CCS is vital say some

‘Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is the only technology able to deliver significant emissions reductions from the use of fossil fuels’. So said the International Energy Agency in a report last year. It went on ‘CCS can reduce emissions not only from power generation, but also from industrial sectors such as iron and steel, refining, petrochemical, and cement manufacturing.’  According to its modeling, ‘CCS could deliver 13% of the cumulative emissions reductions needed by 2050 to limit the global increase in temperature to 2°C (IEA 2DS). This represents the capture and storage of around 6 billion tonnes (Bt) of CO2 emissions per year in 2050, nearly triple India’s energy sector emissions today.’ It adds ‘Half of this captured CO2 in the 2DS would come from industrial sectors, where there are currently limited or no alternatives for achieving deep emission reductions.  While there are alternatives to CCS in power generation, delaying or abandoning CCS in the sector would increase the investment required by 40% or more in the 2DS, and may place untenable and unrealistic demands on other low emission technology options.’

www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/carbon-capture-and-storagethe-solution-for-deep-emissions-reductions.html

While some see CCS as just a way to allow fossil fuels to still be used, the IEA says ‘a 2^oC pathway represents a significant departure from “business-as usual” for fossil fuels. Coal use in power generation falls to around one-third of current levels.’  However, it is still used, but emissions are reduced since 95% of coal-fired generators are equipped with CCS. It adds ‘40% of gas-fired power generation will also need to be equipped with CCS in 2050.’ It says ‘this has implications for decisions to invest in fossil fuel-based power generation and industrial facilities today, as most of these large capital investments are based on assumed lifetimes of several decades – 30 to 40 years for a power plant. Retrofitting of CCS would prolong the economic life of these assets and provide a form of insurance against asset stranding. China alone has an installed capacity of around 860 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power, and IEA analysis suggests that more than one-third of this fleet could be candidates for CCS retrofit.’ 

Is that really what we want- to make fossil fuel use viable long term? Is it actually possible technically? The IEA say yes on both counts and reports on some existing CCS projects. In addition to various Enhanced Oil Recovery CO2 injection project it says ‘the global portfolio of CCS projects now includes the Boundary Dam Project in Saskatchewan, Canada, which in October 2014 became the first operating coal-fired power plant to apply CCS. Two additional projects in the power sector, the Kemper County project in Mississippi and the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project in Texas, are due to come into operation in 2016. The Shell Quest CCS project, launched in November 2015, is the world’s first CCS project to reduce emissions from oil sands upgrading’. And more are planned.  It concludes ‘Boosting the number of large-scale projects under development is a priority. These projects are critically important in providing commercial experience, enabling key technologies to be refined and cost reductions to be achieved’. Convinced? Well the UK government wasn’t: it scrapped the UK’s £1bn CCS competition.

The IEA however see CCS as ‘an essential part of the climate solution’. It claims that‘ a 2-degree pathway requires deployment of CCS in both industrial and power applications’ and notes that CCS is already a reality: ‘there are currently 15 large-scale CCS projects operating throughout the world, with 7 more expected to come online by 2018’.

It also claims that ‘CCS could be competitive with other dispatchable, low-emission generation technologies by 2030’, citing Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) as an example.  Moreover, CCS ‘is not just a coal technology. It is needed to reduce emissions from a range of applications, including steel and cement manufacturing’. And via BECCS, with biomass used as a fuel and the emissions captured, it can be carbon negative. All of this slowing climate change. Quite a sales pitch!

The economic case seems a little week. All sorts of green energy options might be viable by 2030, not just CSP, and many already are. The issue is whether it’s worth pursuing CCS now. And the case for that seems to rest on the belief that renewables can’t or won’t deliver to scale and in time, with progress being slow due to resistance to change. So lets start digging! But can we really bury all the emissions we will continue to produce safety forever?  Will that be any easier than getting renewables going fully?  If governments and companies, or the public, are not willing to push ahead with renewable fast enough for whatever reason, will they be any more inclined to support CCS? Or is it just that the fossil fuel lobby wants it, given that it has so much invested in fossil energy- and is very powerful. And if that slows the development of renewables, then from its perspective, that’s just too bad, but BECCS is dangled as a long-shot consolation. 

Pragmatically, a bit of CCS for difficult-to-deal-with industrial processes, and maybe BECCS, may be helpful, but bulk CCS for power generation seems a risky, inelegant technical fix, stuffing CO2 into strata deep underground in the hope it will stay there forever.  While potentially delaying the switch over to renewables.

CCS is not the only large-scale geoengineering option that’s been proposed. Some are even more fanciful and potentially risky: seeding the oceans with ferric compounds to absorb GHG, putting aerosols particles in the high atmosphere to reduce solar input. Here’s an overview: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032113008460  

Slightly more credible within this wide range of ideas is direct air capture of CO2:  https://absuploads.aps.org/presentation.cfm?pid=11396 And maybe photo-catalytical conversion of other GHGs and  pollutants. See: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389556711000281 There is also a range of mega solar ideas, including mile high solar chimneys with solar heat updrafts from a vast solar greenhouses driving wind devices mounted inside the towers: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032110001292 and more recently: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X14003284 and www.scientific.net/AMM.283.57

That may be a bit more credible and does avoid having to store wastes somewhere. But it still sounds like a long shot, compared to conventional renewables. Towers a mile or more high seem to be a little extreme. Just like digging deep into the earth. 

Re-afforestation and changed farming practices seem more likely to be successful (and cheaper) for large-scale carbon capture/retention than major geoengineering projects and also easier than giant solar projects. But these less aggressive sequestration approaches can only go so far. Most agree that the real answer is the more fundamental approach of reducing CO2 emissions at source by switching to renewables. The claim that they will not be developed fast enough and so there is an urgent need for new approaches to dealing with climate change, may lead some to back large-scale geoengineering and CCS as desperate measures. Some say we must accept the risks and ensure we have the full range of options available. In his recent book ‘Systems Thinking for Geoengineering Policy’, OU academic Robert Chris argues that we should promote approaches to dealing with climate change that are ‘robust against the widest range of plausible futures, rather than optimal only for the most likely’. Well maybe, options should not be foreclosed, but surely we should focus on renewables as the best option: www.tandf.net/books/details/9781138841178/

The Legacy of Nuclear Power

Nuclear power epitomises the problems of technology choice we face. While some see it as a valuable and reliable energy source, its critics say that it it locks us into an inflexible, unforgiving, costly and risky pattern of reliance into the far future, with uncertain payoffs.  They say these characteristics, and the troubled legacy we have already inherited, imply a need to consider long term ethical and moral issues, as well as shorter term economic, and strategic concerns, and should give us reason to pause before making any further commitments. 

There is no question that nuclear fission leads to the production of very long-lived and very dangerous nuclear wastes.  OU Emeritus Prof. Andy Blowers has produced a new Earthscan book focusing on the waste management issue, and underground geological waste disposal, which is where long-term intergenerational ethical issue come to the fore. What right do we have to bequeath future generations problems we can’t solve?  In the shorter term, on what basis can communities be asked to accept the risks and uncertainties of hosting a nuclear waste disposal facility into the far future?

By looking in detail at examples around the world, he identifies some key characteristics for sites that have been selected or proposed. They have almost all been in peripheral, often economically weak areas, where local resistance and political opposition was usually unlikely or muted. In most cases, the waste sites have followed on from earlier nuclear projects: once a beachhead had been established it was easier to expand it, with economic lock-in maintaining the momentum. So attractive is this existing-site option that it almost seems to override technical geological suitability.

The specifics of the proposed disposal approaches also seem to reflect concerns about local and wider public reactions. Ideally, to reduce public concern, long-lived wasted should be buried deep and permanently, so that they can be forgotten about: out of sight, out of mind. However, this may not be the most rational approach. It is possible that, in the centuries ahead, new technologies will emerge that can make use of some of these waste- extracting value and reducing their hazards. In which case continued accessibility would be important. That may also be important if anything goes wrong with the disposal approach, or if new better disposal approaches emerge.  So the spectrum of options runs from full final irretrievable disposal to accessible long term, but still underground, storage. 

How long it would be possible to maintain accessibility is unclear: there will be limits. Moreover, in practice it will be many decades before much of the waste currently in interim surface stores, or being produced, can be disposed of in underground repositories of whatever sort. So for good or ill, we have time to see what else can be done with it.  But the inescapable bottom line is that it will have to go somewhere. This book explores the social and local community dimensions involved in that choice, but also inevitably highlights the fact that producing yet more of it will make finding a home for waste even harder. 

The current state of play in the UK is that a site for final geological disposal of the UKs high level nuclear waste is still being sought, with communities being invited to host it, possibly in return for substantial funding for local social projects. So far the only offer has been for a site in Cumbria, near Sellafield, backed by the local Copeland and Allerdale district councils. However, that was strongly opposed by Cumbria County council.  Provocatively, the government then indicated it might give local councils the final say, but so far no decision has emerged:  www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/12/county-councils-nuclear-waste-dump-sites

The aim is still to have a site chosen somewhere ready for it to be started up by around 2040, but with opposition likely to be strong, it may have to be imposed. Moreover, it would take time to build and would be earmarked preferentially for the existing/current legacy waste, possibly to be loaded up from around 2060 onwards. There would not be room for the wastes from the new plants that are currently proposed to start up in the late 2020’s until around after around 2130! That would be long after these new plants would have closed, even assuming 60 year operational lives. www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/168047/bis-13-630-long-term-nuclear-energy-strategy.pdf

At present it is not proposed to reprocess the highly-active spent fuel from these new plants, so as to extract plutonium. That means that, thankfully, the production of large amounts of secondary wastes would be reduced: reprocessing creates a lot of intermediate and low level wastes. However, the aim is to go for high burn up of fuel, so as to improve the fuel economics: more highly enriched fuel is used, able to stay in use longer, generating more energy before fuel changes are need.  But that also means the waste fuel, with more plutonium and other byproducts included, would be much more active than conventional reprocessed fuel would have been. That would make its ‘temporary’ storage, on site at the new plants around the UK, harder, with ‘temporary’ meaning maybe 100 years before it could be finally disposed of when and if the national geological repository became available.

Meanwhile, there is the large amount of the low and intermediate level wastes, most of which at present is stored at Sellafield, though, provocatively, some lower level material seems likely to be destined for regional distribution in selected land fill sites. In addition, the fate of the 140 tonnes plutonium that has already been extracted from earlier fuel remains unclear: http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/POST-PN-0531/POST-PN-0531.pdf.

Like most the rest of the high level nuclear waste, it’s in temporary storage at Sellafield. Most of it is from UK plants. The governments preference is for the plutonium to be used along with reprocessed or depleted uranium 238, in Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX), possibly for use in some of the proposed new reactors. That would involve building a new multi billion pound MOX fabrication plant. 

However, all that awaits the construction of the new power plants and a decision on MOX seems unlikely before they are built and running, if they go ahead- in the late 2020s/early 2030s. http://corecumbria.co.uk/briefings/new-build-reactor-delays-put-sellafields-plutonium-decision-on-the-back-burner/ And of course, if built, whatever fuel they use, the new plants will create yet more plutonium and wastes, so the problem continues into the far future, unless new technology emerges. It is conceivable that new types of plants could be developed that burnt up plutonium and some of the wastes, but that seems long off with unknown risks and costs, and there would still be some wastes to deal with, even with advanced fast neutron/molten salt/thorium reactors.

 As can be seen, the waste issue is complex and very long-term, and arguably best reduced by not producing more. Though we have to deal with what already exists- including around 1,400 cu meters of high level waste awaiting disposal somewhere: https://ukinventory.nda.gov.uk/. However, it won’t be easy getting agreement on where any of it is to go, as Blowers’ book makes clear, and as this recent review also concludes: https://rwm.nda.gov.uk/publication/societal-aspects-of-geological-disposal/  

The hunt for a site is supposed to start in earnest in 2017…