Event Summary
Technology Alone Won't Cut CO2 Emissions, Panelists Warn
Technological innovation alone is unlikely to stop the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, several speakers warned at a Resources for the Future panel on February 1, 2006.
New technologies, they said, will not be developed and put into practice fast enough unless the process is forced forward by government rules that make these emissions expensive to the industries that cause them.
Worldwide coal consumption is rising steadily, and is a major source of carbon dioxide. The rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is apparently the principal cause of global warming. In all three of the world's leading consumers of coal -- in order, China, the United States and India -- there are no limits on emitting carbon dioxide into the sky. In economic terms, emissions are free.
John M. Deutch, institute professor at MIT, said that work under way at MIT indicates that the breakpoint at which industrial emitters like electric utilities would find it advantageous to capture and sequester carbon dioxide is around $27 dollars a ton. At that cost, he said, it would be possible to stabilize the carbon dioxide concentration in the world's atmosphere at 550 parts per million (ppm). It is now about 378 ppm.
The MIT researchers believe that there is every scientific reason to say that carbon capture and sequestration is possible but, Deutch added, the world is far from the technological and political conditions necessary to carry it out.
Last year's tremendous increase in the price of oil has increased reliance on coal, Joel Darmstadter, senior fellow at RFF, pointed out. Carbon dioxide emissions worldwide are now rising about 1.5 per cent a year. One consequence, he observed, is to make carbon capture and sequestration increasingly important.
The U.S. government's most prominent project in this field, the Energy Department's FutureGen, was announced by President Bush in early 2003. It is conceived as a coal-fired electric generating plant operating with almost no emissions to the atmosphere and is scheduled to be running by 2013. One plant will not suffice, Deutch suggested, to explore the needed range of technical solutions. There should be perhaps 50 experimental plants around the world, he said, operating under varying conditions and using different types of coal.
Another panelist, David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council, urged a more conservative goal of 450 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, to lower the risk of dangerous change in the climate. If governments wait until experimental pilot plants are up and running successfully, he argued, the new technologies will not influence general industrial practice until the late 2020's --- and by then, he emphasized, it will be too late to hold the concentration of carbon dioxide at 450 ppm.
Coal production in China is now twice as high as in the United States, reported Mike Mosser of the U.S. Department of Energy. As recently as 2001, China produced less coal than the United States.
Some carbon sequestration and storage is being done currently, Edward S. Rubin of Carnegie Mellon University observed. But he cited a recent study by the International Panel on Climate Change concluding that, among the barriers to wider use, there were no demonstrations yet of this technique at large coal-fired plants and there was inadequate understanding of underground geological structures.
Actually building and using large systems to sequester and store carbon will be an important source of the innovation necessary to make the technology work successfully, he pointed out. The stringency of the required emissions reduction, he said, will be critical to the speed of innovation.
To achieve reductions in carbon emissions, Rubin recommended a combination of the traditional supports for innovation plus regulation. By penalizing emissions over the limits that they set, regulations in effect put a price on emissions.
