His first conclusion [PDF] is that energy systems change very slowly. The modern world today relies on machines that were invented in the 1880s — the steam turbine, the internal combustion engine, plus thermal and hydropower for making electricity. These were supplemented in the 1930s and ’40s by gas turbines and nuclear fission power. The photovoltaic solar cell for converting sunlight directly into electricity was theorized in 1839 but not actually created until 1954 — and today, 54 years later, solar photovoltaic power remains a minuscule contributor to the world’s energy needs.

From the stone age until the 1890s, humans relied mainly on biofuels. But Smil examines carefully, then dismisses, the dream of returning to large-scale energy systems derived from biomass (capturing sunlight in plants, then processing the plants to release energy), including ethanol. To provide the world’s transportation fuels with the most efficient of these systems — Brazilian ethanol from sugar cane — would require a third of the planet’s cultivated land, or nearly all the agricultural land in the tropics, Smil points out. Furthermore, such systems not only require too much land (thus disrupting important ecosystem services), they also require too much nitrogen fertilizer — so the ecological impact would be unacceptably large. Excessive human use of nitrogen fertilizer has been recognized as a global problem for more than a decade. (See Smil’s paper on this and other human disturbances of global material cycles [PDF].)

Despite massive government subsidies, nuclear power has no obvious future, Smil believes. This results from a combination of things — the rapid introduction of flawed reactor designs in the 1960s, the Chernobyl accident, the “serial failure” of fast-breeder reactors, the unsolved problem of nuclear waste, the unsolvable problem of terrorist threats involving nuclear material — all producing dismal public acceptance of the technology (not to mention investor fear).

Nuclear fusion has been subsidized steadily at the rate of $250 million per year for the past 50 years, “with nothing practical to show for it,” Smil observes. He believes it is “extremely unlikely” that nuclear fusion will play any significant role in future energy scenarios.

This leaves solar energy and fossil fuels.

Smil points out that the sunlight reaching the surface of the earth is truly enormous compared to human energy demands — something like 10,000 times as large as all human energy needs. But the resource is diffuse, not concentrated, so it will require 10 to 100 times as much physical space to use sunlight instead of fossil fuels (or 1000 to 10,000 times as much space, if we opt for growing biofuels). Still, direct conversion of solar energy into both low-temperature and high- temperature heat, plus electricity, “could supply a lasting, planet- wide foundation for non-fossil economies,” Smil says [PDF].

Fossil fuels began supplying humans with more energy than biomass (wood, charcoal and crop residues) starting in the mid-1890s. However, if fossil fuels are contributing substantially to the problem of global warming because they emit carbon dioxide (CO2), then they must be phased out, the sooner the better, and the transition to solar power must proceed apace.

However, the fossil corporations have a different idea (shared by their allies in the chemical, automobile, railroad and mining corporations — plus their loyal representatives in Congress and the White House, plus the Presidential candidates of both major parties). Their plan is an end-of-pipe solution — to capture, compress into liquid, and bury carbon dioxide in the ground. Given growing public awareness of the large costs of global warming, this carbon-burial plan — as far-fetched as it may be — is the only way the coal and oil corporations can continue to burn fossil fuels until there are no more fossil fuels left to burn.

Here, in a very long quotation [PDF], is what Vaclav Smil has to say about burying carbon dioxide in the ground:

Underground sequestration of carbon — now routinely sold as both a feasible and an effective solution to avoid global warming (Socolow 2005; IPCC 2006) — is a prime example of what I call the GM approach to engineering a desirable change. In the early 1970s, when faced with the legislative fiat to cut automotive emissions of CO, NOx and VOC the world’s largest company chose not to lower them at all but to install costly and resource-intensive three-way catalytic converters. In contrast, Soichiro Honda, the founder of the eponymous and now legendary engineering corporation, approached the challenge as an ecologist and asked:

‘What would happen if catalytic converters were installed in a large number of automobiles, emitting platinum, palladium, and other heavy metals that would then enter human bodies? There are too many unknowns.’ (Sakiya 1982:181).

Honda’s engineers thus concentrated on developing their extraordinary compound vortex controlled combustion (CVCC hence Honda Civic) and theirs was the first engine to meet U.S. EPA’s strict automotive emissions requirements. Honda’s way — minimizing the production of undesirable outputs rather than controlling them as an after-thought — should be always the guiding principle of any intelligent, far- sighted, rational design. I do not have to belabor the wider lesson taught by these two companies. Three decades after it surprised with its innovative engine design Honda is the world’s leading, and a highly profitable, automotive innovator whose two dominant vehicles, Accord and Civic, set the standard for car-making in compact and sedan class while GM is a virtually bankrupt outfit (losing thousands of dollars on every car sale) whose products include such ridiculous monsters as Yukon (24 L/100 km [= 9.8 miles per gallon]) and H1, a military assault vehicle weighing 4,700 kg [= 5.2 tons].

I must hasten to add [says Smil] that underground CO2 sequestration in the service of secondary oil recovery is most desirable, as is any form of plant-bound sequestration, ranging from a gradual build-up of soil organic matter to massive planting of trees. But beyond these highly desirable actions the stress must be on reducing the emissions, not hiding them in an uncertain and costly manner. There are simply too many unknowns to commit enormous investments to an undertaking whose results could be obtained in many more preferable ways. But ignoring the avoidance principle that should guide any sound engineering and environmental action does not turn sequestration into a more practical proposition: even if we were to embrace this second- rate option the magnitude of the enterprise needed to make a real difference will defeat us.

A key comparison illustrates the daunting scale of the challenge. In 2005 worldwide CO2 emissions amounted to nearly 28 Gt [gigatonnes, or billions of metric tonnes]; even if were to set out only a modest goal of sequestering just 10% of this volume we would have to put away annually about 6 Gm3 [billion cubic meters] (assuming that all of the gas is compressed at least to its critical point where its density is 0.47 g/mL [grams per milliLiter]). The current extraction of crude oil (nearly 4 Gt [billion tonnes] in 2005) translates to less than 5 Gm3 [billion cubic meters]. Sequestering a mere 1/10 of today’s global CO2 emissions (< 3 Gt [billion tonnes] CO2) would thus call for putting in place an industry that would have to force underground every year the volume of compressed gas larger than or (with higher compression) equal to the volume of crude oil extracted globally by the petroleum industry whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place over a century of development. Needless to say, such a technical feat could not be accomplished within a single generation.

The obvious question is why it should be even attempted given the fact that a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions could be achieved by several more rational, mature and readily available adjustments. The most radical of these steps would be the reduction of the average annual U.S. per capita energy (about 330 GJ [billion Joules]/year, or roughly twice the affluent EU [European Union] level) by about 40%: this transformation alone would reduce the global carbon emissions by at least 2.5 GT [billion tonnes] CO2. Of course, this suggestion is always met with derision and the chances of such a shift are judged to be utterly impossible. But before you rush to join that dismissive howl recall that when empires unravel their energy use shrinks.

The last perfect example was the demise of the Soviet Empire: between 1989 and 1997 the primary energy use in the successor states of the USSR fell by a third. Then consider the current U.S. trajectory of enormous accumulated budget and trade deficits, more than twice as large unfunded health and social security liabilities, absence of any new domestic savings, gutting of the country’s manufacturing, dismal state of its education, acute strategic overstretch and a crippling dependence on energy imports (as of 2005 even its net food imports!) — and you do not need a great deal of imagination to construct scenarios of a major economic (choose one: crisis, pull-back, collapse) to be accompanied by significantly reduced energy consumption.” [End of Smil quotation] (Smil has elaborated elsewhere [1.2 Mbyte PDF] his reasons for believing that America’s global empire is in the final stages of retreat.)

In sum, Smil believes that burying carbon dioxide in the ground is:

1. a monumentally dumb idea, because the first principle of good industrial design is to avoid production of undesirable outputs rather than controlling them as an afterthought;
2. fraught with uncertainties, not the least of them being unknown costs that are surely larger than what is being forecast on the basis of almost no real-world experience;
3. a project that could not be accomplished in a single generation, because capturing even 10% of human CO2 emissions would require creation of an industrial infrastructure as large as the present-day global petroleum industry, which took 100 years to build;
4. unnecessary, because merely eliminating the most obvious forms of waste from U.S. energy use — making us as efficient as Europe — would accomplish the same thing far more cheaply and far more rapidly (with considerable health benefits from reduced pollution, I might add).

Smil elaborated on this last point in a short paper [PDF] in 2002. He pointed out that the U.S. requires 7 tons of oil equivalent (toe) per person per year to maintain our present lifestyle. But he shows that a top-notch lifestyle requires no more than 2.6 toe and arguably even a bit less. “Our quest for ever higher energy use thus has no objective or subjective justification,” he concludes.

In sum, we could cut our energy use by more than 60 percent without diminishing our lifestyle in any way — and arguably it would be enhanced, because so much pollution would be avoided by the shift.

Burying CO2 in the ground is a General Motors solution, when what we need is a Honda solution.

U.S. coal companies like Peabody and Arch plan to combine well-known coal-to-liquids technology and rapidly-evolving coal-to-chemicals technologies with untested methods of capturing carbon dioxide (or CO2, the main global-warming gas), compressing it into a liquid, and injecting it a mile below ground, hoping it will stay there forever. (Burying CO2 is called “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS.) If coal executives succeed in convincing the public to pay for all this, low-carbon renewable energy systems and waste-free “green chemistry” will be sidelined for decades to come.

The coal industry has nearly universal support in Congress. During President Bush’s 2008 State of the Union address, one of the few lines that drew enthusiastic applause was, “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions.” A few days later, the president announced his latest budget, with $648 million in taxpayer subsidies for “clean coal.” A few days after that, the government announced it was ending its participation in the nation’s first “clean coal” demonstration, the Futuregen project in Mattoon, Illinois. Obviously, Washington is experiencing policy angst over global warming, and “clean coal” lies at the heart of the debate. Both coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemicals depend entirely on carbon burial being possible, affordable, and convincingly safe and permanent.

Despite political support in Congress, “coal-to-liquid fuels” had its coming-out party earlier this year, and it did not go well. Here’s the story:

In 2006, the Western Governors’ Association began a process called “Transportation Fuels for the Future: a Roadmap for the West.” They set up teams to work on fuel efficiency, ethanol, biodiesel, electric propulsion, hydrogen, natural gas, and coal-to-liquids. The Western states hold 59 percent of the nation’s coal reserves, so Western governors (many of whom who need coal money to get reelected) are hoping to use American coal to provide America’s energy and to get us loose from foreign oil. So far, so good.

Most of the governors’ teams were polite and well-behaved, but the coal-to-liquids (CTL) team started brawling right from the start. The CTL team was stacked with coal industry reps (or their stand-ins)¹ who naturally came in with the preconceived idea that Uncle Sam should spend billions subsidizing coal-to-liquids in the Western states. And that was precisely the conclusion that the team reached in its final report [PDF]. But then the mud hit the fan. It got so bad that the representative from Natural Resources Defense Council quit the task force.

Even Princeton University got muddied in the fray. The Western Organization of Resource Councils, a coalition of seven community groups with 9,500 members and 45 local chapters, accused [PDF] Robert H. Williams of the Princeton Environmental Institute of using an “accounting gimmick” to make coal-to-liquids seem environmentally benign compared to the alternatives. For the past five years, Princeton has been funded by the coal, oil, and automobile industries to figure out how to bury carbon dioxide in the ground, to help the coal-to-liquids (“synthetic fuels” or “synfuels”) industry thrive.

When it was all over, a group of 14 national and regional environmental groups² wrote a searing letter [PDF] to the Western governors demanding that the whole coal-to-liquids study be discarded and re-done. Of course their request was ignored, but it revealed widespread, united opposition to coal-to-liquids among grassroots groups across the Western states. Even some of the big national groups, NRDC and Environmental Defense, who often work at cross purposes with grassroots groups, opposed coal-to-liquids. Oddly, NRDC is a wildly enthusiastic cheerleader for burying CO2 in the ground — more enthusiastic than even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — yet they strongly oppose turning coal into liquid fuels. Some would call NRDC’s stance a “nuanced” policy; others might call it schizophrenic. (Recently NRDC’s support for CCS appeared to be wavering when George Peridas, one of NRDC’s two main CCS cheerleaders, acknowledged, “There are cheaper ways and cleaner ways and preferable ways to meet energy demands, but I think CCS will ultimately be needed, too.”)

The Denver office of Environmental Defense chimed in with its own withering assessment [PDF] of the governors’ coal-to-liquids report. Martha Roberts and Vicky Patton of ED wrote, “The CTL [coal-to-liquids] working group’s recommendation for considerable federal subsidies to support development of carbon-intensive CTL transportation fuel seriously misses the mark and leads the nation in the wrong direction, veering recklessly distant from climate security.”

The Western Organization of Resource Councils sent its own blistering critique [PDF] of the CTL team’s conclusions. They pointed out that, in 2007, the National Academy of Sciences said they couldn’t be sure that the Western states had more than 100 years of coal remaining. Deploying a CTL industry might cut that to 50 years. If access to some known coal reserves were denied by landowners who didn’t want their land strip-mined, available coal could fall below even a 50-year supply. Relying on resources with finite supply means that, by definition, a coal-to-liquids industry isn’t sustainable. They also pointed out that the CTL team envisioned a “mature” industry producing 5 million barrels of liquid fuels per day, but such an industry would require, annually, two and a half times as much water as the city of Denver, Colo. Where would that water come from?

For all their political clout, coal and coal-to-liquids advocates did not fare well in the governors’ final report, “Transportation Fuels for the Future” [PDF]. The final report pointed out the following:

• Even with CCS, coal-to-liquids will release as much CO2 into the air as petroleum-based fuels do today. Without CCS, coal-based fuels will release twice as much CO2 (per unit of usable energy) as petroleum-based fuels. (Actually, as Environmental Defense pointed out [PDF] in its critique of the governors’ CTL report, even with complete carbon burial, liquid fuels from coal would still emit 3.7 percent more CO2 per unit of usable energy, than today’s petroleum-based fuels.)
• CTL plants “will require a massive infrastructure build out, including rail transportation, water supply, and treatment facilities, transmission lines, carbon capture facilities, and carbon dioxide pipeline transport to storage sites.” (pg. 16)
• “A mature CTL industry will use up underground carbon dioxide storage capacity which may compete with the storage capacity needs to dispose of carbon dioxide arising from the use of coal for electricity generation.” (pg. 16)
• “… it is uncertain whether there is sufficient coal for both fuel production and electricity generation.”

So CTL may seem like a workable idea on the face of it (at least in China), but the details seem fraught with problems that will be very difficult to resolve.

Not the least of these is the united grassroots opposition that surfaced during the Western Governors’ Association’s attempt to promote coal-to-liquids. Even with a major split in the environmental movement over burial of CO2 in the ground, everyone is united in opposition to coal-to-liquid fuels. This opposition will be difficult to overcome, even for an industry with Congress and all the presidential candidates (except Ron Paul) comfortably in its pocket.

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¹ The initial coal-to-liquids team included Paul Bollinger (DOD/Air Force, which aims to develop jet fuel from coal); Graham Parker (Pacific Northwest National Lab, a taxpayer-supported “clean coal” research organization); Greg Schaefer (Arch Coal, 2nd largest U.S. coal company); Dick Shepard and Dave Perkins (Rentech, “clean coal” technology providers); Robert Williams (Princeton Environmental Institute, funded by coal, oil and automobile companies to demonstrate feasibility of, and smooth the way for, “clean coal” and synthetic fuels from coal), and Chuck McGraw, Natural Resources Defense Council (big supporters of “clean coal” but not of coal-to-liquids). Mr. McGraw resigned from the coal-to-liquids team in September 2007 “after ascertaining that the report would not adequately represent their organization’s viewpoint,” as the CTL team’s final report stated ungrammatically.

² Appalachian Voices; Natural Resources Defense Council; Friends of the Earth; Montana Environmental Information Center; Valley Watch; Western Organization of Resource Councils; Greenpeace; Montana Audubon; Dakota Resource Council; KyotoUSA; Center for Biological Diversity; Climate Protection Campaign; Powder River Basin Resource Council; Sierra Club, Wyoming