Energy For A Sustainable Future

How the U.S. handles its need for increased energy supplies and the growing concern over the impacts of global climate change is a vexing issue. More than 500 energy experts and policymakers at a recent conference in Washington, D.C., discussed the advances being made in these areas. They are worried, however, about whether the nation has the political fortitude to move toward a more sustainable energy future.

Participants at the conference, "Energy for a Sustainable & Secure Future," sponsored by the National Council for Science & the Environment, considered how to integrate climate-change concerns into energy planning, how to prioritize research into more sustainable energy systems, and how to communicate information about climate change in a way that compels action by society.

Underlying many of the discussions were questions about the urgency of taking action on climate change. If global warming will cause irreparable damage within the next 40-50 years unless strong action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then adopting available technologies for cutting emissions should be an urgent priority. But if society can safely wait another half-century before making major emissions cuts, then research on new technologies would be the most logical strategy. Many speakers at the conference described activities already under way despite the absence of clear answers to these questions.

Ross Pillari, president of BP America, opened the meeting by describing some general trends in world energy supply and demand and the steps that his company has taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He advocated the idea of acting now "in the short term in order to have real progress and success for the long term."

As background, Pillari laid out the circumstances that make energy a crucial issue at this time in history. Global population, now at 6.5 billion, is projected to be almost 7.5 billion within a decade. As more and more people live in cities-about 4 billion by 2015-they will demand greater per capita energy use. Current oil demand at about 85 million barrels per day is expected to increase to at least 105 million bbl per day by 2015, while demand for natural gas could increase 40%. At the same time, renewable energy, which now supplies 2.5% of world demand, is expected to rise to just 3% of the total by 2020 if only currently known technologies are used, he said.

In the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China, the increased demand for oil and natural gas can be met only by trade and import, Pillari said, and most of the imported oil will come from three areas: Russia, West Africa, and the Persian Gulf. "Supply and demand are not co-located," he noted.

To ensure secure supplies of oil and natural gas, it is necessary to develop more oil and gas fields and build more pipelines and liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, he said. For example, BP and its partners are investing about $20 billion to build a 3,500-mile natural gas pipeline from Alaska through Canada to the lower 48 states. BP has also proposed two LNG projects, one on the East Coast and one in the Gulf of Mexico, at a total cost of $1.2 billion.

However, Pillari said that BP also believes it is necessary to take precautionary action to address climate change. It has started by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations 10% from the 1990 baseline. It accomplished this with efficiency improvements and by eliminating routine flaring of natural gas in oil-drilling operations.

BP is also investing an estimated $8 billion over 10 years in alternative energy production such as solar, Pillari said. It already has captured 10% of the global solar market. In addition, BP is working on cogeneration technologies and combined-cycle gas turbines, a more efficient way of producing power with natural gas. In Scotland, it is building the first commercial carbon sequestration project that will convert natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide and sequester the CO₂ in depleted oil fields.

Many of BP's investments, Pillari said, are based on the presumption that, throughout much of the world, a tax or some sort of cost will be placed on CO₂ emissions within the next decade. Pricing carbon will create a large market for technologies that reduce emissions, he explained.

Companies are not the only ones trying to move forward on sustainable energy. Kathleen A. McGinty, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Bill Clinton, said that even though Pennsylvania does not need renewable energy because of its large coal reserves, the state has a renewable portfolio standard or mandate to use a certain percentage of renewable energy. By 2014, the plan is to have 8% of Pennsylvania's electricity come from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, and 10% from burning waste coal and incinerating trash and other waste. In addition, Pennsylvania is building its first coal-to-liquids plant, which will produce as much as 40 million gal of diesel fuel annually at a fraction of the normal cost, McGinty said.

Pennsylvania currently has 15 landfill-gas, biomass, and coal-mine-methane-recovery projects for energy production, McGinty said. One project captures enough methane to heat 15,000 homes. Pennsylvania also has more installed wind power capacity than any state east of the Mississippi, and it has the capacity to produce 3.2 million gal of biodiesel annually.

"The U.S. is sitting on the edge of a great opportunity to modernize its energy infrastructure," McGinty said. To comply with federal air quality rules over the next few years, she explained, the U.S. can do one of three things with old coal-fired power plants: shut them down, install scrubbers and run them for another 30 years, or install advanced coal-gasification and liquefaction technology, which uses coal more efficiently and has lower particulate emissions than conventional coal plants. "We in Pennsylvania are allowing power plants to defer installation of scrubbers for five years" if they promise to install coal-gasification equipment, she said.

One major session of the conference dealt with the promises of sustainable energy systems that have recently been developed or are under development. "We are currently living like energy hunter-gatherers, but we could be energy farmers," said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Right now, Kammen said, wind probably has the greatest potential as a renewable energy source. Almost 10,000 MW-or the equivalent of 10 large power plants-have been installed in the U.S. He noted that for many applications, wind, now selling for 4 to 7 cents per kWh, is the cheapest source of energy.

In addition to wind, ethanol, made by fermenting corn or switchgrass or agricultural waste, also promises to reduce petroleum use and cut CO₂ emissions. It can be mixed with gasoline and used in so-called flex-fuel vehicles being manufactured today. "Corn ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 10-15% on average compared with gasoline," Kammen said. Consequently, production of ethanol from cellulose will probably be required for large-scale use of ethanol as a fuel, he explained. Such an approach could lead to a biofuels industry that could play a key role in meeting U.S. energy and environmental goals, he said. "Hydrogen may well have a role as a fuel in the long run, but it won't have an immediate impact."

Lee R. Lynd, professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, said it will be possible to convert the cellulose in perennial grasses to ethanol at a cost that is equivalent to $30 per barrel of oil. "When you grow grass and harvest it, more carbon is left in the ground than was there during the previous growing season, and about 75% of the feedstock energy can forseeably be converted into usable fuel," he said. "This energy production method would have several advantages," he explained. "It would radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy security, improve the sustainability of agriculture, and improve rural communities by providing an additional source of income." A company in Canada called Iogen is now running a large-scale demonstration project that is producing cellulosic ethanol, and it is planning to build several commercial plants.

James Lake, associate director for nuclear programs at the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL), stressed the role that nuclear plants can play in a sustainable energy future. Today's nuclear plants are 23% more efficient than they were 10 years ago, and their safety performance shows continuous improvement, he said.

INL is working on a next-generation, very high temperature nuclear reactor that generates electricity and large amounts of hydrogen from water without emitting greenhouse gases, Lake said. "If nuclear power can contribute to producing hydrogen emissions-free, that is an important area of research."

Renewable energy sources, however, are not the only way to improve energy sustainability. Great energy savings can result from redesigning buildings, said Volker Hartkopf, director of the Center for Building Performance & Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University. As an example, he described a 7,000-sq-ft office building constructed at Carnegie Mellon that uses much less energy than conventional buildings. Movable shaped-glass shelves outside the building and special blinds inside conserve both heat and light. Most of the year, the building requires no artificial light, and for six months of the year, it requires no heating or cooling, Hartkopf said. If the electricity in the grid shuts down, that is not a problem, he said, because solar power can supply all the energy needed. In fact, by collecting solar energy, many buildings could become net energy exporters, he explained. If the U.S. required the construction of highly energy efficient buildings, this could greatly reduce CO₂ emissions and enable exports of technology for efficient structures, he explained.

In one session, speakers considered why the robust science of climate change hasn't prompted more action. One of the problems in getting the public to respond is that climate science uses too many unintelligible terms to describe the phenomenon, said Richard Somerville, professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. For example, he said, "when the public hears the term 'positive feedback,' they think this is something good." In fact, it usually means that a system responds to a change in one variable by making the variable change even more in the same direction, thereby speeding up an undesirable process, such as melting of polar ice. Radiation, which often means heat from the sun in climate science, sounds like something harmful to many nonscientists because they associate it with radioactivity, he said.

Another problem is that when scientists communicate their findings about climate change, they usually emphasize what they don't yet know, Somerville said. "This gives people the idea that everything is unknown." At an Aspen, Colo., meeting last summer on why the science of climate change doesn't prompt more action, "we decided that the highest priority was to create a bridge institution, perhaps associated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that would communicate information to the public about climate change," he said. "It would be proactive and would respond to disinformation."

"What scientists can do is to help ensure the integrity with which information about climate change is used," said Rick S. Piltz, founder and director of Climate Science Watch, a part of the Government Accountability Project. "We need to hold policymakers and politicians accountable" and to speak up when they distort information, he insisted.

During the final conference session, the participants discussed the major problem of how to integrate the concern over climate change into national energy planning. Marilyn A. Brown, director of the Engineering Science & Technology Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said the U.S. should adopt "no regrets" energy efficiency options-technologies that would be good for consumers and the economy irrespective of their climate-change benefits. "If energy use in the U.S. expands 1.5% per year, as it is doing now, then we will need four times as much energy by 2100," she said. "If we reduce that growth rate to 0.75% annually, then energy demand will be only twice as large by 2100," she explained. Lowering the growth rate is not unrealistic because "more efficient conversion of cellulose to ethanol and high-performance computing are expanding our options for reducing the use of fossil fuel," she said. And nanoscience materials research promises to produce a string of future breakthroughs that will improve energy technologies, she explained.

Trying to stabilize the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere by 2100 is another way to approach national energy planning, but it would be a huge undertaking, said David Conover, director of the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program. If we set a goal of stabilizing the atmospheric CO₂ concentration at 550 ppm by the end of the century, the world would have to mitigate a total of 500 billion metric tons of CO₂ (measured as carbon) by then. This would mean cutting billions of metric tons each year, starting in about 2020 (550 ppm is a stabilization level that some scientists consider necessary for avoiding dangerous climate interference). Reducing the amount of CO₂ emitted from liquid fuels by 1 billion tons annually means using an area the size of Iowa to grow biomass for ethanol, he said. "When you are talking about a century-long challenge, what do you set your eye on?" he asked.

In the end, however, the concern was that the U.S., even if it has some feasible options to mitigate climate change, has not been making the right choices. Joseph J. Romm, executive director of the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions and former acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Energy Department during the Clinton Administration, claims that the U.S. has pursued "disastrous climate strategies" to this point. "I extend my apologies to you, not only for our bad policies, but because we are actively interrupting other countries' climate policies.

"If we had a flow of CO₂ into geological repositories equal to the amount of oil being taken out of the ground, if we used one-twelfth of the world's cropland for biofuel production, and if we built many new nuclear plants-if we did all these things-we still might have a climate disaster," he warned. But, he said, humanity already possesses the fundamental technical and industrial know-how to solve the climate problem for the next half-century.

"Only one in a hundred people has any idea of what will happen to the U.S. in this century if little is done about greenhouse gas emissions," he said. "We are simply running out of time. Federal legislation is the only thing" that can change business and consumer practices and accomplish the kinds of sharp reductions in CO₂ required to stabilize atmospheric concentrations, he warned.