Im hoping that with the cost curve of renewables and batteries, we get to a point fairly soon when market forces do the electrification prioritization for us. I think electrification of the home and transportation will be a superior, and cheaper, product than what we currently use. Of course, fairly soon could be too late.
1) Gas cooking is *the* key driver of gas in new residential construction. Consumers simply do not know how good induction cooking is, and when they're shopping for a new home with 100 other priorities is not the time to educate them. Honestly, banning gas hookups in new construction like some municipalities have done seems like the most reasonable policy to address it in new construction. You obviously need large subsidies and financing for retrofits, and I would argue for essentially free retrofits for low-income folks. Market forces will take decades, and not just 1 or 2 decades.
2) Electrifying transportation has a first-mover problem with gas stations/charging stations. You need policy to address this too, otherwise, again, market forces will take decades (and not just 1 or 2 decades, either). If the market alone ever gets there - I would guess that it never will for rural areas.
In both cases, a critical mass of actors in multiple markets has to move to the more-efficient technology preference more or less simultaneously. I'm not sure about other electrification technologies, but I would guess they have similar market-failure problems (I would guess principal/agent problems in the case of commercial real estate, for example).
Yes. This ties back to Dave's thesis here: CCS is never going to apply to gas use outside of the power sector. Nobody is promising CCS for furnaces, water heaters or gas ranges! That's two thirds of all U.S. gas demand currently. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38812
There's a growing movement to ban natural gas hookups in new housing construction. This sends the right signal. Retrofitting existing houses from gas to electric heating is a big ask; there are now high-COP heat pumps for both forced air and hot water radiator heating that work even in very cold climates. These won't compete on price with gas unless there's a seriously high carbon tax on natural gas, so subsidies for the cost of conversion will be essential.
Then there's oil - we're never going to have CCS for cars, trucks or buses. So the *oil* industry has NO path to becoming "low carbon." Oil just has to stop. Leave it in the ground. All ground transport must be electrified (or fueled by hydrogen)
The only policy pathway I can see for that is to ban the sale of fossil fueled cars, trucks and buses by a set date not too far off. Several nations have set such cutoffs for year 2035. California is working on such a policy.
All this will need government intervention. There's a great book by Canadian author Seth Klein titled "A Good War" that discusses how we retooled our economies in short order to fight WW II as a model for the scale of effort we'll need to achieve this energy transition quickly enough.
1) Induction is the best! But I didn’t know that til I bought a house with an induction range on accident. I think you are right about the policy angle on that one.
2) I own some rental property and I can’t figure a financial rational to electrify or increase efficiency, as people don’t make their rental decisions based on total cost of renting as far as I can tell.
Yes, 2) makes sense from my experience as a renter (though a couple years rusty). Thanks for highlighting the rental market, I forgot about that. There are just too many variables one has to keep track of while shopping for a place, and efficiency is too complicated and opaque to really include. If ads and websites were mandated to highlight estimated total cost of rentership (calculated via a government-mandated formula), that would mostly do it (aside from efforts to game the formula). But they are not. Getting all rental homes retrofitted for electrification is going to be a huge lift. I fear that even essentially-free retrofits wouldn't be enough to incentivize landlords given the hassle and likely increased vacancy time between tenants in order to allow for the retrofit. We will probably get to a place where a mandate is necessary (unless we allow the cost of gas for the last few consumers to rise to its actual cost, which might not be good from an equity perspective).
Agreed, Alex. This is one area where I think the clever schemes of technocrats are going to come to naught -- it's eventually going to take some old-school heavy-hand-of-government stuff. At least if we want to do it on schedule.
Technology is already there to do the work. Policy is set up to encourage and support rent-seeking by established players (e.g. the extractive industries, but also every utility district is incented to build and burn more year over year). Technology can provide the shove, but only Policy removes the lock on the wheel of change.
As a for instance, I can't get an incentive to replace my natural gas furnace with an electric or a heat pump. I will get money back if I install new NG infrastructure. That's not technology, that's policy. Going further, I can't find an installer for a residential ground source heat pump above 5T - regardless of incentives. Incentives throughout distribution systems are not aligned with a drawdown and early adopters have a headwinds to push through on their own today.
Market forces encourage every part of the chain to preserve their current paths to profitability. The only folks with incentives to go a different route are currently locked out of access to the customer, contracts for feedstocks/raw materials/funding for utility scale projects. In a consumer space the S-curve of adoption sweeps aside incumbents, but utility provisioning isn't a consumer game. As Dave has been hammering on all year, Wind and Solar are already better for the utilities and the consumers and are moving forward gradually. But the installed infrastructure is still coded for fossil fuels and all that has to be ripped and replaced and not even a negative (node) price on oil is enough to flip it like a switch.
AOTA is often the other (action vs. restraint) side of the coin of “We shouldn’t pick winners.” But that one is intellectually bankrupt for the same reasons. We spend good and scarce tax money on government programs and employees, including elected ones, so they will pick winners, distinguish and differentiate among alternatives, and guide toward the common good. It matters. Thanks, David, for a great start on the new effort!
One thing I've always wondered about is rhetoric that lumps together CCS and direct-air capture like they are in the same basket. While CCS is more economic now (even if it doesn't really make sense), shouldn't direct air capture be pursued with more funding as a decades-out player? Is there any reason to believe direct air capture technology would be owned by legacy fossil fuel groups and have negative social impacts? Genuinely looking for insight on this as I am just beginning to read more about CCS and DAC. It seems to me we should take more care to differentiate CCS and DAC.
DAC drives EOR via CCS which is another fossil fuel play. Ok, that was cryptic acronym soup: Pulling carbon out of the smokestack as you burn fossil fuels makes your burning action less bad, but when you turn around and pump that mitigated carbon into an oil well in order to push more gas and oil out to the surface you've double down on burning at a time we should be transitioning to as much electric power as possible. This is the core challenge in current DAC-CCS work - the funding is aimed at trying to enable more extraction. The fossil fuel companies get the green-washing from CCS and more efficient extraction for their ongoing operations. We can talk about good and bad in extractive industries, but Equinor and Exxon are on two different extreme paths; one is investing in offshore wind and the other promoting ads for CCS.
The opportunity cost is lost in the fungibility positioning. CCS spent mitigating fresh burn is CCS spent not drawing down the reservoir we've put into circulation. Levelling off is still terrible, which is the main point and draw of us to this conversation :)
I think humans are pretty bad at recognizing the operative time-scale of the carbon cycle. CCS that puts CO2 into water in a well doesn't come close to the stable storage we're replacing with oil and gas that has spent millions of years below ground. Human-scale 'storage' maxes out at a few thousand years (e.g. great Pyramids are some of our oldest standing intentional structures, Polish Salt mines with a few hundred years of storage perhaps the longest running intentional storage?) - it just doesn't line up by orders of magnitude. As a pro-technology person, I think we need to be pulling CO2 from seawater into solid state carbon storage, bulk Carbon Nitrides and the like. Long term, high density, stability. Or, get really creative about subductive carbon storage and the law of the sea, but then you really are playing with fire.
I think CCS is two separate things that hides two separate questions.
The two things are 1) literally capturing carbon and putting it somewhere and 2) capturing fossil fuel emissions and using established oil industry tech (pipelines and pumps and fracking, oh my) to hide them underground.
The two questions are 1) how and where to capture carbon and 2) how and where to hide it. Each of these questions has several proposed answers, of which the oil industry's preferences are only one.
As evidence, consider BECCS, which the vast majority of the IPCC under-2C scenarios rely heavily upon. That is to say, the carbon cycle people who still advocate for a 2C target are convinced that we are already committed to BECCS. You can see from the name that BECCS is a form of CCS, but the capture part doesn't help the fossil fuel industry. If you believe in ambient air capture (I think it's energetically a long shot compared to BECCS) you are advocating something we might call CACCS. In either case, it's very difficult at scale, but to my point, in either case we need somewhere to put the carbon.
So then there's the question of the CS, how to get the carbon out of the atmosphere and put it somewhere it won't bother us. On this matter, the pump and store geologically method is the leading suggestion, and it will benefit some oil industry sectors, but there are some proposals for deep ocean sequestration that appear to have merit.
I think things are complicated enough without muddling the questions and the issues.
So let me clarify:
1) Can we be serious about a 2 C target without some sort of sequestration? On this the answer is probably not.
2) How do we capture the carbon? The argument is that fossil fuel infrastructure is not going away overnight so we should capture as much of those emissions as is feasible. This means electrifying mobile sources and distributed sources, but accepting that a great deal of the electricity will come from methane for a while, so we might as well mitigate that impact.
3) Separately, after we capture it, where do we put it and how? Here the technology that's already established for small scale CO2 pipelines and pumps seems very appropriate, and competing technologies remain speculative.
Using CCS as a single concept when it's two is muddling the conversation.
But does "all of the above" mean the same thing as "the options are fungible"?
I think "options are fungible" implies that we can either focus on CCS and forget about renewables, or else focus on renewables and forget about CCS, and that it doesn't really matter which. If we need to do both then this is wrong and the options aren't fungible... but "we need to do both" is how I've always understood "all of the above".
It's very easy to say we need to do everything (and very true!), but in our fallen political world there are sometimes going to be tensions and trade-offs, questions about where to spend attention/effort/political will. Choices will have to be made, battles prioritized. My worry is people retreat to "all of the above" when they can't otherwise defend their choices & priorities.
True! But I first started paying attention to the CCS issue because there's legislation before Congress in the lame-duck session that would strengthen and improve the tax subsidy. Here's a statement from the (mostly industry-dominated) Carbon Capture Coalition endorsing the bills:
This doesn't seem like a situation where voting for CCS tax breaks prevents the development of renewable energy sources (or the planting of trees, et cetera). I wrote to my members of Congress asking them to support the bills because it looks as if they stand up on their merits, without any implication that CCS is a magic bullet.
I agree with a good deal of what is said here, but I would also say you need to do more homework on Ernie Moniz if you're going to trash him. He's nobody's fool in any manner of speaking. His only real failing in the realm you're discussing here, perhaps, is not that he drank koolaid but was forced to absorb a heavy and viscous dose of political realism during his time in Washington. This kind of realism is fundamentally short-term in its outlook, as it focuses on so many existing stakeholders and interests. I've been there myself, and it's neither pretty or fun (unless you're a hopeless wonk, of course).
He saw first hand, because it happened while he was in D.C., that the fracking revolution completely overturned the short- and mid-term geopolitics of global energy. It freed the US from its most long-standing national security worry, "foreign oil," such that, by 2018, American companies were crude exporters, competing with OPEC. This put a lot of stars in a great many half-closed eyes--eyes that were persuaded to look away from the climate implications. There's a good deal more to say about this, but life is short.
Moniz, whom I've never met, was the man who brought the Iran Nuclear Deal to fruition from the U.S. side (the head negotiator on the Iranian side was an old MIT schoolmate of his). This was a massive achievement by any stretching of an existing imagination. It may not seem to be relevant here, but it very much is. Hard ground, desert pavement political realism leads not to cynicism exactly but to a decay and even polluting of one's ability to gain a larger perspective. It is a kind of realism that brings distinct and disabling limits.
In his quieter moments, I suspect Mr. Ernie agrees that CCS has to be a dead-end and that fossil fuels of all kinds must be reduced and reduced much more, whereas DAC in some form he would probably say is likely not a dead end, since we need such emergency technologies to full deal with the climate threat long-term.
If you haven't yet, you might check out the Energy Futures Initiative that Moniz is part of (https://energyfuturesinitiative.org/). While this will still earn some of your sarcasm, I imagine, it will also clarify that he is more interested in future non-carbon technologies, not least GEN III+ and IV nuclear but also others.
I don't say any of this as a "fan" of Moniz. But his stance has evolved in some ways and it also needs to be understood in context of his time in the "other Washington" (I live in Seattle too, and teach at the UW). He and his immediate predecessor, Steve Chu were the first scientists that were ever given the position as head of DOE. This is pretty fucking ridiculous, even if you don't think about it. In the end, realism has its limits. To defeat the climate monster we need hopes and ambition too.
I need to say this and this is as good a time and place to try as any.
Stipulating that fossil fuel companies have behaved execrably in the public discourse on climate, they remain major stakeholders in the issue and primary resources in the solution. I'm not one for punishing corporations; they are profit-making machines more than anything. If they are motivated to lie and cheat they will. They were and they did.
If machines misbehave they are ill-designed, but not something to be angry at. If a bad driver kills (your dog, you are very justified in being angry at them and acting on your anger but kicking the car is silly.
Our job is to design the system such that lying in public doesn't improve the fortunes of the corporations, and to punish, legally or socially, the individuals who did the lying. But the people who imagine that the corporations are the enemy and that destroying them is the solution are making a terrible and terribly consequential category error.
I hear "all of the above" and immediately think: https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions we should be talking more about education and food waste and refrigeration even if we care primarily about energy!
But, as a statement of policy intent, it completely fails to clarify which values and priorities will be supported by the collective initiative. Which one do we do first? Which one must succeed else rendering the rest moot? Policy fails if it doesn't make it clear what it aims to accomplish, how it will evaluate those objectives, and when success or failure will be evaluated. Today, we are still celebrating greenwashing and 'recognition of the problem' in the discourse... the existence of the February 1981 National Geographic special report on Energy suggests if we don't try something different this time we should only expect change after exhausting every other possible option.
Despite this, I am hopeful. Real money is starting to flow into green-tech startups and consequences are showing up on supermajor quarterly earning reports. I don't think we've been so close to a tipping point, in my lifetime, where we can expect non-linear and irreversible progress. But knowing the values and tradeoffs absolutely matters. When birds and tortoises under the blade or mirror become the cost of preserving us all we are living the trolley problem (and possibly ignoring that we've been living it all along via fossil fuels and the choices built into our systems today).
It's hard for me to understand why we even talk about CCS in the same conversation as our "energy mix." I know it's a kinda sexy idea, but it's just not relevant to decarbonizing right now.
I think because we're addressing "All of the above" ;-)
CCS is an essential piece in drawing down the level of carbon we're at today. It even has a small impact on the rate of carbon introduction. That's, I guess, where it enters into the energy mix when we think about how to generate looking forward.
If we think of the energy mix boundary as a little wider than just forward looking generation, say to include paying down the carbon loan we've been taking out since the industrial revolution, CCS is how we pay down that debt. The natural cycle of rock weathering will unwind our temporary damage in some 500,000 years, whereas the CCS path may help us get there survivably quicker.
Well it's eventually energy adjacent, and more importantly it's chasing a slice of the broader energy innovation pie. While things shouldn't be zero sum, in a sane world we'd be dumping money out of helicopters to energy innovators, as it stands the spend on energy innovation is stable so they fight for access to that money.
There are lots of technologies that don't have much traction in our current energy ecosystem which we talk about because they're cool or could be important one day. I love SMR but there are not yet even pilot stage gen 4 reactors. There are designs, there are some theoretical startups, but there isn't even the regulatory environment to manufacture a reactor. Should we also not talk about next-gen nuclear?
At least next-gen nuclear is on solid physical footing and it could be a part of existing energy infrastructure. The issue, as David puts it, is that "Capturing and burying carbon at scale will require enormous global infrastructure, by some estimates three times the size of the oil industry. Even if all that infrastructure is built out, it will be utterly inadequate to offset the emissions of economies still running on fossil fuels." CCS seems like a pipe dream for pretty tough physical reasons.
Well put! Feels like NPC's "dual challenge" framing is along the same lines. I adore the man's bob cut, but recall it somewhat masked a "completely masculine" line in the DOE 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review (Moniz's "blueprint" for all-of-the-above; see Chapters 4, page133):
"RDD&D opportunities in wellbore integrity, subsurface stress and induced seismicity, permeability manipulation, and new subsurface signals could lead to a future of real-time control or “mastery” of the subsurface."
I always interpreted Moniz's "All of the Above" as meaning reserving a place in our energy generation for natural gas, the so-called "bridge fuel". He was fine with solar and wind, but whatever they couldn't generate at any particular instant of time would be made up for with nat gas. This necessarily would mean that you would have to build, worst case, as much nat gas capacity as it took to run the grid alone, minus the nuclear portion, and absent any large electricity imports, coordinated by an overall grid national grid controlling/management entity.
The problem with that is that given the lightning fast development of grid battery storage, the other end of the bridge is now in sight. The idea of putting renewably generated electricity directly on the grid is going to be replaced by putting it into a big on-site battery that then puts electricity onto the grid. This would let you store your solar and wind electricity for the times when, as is repeated ad nauseum in the media, "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow".
The result would be the beginnings of what the grid will eventually run on in a hundred years: sustainable baseload power. Thus the nat gas portion of All the Above will be superfluous. Let's just hope the Moniz's 20 years from now won't be desperately clinging to hydrogen from steam-reformed methane, since that also has a significant carbon footprint.
How about, “Some of everything, and how much of each thing will be determined by the economics”? CCS will be used where there is no less expensive alternative—probably limited to a handful of energy-intensive industries. Of course, the Republicans don’t want to leave it up to the economics, they want to protect incumbent industries.
"For the next two years, Republicans will have control of the Senate." - probably, sure. But I think we still have a shot. 5%? 25%? Voting in the time of Trump and COVID is very unpredictable.
Yeah, but if the deciding votes on climate legislation have to get past Joe Manchin, not sure if that's really much better than Republican control on the climate front. Other issues will be much better off, but will substantial climate change legislation be on the table if they need Manchin?
I would guess that having Schumer in charge would be BFD. It opens up the possibility of just buying-off Manchin with investments in WV. But I don't know much about Manchin.
I vividly remember in summer 2008 when high gas prices freaked everyone out, leading to “Drill Baby Drill” on the right, and eventually leading a campaigning Obama to moderate his position on offshore drilling. At the time, it sure felt like we weren’t able to punch back effectively on “all of the above” because 1) Obama as the new standard-bearer had taken the wind out of the sails of what had been a pretty strong Democratic Congressional leadership and environmental community consensus; and 2) the counter to “all of the above” was “some or the above,” which isn’t great. Back then, conventional political wisdom (and possibly truth) was that any economic hit on a climate solution was rhetorically existential. It’s possible that’s still the case, but time and tide have led to the costs of inaction being harder to ignore.
Im hoping that with the cost curve of renewables and batteries, we get to a point fairly soon when market forces do the electrification prioritization for us. I think electrification of the home and transportation will be a superior, and cheaper, product than what we currently use. Of course, fairly soon could be too late.
It's really tough...
1) Gas cooking is *the* key driver of gas in new residential construction. Consumers simply do not know how good induction cooking is, and when they're shopping for a new home with 100 other priorities is not the time to educate them. Honestly, banning gas hookups in new construction like some municipalities have done seems like the most reasonable policy to address it in new construction. You obviously need large subsidies and financing for retrofits, and I would argue for essentially free retrofits for low-income folks. Market forces will take decades, and not just 1 or 2 decades.
2) Electrifying transportation has a first-mover problem with gas stations/charging stations. You need policy to address this too, otherwise, again, market forces will take decades (and not just 1 or 2 decades, either). If the market alone ever gets there - I would guess that it never will for rural areas.
In both cases, a critical mass of actors in multiple markets has to move to the more-efficient technology preference more or less simultaneously. I'm not sure about other electrification technologies, but I would guess they have similar market-failure problems (I would guess principal/agent problems in the case of commercial real estate, for example).
Yes. This ties back to Dave's thesis here: CCS is never going to apply to gas use outside of the power sector. Nobody is promising CCS for furnaces, water heaters or gas ranges! That's two thirds of all U.S. gas demand currently. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38812
There's a growing movement to ban natural gas hookups in new housing construction. This sends the right signal. Retrofitting existing houses from gas to electric heating is a big ask; there are now high-COP heat pumps for both forced air and hot water radiator heating that work even in very cold climates. These won't compete on price with gas unless there's a seriously high carbon tax on natural gas, so subsidies for the cost of conversion will be essential.
Then there's oil - we're never going to have CCS for cars, trucks or buses. So the *oil* industry has NO path to becoming "low carbon." Oil just has to stop. Leave it in the ground. All ground transport must be electrified (or fueled by hydrogen)
The only policy pathway I can see for that is to ban the sale of fossil fueled cars, trucks and buses by a set date not too far off. Several nations have set such cutoffs for year 2035. California is working on such a policy.
All this will need government intervention. There's a great book by Canadian author Seth Klein titled "A Good War" that discusses how we retooled our economies in short order to fight WW II as a model for the scale of effort we'll need to achieve this energy transition quickly enough.
1) Induction is the best! But I didn’t know that til I bought a house with an induction range on accident. I think you are right about the policy angle on that one.
2) I own some rental property and I can’t figure a financial rational to electrify or increase efficiency, as people don’t make their rental decisions based on total cost of renting as far as I can tell.
Yes, 2) makes sense from my experience as a renter (though a couple years rusty). Thanks for highlighting the rental market, I forgot about that. There are just too many variables one has to keep track of while shopping for a place, and efficiency is too complicated and opaque to really include. If ads and websites were mandated to highlight estimated total cost of rentership (calculated via a government-mandated formula), that would mostly do it (aside from efforts to game the formula). But they are not. Getting all rental homes retrofitted for electrification is going to be a huge lift. I fear that even essentially-free retrofits wouldn't be enough to incentivize landlords given the hassle and likely increased vacancy time between tenants in order to allow for the retrofit. We will probably get to a place where a mandate is necessary (unless we allow the cost of gas for the last few consumers to rise to its actual cost, which might not be good from an equity perspective).
Agreed, Alex. This is one area where I think the clever schemes of technocrats are going to come to naught -- it's eventually going to take some old-school heavy-hand-of-government stuff. At least if we want to do it on schedule.
Its not just consumers who are behind on induction, it's building trades, developers, and residential real estate brokers.
Technology is already there to do the work. Policy is set up to encourage and support rent-seeking by established players (e.g. the extractive industries, but also every utility district is incented to build and burn more year over year). Technology can provide the shove, but only Policy removes the lock on the wheel of change.
As a for instance, I can't get an incentive to replace my natural gas furnace with an electric or a heat pump. I will get money back if I install new NG infrastructure. That's not technology, that's policy. Going further, I can't find an installer for a residential ground source heat pump above 5T - regardless of incentives. Incentives throughout distribution systems are not aligned with a drawdown and early adopters have a headwinds to push through on their own today.
Market forces encourage every part of the chain to preserve their current paths to profitability. The only folks with incentives to go a different route are currently locked out of access to the customer, contracts for feedstocks/raw materials/funding for utility scale projects. In a consumer space the S-curve of adoption sweeps aside incumbents, but utility provisioning isn't a consumer game. As Dave has been hammering on all year, Wind and Solar are already better for the utilities and the consumers and are moving forward gradually. But the installed infrastructure is still coded for fossil fuels and all that has to be ripped and replaced and not even a negative (node) price on oil is enough to flip it like a switch.
That’s a helpful way of thinking about it. Thanks!
AOTA is often the other (action vs. restraint) side of the coin of “We shouldn’t pick winners.” But that one is intellectually bankrupt for the same reasons. We spend good and scarce tax money on government programs and employees, including elected ones, so they will pick winners, distinguish and differentiate among alternatives, and guide toward the common good. It matters. Thanks, David, for a great start on the new effort!
David, your argument is important and absolutely right. That's why you need to address not only the criteria for choice that you mention but also, importantly, the economic element—climate opportunity cost—described at https://www.forbes.com/sites/amorylovins/2019/11/18/does-nuclear-power-slow-or-speed-climate-change/. —Amory Lovins
One thing I've always wondered about is rhetoric that lumps together CCS and direct-air capture like they are in the same basket. While CCS is more economic now (even if it doesn't really make sense), shouldn't direct air capture be pursued with more funding as a decades-out player? Is there any reason to believe direct air capture technology would be owned by legacy fossil fuel groups and have negative social impacts? Genuinely looking for insight on this as I am just beginning to read more about CCS and DAC. It seems to me we should take more care to differentiate CCS and DAC.
I frequently see CCS or CCUS framed as a kind of "on ramp" that will help scale up & bring down costs for DAC later on.
DAC drives EOR via CCS which is another fossil fuel play. Ok, that was cryptic acronym soup: Pulling carbon out of the smokestack as you burn fossil fuels makes your burning action less bad, but when you turn around and pump that mitigated carbon into an oil well in order to push more gas and oil out to the surface you've double down on burning at a time we should be transitioning to as much electric power as possible. This is the core challenge in current DAC-CCS work - the funding is aimed at trying to enable more extraction. The fossil fuel companies get the green-washing from CCS and more efficient extraction for their ongoing operations. We can talk about good and bad in extractive industries, but Equinor and Exxon are on two different extreme paths; one is investing in offshore wind and the other promoting ads for CCS.
The opportunity cost is lost in the fungibility positioning. CCS spent mitigating fresh burn is CCS spent not drawing down the reservoir we've put into circulation. Levelling off is still terrible, which is the main point and draw of us to this conversation :)
I think humans are pretty bad at recognizing the operative time-scale of the carbon cycle. CCS that puts CO2 into water in a well doesn't come close to the stable storage we're replacing with oil and gas that has spent millions of years below ground. Human-scale 'storage' maxes out at a few thousand years (e.g. great Pyramids are some of our oldest standing intentional structures, Polish Salt mines with a few hundred years of storage perhaps the longest running intentional storage?) - it just doesn't line up by orders of magnitude. As a pro-technology person, I think we need to be pulling CO2 from seawater into solid state carbon storage, bulk Carbon Nitrides and the like. Long term, high density, stability. Or, get really creative about subductive carbon storage and the law of the sea, but then you really are playing with fire.
I think CCS is two separate things that hides two separate questions.
The two things are 1) literally capturing carbon and putting it somewhere and 2) capturing fossil fuel emissions and using established oil industry tech (pipelines and pumps and fracking, oh my) to hide them underground.
The two questions are 1) how and where to capture carbon and 2) how and where to hide it. Each of these questions has several proposed answers, of which the oil industry's preferences are only one.
As evidence, consider BECCS, which the vast majority of the IPCC under-2C scenarios rely heavily upon. That is to say, the carbon cycle people who still advocate for a 2C target are convinced that we are already committed to BECCS. You can see from the name that BECCS is a form of CCS, but the capture part doesn't help the fossil fuel industry. If you believe in ambient air capture (I think it's energetically a long shot compared to BECCS) you are advocating something we might call CACCS. In either case, it's very difficult at scale, but to my point, in either case we need somewhere to put the carbon.
So then there's the question of the CS, how to get the carbon out of the atmosphere and put it somewhere it won't bother us. On this matter, the pump and store geologically method is the leading suggestion, and it will benefit some oil industry sectors, but there are some proposals for deep ocean sequestration that appear to have merit.
I think things are complicated enough without muddling the questions and the issues.
So let me clarify:
1) Can we be serious about a 2 C target without some sort of sequestration? On this the answer is probably not.
2) How do we capture the carbon? The argument is that fossil fuel infrastructure is not going away overnight so we should capture as much of those emissions as is feasible. This means electrifying mobile sources and distributed sources, but accepting that a great deal of the electricity will come from methane for a while, so we might as well mitigate that impact.
3) Separately, after we capture it, where do we put it and how? Here the technology that's already established for small scale CO2 pipelines and pumps seems very appropriate, and competing technologies remain speculative.
Using CCS as a single concept when it's two is muddling the conversation.
But does "all of the above" mean the same thing as "the options are fungible"?
I think "options are fungible" implies that we can either focus on CCS and forget about renewables, or else focus on renewables and forget about CCS, and that it doesn't really matter which. If we need to do both then this is wrong and the options aren't fungible... but "we need to do both" is how I've always understood "all of the above".
It's very easy to say we need to do everything (and very true!), but in our fallen political world there are sometimes going to be tensions and trade-offs, questions about where to spend attention/effort/political will. Choices will have to be made, battles prioritized. My worry is people retreat to "all of the above" when they can't otherwise defend their choices & priorities.
True! But I first started paying attention to the CCS issue because there's legislation before Congress in the lame-duck session that would strengthen and improve the tax subsidy. Here's a statement from the (mostly industry-dominated) Carbon Capture Coalition endorsing the bills:
https://carboncapturecoalition.org/carbon-capture-coalition-welcomes-introduction-of-bipartisan-senate-bill-to-enhance-section-45q-tax-credit/
This doesn't seem like a situation where voting for CCS tax breaks prevents the development of renewable energy sources (or the planting of trees, et cetera). I wrote to my members of Congress asking them to support the bills because it looks as if they stand up on their merits, without any implication that CCS is a magic bullet.
I agree with a good deal of what is said here, but I would also say you need to do more homework on Ernie Moniz if you're going to trash him. He's nobody's fool in any manner of speaking. His only real failing in the realm you're discussing here, perhaps, is not that he drank koolaid but was forced to absorb a heavy and viscous dose of political realism during his time in Washington. This kind of realism is fundamentally short-term in its outlook, as it focuses on so many existing stakeholders and interests. I've been there myself, and it's neither pretty or fun (unless you're a hopeless wonk, of course).
He saw first hand, because it happened while he was in D.C., that the fracking revolution completely overturned the short- and mid-term geopolitics of global energy. It freed the US from its most long-standing national security worry, "foreign oil," such that, by 2018, American companies were crude exporters, competing with OPEC. This put a lot of stars in a great many half-closed eyes--eyes that were persuaded to look away from the climate implications. There's a good deal more to say about this, but life is short.
Moniz, whom I've never met, was the man who brought the Iran Nuclear Deal to fruition from the U.S. side (the head negotiator on the Iranian side was an old MIT schoolmate of his). This was a massive achievement by any stretching of an existing imagination. It may not seem to be relevant here, but it very much is. Hard ground, desert pavement political realism leads not to cynicism exactly but to a decay and even polluting of one's ability to gain a larger perspective. It is a kind of realism that brings distinct and disabling limits.
In his quieter moments, I suspect Mr. Ernie agrees that CCS has to be a dead-end and that fossil fuels of all kinds must be reduced and reduced much more, whereas DAC in some form he would probably say is likely not a dead end, since we need such emergency technologies to full deal with the climate threat long-term.
If you haven't yet, you might check out the Energy Futures Initiative that Moniz is part of (https://energyfuturesinitiative.org/). While this will still earn some of your sarcasm, I imagine, it will also clarify that he is more interested in future non-carbon technologies, not least GEN III+ and IV nuclear but also others.
I don't say any of this as a "fan" of Moniz. But his stance has evolved in some ways and it also needs to be understood in context of his time in the "other Washington" (I live in Seattle too, and teach at the UW). He and his immediate predecessor, Steve Chu were the first scientists that were ever given the position as head of DOE. This is pretty fucking ridiculous, even if you don't think about it. In the end, realism has its limits. To defeat the climate monster we need hopes and ambition too.
I need to say this and this is as good a time and place to try as any.
Stipulating that fossil fuel companies have behaved execrably in the public discourse on climate, they remain major stakeholders in the issue and primary resources in the solution. I'm not one for punishing corporations; they are profit-making machines more than anything. If they are motivated to lie and cheat they will. They were and they did.
If machines misbehave they are ill-designed, but not something to be angry at. If a bad driver kills (your dog, you are very justified in being angry at them and acting on your anger but kicking the car is silly.
Our job is to design the system such that lying in public doesn't improve the fortunes of the corporations, and to punish, legally or socially, the individuals who did the lying. But the people who imagine that the corporations are the enemy and that destroying them is the solution are making a terrible and terribly consequential category error.
I hear "all of the above" and immediately think: https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions we should be talking more about education and food waste and refrigeration even if we care primarily about energy!
But, as a statement of policy intent, it completely fails to clarify which values and priorities will be supported by the collective initiative. Which one do we do first? Which one must succeed else rendering the rest moot? Policy fails if it doesn't make it clear what it aims to accomplish, how it will evaluate those objectives, and when success or failure will be evaluated. Today, we are still celebrating greenwashing and 'recognition of the problem' in the discourse... the existence of the February 1981 National Geographic special report on Energy suggests if we don't try something different this time we should only expect change after exhausting every other possible option.
Despite this, I am hopeful. Real money is starting to flow into green-tech startups and consequences are showing up on supermajor quarterly earning reports. I don't think we've been so close to a tipping point, in my lifetime, where we can expect non-linear and irreversible progress. But knowing the values and tradeoffs absolutely matters. When birds and tortoises under the blade or mirror become the cost of preserving us all we are living the trolley problem (and possibly ignoring that we've been living it all along via fossil fuels and the choices built into our systems today).
These well thought out comments alone are worth the price of admission. So glad I joined. I’m learning from everyone of y’all.
It's hard for me to understand why we even talk about CCS in the same conversation as our "energy mix." I know it's a kinda sexy idea, but it's just not relevant to decarbonizing right now.
I think because we're addressing "All of the above" ;-)
CCS is an essential piece in drawing down the level of carbon we're at today. It even has a small impact on the rate of carbon introduction. That's, I guess, where it enters into the energy mix when we think about how to generate looking forward.
If we think of the energy mix boundary as a little wider than just forward looking generation, say to include paying down the carbon loan we've been taking out since the industrial revolution, CCS is how we pay down that debt. The natural cycle of rock weathering will unwind our temporary damage in some 500,000 years, whereas the CCS path may help us get there survivably quicker.
Well it's eventually energy adjacent, and more importantly it's chasing a slice of the broader energy innovation pie. While things shouldn't be zero sum, in a sane world we'd be dumping money out of helicopters to energy innovators, as it stands the spend on energy innovation is stable so they fight for access to that money.
There are lots of technologies that don't have much traction in our current energy ecosystem which we talk about because they're cool or could be important one day. I love SMR but there are not yet even pilot stage gen 4 reactors. There are designs, there are some theoretical startups, but there isn't even the regulatory environment to manufacture a reactor. Should we also not talk about next-gen nuclear?
At least next-gen nuclear is on solid physical footing and it could be a part of existing energy infrastructure. The issue, as David puts it, is that "Capturing and burying carbon at scale will require enormous global infrastructure, by some estimates three times the size of the oil industry. Even if all that infrastructure is built out, it will be utterly inadequate to offset the emissions of economies still running on fossil fuels." CCS seems like a pipe dream for pretty tough physical reasons.
Well put! Feels like NPC's "dual challenge" framing is along the same lines. I adore the man's bob cut, but recall it somewhat masked a "completely masculine" line in the DOE 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review (Moniz's "blueprint" for all-of-the-above; see Chapters 4, page133):
"RDD&D opportunities in wellbore integrity, subsurface stress and induced seismicity, permeability manipulation, and new subsurface signals could lead to a future of real-time control or “mastery” of the subsurface."
I always interpreted Moniz's "All of the Above" as meaning reserving a place in our energy generation for natural gas, the so-called "bridge fuel". He was fine with solar and wind, but whatever they couldn't generate at any particular instant of time would be made up for with nat gas. This necessarily would mean that you would have to build, worst case, as much nat gas capacity as it took to run the grid alone, minus the nuclear portion, and absent any large electricity imports, coordinated by an overall grid national grid controlling/management entity.
The problem with that is that given the lightning fast development of grid battery storage, the other end of the bridge is now in sight. The idea of putting renewably generated electricity directly on the grid is going to be replaced by putting it into a big on-site battery that then puts electricity onto the grid. This would let you store your solar and wind electricity for the times when, as is repeated ad nauseum in the media, "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow".
The result would be the beginnings of what the grid will eventually run on in a hundred years: sustainable baseload power. Thus the nat gas portion of All the Above will be superfluous. Let's just hope the Moniz's 20 years from now won't be desperately clinging to hydrogen from steam-reformed methane, since that also has a significant carbon footprint.
They are welcome to CCS on whatever planet that exists, Narnia, Mordor. I'd like to defeat carbon on earth first... Apologies to Ahmer Rahman.
How about, “Some of everything, and how much of each thing will be determined by the economics”? CCS will be used where there is no less expensive alternative—probably limited to a handful of energy-intensive industries. Of course, the Republicans don’t want to leave it up to the economics, they want to protect incumbent industries.
"For the next two years, Republicans will have control of the Senate." - probably, sure. But I think we still have a shot. 5%? 25%? Voting in the time of Trump and COVID is very unpredictable.
Yeah, but if the deciding votes on climate legislation have to get past Joe Manchin, not sure if that's really much better than Republican control on the climate front. Other issues will be much better off, but will substantial climate change legislation be on the table if they need Manchin?
I would guess that having Schumer in charge would be BFD. It opens up the possibility of just buying-off Manchin with investments in WV. But I don't know much about Manchin.
A Marshall Plan for West Virginia! I'm here for that!
I vividly remember in summer 2008 when high gas prices freaked everyone out, leading to “Drill Baby Drill” on the right, and eventually leading a campaigning Obama to moderate his position on offshore drilling. At the time, it sure felt like we weren’t able to punch back effectively on “all of the above” because 1) Obama as the new standard-bearer had taken the wind out of the sails of what had been a pretty strong Democratic Congressional leadership and environmental community consensus; and 2) the counter to “all of the above” was “some or the above,” which isn’t great. Back then, conventional political wisdom (and possibly truth) was that any economic hit on a climate solution was rhetorically existential. It’s possible that’s still the case, but time and tide have led to the costs of inaction being harder to ignore.