Our Fast-Paced Modern Climate

Posted on December 16, 2013 by amyhuva

How can we determine dangerous levels of climate change so that we can stay within those limits?

WHO: James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, USA Pushker Kharecha, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, New York, USA
Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (CEA-CNRS-UVSQ), Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Frank Ackerman, Synapse Energy Economics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
David J. Beerling, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK
Paul J. Hearty, Department of Environmental Studies, University of North Carolina, USA
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, Australia
Shi-Ling Hsu, College of Law, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA
Camille Parmesan, Marine Institute, Plymouth University, Plymouth, Devon, UK, Integrative Biology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA
Johan Rockstrom, Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm University, Sweden
Eelco J. Rohling, School of Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton, Hampshire, UK Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Pete Smith, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom
Konrad Steffen, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zurich, Switzerland
Lise Van Susteren, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Advisory Board, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Karina von Schuckmann, L’Institut Francais de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer, Ifremer, Toulon, France
James C. Zachos, Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

WHAT: Working out what the limit to dangerous climate change is and what the implications are for the amount of carbon we need to not burn.

WHEN: December 2013

WHERE: PLOS One, Vol 8. Issue 12

TITLE: Assessing ‘‘Dangerous Climate Change’’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature (open access)

This (very) lengthy and detailed paper runs us all through exactly what’s happening with the planet’s climate, what’s making it change so rapidly (spoiler: it’s us) and what objectively we need to do about it. Needless to say, since the lead author is Dr. James Hansen, the godfather of climate science, we would do well to heed his warnings. He knows his stuff; he was doing climate models before I was born (seriously).

Firstly, the paper points out that humans are the main cause of climate change and then also neatly points out that while all 170 signatories to the UN Framework on climate change (UNFCCC) have agreed to reduce emissions, so far not only have we not worked out what the limit for ‘dangerous’ climate change is, we’ve also done nothing to fix it except fiddle at the edges.

Epic procrastination fail, humanity.

Norman Kuring, NASA GSFC, using data from the VIIRS instrument aboard Suomi NPP

Then, the researchers look at 2^oC warming as a target. In reality, while 2^oC is a nice, seemingly round number that is far enough away from our current 0.8^oC of warming, the reason it was randomly chosen to be our line in the sand is that it’s the point beyond which ecosystems start collapsing. I have a sneaking suspicion it was also easy to agree on because it was way into the ‘distant’ future, but let’s play nice and believe it was all for rational scientific rigour.

The latest IPCC report says that if we’re going to stay below 2^oC, we can burn a total of 1,000GtC (Gigatonnes of carbon). Ever. This means we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground and stop cutting down more trees than we plant.

As has been pointed out in previous papers, the researchers show that burning all the fossil fuels is a really bad idea. A really bad idea in a mass extinction like the dinosaurs kind of way.

So, if we look at all the warming that has happened so far and measure the energy imbalance in the atmosphere, what do we get? Firstly a step back – energy imbalance. This is your energy budget where you always want it to be constant. Energy comes into the atmosphere from the sun, some goes back out, some stays and keeps us warm and comfy on planet Earth.

Fossil fuels mean that humans have taken a seriously large amount of energy out of the ground and burned it. Releasing this energy into the atmosphere means we’ve now got too much energy inside our atmosphere and we’re out of balance.

What happens when we’re out of balance? Well, so far it hasn’t been pretty. With only 0.8^oC of global warming 98% of Greenland’s surface melted for the first time in recorded history, Arctic sea ice hit new record lows, the planet has seen more frequent more extreme storms, floods, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts, fires, algal blooms, glacial melt, and ocean acidification. We’ve had weird storms no-one has ever heard of before like Derechos, we’ve had tropical diseases in new places, and the Jet Stream over the Northern Hemisphere getting ‘stuck’ and dumping more weird weather on us. It’s pretty clear the planet is unwell and that it’s because of us.

If all that terrifying stuff is happening at 0.8^oC of warming, what does that make 2^oC? Hopefully your answer is ‘horrifying’, because that’s what my answer is. Since 2050 (when we’ll arrive at 2^oC if we keep going business as usual) is within my working lifetime, I’ll let you know how horrifying it is when we get there.

More scientific than ‘horrifying’ though, the researchers point out that previous paleoclimate changes, from the Earth’s tilt and other slow oscillations took between 20,000 – 400,000 years to happen. Changes happening at that rate give the plants and animals and fish time to relocate and survive. The rate at which we’re changing our modern climate is bad news for things that are not mobile.

How far out of balance are we? The paper estimates that between 2005-2010 the planet was 0.58 W/m² (± .15W/m²) out of balance. How much of that was caused by humanity? Well, solar irradiance has been going down over the last while, so it’s pretty much all us.

If we are 0.5 W/m² out of balance, the researchers calculate that we would need to reduce the CO₂concentration down to 360ppm to have energy balance again (we’re currently at 395ppm). If you include some error in the calculations and we’re 0.75W/m² out of balance, humanity needs to get CO₂ down to a concentration of 345ppm.

To make planning easier, the researchers suggest we just aim to get and stay below 350ppm.

The paper then runs through all the reasons why 2^oC is a really bad idea to let happen. Because it will lead to damaging sea level rise (sorry Miami), because change is happening too quickly for many species to survive and more than half the species on the planet could go extinct from too much warming (and yes, if we warm this planet enough, humans could be part of that mass extinction).

Because the recovery back to normal temperatures happens on a timescale of millions of years which is beyond the comprehension of humanity.

So to avoid being the next mass extinction, what do we need to do? First, we need to quantify how quickly fossil fuels need to be totally phased out.

If emissions are reduced to zero in 2015, the world could get back to 350ppm by 2100. If we wait until 2035, it would take until 2300. If we wait until 2055, it would take until the year 3000. So when we start reducing emissions is important.

Reduction scenarios (from paper) BAU: Business As Usual

If we had started reducing emissions in 2005, it would only have taken reductions of 3.5% per year. Since we didn’t do that, if we start now, we need to reduce emissions by 6% a year. If we delay until 2020 it becomes 15% per year, so let’s not procrastinate on this one humanity. Also keep in mind that the amount that is considered ‘politically possible’ is currently around 2-3% reductions each year, which means that scientific reality and political delusions are going to collide very soon.

If we reduce our carbon emissions by 6% per year to keep below 350ppm of carbon dioxide by the end of the century, our total carbon budget is going to be 500GtC.

This means we’ve got ~129GtC that we can burn between now and 2050, and another 14GtC left over for 2050-2100. Humanity has already burned through ~370GtC from fossil fuels, so we’ve got to kick this habit quickly.

The paper points out that this means all of our remaining fossil fuel budget can be provided for by current conventional fossil fuels. Therefore, we would require the rapid phase-out of coal and leave all unconventional fossil fuels in the ground. Yes, all of them – all the tar sands, the shale gas, the shale oil, the Arctic oil, the methane hydrates, all of it.

The researchers also say that slow climate feedbacks need to be incorporated into planning, because we’re probably starting to push those limits. Slow feedbacks include things like melting ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica), deforestation, melting permafrost and methane hydrates.

These things are like climate ‘black swans’ – they’re unquantifiable in that you don’t know when you’ve passed the irreversible tipping point until after you’ve gone beyond it, but things like the ocean no longer being able to absorb most of the carbon we spew into the atmosphere and the rapidly melting permafrost need to be considered in daylight as well as our nightmares now. This is because slow feedbacks can amplify climate changes by 30-50% which puts a big hole in our ‘not burning carbon anymore’ plan.

The paper points out: ‘warming of 2^oC to at least the Eemian level could cause major dislocations for civilisation’ which I don’t even need to translate from scientist, because scientists are no longer bothering to pull their punches when explaining how quickly we need to stop burning carbon before we’re really screwed.

So what do we do? The paper makes some suggestions, pointing out that since the science clearly shows what’s happening, the range of responses is also pretty clear.

The first thing is a price on carbon. This paper suggests a carbon ‘fee’ with a border levy for countries that don’t sign up to the fee idea. The fee starts at $15/tonne of carbon and increases by $10/tonne each year. Imports from countries that don’t have the fee get charged at the border, which can then be used for assistance to industries that are exporting to countries without the fee.

They point out that this fee is below the price of cleaning up our climate carbon mess. If we wanted to pay to sequester 100ppm of CO₂ out of the atmosphere, it would cost ~$500/tonne of carbon. If that was charged to all countries based on their cumulative emissions, that would be a cost of $28 trillion for the USA (or $90,000 per person) who is responsible for 25% of cumulative global emissions. Hmmm – expensive.

The other things we need to get rid of fossil fuels are hybrid renewable smart grids and better efficiency as well as not only an end to deforestation but ‘reforestation’ and increasing the amount of trees on the planet.

There’s a lot of work to be done, but the clearest thing from this paper is the choice we cannot make is to do nothing. So let’s stop burning carbon.

Reviewing Our Budget

Posted on September 26, 2013 by amyhuva

In the lead up to the IPCC 5^th Assessment Report next week, let’s review the Unburnable Carbon report and remind ourselves how much carbon we have left to burn.

WHO: James Leaton, Nicola Ranger, Bob Ward, Luke Sussams, and Meg Brown, Carbon Tracker Initiative

WHAT: Measuring the amount of capital, assets and infrastructure that is currently overvalued and will be stranded or wasted when we act on climate change.

WHEN: 2013

WHERE: On the Carbon Tracker website

TITLE: Unburnable Carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets (open access)

As I’m sure all of you RtS readers are aware (and excited about!); the IPCC are releasing the first part of their 5^th Assessment Report on Friday September 27^th and then slowly drip feeding us chapter by chapter over the next year.

This is exciting for climate nerds like me because the last IPCC report came out in 2007, so it was looking at the state of climate science in a very different world – before the 2008 financial crash, before the weather started getting seriously weird and going haywire, before 98% of Greenland melted one summer, the Arctic Death Spiral, the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen talks…. yeah, a lot has happened since 2007.

So, in preparation for when this international ‘State of the Climate’ report comes out, I thought it would be good to look at the Carbon Tracker’s Unburnbable Carbon report from this year to remind ourselves of the budget of carbon we have left that we can spew into the atmosphere and still have a chance of not totally cooking the climate.

The Carbon Tracker report looks at two different budgets – if we want to have an 80% chance of not going beyond a certain amount of global warming, and if we want to have a 50% chance of not going beyond a certain amount of global warming. Given that we haven’t done much to lower global carbon emissions yet, I think we’ll push to a 50/50 chance of cooking our habitat (humans are great at procrastinating after all), but feel free to be optimistic and look at the 80% option.

Carbon budget from now until 2050 (from paper)

If we start from the assumption that humanity will act to save ourselves and keep global warming at 2^oC or less with a 50/50 chance, we have 1,075 Gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ left to burn over the next 37 years.

Now, you might ask – what about carbon capture and storage? Everyone says that technology is going to be big! The Carbon Tracker people ran those numbers. The 2015 estimate for carbon capture and storage projects (CCS) is 2.25million tonnes of CO₂ being sequestered over 16 projects. The idealised scenario for CCS is that it will be able to sequester around 8Gt of CO₂ each year, which Carbon Tracker worked out would be 3,800 projects operating by 2050 and would only reduce the above carbon budgets by 125Gt. It definitely isn’t a ‘get out of jail free and burn the fossil fuels’ card.

Speaking of burning all the fossil fuels – how much do we have left? The World Energy Outlook, which gets released by the International Energy Agency each year estimated in 2012 (the 2013 report will be released in November this year) that there were total assets equivalent to 2,860Gt CO₂ in the world. This is enough carbon to cook the atmosphere beyond 3^oC and probably into the next mass extinction.

The report rightly points out that if we assume we want to save a livable climate and keep within the above carbon budgets, then between 65-80% of all the listed reserves for fossil fuel companies cannot be burned. It’s simple math: 2,860 is more than double the budget for keeping under 2^oC with a 50/50 chance of blowing past the temperature.

But enough about trying not to cook the atmosphere – how about the important things – like what does it mean for financial markets?

Carbon Tracker looked at the capital expenditure by publicly listed fossil fuel companies to work out how much money is being spent trying to find new reserves of fossil fuels that will add to the list we can’t burn and are therefore being over-valued, because the market valuation assumes they will be burned and a profit will be made from burning it.

In 2012, the 200 listed fossil fuel companies spent $674billion on capital expenditure. $593billion of that was spent looking for more oil and gas, while $81billion of that was spent looking for more coal. If these kinds of spending continue (if the companies don’t admit that there is going to be an end to carbon pollution) over the next decade $6.74trillion dollars could be wasted looking for fossil fuels that have to stay in the ground.

As the authors say: ‘this has profound implications for asset owners with significant holdings in fossil fuel stocks’ because what investors are being sold is the lie that these reserves can be profitably sold and burned.

There’s also a lot of risk associated with this. Over the last two years, the amount of carbon being traded on the New York Stock Exchange has increased by 37% and in London it’s increased by 7%. This means that similar to the sub-prime loan crisis that precipitated the 2008 financial crash, all investors are exposed to carbon risk through the over-valuation of fossil fuel companies.

Map of oil, gas and coal reserves listed on world stock exchanges (from paper)

There’s a risk of carbon not being properly managed as a risk within stock portfolios which could create a carbon bubble that will burst as carbon starts being constrained, and there’s also the risk of stranded assets, where the fossil fuel companies sink all the capital expenditure into their projects only to find they can’t burn the carbon and there was no point in building the mine/gas well/oil platform in the first place.

The report states: ‘investors need to challenge the continued pursuit of potentially unprofitable projects before costs are sunk’. This makes sense also because oil and gas are becoming harder to get at (tarsands, tight oil, gas fracking, Arctic drilling), so the cost is going up and the profit margins are getting squeezed, unless the price of oil keeps climbing. This means that fossil fuels are going to increasingly become challenged by lower cost lower carbon options, because mining for sunshine is really not that hard.

So if we agree that we’ll stop burning carbon before we’ve cooked the atmosphere and therefore that means that 80% of the world’s fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground, what does it mean for the fossil fuel companies themselves?

Well, they may have some debt problems on the horizon. The report points out that even without a global climate change agreement the coal industry in the USA is looking increasingly shaky, just from new air quality regulations. They point out that if the business models unravel that quickly, these companies may have problems refinancing their debt when they mature in the near future (which is also a risk for investors). They point out that any company with tar sands exposure will also have stranded asset risk because the business model relies on high oil prices to be profitable.

Basically they show that traditional business models are no longer viable in energy markets that will be moving towards decarbonisation and that different information is going to be needed for investors to manage the risk of carbon in their portfolio.

In the final section of the report, Carbon Tracker gives a list of recommendations for investors, policy makers, finance ministers, financial regulators, analysts and ratings agencies for how we can avoid this financial carbon bubble. The recommendations include better regulation, shareholder engagement and resolutions, fossil fuel divestment, and better risk definition.

The full list of Carbon Tracker recommendations (click to embiggen) (from paper)

For what it’s worth, my recommendations would be to remove fossil fuel subsidies, stop looking for new reserves of carbon that we can’t burn and price carbon pollution. And as usual, stop burning carbon.

100% Australian Renewable

Posted on August 23, 2013 by amyhuva

What does 100% renewable electricity for the whole of Australia look like?

WHO: The Australian Energy Market Operator, commissioned by the Australian Federal Government

WHAT: Modelling for what a 100% renewable national electricity grid for Australia would look like.

WHEN: July 2013

WHERE: Online at the Department of Climate Change website

TITLE: 100 PER CENT RENEWABLES STUDY – MODELLING OUTCOMES (open access)

The Australian Department of Climate Change (yes, they have one!) commissioned the Australian Energy Market Operator in conjunction with CSIRO and ROAM Consulting to model what a national energy market would look like in 2030 and 2050 with 100% renewable electricity. Oh, and when they say ‘national’ they mean the more densely populated East Coast of the country (sorry WA and NT…)

The ‘national’ energy market (from paper)

They looked at two different scenarios – the first one was rapid deployment of renewable technology with moderate electricity demand growth (ie. including energy efficiency gains), and the second one was moderate deployment of renewable technology with high demand growth (no efficiency gains).

They ran both scenarios for getting our act together by 2030 and procrastinating until 2050 to see what might happen.

Given that this is a government document, it comes with many caveats (of course!). There are uncertainties (always); CSIRO says bioenergy is feasible, other groups say it’s not that feasible. The costs don’t include transitional factors (and change over time), the costs of land acquisition or stranded fossil fuel assets and infrastructure. Phew.

They also pointed out the obvious (someone has to say it I guess) that because this is looking at 100% renewable electricity it does not look at nuclear, natural gas or coal with carbon capture and storage. This is a fossil free zone people!

Ok, so what did they look at? They took data from the 2012 Australian Technology Assessment by the Australian Government Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics, and using that looked at what demand might look like in 2030 and 2050, and calculated the approximate costs.

Their findings in a nutshell are that a renewable system needs more storage (you can’t put solar in a pile like coal to burn later), is a more diverse and distributed system, needs an expanded transmission network and will be primarily driven in Australia by solar.

Depending on when Australia does it, it will cost somewhere between $219billion and $332billion dollars to build. No surprises that it’s cheaper to do it now, not to mention the stranded infrastructure and assets you save by starting the transition now. It’s cheaper after all not to build the coal terminal if you’re only going to use it for a short period of time.

Cost calculations for Scenario 1 (rapid deployment) and Scenario 2 (moderate deployment) (from paper)

They included energy consumption by electric vehicles (EVs) as well as the reduction of demand from rooftop solar. Interestingly, rooftop solar will dramatically change the makeup of a national energy grid. Currently the energy grid is summer peaking, which means more power is used in summer (for things like air conditioners when it’s seriously hot outside). With the uptake of rooftop solar, the grid will become winter peaking, because demand decreases in summer when everyone’s solar panels are doing great.

They ran the numbers to make sure a renewable power grid is as reliable as the current power grid, which is 99.998% reliable, and made sure the technologies they picked are either currently commercially available, or projected to be available soon.

They found that the capital costs are the main factor, given that once renewable power is installed; it costs almost nothing to run, because you don’t have to feed it fossil fuels to go. There are maintenance costs, but all power stations have maintenance costs.

Storage capacity wasn’t found to be economically viable with batteries once scaled up, given that a renewable grid needs 100-130% excess capacity. So storage would be in solar thermal, pumped hydro, biogas or biomass. The paper noted that geothermal (which Australia has a fair bit of) and biomass are similar to current standard baseload power in the way they can be used. Concentrated solar thermal is still a new technology that is being developed, so the scale up potential is not fully known yet, but it’s working well in Spain so far.

The space required to do this (to put the solar panels on and the wind turbines in) is between 2,400 – 5,000km²which is small change in a country that has 7.7mill km² and is mostly desert. So people won’t need to worry about wind turbines being put forcibly in their backyards, unless they want them (can I have one? They’re pretty!).

The most economic spread of renewables for transmission costs was a combination of remote with higher transmission costs and local with lower energy generation capacity.

Transmission possibilities (from paper)

The sticking point was meeting evening demand – when everyone comes home from work and turns the lights on and starts cooking dinner and plugs in their EV in the garage. The paper pointed out that work-based charging stations could promote charging your car during the day, but also ran scenarios where the demand shortfall could be met by biogas. This also applied for weeks where the storage capacity of the renewables was low (a week of low wind or a week of overcast weather).

Meeting demand shortfall by dispatching biogas and biomass (from paper)

Long story short, the future is hybrid renewable systems.

Breakdown of each technology for the different scenarios (from paper)

There is no single technology that can replace the energy density of fossil fuels, but a hybrid grid can. Diversifying both the technology and geography of the power grid will not only allow for 100% renewable generation, it will also build resilience.

As climate change extreme weather events become more common, having a distributed power system will avoid mass blackouts. It will be better for everyone’s health (living near a coal mine or a coal power station is NOT good for your health) and it will slow the rate at which we’re cooking the planet. Sounds good to me.

Vote for last week’s paper!

Posted on August 19, 2013 by amyhuva

Remember how I was excited about the possibilities of scaling up the carbon sequestration process outlined in last week’s post from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA?

Turns out you can vote for it!

I had an email from the lead author of the paper (I send my blog posts to the lead authors when I post them) letting me know that their process has made the finalists of two MIT Climate CoLab ideas. So if you’re excited about the idea of feasibly sequestering carbon dioxide from the oceans being tested out as well, you can vote for them.

The first proposal is for the Geoengineering section called ‘Saving the Planet v2.0‘. The second proposal is for the Electric power sector section called ‘Spontaneous Conversion of Power Plant CO2 to Dissolved Calcium Bicarbonate‘.

Climate CoLab is an online space where people work to try and crowdsource ideas for what to do about climate change. The contest voting closes in 11 days (August 30th) and the winning proposals will be presented at the Crowds & Climate Conference at MIT in November.

So if it takes your fancy, and you’d like to see this project presented at the conference, go forth and vote!

Disclosure: I am not affiliated with either the paper or the MIT CoLab project.

Antacid for our Oceans

Posted on August 15, 2013 by amyhuva

An electrolysis method that removes CO₂ from seawater could be affordably scaled up for commercial carbon sequestration.

WHO: Greg H. Rau, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, Physical and Life Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA
Susan A. Carroll, William L. Bourcier, Michael J. Singleton, Megan M. Smith, and Roger D. Aines, Physical and Life Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA

WHAT: An electrochemical method of sequestering CO₂ from sea water using silicate rocks.

WHEN: June 18, 2013

WHERE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), PNAS vol. 110, no. 25

TITLE: Direct electrolytic dissolution of silicate minerals for air CO₂ mitigation and carbon-negative H₂ production (open access)

This paper was fun – I got to get my chemistry nerd back on thinking in moles per litre and chemical equations! It almost made me miss university chemistry lectures.

No, not those moles per litre! (IFLS facebook page)

So what does chemistry jokes have to do with carbon sequestration? It’s looking increasingly like humanity is going to have to figure out ways to draw carbon out of the atmosphere or the oceans because we’ve procrastinated on reducing our carbon emissions for so long.

There’s two options for this – you can either create a chemical reaction that will draw CO₂ out of the air, or you can create a chemical reaction that will draw CO₂ out of a solution, and given how quickly the oceans are acidifying, using sea water would be a good idea. The good news is; that’s exactly what these researchers did!

Silicate rock (which is mostly basalt rock) is the most common rock type in the Earth’s crust. It also reacts with CO₂ to form stable carbonate and bicarbonate solids (like the bicarbonate soda you bake with). Normally this takes place very slowly through rock weathering, but what if you used it as a process to sequester CO₂?

The researchers created a saline water electrolytic cell to test it out. An electrolytic cell is the one you made in school where you had an anode and a cathode and two different solutions (generally) and when you put an electric current through it you created a chemical reaction. What these researchers did was put silicate minerals, saline water and CO₂ in on one side, and when they added electricity got bicarbonates, hydrogen, chlorine or oxygen, silicates and salts.

A basic schematic of the experiment (from paper)

The researchers used an acid/base reaction (remember those from school?!) to speed up the silicate and CO₂ reaction, which also works well in an ocean because large differences in pH are produced in saline electrolysis. Are you ready to get really nerdy with me? The chemical equation is this:

Chemical equation for the experiment (from paper)

So how did the experiment go? It worked! They got successfully sequestered carbon dioxide with an efficiency of 23-32% that sequestered 0.147g of CO₂ per kilojoule (kJ) of electricity used.

There are issues around the scaling up of the reaction of course – once the bicarbonate has been created, where do you store it? The paper suggested ocean storage as the bicarbonate solids would be inert (un-reactive). I would hope that a re-use option could be found – has anyone looked into using bicarbonate solids as an eco-building material?

There’s also the issue of needing to power the reaction with electricity. If scaled up, this process would have to make sure it was powered by renewable energy, because burning carbon to sequester carbon gives you zero.

Also, if sea water is used, the main by-product is Cl₂ so the researchers point out that while it would be feasible to do this process directly in the ocean, the issue of what to do with all that chlorine would need to be dealt with. The paper suggests using oxygen selective anodes in the electrolysis, or ion-selective membranes around the reaction to keep the chlorine separate from the ocean.

That being said, there are some exciting upsides to this process. The paper points out that the amount of silicate rock in the world ‘dwarf[s] that needed for conversion of all present and future anthropogenic CO₂.’ Also, using sea water is an easier way to sequester CO₂ rather than air-based methods.

Scaling the method up is economically feasible too. The researchers estimated that 1.9 MWh (megawatt hours) of power would be needed per metric tonne of CO₂sequestered. If the waste hydrogen from the process were sold as hydrogen fuel for fuel cells, the price of CO₂ sequestered would be $86/tonne. If the hydrogen fuel wasn’t feasible, it would still only be $154/tonne, which compares very favourably to most current carbon capture and storage feasibility estimates of $600-$1000/tonne of CO₂.

So, like an antacid for the oceans, if this process can be scaled up commercially through research and development, we could have an effective way to not only capture and store carbon, but also reduce ocean acidification. A good-news story indeed – now we just need to stop burning carbon.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Posted on June 12, 2013 by amyhuva

Looking at the Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions being undertaken by developing countries with the UNFCCC.

WHO: Xander van Tilburg, Sophy Bristow, Frauke Röser, Donovan Escalante , Hanna Fekete, MitigationMomentum Project, Energy research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN)

WHAT: An update on the progress of the NAMA projects under the UNFCCC process

WHEN: June 2013

WHERE: Published on their website MitigationMomentum.org

TITLE: Status Report on Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) (open access)

This week, the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) is meeting in Bonn to try and make some more progress towards action on climate change (yay!). One of the papers that was released to time with the negotiations is this one and I thought it would be interesting to look at what actually happens on the ground in relation to the high level negotiations. There will be lots of acronyms, so bear with me and I’ll try and get us there in English.

What is a NAMA?

NAMAs are not this guy (photo: Tamboko the Jaguar, flickr)

Did you say Llama? No, NAMA… In true bureaucratic style, the UN came up with the really forgettable name of NAMA for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions, which can also be called ‘correctly fitting climate jeans’ or even ‘different places are different’. I want to keep calling them llamas (because I lack that maturity) but I promise not to make any bad llama jokes. The main thing you need to remember is that climate mitigation in Alaska is obviously going to be different to climate mitigation in Indonesia because they’re very different locations and economies.

The idea with NAMA is for a bottom up approach to the UNFCCC negotiations and the ideas that come out of the negotiations (they’re not just talk-fests – they have program and policy ideas too!).

Because the wealthy industrialised countries (also called the First World, Global North or Annex 1 in UN speak) are mostly responsible for the emissions causing climate change, we are also then more responsible for the cleanup. So in 2007 at the Conference of the Parties (COP 13) in Bali, it was decided that NAMA projects should be created by developing countries for mitigation projects they’d like to do which would be funded by industrialised countries.

The projects need to be related to sustainable development and are supported through technology, financing and capacity building (training local people). The people running the projects also report back to the UNFCCC so that progress can be monitored (like any project). The first group of NAMAs were submitted to the UNFCCC Secretariat at the Copenhagen COP 15 in 2009.

NAMA projects are only conducted in developing countries because the idea is that it’s going to be easier for those countries to change the way they’re developing towards a low carbon economy, rather than just following in the full carbon burning footsteps of the industrialised world and then having to retrofit low carbon alternatives.

So if they’re going to try and build it right the first time round, what do they do? First, the country comes up with a feasibility study – what do they want to do and is it possible? If it is possible, then they develop the concept to present to the UNFCCC for funding. The concept has to have a mitigation objective and be clear about who is running the project as well as support from the government of the country.

Once they’ve worked out what they’re doing, they start the preparation phase where they work out the costs, the specific support they need to pull off the project and an estimate of how much carbon emissions will be reduced through the project.

Finally, they start the implementation of the project, which is my favourite bit – getting on the ground and getting it done.

NAMA projects by stage (left) and location (right) (from paper)

So far, €100million has been provided to NAMA projects, and a NAMA facility was launched to help the projects with financial and technical support in December 2012. Most of the projects are related to energy supply and the majority of them (56%) are based in Latin America.

The funding agreed to was from 2010 until 2012, so a long term financing arrangement will need to be made at this year’s talks, but I think it’s really exciting to see the tangible reality of what the UNFCCC is trying to do.

The first two NAMA projects submitted were from Mali and Ethiopia looking at shifting freight to electric rail in Ethiopia and energy efficiency and renewable energy supply in Mali.

So far, five projects have advanced far enough to receive funding. The projects are between 3-5 years in length, need between €5 – €15million in funding and should be able to start quickly (within 3-12 months) after applying.

The five projects are:

Small scale renewable energy projects in Northern Sumatra, Indonesia with a feed-in tariff for independent power producers (IPPs)
A project to stimulate investment in renewable energy systems in Chile
Waste to energy systems using agricultural waste in Peru (with different approaches tailored to different geographic locations)
Energy conservation and efficiency standards for the building sector in Tunisia
A geothermal energy project in Kenya

There are still details and processes that need to be worked out as the NAMA program progresses, given that one size never fits all for climate mitigation and renewable energy generation. But I really like the idea of locally developed projects that suit the challenges different countries face being implemented on the ground, supported at a high level from the UNFCCC.

Climate Question: Do We Get to Keep Flying?

Posted on June 6, 2013 by amyhuva

An analysis of jet fuel alternatives that could be viable in the next decade.

WHO: James I. Hileman, Hsin Min Wong, Pearl E. Donohoo, Malcolm A. Weiss, Ian A. Waitz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
David S. Ortiz, James T. Bartis, RAND Corporation Environment, Energy and Economic Development Program

WHAT: A feasibility study of alternatives to conventional jet fuel for aircraft.

WHEN: 2009

WHERE: Published on both the MIT website and RAND Corporation website

TITLE: Near-Term Feasibility of Alternative Jet Fuels

Last week, I looked at how our transport systems could be carbon free by 2100 and was intrigued by the comment ‘hydro-processed renewable jet fuel made from plant oils or animal fats is likely to be the only biomass-based fuel that could be used as a pure fuel for aviation, but would require various additives in order to be viable as an aviation fuel’.

It made me wonder what was being done for airplane fuel alternatives, or do we not have any alternatives and will I have to give up visiting my family in Australia?

Any other options? (photo: Amy Huva 2013)

I came across this technical report by MIT and the RAND Corporation (apparently RAND stands for Research ANd Development) and sat down to read all 150pages (you’re welcome) and see what our options for fuels that we could feasibly use in the next decade are.

The paper compared alternative fuels on the basis of compatibility with existing aircraft and infrastructure, production potential, production costs, lifecycle Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, air quality emissions, merit of the fuel as jet fuel vs ground fuel and the maturity of the technology.

The researchers pointed out (quite rightly) that emissions from biofuels need to take into account the carbon emitted through land use changes because if you clear-fell a forest to plant a biofuel crop any carbon you’ve saved by not burning oil has just been invalidated by the carbon emitted from clear-felling the forest.

Deforestation: not helpful. (Image by: Aidenvironment, flickr)

There were five different fuel groups looked at;

Conventional Petroleum
Unconventional Petroleum
Synthetic fuel from natural gas, coal or biomass
Renewable oils
Alcohols

The standard fuel used in North America for aviation is called Jet A and was used as the benchmark for the study. So what did they find?

Conventional Petroleum Fuels

Almost all Jet A fuel comes from crude oil and is kerosene based. The emissions from Jet A are 87.5g of CO₂e (CO₂ equivalent) per megajoule (MJ) of energy created (g CO₂e/MJ). Of that 87.5g, 73.2g comes from the burning of the fuel and there can be a 7% variation on the amount emitted from refining depending on the quality of the crude oil used and the refining process.

The world consumption of jet fuel is estimated at 5million barrels per day of oil. This number is really hard to wrap your head around, so let me quickly walk you through some math. A barrel of oil is 159L, which means 5million barrels per day is 795,000,000L of oil burned each day. To get that volume of water, you would have to run a fire hose (359L/minute) for 101 years (yes, YEARS). We burn that much in one day.

Given that a conventional fuel is already oil based and you can’t reduce those carbon emissions, the tweak for this paper was an Ultra Low Sulfur Jet A fuel, which would reduce sulfur emissions from burning the fuel.

While it’s a great to reduce sulfur emissions that cause acid rain, the extra refining needed upped the lifecycle emissions to 89g CO₂e/MJ.

Unconventional Petroleum Fuels

Unconventional fuels are things like the Canadian tar sands (or oil sands if you’re their PR people) and Venezuelan Heavy Oil. These oils are dirtier and require more refining to be made into jet fuel. They also require more effort to get out of the ground, and so the lifecycle emissions are 103g CO₂e/MJ (with an uncertainty of 5%). The upstream emissions of sourcing and refining the fuel are what add the extra – burning the fuel has the same emissions as Jet A, and the upstream emissions range from 16g CO₂e/MJ for open cut mining to 26g CO₂e/MJ for in-situ mining.

You can also get shale oil through the process of fracking and refine it to Jet A. Shale based Jet A also burns the same as Jet A, but the extraction emissions are a whopping 41g CO₂e/MJ which is double the tar sands extraction emissions, giving an overall 114.2g CO₂e/MJ lifecycle emissions.

Fischer-Tropsch Synthetic Fuels

These are fuels derived through the catalysed Fisher-Tropsch process and then refined into a fuel. These fuels are good because they have almost zero sulfur content (and therefore almost zero sulfur emissions). They don’t work as a 100% fuel without an engine refit because of the different aromatic hydrocarbon content, and the energy density is 3% less than Jet A (meaning you’d need 3% more fuel in the tank to go the same distance as Jet A fuel). However, it does combine easily to make a 50/50 blend for planes.

You can make FT Synthetic fuel from natural gas which gives you 101g CO₂e/MJ emissions, from coal which gives you between 120-195g CO₂e/MJ and relies on carbon capture and storage as a technical fix, or from biomass, which has almost zero lifecycle emissions ONLY if you use a waste product as the source and don’t contribute to further land use changes.

Renewable Oils

These are biodiesel or biokerosene which can be made from soybean oil, canola oil, palm oil, coconut oil, animal fats, waste products or halophytes and algae.

Because this paper was looking at fuels that could be commercially used in the next 10 years, they looked at a 5% blend with Jet A fuel to meet freeze point requirements (most renewable oils freeze at too high a temperature for the altitude planes fly at). They found too many safety and freezing point issues with biodiesel or biokerosene, so didn’t calculate the emissions from them as they’re not practical for use.

Another renewable oil is Hydroprocessed Jet Fuel entertainingly sometimes called ‘Syntroleum’. This is made from plant oils, animal fats or waste grease. Soybean oil without land use emissions would have only 40-80% of the emissions of Jet A, while palm oil would have 30-40% the emissions of Jet A.

Alcohol Fuels

The paper looked at using ethanol (the alcohol we drink) and butanol as replacement fuels. They both had lower energy densities to Jet A, higher volatility (being flammable and explosive) and issues with freezing at cruising altitude. While butanol is slightly safer to use as a jet fuel than ethanol, the report suggests it’s better used as a ground transport fuel than a jet fuel (I assume the better use of ethanol as a drink is implied).

Options for jet fuel alternatives (from paper)

After going through all the options, the researchers found that the three main options we have for alternative fuels over the next decade that could be commercially implemented are;

Tar sands oil
Coal-derived FT Synthetic oil
Hydroprocessed Renewable jet fuel

They recommended that when looking to reduce the emissions from the transport sector that aviation shouldn’t be treated any differently. While strongly recommending that land use changes be taken into account for the use of biofuels, they also pointed out that the use for aviation should also be looked at as limited biofuel resources may be more effective producing heat and power rather than being used for transport.

Personally, I don’t find the report very heartening given that the first two options involve either dirtier oil or really dirty coal when what we need to be doing is reducing our emissions, not changing the form they’re in and still burning them. I’ll be keeping my eye out for any new research into hydroprocessed renewable jet fuels that could use waste products or algae – given the speed that oceans are acidifying, there could be a lot of ocean deadzones that are really good at growing algae and could be used as a jet fuel.

But until then, it looks like there aren’t many options for the continuation of air travel once we start seriously reducing our emissions – they’ll be a really quick way to burn through our remaining carbon budget.

Your Transport – Carbon Free in 2100

Posted on May 30, 2013 by amyhuva

Detailed scenarios looking at how all transport of people and goods can be zero carbon by 2100

WHO: L.D.D. Harvey, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Canada

WHAT: Scenarios across all sectors of transport for people and goods and how they can be zero carbon by the year 2100

WHEN: March 2013

WHERE: Energy Policy, Vol. 54

TITLE: Global climate-oriented transportation scenarios (subs req.)

We need to decarbonise our economy, but what does that actually look like? What do our transit and transport systems look like with zero carbon? Are we all going back to the horse and cart? I don’t think my apartment can fit a horse!

This very very detailed paper from the University of Toronto looked at what might happen, and the general gist of it is that first we need to work really hard to increase the efficiency of all our transport. Once we’ve gotten the energy intensity as low as possible on everything, we need to switch the remaining energy requirements over to different fuel sources (bio fuels, hydrogen fuel cells, electric).

For this paper, the globe was divided into ten socio-economic regions that had different per capita incomes, activity levels, energy intensities, potential for future population growth, income growth and energy levels. Each segment was then analysed for the per capita travel of light duty vehicles (cars, SUVs, pickup trucks), air travel, rail travel and other modes of transport. To further complicate the calculations, there were low growth and high growth scenarios looked at as well.

The data was worked from 2005 and extrapolated out to 2100 and if this kind of large scale number crunching really gets you going, all the spreadsheets that the researcher used are available online here (Climate-OrientedTransportScenarios) for you to do your own zero carbon transport scenarios (thanks to Dr. Harvey for making this available open access).

Energy demand scenarios (from paper)

Interestingly, growth in per capita travel relative to GDP growth has halted in several industrialised countries, which makes sense when you think about it – beyond a certain point you end up with more money to travel than time to do it in.

In terms of climate change, the paper assumes we’re able to stabilise the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere at 450ppm. The paper also talks a lot about peak oil and the effect it could have on resource prices and the availability of fossil fuels as fuel. Given that we need to leave 80% of the known fossil fuel reserves on the planet in the ground, I’m not so sure how much effect peak oil may have, but you never know – we could be suicidal enough to try and burn all of it.

Cars

Improvements need to be made reducing the weight of cars, improving the engine efficiency and the aerodynamics. Passenger space will increase so we can transport more people per car, air conditioning becomes more efficient (and necessary in some places because of climate change) and hybrid electric cars replace fossil fuel cars for urban driving. Fuel consumption drops from 10.4L/100km in 2005 to 1-2L/100km (of a biofuel) in 2100.

While I was really hoping the paper would tell me of the demise of ugly giant pickup trucks, sadly it looks like we may keep them and they’ll become hydrogen fuel cell monster trucks.

Buses

Buses will increase engine efficiency and ridership. Many buses are already diesel or electric, but the diesel efficiency will become around 50% and the hydrogen fuel cell buses will have 60% engine efficiency.

Passenger Rail

Trains will be electrified where they can be, and efficient diesel (becoming biofuel) where they can’t be electrified.

Air

The efficiency of planes is expected to increase by 20% from 2000 – 2020, with a 1% per year efficiency gain every year after that. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has already announced they’re aiming for 2% per year efficiency to 2050, so this one isn’t too far from reality. However, the paper points out that this will probably require a radical change in aircraft design, and a possible switch to plant oils or animal fat biomass-based fuel beyond that.

Freight

Freight trains need to reduce their weight, improve their engine efficiency, develop diesel-electric hybrid drive trains and get clever about load configuration to maximise efficiency. The energy requirement of tractors and other long haul trailers also needs to be reduced.

Marine freight is an interesting one. The paper points out that the majority of the world’s shipping is currently oil, coal and other bulk materials like iron ore. Obviously, none of this will need to be shipped anywhere in a zero carbon world, because we won’t need it. Mostly, marine freight will reduce the energy intensity of ships, and future transport will be made up of 60% container ships, 20% bulk ships, 10% general cargo ships and 10% biofuel supertankers.

Green Scenarios

The paper also looks at some ‘Green Scenarios’ which are the ones where we actually get ourselves into gear seriously to decarbonise (and hopefully stop having the endless debate about whether climate change is ‘real’).

The green scenarios have additional reduced total passenger travel with truck and air travel compensated by rail and other travel modes. There’s also an extra 20% decrease in global freight, which makes me hope people become more minimalist and have less junk in this future scenario? (I can dream!)

Initially, the greatest demand for biofuels are cars, but by 2035 freight is the biggest biofuel user, so maybe we’ve started to also become more clever in the way we plan urban areas with density and rapid transit too? (I think I like this future planet!)

Fuel demand scenarios (from paper)

The paper concludes that we need new urban development with higher density, more walkable, bikable and transit friendly options as well as making energy intensity reductions in all forms of transport and then switching the remaining fossil fuels to hydrogen or biofuel. This will go hand in hand with engine efficiency increases as well as battery technology improvements.

The key thing I took away from this paper is that we need to be doing ALL of this. We can’t just drive an electric car and still have our books from Amazon.com shipped here on an old, inefficient cargo ship belching fossil fuels. We also can’t fix one single transport sector and wash our hands of it saying ‘there- I fixed climate change!’

Climate change will affect everything, regardless of whether we actually do something about it or not. So we need to change the way we do everything to do it without carbon.

Wind Power Kicks Fossil Power Butt

Posted on May 3, 2013 by amyhuva

What if you ran the numbers for wind power replacing all fossil fuel and nuclear electricity in Canada? How could it work? How much would it cost?

WHO: L.D. Danny Harvey, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Canada

WHAT: Mapping and calculating the potential for wind electricity to completely replace fossil fuel and nuclear electricity in Canada

WHEN: February 1^st, 2013

WHERE: Energy Vol. 50, 1 February 2013

TITLE: The potential of wind energy to largely displace existing Canadian fossil fuel and nuclear electricity generation (subs req.)

As a kid, I really loved the TV series Captain Planet. I used to play it in the school yard with my friends and I always wanted to be the one with the wind power. Mostly because my favourite colour is blue, but also because I thought the girl with the wind power was tough.

Go Planet! Combining the power of wind, water, earth, fire and heart (Wikimedia commons)

What’s my childhood got to do with this scientific paper? Well, what if you looked at the Canadian Wind Energy Atlas and worked out whether we could harness the power of wind in Canada to replace ALL fossil fuel and nuclear electricity? How would you do it? How much would it cost? That’s what this researcher set out to discover (in the only paper I’ve written about yet that has a single author!)

Refreshingly, the introduction to the paper has what I like to call real talk about climate change. He points out that the last time global average temperatures increased by 1^oC, sea levels were 6.6 – 9.4m higher, which means ‘clearly, large and rapid reductions in emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are required on a worldwide basis’.

Of global greenhouse gas emissions electricity counts for about 25%, and while there have been studies in the US and Europe looking at the spacing of wind farms to reduce variability for large scale electricity generation, no-one has looked at Canada yet.

So how does Canada stack up? Really well. In fact, the paper found that Canada has equivalent wind energy available for many times the current demand for electricity!

The researcher looked at onshore wind and offshore wind for 30m, 50m and 80m above the ground for each season to calculate the average wind speed and power generation. Taking into account the wake effect of other turbines and eliminating areas that can’t have wind farms like cities, mountains above 1,600m elevation (to avoid wind farms on the Rocky Mountains), shorelines (to avoid wind farms on your beach) and wetlands, the paper took the Wind Energy Atlas and broke the map into cells.

For calculating your wind farm potential there are generally three options; you can maximise the electricity production, maximise the capacity factor, or minimise the cost of the electricity. The paper looked at all three options and found that the best overall option (which gives you a better average cost in some cases) was to aim for maximum capacity.

Using wind data and electricity demand data from 2007, the researcher ran the numbers. In 2007, the total capacity of fossil fuel and nuclear electricity was 49.0GW (Gigawatts), or 249.8TWh (Terrawatt hours) of generation. This is 40% of the total national electricity capacity for Canada of 123.9GW or 616.3TWh generation.

To deal with the issue of wind power being intermittent, the paper noted that there’s already the storage capacity for several years electricity through hydro in Quebec and Manitoba, as well as many other options for supply-demand mismatches (which this paper doesn’t address) making a national wind electricity grid feasible.

To run the numbers, the country was split into 5 sectors and starting with the sector with the greatest wind energy potential, the numbers were run until a combination was found where the wind energy in each sector met the national fossil fuel and nuclear requirements.

Wind farms required in each sector to provide enough electricity to completely replace the fossil fuel and nuclear power used in 2007 (from paper)

Once the researcher worked out that you could power the whole country’s fossil fuel and nuclear electricity with the wind energy from any sector, he looked at minimising costs and meeting the demand required for each province.

He looked at what size of wind farm would be needed, and then calculated the costs for infrastructure (building the turbines) as well as transmission (getting the electricity from the farm to the demand). Some offshore wind in BC, Hudson Bay, and Newfoundland and Labrador, combined with some onshore wind in the prairies and Quebec and that’s all we need.

The cost recovery for the investment on the infrastructure was calculated for 20 years for the turbines and 40 years for the transmission lines. The paper found that minimising transmission line distance resulted in the largest waste generation in winter, but smallest waste in the summer, however overall, the best method was to aim for maximising the capacity factor for the wind farms.

But the important question – how much would your power cost? On average, 5-7 cents per kWh (kilowatt hour), which is on par with the 7c/kWh that BC Hydro currently charges in Vancouver. Extra bonus – wind power comes without needing to mine coal or store radioactive nuclear waste for millions of years!

Estimated wind power costs for Canada (from paper)

Some more food for thought – the researcher noted that the estimated cost for coal fired electricity with (still unproven) carbon capture and storage technology is likely to be around 9c/kWh, while the current cost for nuclear generated electricity is between 10-23c/kWh. Also, the technical capacity factor for turbines is likely to increase as the technology rapidly improves, which will reduce the cost of producing wind electricity all over again.

This is all great news – Canada has the wind energy and the potential to build a new industry to not only wean ourselves off the fossil fuels that are damaging and destabilising our atmosphere, but to export that knowledge as well. We can be an energy superpower for 21^st Century fuels, not fossil fuels. I say let’s do it!

Carbon in Your Supply Chain

Posted on March 11, 2013 by amyhuva

How will a real price on carbon affect supply chains and logistics?

WHO: Justin Bull, (PhD Candidate, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada)
Graham Kissack, (Communications Environment and Sustainability Consultant, Mill Bay, Canada)
Christopher Elliott, (Forest Carbon Initiative, WWF International, Gland, Switzerland)
Robert Kozak, (Professor, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada)
Gary Bull, (Associate Professor, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada)

WHAT: Looking at how a price on carbon can affect supply chains, with the example of magazine printing

WHEN: 2011

WHERE: Journal of Forest Products Business Research, Vol. 8, Article 2, 2011

TITLE: Carbon’s Potential to Reshape Supply Chains in Paper and Print: A Case Study (membership req)

Forestry is an industry that’s been doing it tough in the face of rapidly changing markets for a while. From the Clayoquot sound protests of the 1990s to stop clearcutting practices to the growing realisation that deforestation is one of the leading contributors to climate change, it’s the kind of industry where you either innovate or you don’t survive.

Which makes this paper – a case study into how monetising carbon has the potential to re-shape supply chains and make them low carbon – really interesting. From the outset, the researchers recognise where our planet is heading through climate change stating ‘any business that emits carbon will [have to] pay for its emissions’.

To look at the potential for low carbon supply chains, the paper looks at an example of producing and printing a magazine in North America – measuring the carbon emissions from cutting down the trees, to turning the trees into paper, transporting at each stage of the process and the printing process.

Trees to magazines (risa ikead, flickr)

They did not count the emissions of the distribution process or any carbon emissions related to disposal after it was read by the consumer because these had too many uncertainties in the data. However, they worked with the companies that were involved in the process to try and get the most accurate picture of the process they possibly could.

The researchers found that the majority of the carbon is emitted in the paper manufacturing process (41%) as the paper went from a tree on Vancouver Island, was shipped as fibre to Port Alberni in a truck, manufactured into paper and then shipped by truck and barge to Richmond and then by train to the printing press in Merced, California.

Activity	Carbon Emissions (CO₂/ADt)	Percentage of Total
Harvesting, road-building, felling, transport to sawmills	55kg	12%
Sawmilling into dimensional and residual products	45kg	10%
Transport of chips to mill	8kg	2%
Paper manufacturing process	185kg	41%
Transportation to print facility	127kg	28%
Printing process	36kg	8%
Total	456kg	100%

Supply Chain Emissions (Table 1. Reproduced verbatim from hardcopy)

The case study showed that upstream suppliers consume more energy than downstream suppliers, however downstream suppliers are most visible to consumers, which poses a challenge when trying to get larger emitters to minimise their carbon footprint, as there’s less likelihood of consumer pressure on lesser known organisations.

That being said, there can be major economic incentives for companies to try and minimise their carbon footprint given that Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railways (who shipped the paper from Canada to the printing press in California in this study) spent approximately $4.6billion on diesel fuel in 2008 (the data year for the case study).

Given that California implemented a carbon cap and trade market at the end of 2012 and that increasing awareness of the urgency to reduce our carbon emissions rapidly and significantly means the price of carbon is likely to increase, $4.6billion in diesel costs could rapidly escalate for a company like BNSF. If part or all of their transport costs could be switched to clean energy, as polluting fossil fuel sources are phased out the company will start saving themselves significant amounts.

The companies in this study were very aware of these issues, which is encouraging. They agreed that carbon and sustainability will be considered more closely in the future and that carbon has the potential to change the value of existing industrial assets as corporations who are ‘carbon-efficient’ may become preferred suppliers.

The researchers identified three types of risk that companies could face related to carbon; regulatory risk, financial risk and market access risk. The innovative businesses who will thrive in a low carbon 21^st century economy will be thinking about and preparing for operating in an economy that doesn’t burn carbon for fuel, or where burning carbon is no longer profitable.

I really liked the paper’s example of financial risk in the bond market ‘where analysts are projecting a premium on corporate bonds for new coal fired power plants’, meaning it will be harder for companies to raise money to further pollute our atmosphere. This is especially important given that Deutsche Bank and Standard and Poors put the fossil fuel industry on notice last week saying that easy finance for their fossil fuels party is rapidly coming to an end.

Of course, no-one ever wants to believe that the boom times are coming to an end. But the companies that think ahead of the curve and innovate to reduce their carbon risk instead of going hell for leather on fossil fuels will be the ones that succeed in the long run.

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