I made the following analysis at this link: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2244#comment-155897

As you say, there are 2 problems here.
1) global warming
2) peak oil

The solution to problem #1 is not as obvious as simply finding a 'sustainable' rate of fossil fuel consumption. I doubt that there exists such a rate of any significance because what ultimately determines the Earth's climate is the cumulative amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is, the total amount _not_ sequestered in the ground or water. Since the time scale is hundreds of years, then any rate that would consume all fossil resources within, say, 300 years would end up more or less like consuming them in 30 years. It might give a some extra time, but the end result would be the same. I don't think any rate that we set as a 'sustainable' amount will last over 200 years.

Ultimiately, we need to have as much CO2 sequestered in the ground or water as possible. Clearly, the amount in vegetation is limited. Most CO2 must be sequestered under ground, either in form of coal or waste CO2. We have to set limits on what we can burn and/or how we burn it.

Problem #2 complicates things. Given the tremendous value of liquid fossil fuels, I would say that if we are going to emit CO2, then using oil gives the most punch for the emissions. So, I would write off all crude oil as gone. It will be burned. The stuff is too good.

That leaves coal, tar sands, and oil shale. Since these give less return for cO2 emissions, this is where we need to set limits. Designate areas as 'no mining', or 'carbon-sequestered mining only'.

Natural gas may be in the same boat as oil.

My suggestion would be to ban oil shale globally. Move towards banning tar sands globally. Designate the most envirnomentally sensitve areas as 'no mining' zones. And figure out how much CO2 from the remaining coal must be sequestered.

Of course, nobody suggested that I was onto something. So I found your post to be very affirming.

I object to the use of this ASPO data. Not to mention that this is one of the most confusing charts of all time. EIA, IEA, OGJ would be better. Not to mention IHS Energy or Wood Mackenzie.

I'm thinking C+C+NGLs.

Your analysis makes the assumption that climate response will be linear and proportional to the quantity of CO2.


Hansen has said that this linear response cannot be assumed and that a non-linear, abrupt sequence of climate change is much more likely.


The fairly recent discovery of accelerating glacial ablation is evidence for a non-linear response.


If we follow your logic we are placing a bet that climate response to CO2 is linear and we therefore can go ahead and burn all the CC and NG available to us.


This is not science; it is betting. The stakes are very high. You may wish to ask your children if they wish to assume the risks to which you appear willing to subject them.

As it appears that the world may pass a tipping point soon, beyond which it will be
impossible to avert massive future impacts on humans and other life on the planet:
Who Bears (Legal/Moral) Responsibility?
1. Scientists?
2. Media?
3. Special Interests?
4. U.S. Politicians?
5a. Today’s U.S. Public?
5b. U.S. Children/Grandchildren?

The above is from page 43 of the PDF Vernon cites above for Hansen. In this PDF Hansen is clearly arguing against the Business As Usual (BAU) scenario and is most emphatic that BAU may result in runaway, uncontrollable climate change.


Chris Vernon's post above appears to be arguing in favour of BAU. I do not believe Hansen has changed his opinion. If not then Vernon's post appears to be an irresponsible distortion of Hansen's warnings.

We should have an objective of cutting coal use by 5% a year from now on. For the western world that could mean not only turning off light switches and driving fewer miles but also buying fewer goods and not just from China.

Coal's dream run looks set to continue for a variety of reasons;

1) politicians won't hurt coal jobs
2) politicians won't bring in meaningful carbon caps without giant loopholes
3) green utopians tell us magical energy sources make nuclear unnecessary
4) carbon capture and storage is prohibitively expensive
5) the average consumer doesn't see the connection between shiny appliances and dirty coal
6) oil depletion will spur coal-to-liquids
7) electrification of transport will probably require more cheap generation

I don't see any coal slowdown within a decade.

'36 years of 2007 coal burn'

however since 2007 is up 10% from 2006, and with the depletion of oil, this rate of increase would increase, we'll hit that limit quite a bit sooner.

(assumin 10% increase)

the amount of coal burnt each year = 1.1^x
the intergral of 1.1^x between 0 and y = -10.5+10.5^y*10^(1-y)
where 10.5 is a rounding of 1/ln(1.1)
: solving for when this reaches 36 gives us 15.6 years, not 36.
the worrying thing is that by 37 years we have put out 10x the amount required to cross the threshold, assuming the 10% per year continues.

Andrew

ps. anyone know a cheap source for electric solar panels in Australia
i'm looking at about 1kw depending on price - yes i know this isn't enough, but they are expensive little beasties atm.
(i think we have roughly until the beginning of next year when a coal power station shuts down due to lack of water because of the drought we are having - http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21189976-5005340,00.html)

MANDATORY RENEWABLE ENERGY – THE ENERGY EVOLUTION –R12

In order to insure energy and economic independence as well as better economic growth without being blackmailed by foreign countries, our country, the United States of America’s Utilization of Energy Sources must change.
"Energy drives our entire economy.” We must protect it. "Let's face it, without energy the whole economy and economic society we have set up would come to a halt. So you want to have control over such an important resource that you need for your society and your economy." The American way of life is not negotiable.
Our continued dependence on fossil fuels could and will lead to catastrophic consequences.

The federal, state and local government should implement a mandatory renewable energy installation program for residential and commercial property on new construction and remodeling projects with the use of energy efficient material, mechanical systems, appliances, lighting, etc. The source of energy must be by renewable energy such as Solar-Photovoltaic, Geothermal, Wind, Biofuels, Ocean-Tidal, Hydrogen-Fuel Cell etc. This includes the utilizing of water from lakes, rivers and oceans to circulate in cooling towers to produce air conditioning and the utilization of proper landscaping to reduce energy consumption. (Sales tax on renewable energy products and energy efficiency should be reduced or eliminated)

The implementation of mandatory renewable energy could be done on a gradual scale over the next 10 years. At the end of the 10 year period all construction and energy use in the structures throughout the United States must be 100% powered by renewable energy. (This can be done by amending building code)

In addition, the governments must impose laws, rules and regulations whereby the utility companies must comply with a fair “NET METERING” (the buying of excess generation from the consumer at market price), including the promotion of research and production of “renewable energy technology” with various long term incentives and grants. The various foundations in existence should be used to contribute to this cause.

A mandatory time table should also be established for the automobile industry to gradually produce an automobile powered by renewable energy. The American automobile industry is surely capable of accomplishing this task. As an inducement to buy hybrid automobiles (sales tax should be reduced or eliminated on American manufactured automobiles).

This is a way to expedite our energy independence and economic growth. (This will also create a substantial amount of new jobs). It will take maximum effort and a relentless pursuit of the private, commercial and industrial government sectors’ commitment to renewable energy – energy generation (wind, solar, hydro, biofuels, geothermal, energy storage (fuel cells, advance batteries), energy infrastructure (management, transmission) and energy efficiency (lighting, sensors, automation, conservation) (rainwater harvesting, water conservation) (energy and natural resources conservation) in order to achieve our energy independence.

"To succeed, you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality."

Jay Draiman, Energy Consultant
Northridge, CA. 91325
Feb. 12, 2007

P.S. I have a very deep belief in America's capabilities. Within the next 10 years we can accomplish our energy independence, if we as a nation truly set our goals to accomplish this.
I happen to believe that we can do it. In another crisis--the one in 1942--President Franklin D. Roosevelt said this country would build 60,000 [50,000] military aircraft. By 1943, production in that program had reached 125,000 aircraft annually. They did it then. We can do it now.
The American people resilience and determination to retain the way of life is unconquerable and we as a nation will succeed in this endeavor of Energy Independence.

The Oil Companies should be required to invest a substantial percentage of their profit in renewable energy R&D and implementation. Those who do not will be panelized by the public at large by boy cutting their products.

Solar energy is the source of all energy on the earth (excepting volcanic geothermal). Wind, wave and fossil fuels all get their energy from the sun. Fossil fuels are only a battery which will eventually run out. The sooner we can exploit all forms of Solar energy (cost effectively or not against dubiously cheap FFs) the better off we will all be. If the battery runs out first, the survivors will all be living like in the 18th century again.

Every new home built should come with a solar package. A 1.5 kW per bedroom is a good rule of thumb. The formula 1.5 X's 5 hrs per day X's 30 days will produce about 225 kWh per bedroom monthly. This peak production period will offset 17 to 2

4 cents per kWh with a potential of $160 per month or about $60,000 over the 30-year mortgage period for a three-bedroom home. It is economically feasible at the current energy price and the interest portion of the loan is deductible. Why not?

Title 24 has been mandated forcing developers to build energy efficient homes. Their bull-headedness put them in that position and now they see that Title 24 works with little added cost. Solar should also be mandated and if the developer designs a home that solar is impossible to do then they should pay an equivalent mitigation fee allowing others to put solar on in place of their negligence. (Installation should be paid “performance based”).

Installation of renewable energy and its performance should be paid to the installer and manufacturer based on "performance based" (that means they are held accountable for the performance of the product - that includes the automobile industry). This will gain the trust and confidence of the end-user to proceed with such a project; it will also prove to the public that it is a viable avenue of energy conservation.

Installing a renewable energy system on your home or business increases the value of the property and provides a marketing advantage.

Nations of the world should unite and join together in a cohesive effort to develop and implement MANDATORY RENEWABLE ENERGY for the sake of humankind and future generations.
The head of the U.S. government's renewable energy lab said Monday (Feb. 5) that the federal government is doing "embarrassingly few things" to foster renewable energy, leaving leadership to the states at a time of opportunity to change the nation's energy future. "I see little happening at the federal level. Much more needs to happen." What's needed, he said, is a change of our national mind set. Instead of viewing the hurdles that still face renewable sources and setting national energy goals with those hurdles in mind, we should set ambitious national renewable energy goals and set about overcoming the hurdles to meet them. We have an opportunity, an opportunity we can take advantage of or an opportunity we can squander and let go,"
solar energy - the direct conversion of sunlight with solar cells, either into electricity or hydrogen, faces cost hurdles independent of their intrinsic efficiency. Ways must be found to lower production costs and design better conversion and storage systems.

Jay Draiman
Northridge, CA 91325
Email: renewableenergy2@msn.com

Thanks for this Chris.

What I don't quite get is this 450 ppm number. Do you know where this comes from? Does Hansen explain it clearly?

From what I can see going on with respect to positive feedbacks and functional declines in the cryosphere, the biosphere, and the oceans--all of which will take decades if not centuries to adjust to the current levels of GHGs--we are in a very dicey situation at the current 380 ppm (or ca. 400 ppm CO2 equivalent when other GHCs are included).

I think we need a decline in the concentration of GHCs toward pre-industrial levels rather than thinking about stabilization at some amount higher than today. Do you know of anyone out there saying this?

It is interesting to have Hansen talk about this though. The IPCC uses estimates of fossil fuel availability based on a review paper by Roger from the late 1990s. This can be found in references in the SRES section of the TAR.

Thank you Chris for keeping this subject up to date.

For those who want to know more about fossil fuel consumption, especially Coal, on the XXI check this paper:

Fossil fuels: what future?

This is a great link on the cryosphere I post periodically.
Its updated daily.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

Here is todays graph.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg

You can clearly see the effects of the warm fall on sea ice.
In if you look through past years it is obvious the at least in the Artic we are seeing a real change in the climate not a smooth warming.I don't think we can assume that increases in CO2 levels lead to smooth changes
in the climate.

More important is the fact that natural positive feedbacks such as melting permafrost which add C02 and worse methane to the atmosphere may significantly increase C02 levels in addition to the effects of human C02 production. Remember our planet has a natural cycle of warming and cooling periods. Human induce warming has probably caused a unnatural initiation of a natural warming cycle.

I'm not convinced that any of the measures put forth would solve the global warming problem. The only safe approach is to move a zero emission society. Even constant emissions are probably not good enough to prevent a significant warming event. And once the natural warming cycle gets going I think that emissions from natural sources could easily swamp any reasonable change we could make in emissions if we continue to live the way we do.

As you can see I'm far more pessimistic about the prospects for us to ameliorate the effects of global warming
than the IPCC report which is considered pessimistic itself. And the chances of us even meeting any of the reduction requirements suggested in the report are slim on the global scale.

Thus I think its more important for countries to take the stance that they plan to convert their societies to zero emissions and that they assume that international trade may fragment over time requiring them to be able to produce everything needed for their society locally if needed. For a modern way of life like ours this probably requires the country to have significant renewable resources and a population in the range of 30-100 million.

With enough agricultural land to sustain the population. And finally the climate should probably not be semi-arid and dependent on glacial or winter snow melt unless the population density is low since these types of climates are subject to severe drought during global warming.

In short we need to consider the creation of economic arks that create high tech zero emission localized societies. Trade will continue to be important of course but economic upheaval in regions that are suffering from climate change or the failure to convert from a fossil fuel economy will make dependence on trade problematic.

In fact towards the end of the Roman Empire the estates followed exactly this model moving to produce all goods locally this became the medieval guilds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild

In our case a guild like system might be needed to ensure supplies of finished goods in the face of chaotic
international conditions.

In any case the direct impact on us from both global warming and peak oil is local recurring shortages of goods
and unstable exports as strife hits both producers and consumers.

I just cannot see us able to take our society forward as it is today as the twin effects of global warming and peak oil become obvious. Either the societies will restructure to maintaining a high standard of living with zero emissions or they will collapse reverting to low emission primitive agricultural societies.

I assume a mix of both with large population loss all but certain. Assuming we can maintain regions of the earth that can continue to produce high technology it may be 100 years or more before technology again spreads through most of the planet. This time it will be green high tech and probably fusion devices. But the second industrial revolution will probably be a lot slower than our current one.

I can get onboard this switch everything off strategy as far as coal goes but surley the problem with peak oil and peak NG is that there will be moves into a growing use of coal.

getting off coal onto the list of alternatives looks a ask to me without some sort of direct comand intervention.Whats more stopping new builds with in the decade? currently electricity consumption global is running at 8.5%! most of this via coal. I only hope India and china go off the boil somewhat.

if this continues for a decade we are looking at burning more coal in the next 10 years than all previous history!

we need to start switching stuff now. are we going to need to wait another two US election cycles for action on this.

I don't consider myself in the doomer camp but etc... continued page 94

we already have proposals for new coal stations in the UK IIRC?

I think we need to push rationing and the command economy

Boris
london

I can't help thinking that it is easier to move away from coal than it is oil and gas leaving it unburnt in the ground and surely that is what is important, the easiest of a bunch of hard choices? I say easiest as we have many alternative (wind, wave, nuclear, tidal, solar, geothermal, biomass etc) ways of generating electricity and from where we stand today electricity consumption could be reduced significantly with minimal pain.

Chris, I agree entirely with the bit in bold.

The crux of the matter in getting off coal is substitution - and I think this graphic posted by Khebab gives some food for thought.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2186

I never fully got my head around the "each year for 50 years" part of this graphic. But the question is, to get off coal, how many nukes or how many windmills will we need? The coal plant was rated at 500 MW, the wind turbines 1.650000 MW and the nuke 1.1 GW.

I'm still a little concerned about the availability of U - and what we might use to dig it out of the ground.

Too many people using too many resources.

It looks like we are not willing to deal with reality, so reality will deal with us.

Ouch.

Thanks for the technical discussion.

What I take away thus far is that we have no technical solutions which will enable us to continue to consume nearly the amount of energy we consume now.

Stir the whole big picture into this.

We will spend far more energy on war in the next few years than we ever have -- stupendous amounts of energy and materials.

We will begin to experience various shortages -- water, food, energy, medicines -- as resources are depleted and population continues to grow.

We will spend more energy dealing with the effects of Global Warming already happening.

We will spend more energy on social unrest due to massive changes and unresposive political elites.

Things look a bit grim.

The technical discussion is so necessary, but we sure do need more informed public discussion of these issues and more informed public policy decisions based on that process. As always, eh?

And so it goes...

Chris, I think you have the numbers slightly wrong. This graph here:

shows carbon emissions from coal at 2.2 Gt carbon for 2000. With 5 bln.tonnes of coal burnt in 2000, this translates to 44% average carbon content of coal. This is in line with various sources, pointing carbon content ranging from 30-40% for lignite to 85-90% for anthracite. Your 95% for hard coal is way off and is applicable only to the tiny amounts of very high-grade anthracite.

Using the 2005 number of 5.9 bln.tonnes of coal produced x 0.44 = 2.6 Gt of carbon. 200 / 2.6 = 77 years of coal at 2005 consumption levels. With rising coal consumption this will certainly go below 50 years. Still we are way off bounds but this sounds much less urgent than 36 years IMO... I believe that for less than 50 years we can replace all coal capacity with nuclear - entirely doable task, which would be much harder for the 36 years you come to.

As for reserves they are entirely sufficient to sustain our drive for coal-fueled self-destruction - only the proven reserves are ~ 1 trillion tonnes. Thus reserve / production ratio using 2005 figures would be 169 years, or more than twice the "threshold" number of 77 years. It is estimated that undiscovered or currently rendered uneconomical reserves are 4-5 times the proven reserves and I am certain that a substantial part of those will be put into production when the time for it comes (not very soon).

Of course GW is all about coal, though if I may humbly suggest you can safely put tar sands, heavy oil and oil shale in the picture... these resources total more than the current coal reserves and if business as usual continues, using them is only a question of time.

One more thing: you are also assuming that as oil and gas dwindle this will not affect coal consumption or other fossil fuels consumption, while it is very feasible to gasify coal and replace oil & NG with it. The result would be that it is very likely the 50 year carbon budget I suggested previously would drop even further to 25 or 30 years.

There may be a problem with the methodology you used to estimate the amount of carbon in the world's remaining oil and gas. To reach your total of 162GtC in the 1,398 GB of "all liquids future production to 2100", you assumed "an average carbon share of ~85% by mass...in the remaining oil." This is a common misconception. In reality, 1 barrel of oil generates 3.09 tons of CO2. The correct methodology gives these equivalences: 1.4 trillion bls of oil /7.33 bbls per ton = 191 billion tons of oil. One ton of oil = 41.86 Gigajoules, giving a total of 7,895 billion GJ. One GJ of crude oil = 0.0755 tons of CO2, giving a total of 669GtC, or more than 4 times greater than the 162GtC that you calculate. If I haven't stumbled badly in my calculations, this would call for a re-evaluation of the role of oil in the global warming formula.

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