Total energy independence in 12 years

Stepping aside for a moment from my six-part overview of Prescription for the Planet, I’ll briefly look at another interesting recent book on energy futures.

I’ve just finished reading “Total Energy Independence for the United States: A Twelve-Year Plan (Possible, Affordable, Sustainable)” (2008), by engineer and inventor, Robert M. Wical. It’s an interesting little (108 pg) book, and of relevance for a number of reasons. First, here is the publisher’s blurb:

“The Alternative to Energy Wars Like the One in Iraq…

What if the United States could be energy independent? It’s not just a good science fiction plot. In twelve years, the country could be free from its need of foreign oil, not only helping to level the international economic playing field, but also aiding in the repair of the effects of global warming.

Although it will take a Herculean effort, Bob Wical’s two-part Twelve-Years-to-Hydrogen Plan provides a detailed roadmap to change. The oil from phase one will satisfy the nation’s addiction and enhance national security by making the nation self-reliant for its oil supply. Tax revenues from phase one will finance phase two, allowing for the development of a hydrogen fuel infrastructure. Wical’s dual strategy is currently the most cost-effective, expedient, and safest plan publicly available.

Because of the growing tension in the Middle East and the climate changes that the planet has experienced in the past several decades, now is the time to act. Total Energy Independence clearly shows us how a hydrogen-centered plan is possible, affordable, and sustainable, guiding us to a cleaner, more environmentally friendly future.”

With an added note from the author, which summarises the main message quite succinctly:

“A 90% Self-Funding Answer to the U.S. Energy Crisis: If you find the solutions to the United States’ energy crisis currently being offered by our politicians to be half-measures sometimes bordering on ridiculous, then you will enjoy reading about the real, practical, viable solution to the U.S. energy crisis offered in ‘Total Energy Independence for the United States‘. We already have enough practically FREE fuel to power the Twelve-Years-to-Hydrogen Plan for 500 to 1,000 years. In the first six years of the plan, the U.S. becomes oil independent. By the end of the twelfth year of the Plan, there will be a hydrogen fuel infrastructure sufficient to power our national transportation fleet. Liquid hydrogen fuel would be available at the pump for 50 cents per gallon. The technology required to implement the Plan already exists and is well-documented. A bonus of the plan is that the approximately 60,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste stored in 125 locations throughout the U.S. will be safely consumed. This will essentially eliminate the problem of disposing of massive quantities of toxic nuclear waste. The plan is also a bargain for taxpayers because it is 90% self-funding. The total cost to implement the plan is estimated to be about $1.5 to $1.75 trillion. In other words, just a little more than the cost of ‘George’s War’.”

As you may have guessed from these two descriptions, one of the key technologies underpinning Wical’s plan is Integral Fast Reactor nuclear power, either as a sodium-cooled fast reactor (e.g. General Electric – Hitachi’s  S-PRISM blueprint) or another GIF-selected design, the lead-cooled STAR-LM (Secure Transportable Autonomous Reactor – Liquid Metal; also being researched at Argonne National Laboratories). What is interesting to me is that Bob Wical seems to have come, independently, to the same conclusion as Tom Blees about the huge potential IFR (a third author has also done this — I’ll review his book soon).

Wical’s plan for achieving oil independence (written with the US in focus, but it’s broadly applicable to many nations which are dependent to a large extent on foreign oil — Australia included), depends on accelerated development and rapid  commercial up-scaling of the following core technologies and infrastructure:

– Integral fast reactors (SFR and LFR) — about 500 over 12 years for the US

– in situ conversion processes for oil shales

– electrolysis of water and electrochemical hydrogen compressor

– hydrogen distribution and dispensing systems

– hydrogen-powered automobile and truck technology

– proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells and parallel path magnetic technology

The plan is described as 90% self funding [plenty of details given], due to oil import and military savings and increased fuel-to-wheels efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell technology.

My overall assessment is that Wical has thought a lot about this plan, and his arguments for the feasibility of a ‘hydrogen economy’ (where hydrogen is the primary liquid fuel energy carrier) are reasonably convincing. You’ll find a lot of literature out there which criticises the ‘hydrogen hype’, and many of the arguments have merit. But it has always struck me that the critics of hydrogen seem to be massively overplaying their hand.

Yes, there are issues with the energy required to compress hydrogen and transport it over long distances, in the large size of storage tanks (due to its lower energy density compared to oil and gas derivatives such as petrol [gasoline] and diesel), and in the added expense in containing hydrogen leakage. But there are also advantages, such as its clean burning property (water is the combustion product), high efficiency of fuel cells (about 2.7 times that of the internal combustion engine), and the great strides being made in electrochemical (not mechanical) compression of hydrogen to 10,000 psi, based on a process with no moving parts!

Time will tell how much of an impact hydrogen has for energy storage and transport in our energy future, compared to alternatives such as metal-combustion (my bet is that the latter will prove to be a superior technology, e.g., due to its avoidance of the chicken-or-the-egg syndrome — no fueling/distribution infrastructure is needed to kick it off) . But I do think that it would be grossly unwise to rule out hydrogen, produced by IFR energy, out on the basis of incompletely formed notions about the economic and technological viability of a hydrogen infrastructure today.

Wical recognises the urgency of dealing with global warming, but his primary motivation is to get the USA unhitched from the OPEC bandwagon as fast as possible. An element of his plan therefore involves a stop-gap exploitation of America’s Rocky Mountains shale oils (short-term Government lease of lands to oil companies), via in situ ‘cooking’ to release oil and gas (it has an EROEI of about 3:1). He envisages about 10-15 million barrels a day being produced by this method, using IFRs as the heat source, for a period of 15-25 years, until the hydrogen economy is fully realised. The danger in this approach is that this source of fossil carbon cannot be exploited if we are to have any chance of keeping CO2 levels to below 350 ppm by the end of this century, and that the ~1 trillion barrels of ultimately recoverable oil from this source will prove too tempting a target to forego, should initial exploitation by successful. My bottom line: there has to be other, better ways, to get the vehicle fleet off foreign oil without opening the Pandora’s box of heavy hydrocarbons, even as a temporary ‘fix’.

Overall, this is a well-researched, well-written road map for an alternative energy future. I’m fascinated that Wical has, like Blees, concluded that IFRs are the optimal energy source for rapid decarbonization. I have problems with some elements of the 12 year plan, but am quite impressed with the logical, systematic way in which Wical has treated the pathway to large-scale hydrogen-based fuel infrastructre. It’s certainly not pie in the sky. I honestly doubt that we’ll ever have a fully-fledged ‘hydrogen economy’, but I’m now far more convinced than before that hydrogen can, and will, be a useful energy storage and carrier medium for a post-fossil-fuel society.

I recommend you read Total Energy Independence if you wish to have a broader view of the hydrogen economy, or if you want another perspective on the possibility of IFR as a major future energy source. We need more people like Wical and Blees, who are willing to think big, and fast, on total energy solutions. Governments should start paying more  heed, if they really are honest about tackling climate change and peak oil before the worst in upon us.

How much warming in the pipeline? Part II – it’s as tricky as ABC

Warming ‘in the pipeline’ is a term used to describe lags and inertia in the climate system. As explained in my previous post on this topic,  the planet is committed to further heating and sea level rise, irrespective of what choices we make now, or in the immediate future, to reduce carbon emissions. The global warming trend over the last 100 years (actually, from 1906 to 2005), of 0.56°C to 0.92°C, is not all that we would have expected. That is, there is a ‘missing’ quanta of  warming, which is being hidden by a number of poorly understood factors.

First, let’s consider 21st century carbon emissions mitigation scenarios. A range of possible future energy and economic development storylines have been developed by the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), such as A1FI, A2, B1 etc. (based on global vs regional action, and different tech pathways). For details, see here. These scenarios were used as a basis for the IPCC 2007 AR4 projections of future climate change. Two important points with these SRES storylines: (i) there is no explicit preference given to any particular scenario, and (ii) they are not active mitigation scenarios (mitigation is a byproduct of economic, social and technology choices). As such, it can be confusing to work out what ‘is likely’, and indeed, whether any are particularly realistic.

More usefully in terms of future predictions, a recent paper in PNAS by Van Vuuren and co-workers (including a friend of mine, Tom Wigley, who is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide), assessed the impact on climate change of some plausible real-world actions. Here is the abstract, with some bolding by me:

Estimates of 21st Century global-mean surface temperature increase have generally been based on scenarios that do not include climate policies. Newly developed multigas mitigation scenarios, based on a wide range of modeling approaches and socioeconomic assumptions, now allow the assessment of possible impacts of climate policies on projected warming ranges. This article assesses the atmospheric CO2 concentrations, radiative forcing, and temperature increase for these new scenarios using two reduced-complexity climate models. These scenarios result in temperature increase of 0.5-4.4°C over 1990 levels or 0.3-3.4°C less than the no-policy cases. The range results from differences in the assumed stringency of climate policy and uncertainty in our understanding of the climate system. Notably, an average minimum warming of ≈1.4°C (with a full range of 0.5-2.8°C) remains for even the most stringent stabilization scenarios analyzed here. This value is substantially above previously estimated committed warming based on climate system inertia alone. The results show that, although ambitious mitigation efforts can significantly reduce global warming, adaptation measures will be needed in addition to mitigation to reduce the impact of the residual warming.

Their conclusion? Even with a strong and concerted effort towards rapid carbon mitigation, we are committed to 0.5 to 2.8°C additional warming (on top of what has already been experienced), due to the combined effects of climate system, economic and technological inertia.

This sobering view is supported by many climate scientists in this field; most prominently, by Prof V Ramanathan of University of California — San Diego. Ram is the scientific guru of the study of tropospheric aerosols (soot, dust, sulphates, nitrates and other chemicals that together constitute the low-lying ‘haze’ seen over polluted cities worldwide, and now, large parts of Asia). Aerosols can cool the climate by reflecting solar energy back out to space before it has a chance to be absorbed and re-emitted as infrared radiation by the Earth’s surface, and also warm the climate by absorbing extra energy in the lower atmosphere (coming mostly from incompletely burnt carbon from coal-fired power stations and dung braziers). Collectively, it’s called the Atmospheric Brown Cloud (it used to be known as the Asian Brown Cloud, ’cause that is where most of it is). Also known as ABC.

Last year, Ramanathan and co-author Y. Feng published a remarkable paper in PNAS called “On avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system: Formidable challenges ahead“). Here, once again, is the abstract:

The observed increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) since the preindustrial era has most likely committed the world to a warming of 2.4°C (1.4°C to 4.3°C) above the preindustrial surface temperatures. The committed warming is inferred from the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates of the greenhouse forcing and climate sensitivity. The estimated warming of 2.4°C is the equilibrium warming above preindustrial temperatures that the world will observe even if GHG concentrations are held fixed at their 2005 concentration levels but without any other anthropogenic forcing such as the cooling effect of aerosols. The range of 1.4°C to 4.3°C in the committed warming overlaps and surpasses the currently perceived threshold range of 1°C to 3°C for dangerous anthropogenic interference with many of the climate-tipping elements such as the summer arctic sea ice, Himalayan-Tibetan glaciers, and the Greenland Ice Sheet. IPCC models suggest that ≈25% (0.6°C) of the committed warming has been realized as of now. About 90% or more of the rest of the committed warming of 1.6°C will unfold during the 21st century, determined by the rate of the unmasking of the aerosol cooling effect by air pollution abatement laws and by the rate of release of the GHGs-forcing stored in the oceans. The accompanying sea-level rise can continue for more than several centuries. Lastly, even the most aggressive CO2 mitigation steps as envisioned now can only limit further additions to the committed warming, but not reduce the already committed GHGs warming of 2.4°C.

You can download the PDF of the full paper, for free, here. It’s an excellent piece that should, in the most part, be intelligible to the majority of interested readers.

The net climate-forcing effect of ABCs is much more poorly known than that of long-lived trace greenhouse gases, as explained here. Our best estimate is that in sum, ABCs cool the climate system — potentially offsetting more than half the warming we would have otherwise expected to date.  That is, the new industries and traditional stoves of Asia may have delayed the worst impacts of climate change. Here is a key point made by R&F (I removed the reference numbers for clarify of reading here — see the original paper for the links to the relevant peer-reviewed literature; GHG = greenhouse gases, CEWGA = committed equilibrium warming from greenhouse gases and aerosols, Wm2 = watts per metre squared, DAI = dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system):

First, we have to consider the effect of aerosols, which start off as urban haze or rural smoke and ultimately become transcontinental and transoceanic plumes o ABCs consisting of sulfate, nitrate, hundreds of organics, black carbon, soil dust, fly ash, and other aerosols. ABCs have masked GHG warming by enhancing the albedo (percent of incoming solar radiation re-flected back to space) of the planet. A recent review of available literature estimates the masking effect of ABCs to be
47% (1.4 Wm2) with a 90% confidence interval of 20-80%. The IPCC-AR4  value for the masking is 40%. Effectively, the forcing ‘‘felt” by the climate system is only 53%, i.e., 1.3°C, which is identical to CEW
GA, the committed warming adapted by earlier studies. About 8% of the committe warming (0.2°C) is compensated by increases in the surface albedo because of land-use changes;
20% (0.5°C) is delayed by the thermal inertia of the oceans and it is only the balance of
25%, i.e., 0.6°C, that should by now have manifested as observed warming. This algebraic exercise demonstrates that the observed surface warming of 0.76°C (since the latter half of 1800s) is not inconsistent with the committed warming of 2.4°C.

The fundamental deduction (subject to the assumption of IPCC climate sensitivity) is that if we get rid of the ABCs today the Earth could warm another 1.6° (which includes the delayed warming caused by ocean thermal inertia) unless we act now to reduce GHG concentrations. As shown by couple ocean atmosphere models used in IPCC,
50% of this warming can happen in few decades, and most of the balance will manifest during the course of this century. The situation with respect to sea-level rise is considerably more complex. Sea-level rise caused by thermal expansion (in the range of 10 to 30 cm per century) is likely to continue for centuries (even if the warming asymptotes to values close to CEW
G by 2100) because of the time required for mixing of the heating to deeper oceans. In addition, the range of CEW
G (1.4-4.3°C) raises another major DAI-related issue. As suggested by the IPCC the Greenland Ice Sheet can disappear completely if surface warming is maintained in excess of 1.9-4.6°C for millennia and raise sea level by 7 m or more.

Prof HJ Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute, commented formally in PNAS on the R&F paper here: “Global warming: Stop worrying, start panicking?“.  His conclusion was that R&F’s assessment is technically right, but, as Mark Twain once commented on a Wagner opera, it’s not as bad as it sounds. That is, there is still a fair chance that we can ‘hold the 2°C line’, if strong mitigation of greenhouse gases is combined with the following three actions: (i) a slow, rather than instant, elimination of aerosol cooling, (ii) a directed effort to first remove warming aerosols like black carbon, and (iii) a concerted and sustained programme,  over this century, to draw-down excessive CO2 (geo- and bio-engineering) and simultaneously reduce non-CO2 forcings, such that the final equilibrium temperature rise will be lower than would otherwise be expected on the basis of current concentrations.

His bottom line? “This requires an industrial revolution for sustainability starting now“.

Prescription for the Planet – Part IV – Show me the money!

We’ve now covered all the major technologies proposed by Tom Blees in the book Prescription for the Planet – Integral Fast Reactor nuclear power for electricity generation, boron-fuelled vehicles for transport, and plasma burners for recycling of waste. Set in the context of a legacy of ongoing problems, with stockpiles of nuclear waste and weapons, a rapidly degrading environment and climate system, world energy security standing on a knife edge, and a future of looming shortages as we struggle to make up shortfalls using zero-carbon energy, Blees says we either founder as a civilisation, or choose to re-invent ourselves and emerge renewed as an equitable and sustainable society.

Now that all sounds fine and dandy, but in the cold hard light of day, it’s not all that realistic… is it? I mean, the staggering cost of retooling our entire energy and transport industry, on a planetary scale, is just too high and too difficult, and the pay offs such change might yield are just not worth the pain of adjustment. Business-as-usual is surely the better, cheaper course, at least for now; we should let future generations sort out the energy problem since they’ll all be richer than us thanks to the magic of economic growth. Well, that, in caricature, is what the ‘fossil fools forever’ mob will try to tell you. Blees says they’re wrong — on both counts.

This post, part IV of VI, reviews chapters 8 and 9:

– Chapter 8: Check, Please! (pg 197-240)

– Chapter 9: Cui Bono? (pg 241-262)

I’ll give you the bottom line of these two chapters up front: it will almost certainly cost us less to power the world with IFRs (and whatever contribution renewable energy ends up making — sizeable, I hope) than it will to try and reinforce our creaking, aging fossil fuel infrastructure. Economic arguments pass muster.

Let’s start with the basics. If you are seeking solid ground on relative costs of delivered energy, the assessment of the real-world price of any energy technology can be grounded on three basic principles [you need all three]: (i) discounted cash flow analysis, (ii) scale-up capacity assessment, and (iii) recent experience.

Step (i) is always possible, but  can be prone to wild speculation when hard data on the model parameters are lacking or difficult to estimate in context. For instance, you really need all of the following: interest/discount rate for future value of money estimates, lifetime of infrastructure, capital recovery factor, installed capital cost including interest during construction, average capacity factor of power delivery, annualised capital and decomissioning cost, fuel cost, and cost of operation and maintenance.

Phew! Of course there are, in truth, many details besides these that are involved, such as relative baseload vs peak usage (usually subsumed with the capacity factor and annualised cost estimates), transmission connection (usually within installed capital costs), etc. But putting these complexities aside, the end product of such accounting really depends on whether you are able to get accurate operational data on each of these inputs, or alternatively, whether you pull some parameter values out of certain dark orifices.  Indeed, you can basically come up with anything, from quite reasonable estimates through to wildly under- or over-blown costings of long-term delivered energy (usually expressed as c/KWh). My advice — check assumptions carefully!

Step (ii) is really a topic for another day, but involves the costs and logistical challenges associated with going from small-scale to large-scale operation. For instance, wind power operates perfectly well on a fossil-fuel-based grid infrastructure when it contributes a small fraction of total power, but as it constitutes more and more of the total installed capacity, issues of energy storage or backup from other generating sources come into play. Such problems are not insoluble, but they do impact on the bottom line in ways that cannot necessarily be anticipated using simple ‘bottom-up’ approaches that work by costing each unit and then multiplying by the amount that would be needed.

The guts of Chapter 8 is lots of numbers — really big numbers. It even comes with a vertigo warning. There is a lot of material here, and so I can’t cover all of the key details in a brief review like this. Which is kind of a shame, because you really have to assess the logic of the chapter in full to appreciate the validity of the fundamental argument Blees is trying to make: it can make real financial sense to build IFRs on a massive scale.

Step (iii), recent experience, is the primary basis upon which Blees bases his costings. Perhaps some of the details can come out in the comments of this post, when folks here have specific questions. So, just the core points then:

1) Repeated studies from authoritative sources such as the OECD and IEA show nuclear power is highly cost-competitive with coal (indeed, cheaper 10 of 12 countries assessed).

2) Recent experience shows that modern nuclear reactors can indeed be built to a tight budget — in the range of $1.4 to $2.5 billion per GW capital cost.

3) Reactors become far cheaper if they have the following characteristics: (a) standardised blueprints, (b) simpler design, (c) factory-built modular units, which can be trucked to site, (d) a system within which legalistic impediments are surmounted by sound legislation (one of the big problems in the US).

Note: Standardisation and modularity are the game-changers for the nuclear power industry. For instance, Generation III and III+ light water reactors, which follow these principles, such as France’s European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), GE’s Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) and Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR), and Westinghouse’s AP-1000, cost around $1 to 2 billion per GW installed. Two ABWR were built in the late nineties in Japan for $1.4 B/GW within 36 months, and China has ordered 100 x AP-1000 units, carrying a price tag of $1 B/GW. These are likely to most closely reflect the price tag attached to an S-PRISM (Super Power Reactor Innovative Small Module — a sodium-cooled fast spectrum reactor with metal fuel). GEH estimates the cost of an S-PRISM at $1.3 B/GW, with a high-end estimate for fast reactors of $2.5 B/GW. As to a nation going nuclear in a big way, and benefiting, France is the stand-out real-world example on a per captia basis, with 59 light water reactor plants generating over 63 GWe (80% of supply). Their electricity costs are among the lowest in Europe, at around 3 eurocents per KWh.

4) If the world was to replace it’s energy supply with IFRs, the cost would be roughly $28 trillion (including transmission lines). That’s on the basis of a capital cost of $2 B/GW (so ignoring likely economies of scale that will bring prices down) and the need to supply around 8.75 terrawatts (TW) of generating capacity (for all energy use). For this, you’d need about 3,500 power plants of 2.5 GW each (using 8 x 380 MW modular reactor vessels within 4 power blocks). Any further energy supplied by renewables, geothermal and syngas (e.g., from plasma burners) would be a bonus. For reference, global electricity production in 2005 amounted to 2.3 TW, 16% of which came from nuclear.

5) What may be surprising to many is that the cost of business-as-usual energy development, or a gradual path to de-carbonisation, is about $26 to 35 trillion from 2010 to 2030! These are estimates that come from credible sources such as the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2008 and Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change 2006. This is for the cost of shoring up our fossil fuel infrastructure and upgrading/replacing transmission infrastructure (IEA), or investing 1% of GDP per annum on carbon mitigation (Stern).

6) At the height of its nuclear build-out phase, France was rolling out 6 plants per year. Six countries have a GDP higher than France and all already possess the technology to build fast reactors: USA, China, Japan, India (building one now), Germany and the UK. At France’s historical rate, these countries could together build 117 IFR plants per year, with no greater urgency than the French brought to bear on their road to energy independence. Indeed, China is rolling out over 50 large coal-fired power stations of equivalent size each year. So at this quite feasible rate, it would take 30 years to build 3,500 plants in 7 countries. For less than the cost of reinforcing our fossil fuel infrastructure.

7) There are further paybacks from an IFR roll out: we solve the multi-billion dollar nuclear waste problem fully, and we also save big $$ (and lots of lives and avoidable misery) by drastically cutting air pollution (renewables also achieves this) — a best estimate of $167 billion per year, each year, from the US alone (and a whole lot more from China — I can attest personally to the health effects of that Asian Brown Cloud).

Go and read the extended version in P4TP and see what you think about the credibility of the above analysis. It certainly looks robust to me.

Chapter 9, Cui Bono? (who benefits?), explores the multitude of problems with the privatised portion of the American power industry, with special attention to the past litany of misdemeanours and cover-ups of some nuclear utilities and related problems with its regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Basically, due to the regulatory framework in the US, energy utilities have the ability to gouge their customers with exorbitant pricing (under certain conditions), and most take full advantage of that opportunity whenever they can. Energy is like a societal drug addiction – we can’t do without it (even for a short while), and so we are acutely vulnerable to being exploited by ‘dealers’ when energy is not in abundant supply. Indeed, this goes right through from spot prices of energy delivered to cost estimates of new nuclear power stations. Remember Step (i) above? Well, in the good old US of A, nuclear utilities can have a field day with that number crunching, and charge customers for current power costs on the basis of these pick-and-choose models!

Being rather sympathetic myself to the benefits of publically owned service providers, I think Blees makes a strong case for full public ownership of nuclear power. It’s a form of socialism, to be sure, but before the free market ideologues start frothing at the mouth, consider where society would be without public ownership. Transportation infrastructure, public education, national defense, standards authorities, etc. It’s really a matter not of if public ownership is appropriate, but when. And when we are talking about something as crucial as oversight of nuclear power and a secure energy supply, well… I’ll leave you to judge (but after you’ve read the chapter, please!).

The message about ownership and oversight has a deeper purpose than merely bringing energy costs in America under control. Without something similar operating worldwide, the risks of rampant unmanaged global nuclear energy deployment could well outweigh the benefits it brings to individual countries — perhaps catastrophically so.

We need something GREAT to ensure a global rollout of IFRs is safe and equitable. That’s just what the next part of P4TP is all about…