2012 $) to $650 billion across scenarios, with the difference driven primarily by the relative quantities and prices of residual natural gas and petroleum fuels remaining in the energy system in 2050.¹ The average median value across cases is just over $300 billion.

Based on an uncertainty analysis of key cost parameters, the interquartile range of incremental energy system costs extends from negative $250 billion to $1 trillion... (Figure 12). To put these numbers in context, the (modeled) activity drivers that drive energy service demand in all of the cases are consistent with a U.S. GDP that grows by a real annual average rate of just over 2% per year over the next four decades, to around $40 trillion in 2050. The average 75th percentile estimate of net incremental energy system costs ($730 billion) across cases is equivalent to 1.8% of this GDP level. The average 25th percentile value is negative $90 billion.

Figure 12: Incremental Energy System Costs in 2050, error bars show the 25th and 75th percentile values.

Ed’s note:
Negative values for some of the 25th percentiles suggest we might actually come out ahead, although there will be no way of knowing in advance: the $0 level incorporates projected intrinsic costs of fossil fuels in the baseline bau case. As fossil fuel usage drops in the decarbonization scenarios, fossil fuel intrinsic costs will likely drop. It will be for economists to estimate by how much as we adjust market signals (carbon tax, cap-and-trade, fee-and-dividend) to obtain the desired decrease, if such are the mechanisms we wish to employ.

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8.3 Electricity Costs

Page 46. One of the main incremental cost drivers in the four decarbonization cases is the cost of electricity generation and delivery, measured in electricity rates. Differences from Reference Case rates result primarily from four factors:

1. Penetration of renewables, which adds renewable generator fixed costs and associated transmission costs while reducing conventional generation fixed, variable, and fuel costs;
2. Assumed nuclear capacity expansion, which adds conventional generation fixed costs but reduces variable and fuel costs;
3. Assumed CCS capacity expansion, which adds conventional fixed (CCS costs) and variable costs (heat rate penalties);
4. Amount of electricity used in the production of intermediate energy carriers, which reduces the share of electricity that needs to be delivered on the distribution system and thus lowers average distribution costs.

Despite significant differences in rate components, average rates in all cases are similar to Reference Case levels (Figure 43), with the High CCS Case representing the only significant rate increase (27% over Reference Case rates) and the High Nuclear Case showing only a slight rate increase (5%) under base technology cost assumptions.

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Figure 43: 2050 Average Electricity Rate

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8.4 Electricity Investment

Page 47. In addition to showing average rates, (the study authors) also calculate the incremental investment in electricity generation facilities, relative to the Reference Case. This is a way of conceptualizing the necessary capital that needs to be directed towards the electricity system, as well as identifying specific technology sectors that would experience rapid growth under mitigation cases. In the Mixed Case, increases in annual electricity generation investments would increase $15 billion per year from 2021 through 2030...

From 2031 to 2040, incremental investments would need to more than double to over $30 billion per year. By 2050, the electricity sector would need more than $50 billion per year of incremental investment from Reference Case projections. The High Renewables case would require increased annual investment in renewable generation of over $70 billion per year by 2050 (Figure 45). The High Nuclear Case would need investment in nuclear facilities, both new and repowered existing, of $20 billion per year along with $30 billion in renewable investment increases. The High CCS Case would require nominal increases in renewable generation, with most of the increased investment needed in fossil power plants with CCS. The Mixed Case would require increased investment in all decarbonized generation sources. All cases would see a decline in traditional fossil power plant investment of up to $10 billion.

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Figure 45: Annual Incremental Investments from 2041-2050

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(End Report Excerpts)

Commentary

Finally, we have here one study that compares different technology pathways using the same basic assumptions and models. As indicated under “Electric Generation” in Table 7, absent enormous carbon capture and storage, United States electric power generation will most likely need to double over the next 35 years. This new electric power must be essentially emissions-free; such clean generation must replace nearly all existing fossil generation at well. This by itself is a monumental undertaking, and is the focus of much of our discussion.

One interesting aspect of U.S. Deep Decarbonization Pathways report is it’s choice of energy storage which, while critical to smooth renewable intermittency, can be quite useful for nuclear load balancing as well. The study foregoes the usual high capacity storage systems – Pumped Hydro and Compressed Air – in favor of hydrogen (H2) and synthetic natural gas (SNG). Though not a particularly energy-efficient storage medium compared with CAES or pumped hydro, H2+SNG can similarly be generated during periods of over-supply of high-penetration intermittent wind and sun, and stored in existing natural gas distribution systems (with upgrades), allowing existing gas distribution infrastructure and peaking generators to transition from natural to synthetic gas with least additional capital investment.

Existing gas infrastructure cannot safely handle more than about 7% hydrogen, is why the interest in synthetic methane. The “High Nuclear” scenario anticipates using its additional hydrogen as motor fuel, transported largely in trucks to service stations just like today’s gasoline. (Only cryogenic...)

For those curious about nuclear technology, the report takes a conservative approach and apparently incorporates only the Generation III light-water reactor plants available today. These are modeled to run as steady baseload generators, with low-load power variations shunted to hydrogen generation for transport use.

For those who hold the cheapest energy is that you don’t use, the Deep Decabonization Pathways study does not disappoint. In Table 7 we see a healthy 43% drop in personal energy consumption with 36% population growth, for a net 20% decrease in overall US energy consumption. That is probably about as good as we’re going to get, politically, in the U.S.

The report does not suggest what kind of market signals we might adopt to effect that kind of savings. In 1859 William Jevons showed that increased utilization efficiency, absent an increase in price, can actually lead to an increase in consumption rate of the resource, rather than the desired saving. This is the now-classic Jevons Paradox; the dwindling resource Jevons considered was... British coal.²

Energy transition is an expensive undertaking. But we’re the richest nation on Earth: we can do it. Here. But carbon emissions and global warming are a global problem: see Figure 1. Solving our local problem will not do the U.S. a shred of good if the Rest of the World cannot solve their local problems as well.

And that is where I have a minor quibble with the U.S. Deep Decarbonization Pathways report. Gas backup or energy storage on the grid level is absolutely required for substantial intermittent renewable penetration, but there’s little reason to believe the proposed H2+SNG storage solution for the United States will scale to the Rest of the World. Don’t get me wrong: the US has extensive gas infrastructure and we might as well use it. The Rest of the World does not, and perhaps might be mistaken to acquire one: where natural gas distribution infrastructure is built, natural gas will be produced and burned. In many repects natural gas is a Good Thing. But there is such a thing as having too much, and at some point we should seriously consider just leaving our gas in the ground. The United States might carefully consider which of our own abatement technologies might be most economically adapted for export.

In that regard Figure 2 illustrates wind’s intermittent requirement for expensive gas backup (natural or synthetic), or for storage:

Figure 2: Wind noise on the Irish Grid, 2011

Upper: Demand (black) and estimated wind power generation (green). Mean demand is 2813MW. Mean wind was 467MW with capacity factor 30% and 17% penetration. The correlation between wind generation and demand is close to zero ($\approx 0.05$).
Lower: Effective demand (Demand - Wind) as seen by conventional plant. Effective demand is $\approx 38\%$ more volatile than system demand.

Source: Joseph Wheatley Quantifying CO2 savings from wind power, Energy Policy Volume 63, December 2013, Pages 89 - 96 doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2013.07.123, with additional commentary at Quantifying CO2 savings from wind power redux: Ireland 2012, and more source material here.

Wheatley’s articles are fascinating. Ireland does have gas, so wind backup is not a problem. But Irish gas is more expensive than Irish peat or coal, so clean, lower-emission gas is what wind displaces when it blows. This is a problem, if one’s goal is to actually reduce carbon emissions, rather than to just deploy wind. But that’s what Renewable Portfolio Standards are for: to deploy renewable resources. Emission reductions are a very welcome knock-on, to the extent they occur.

Coal and peat and lignite have other problems when asked to ramp rapidly enough to balance wind, and even a few hours storage can be very beneficial. But wind+storage does add cost to otherwise finely operating thermal generation, and there is no readily apparent reason to expect the Rest of the World to foot the bill for such added expense when they’re strapped enough just trying to supply reliable generation in the first place.

So we also look for clean energy solutions the Rest of the World, not just our isolated corner, can afford. Here’s the problem: U.S. Deep Decarbonization Pathways illustrates a whopping 43% reduction in per capita U.S. energy consumption over 2014 levels. That will be doable, if not easy. But let’s put it in perspective: Germany has a 2014 per capita energy budget about one-half that of the United States, and Bulgaria’s is just one-third.

There are nearly 7.4 billion people in the world today. By 2050 there are projected to be over 9 billion before growth starts tapering off. Historically, there have been but two checks on human population: the Four Horsemen, and plentiful energy. Energy plentiful enough to provide healthy food, decent living accommodations with refrigeration, healthcare, and enough leisure time for a man, his wife, and his kids to educate themselves. Educate themselves, and accumulate enough wealth to support the man and his wife in their old age without needing a plethora of children to help.

In a very real sense energy – reliable, useful energy – is wealth. And personally, I’d prefer to see every person on this planet wealthy enough to limit our collective population by using that wealth in healthy, productive, and caringly civilized manner. As population control, The Four Horsemen are vastly overrated.

Yet today some 1.3 billion of us subsist on wood and dung and hand-collected coal burnt on indoor-fires, and have no access to electricity at all. That is poverty. Energy poverty. United States’ profligacy notwithstanding, what the Rest of The World needs is to consume more energy, not less.

Here’s the reality: if the U.S. were to reduce our per capita energy consumption by another 23% beyond that suggested by U.S. Deep Decarbonization Pathways, to reduce our 2014 consumption by two-thirds to match that of Bulgaria, and the Rest of the World were to raise their consumption to that level, net global energy consumption would more than double, from today’s 15.4 PWh/yr to 37 PWh/yr.
(1 PWh = $10^{12}$ kWh.) If instead our future 9.3 billion person world strives to achieve a living standard, measured by energy consumption, similar to that of today’s Germany, our global energy requirement will more than triple:

Figure 3: Going it alone: US vs The World.

The reality is that such living standards are precisely what the Rest of the World aspires to. Such aspirations are not unreasonable. Nor will they be denied: energy is plentiful, one needs but extract fuel from the ground and burn it.

Of course there are other sources. Hydropower is good, and reliable if you can get it. Like anything else hydro has environmental cost; there’s no free lunch. Neither is hydro available everywhere. Fossil fuels are.

So are wind and sun and uranium – although uranium is so incredibly energy dense and transportable, and refining, recycling, and eventually sequestering any final waste is such an undertaking, that very few of the 36 countries who use the stuff actually bother digging it up themselves.

But again, wind and sun require either extensive storage, or essentially 100% fossil and/or biomass backup. All of these cost, and if in combination they end up costing more than coal, coal it will be.

Figure 45 suggests that of the four scenarios considered, “High Nuclear” has the best shot at coming in cheaper than fossils, although such conclusion is by no mean certain and can hold only if one can take the long view about energy investment. It also can hold only if fossil fuel prices remain high, which is by no means assured if world-wide consumption drastically drops (as it must), and there are insufficient local penalties to discourage fossil fuel use. Ideally – and seemingly in practice as well – one would like clean reliable energy that is intrinsically cheaper than coal. And that’s a tall order.

But not necessarily out of reach. Nuclear power is robust and reliable and reactors can last a long long time. It’s actually a pretty good deal, if you can afford it. We’ll have more on this, and on how storage can contribute, as we continue this series.

Suggested Reading :

1. Energetic Africa Breakthrough Institute Staff, 7 April 2014.
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   “A new report titled Our High-Energy Planet, argues that Obama, the US Congress, and the United Nations ought to encourage and facilitate far greater levels of energy consumption in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing nations. With Africa growing rapidly, the energy access targets set for Africa by the UN are far too low, the report authors say. Increased electrification in Africa and beyond should be understood not as a charity for rural villages but as an essential component of national and human development.”

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2. Obama Thinks Solar Power Will Boost Kenya; Kenyans Aren’t So Sure NPR, July 23, 2015.
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   Ted Miguel, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says that solar panels for homes are less a solution to the power problem than a symptom of a larger problem: how to get millions of Kenyans on the national grid that already powers the country’s rural schools and clinics and public buildings. It’s not an environmental trade-off, he argues. It isn’t like the grid is ”dirty” and solar is ”clean.” Most of Kenya’s grid is powered by clean sources like hydro, geothermal and wind. And because of economies of scale, the cost of electricity on the grid is exponentially cheaper. ”No industrial country,” Miguel writes, ”has ever powered its economic growth with solar lanterns.”

3. Kenya’s Studied Approach to a Nuclear Future ANS Nuclear Cafe, Will Davis, April 8, 2014.
4. South Africa to start nuclear procurement World Nuclear News 15 July 2015.
5. Are Solar Microgrids a Step on the Ladder Towards Grid Access? Alex Trembath, Breakthrough Institute, 16 Dec 2014.
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   “Electrification projects in Dharnai, a village in eastern India, exemplify what can happen when public institutions and private actors fail to coordinate. Greenpeace installed a 100-kilowatt solar/battery microgrid to provide electricity to the villagers, which was promptly undercut when the government extended grid access.”

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6. Potential for worldwide displacement of fossil-fuel electricity by nuclear energy in three decades based on extrapolation of regional deployment data. Staffan Qvist and Barry Brook (2015) PLoS ONE 10(5): e0124074. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0124074
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   ABSTRACT
   

   There is an ongoing debate about the deployment rates and composition of alternative energy plans that could feasibly displace fossil fuels globally by mid-century, as required to avoid the more extreme impacts of climate change. Here we demonstrate the potential for a large-scale expansion of global nuclear power to replace fossil-fuel electricity production, based on empirical data from the Swedish and French light water reactor programs of the 1960s to 1990s. Analysis of these historical deployments show that if the world built nuclear power at no more than the per capita rate of these exemplar nations during their national expansion, then coal- and gas-fired electricity could be replaced worldwide in less than a decade. Under more conservative projections that take into account probable constraints and uncertainties such as differing relative economic output across regions, current and past unit construction time and costs, future electricity demand growth forecasts and the retiring of existing aging nuclear plants, our modelling estimates that the global share of fossil-fuel-derived electricity could be replaced within 25-34 years. This would allow the world to meet the most stringent greenhouse-gas mitigation targets.

   (I)n the pre-nuclear era (1960-1972), the rise in Swedish CO2 emissions matched and even exceeded the relative increase in economic output. Once commercial nuclear power capacity was brought online, however, starting with the Oskarshamn-1 plant in 1972, emissions started to decline rapidly. By 1986, half of the electrical output of the country came from nuclear power plants, and total CO 2 emissions per capita (from all sources) had been slashed by 75% from the peak level of 1970.

   The key finding is that even a cautious extrapolation of real historic data of regional nuclear power expansion programs to a global scale, as shown in the table below, indicate that new nuclear power could replace all fossil-fuelled electricity production (including replacing all current nuclear electricity as well as the projected rise in total electricity demand) in about three decades – that is, well before mid-century, if started soon.

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7. Google Images for Wyoming Coal and Images for Appalachian Coal and Images for Australian Coal and Images for China Coal. Show Details
   Every ton of coal burns to about 2.1 tons of carbon dioxide. If condensed to a solid, each cubic yard of coal would produce twice its volume in dry ice. Industrial carbon dioxide would not be captured and sequestered as dry ice, of course. But to get a flavor of the magnitude of the problem, as you browse this exciting coal train porn, imagine storing twice as many trains of dry ice.