Fossil Fuels and Alternative Energy Sources

Comparative Impacts of Fossil Fuels and
Alternative Energy Sources

KLAUS S. LACKNER
1 Introduction
Growing concerns over the consequences of climate change may severely limit
future access to fossil fuels. A forced choice between energy and environment
could precipitate a major economic crisis, an environmental crisis, or both.
Averting such a crisis will be dicult, because fossil energy resources are an
essential part of the worlds energy supply and climate change is mainly driven
by the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide (CO
2
) is
the unavoidable product of fossil fuel consumption. Therefore, the use of fossil
fuels collides directly with global environmental concerns. Unfortunately, fossil
fuels are dicult to replace, but stabilising the atmospheric concentration of
carbon dioxide requires a nearly complete transition to a carbon-neutral
economy. This implies either the abandonment of fossil fuels or the introduc-
tion of carbon capture and storage, whereby for every ton of carbon extracted
from the ground another ton of carbon is put back.
This chapter discusses the scope of the required reduction in carbon dioxide
emissions and the options available for achieving such reductions. It puts the
continued use of fossil fuels, with carbon capture and storage, in context with
other approaches toward achieving a carbon-neutral energy infrastructure or
otherwise avoiding serious climate change impacts.
The vast scale of energy infrastructures emerges as the central theme. There
are very few energy resources that are large enough to cope with modern global
energy demand. Any technology that will be able to satisfy these demands will
unavoidably interfere with natural dynamic systems. Just like some of the large
1
Issues in Environmental Science and Technology, 29
Carbon Capture: Sequestration and Storage
Edited by R.E. Hester and R.M. Harrison
r
Royal Society of Chemistry 2010
Published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, www.rsc.org
natural cycles, human energy systems are operating on a global scale. It is the
vast scale of human energy demand that shapes the available options.
2 Climate Change
The idea that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere control climate is not new.
While travelling with Napoleon through Egypt, Fourier was the rst to
recognise that the composition of a planetary atmosphere regulates a planets
surface temperature.
13
Some sixty years later, Tyndall measured the absorp-
tion spectrum of CO
2
in the infrared region. His laboratory measurements
showed that carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, which is largely
responsible for the habitable temperature range on Earth.
4
In 1898, Arrhenius
was the rst to quantify the greenhouse eect and estimate the impact of
anthropogenic emissions of CO
2
.
5
While extensive research and numerical
studies have added much detail to our understanding, his initial ideas remain
unchanged.
6
Computer models and observations corroborate the basic insights
developed in the nineteenth century.
Fossil fuels provide 81% of the worlds commercial energy supply.
7
Consump-
tion of fossil fuels produces nearly 30 Pg (petagram)
i
of carbon dioxide annually.
Until now, nearly all of this carbon dioxide has been released to the atmosphere.
In the past, the atmospheric sink was considered large enough to accommodate
any additional carbon dioxide, but the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere
has now risen by more than a third since the beginning of the industrial revolu-
tion, from 280 parts per million by volume (ppm) to 385 ppm today.
Fossil fuel combustion is the single most important contributor to this
change. The total carbon dioxide produced in the combustion of fossil fuel
since the beginning of the industrial revolution actually exceeds the observed
increase in the atmosphere.
8
At present, the carbon dioxide content of the
atmosphere is rising by 2 ppm per year,
ii
suggesting that more than a third of
the fossil carbon dioxide produced does not stay in the atmosphere.
9
The rapid increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has
raised the spectre of severe climate change, and much eort has gone into
understanding the likely scale and the implications of global warming. Today it
is generally accepted that doubling of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
would create serious harm and an often-cited goal for stabilising carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere is 450 ppm, which at current rates of increase would
be breached in about 30 years.
Carbon dioxide is an important greenhouse gas and the most obvious impact
of CO
2
release is global warming. However, CO
2
is also physiologically active
in plants and animals, it is of great importance to ecological systems and it is an
acid that critically aects the chemistry of ocean water.
i
We chose the petagram (Pg) rather than the Gigaton as a unit of mass, because it is the appropriate
SI unit and eliminates all ambiguities over metric vs. non-metric tons. One metric Gigaton is equal
to 1 Pg.
ii
1 ppm of CO
2
in the atmosphere amounts to 2 Pg of carbon or 3.7 Pg of CO
2
.
2 Klaus S. Lackner
While the focus of the climate scientist is on the impact of CO
2
on global
warming, an important focus for the engineer developing a sustainable energy
infrastructure is to eliminate the environmental impacts that arise from the
release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Even more broadly, the energy
engineer has to consider the environmental consequences of generating power.
In this context, it is the unintentional mobilisation of large quantities of carbon
that needs to be eliminated. With a fossil energy infrastructure, the production
of large quantities of oxidised carbon is unavoidable; their release into the
atmosphere can and must be avoided.
The climate scientist will lump CO
2
together with other greenhouse gases; the
engineer of a sustainable energy infrastructure must nd ways of stopping CO
2
emissions. This will eliminate the climate change impact of carbon dioxide, as
well as other impacts of excess carbon. The control or elimination of other
greenhouse gases may also be necessary for stabilising climate. However, the
control of these other greenhouse gases raises rather dierent issues and may
occur outside of the energy sector. Thus, their management should be con-
sidered separately.
Unlike other emissions, carbon dioxide is not a problem at the point of
emission. Carbon dioxide rarely reaches concentrations that constitute a local
hazard. The ambient background level of CO
2
is so high that mixing of CO
2
-
rich plumes with the atmosphere reduces excess concentrations to a small
fraction of the background already in the vicinity of the source.
iii
Carbon
dioxide diers from other power-plant emissions like sulfur dioxide (SO
2
),
because it is not the local impact of CO
2
emissions, but the impacts arising from
the accumulation of CO
2
in the environment that need to be controlled. In the
past, when the local impact of other sour gases was recognised as a serious
hazard, dilution of CO
2
still provided an adequate solution. Today, the CO
2
emissions from power plants have become so large that their impact on the
entire mobile carbon pool can no longer be ignored.
Conceptually it is useful to consider the various carbon pools on earth and
separate them into stable pools that are isolated from other pools, and mobile
pools that interact rapidly. Carbon is either tied up in permanent and stable
carbon pools, like carbonate rocks or coal seams deep underground, or it is part
of the mobile carbon pools on the surface of the Earth. The stable pools are much
larger than the mobile pools. The mobile carbon pools consist of the atmosphere,
the biosphere carbon and the ocean. These three reservoirs are in rapid exchange
with each other, but are essentially decoupled from the other carbon pools.
Before the industrial revolution, the atmosphere contributed less than 600 Pg
(i.e. 600 x 10
15
g) to this pool, today it is 800 Pg. The biomass contribution is
iii
As an example, consider trac on a freeway releasing CO
2
in the wind blowing across the road.
Let us assume a high trac density of 10 cars per second passing a stationary observer, an
emission rate of 2 10
4
kg m
1
of CO
2
per car (roughly 0.087 l km
1
of gasoline or 27 miles to
the gallon), a slow breeze at a wind speed of 2 ms
1
and mixing depth of about 50 m which, given
the turbulence created by the freeway, should be achieved within a few hundred meters of the
freeway. This leads to a total emission rate of 2 10
3
kg m
1
s
1
, which is diluted into 100 m
3
(a
column 50 m tall and 1 m2 m wide) of air, raising the CO
2
content by 210
5
kg m
3
as
compared to a background concentration of 7 10
4
kg m
3
.
3 Comparative Impacts of Fossil Fuels and Alternative Energy Sources
also around 600 Pg. Soil carbon provides another 1500 Pg. The ocean contains
about 39 000 Pg of dissolved inorganic carbon, which is part of the mobile pool,
but cannot easily be changed. The ocean carbon pool may be mobile in the
sense that any carbon atom can enter or leave, but it is persistent in the sense
that it cannot be increased or decreased by large amounts. The amounts that
could be added to the ocean by, for example, doubling the partial pressure of
CO
2
over the ocean are between 1000 and 1400 Pg.
10
Thus, the total exibility
in the mobile surface carbon pool is several thousand petagrams (Pg).
Fossil fuel consumption adds to the mobile carbon pool. Fossil carbon which
is taken from stable carbon pools is oxidised and released to mobile pools,
particularly to the atmosphere. Past fossil fuel consumption has already added
350 Pg. This is a substantial amount.
8
The exchange between the mobile carbon
pool and the naturally sequestered permanent pool is very small, involving a
small fraction of a petagram of carbon per year. As a result, human inuences
completely dominate the change in size of the mobile pool, even if the transfer
rates between the various parts (e.g. between the biomass pool and the atmo-
spheric pool) are far larger than the annual human input to the pool. It will take
several tens of thousands of years before the total mobile carbon pool will re-
establish its equilibrium with the permanent carbon pools.
11
This deviation from equilibrium matters beyond just climate change. For
example, excess carbon leads to the acidication of the ocean.
12,13
It has been
shown that such a modication of the ocean chemistry stunts coral growth.
14,15
Excess CO
2
in the atmosphere also leads to the eutrophication of terrestrial and
oceanic ecosystems. While environmental concern over climate change may be
the leading reason for managing anthropogenic carbon, climate change is only
one concern of many.
At the heart of the problem is the introduction of excess carbon into the
mobile carbon pool. Any human infrastructure which ignores the continued
build-up of excess carbon in the mobile carbon pool cannot be sustained.
Technologies which purport to stop global warming, while allowing the rise in
the mobile carbon pool to continue, are at best emergency measures to bridge a
gap, but they are guaranteed to fail over time. Albedo engineering, for example
by adding sulfates to the stratosphere, can x one symptom but it does not
address the underlying problem.
Practical solutions will need to stop or even reverse the build-up of CO
2
in
the environment. The build-up of carbon must be stopped not just in the
atmosphere, but also in the surface ocean and throughout the entire mobile
carbon pool. This means stopping the mobilisation of additional carbon, or
compensating for the mobilisation of carbon by demobilising an equal amount.
3 The Urgent Need for Energy
Energy is central to economic growth. Without access to adequate energy
supplies, a world population of six to ten billion people would not be possible.
Empirically, economic growth and energy consumption are closely linked, even
4 Klaus S. Lackner
allowing for the fact that the energy eciency of most industrial and com-
mercial processes can be improved, and indeed is improving. The dependence
of a modern society on metals and synthetic materials, on transportation and
information processing, makes access to energy paramount. Every sector of the
economy requires energy and even the most basic needs of humanity could not
be supplied without access to plentiful energy. Energy is necessary in the pro-
duction of food and in the provision of clean water.
16
If the environmental constraints on fossil energy resources cannot be over-
come, the resulting serious shortfall in energy would very likely precipitate a
crisis of unprecedented proportion. Even without the added concerns of climate
change, the worlds energy systems are in a precarious state. Rapid economic
growth is constantly pushing the existing infrastructure to its limits. It would be
extremely dicult to provide sucient energy for rapid world economic growth
while at the same time phasing out fossil energy for environmental reasons.
Energy demand, which had been outstripping supplies in the last few years,
led to enormous price increases, even though the bottleneck was only a few
percent of the total supply. This shows how little exibility there is in the energy
supply sector and how dicult it is to increase the worlds energy supply. Even
the recent sudden drop in demand only makes the point how inelastic the
worlds energy supplies are, but this time with the opposite sign. If these rela-
tively small variations in energy supply and demand can have such a dramatic
impact, consider what might happen if over a few decades 80% of the entire
energy base became o-limits, and if the most cost-eective source of energy
could no longer be deployed in the construction of a new energy infrastructure.
While it may be necessary to learn how to manage with much less energy, if
the development of a sustainable energy supply fails, the highest priority should
be given to developing energy solutions that can provide plentiful energy for
everyone in the decades to come. Supporting a growing world population and
their demand is paramount to political stability and the eventual stabilisation
of the world population. Unfortunately, it is very dicult to achieve this goal
while phasing out fossil fuels.
Higher living standards and increased energy consumption are intrinsically
related. Fighting poverty worldwide will require a means of raising the worlds
living standards to levels the developed nations take for granted. This will
involve the introduction of a basic energy infrastructure and consumption
patterns that are not very dierent from those found today in developed
countries, where these infrastructures have been built over the last hundred
years.
It has been suggested that developing nations might stop at a level of about
2 kW of primary energy per person.
17,18
At this level, basic human needs are
satised and consumption would still be only a fraction of that in Europe or in
the United States.
19
However, it seems unlikely that countries would volunta-
rily give up their potential for growth, particularly as long as there are other
countries that enjoy a much higher standard of living.
Even though one can expect signicant improvements in eciency and a
generally reduced energy intensity of the world economy, it is unlikely that
developing countries could nd a way to leap-frog developed nations and arrive
at a far less energy-intensive economy that nevertheless delivers a high standard
of living. Developing basic transportation infrastructures, a decent housing
stock with the attendant need for heating and cooling, the development of basic
food supplies and basic manufactured goods will likely require an energy
infrastructure of similar size to that built up in the developed countries.
It may well be possible to reduce some energy consumption by applying more
advanced technology, but this is likely to remain the exception rather than the
rule. For example, the need to build a wire-based telephone network may well be
avoided, but most of the infrastructure will be similar in energy intensity to those
known from the developed nations. Furthermore, rapidly growing economies
tend to be less ecient in their implementations of technology, because there is a
large opportunity cost in squeezing out the last bit of eciency. Indeed it is
generally the case that the energy intensity (i.e. the ratio of energy consumption
to GDP) is lower in developed countries than in developing nations.
Much of what will be implemented initially in a developing country are low
cost, and hence often less ecient versions of technology than those already
deployed elsewhere. Over time, both developing and developed countries will
adopt similar technologies and the two types of economies will converge.
Catching up with todays developed countries would increase world energy
demand by a factor of ve to ten.
It is dicult to see why rich countries would refrain from raising their living
standards. Economic slowdowns are typically fought at great cost and policy
makers have every incentive to keep their local economies on a growth tra-
jectory. Economic growth will bring with it additional energy demands, which
are dicult to predict. In the developing countries, one can assume that, at least
to some approximation, the development is likely to retrace the steps already
taken by the developed nations. However, much of future growth in the
developed countries will arise around new and innovative technologies that
either do not yet exist, or that are still in their infancy. It is not clear what will
be the next technological wave and how much energy it will demand. It is,
however, worthwhile to point out that the last technological wave, which was
focused on computation and information processing, was exceptional in its low
energy intensity. Thus, the past trend of a continued reduction in energy
intensity
20
may not be maintained over the next few decades. This would put in
disarray all predictions of future energy consumption, as it has been taken for
granted that the energy intensity of the world economy should drop at a rate of
at least 1 percent per year.
21
Energy is so central in supporting economic well being, that it seems highly
unrealistic to expect that humans will forgo the use of energy, unless circum-
stances make any other course impossible. Just for the world to catch up to the
standard of living taken for granted in the developed world implies an eco-
nomic growth that could be ten-fold. Annual growth of 2.3% would result in a
ten-folding over a century as well. Past growth in the developed nations
resulted in an increase in energy consumption by a factor of greater than ten
during the 20
th
century.
6 Klaus S. Lackner
4 The Environmental Impact of Energy
A modern societys energy consumption is so large that it cannot help but have
an impact on large natural cycles and the environment. For example, based on
US averages, the human energy consumption in the State of New Jersey, with a
population density of 438 km
2
, exceeds the photosynthetic productivity of a
similar, equally sized, but pristine area. In other words, human activities have
created energy ows which match those of entire ecosystems. Environmental
impacts from human power generation systems are therefore bound to be
profound. In very real ways, engineered systems begin to shape the dynamics of
large-scale natural systems. In engineering energy infrastructures it is important
to recognise these impacts and to develop designs which minimise them.
The understanding that energy industries can do harm to the environment is
not new, and environmental concerns over the use of fossil fuels in power
generation have already shaped the way these industries operate. Carbon
dioxide concerns simply broaden the agenda. Impacts of energy consumption,
ranging from thermal pollution of rivers to smog and acid rain, have shaped a
large part of the environmental agenda of the twentieth century. Now the
release of CO
2
has been added to the long list of environmental impacts that are
caused by the use of fossil energy resources. Fossil fuels are not just a large
source of greenhouse gases, but they are also a source of many dierent streams
of pollutants, including heavy metals and ne particulates. Their extraction
from the ground also adds to their environmental impact.
Attempts to address the environmental consequences of fossil fuel use have
resulted in technological advances. Technology changes have led to a drastic
reduction in the pollution from fossil fuel-based power. While there is still a gap
between what can be done and what is done, it is clear that current technology
can eliminate many of the major concerns over fossil fuel-based energy sources.
However, the large-scale production of CO
2
has not yet been addressed.
Carbon dioxide may have less of an acute impact at the point of emission,
but it is produced in exceedingly large quantities. Unlike sulfur, which is a trace
constituent of fossil fuels, the oxidation of carbon to carbon dioxide is central
to energy extraction and thus cannot be avoided. Today, the primary obstacle
to the use of fossil fuels is the carbon dioxide emission associated with its use.
Given the huge scale of energy generation in a modern society, it is not
surprising that all modern energy systems have some impact on the local and
global environment. The specics dier for each case, but a few general themes
emerge. Most energy systems cause changes in the system from which they
harvest the energy. Mining impacts are large, but there are also concerns about
the sheer size of the windmill parks necessary to replace fossil fuels. Many of
the alternative energy systems also release pollutants or toxins into the
environment.
In order to create a sustainable, global energy infrastructure, the world must
solve several problems simultaneously. First among them is the need to provide
a strong energy foundation for a path out of poverty and toward rapid economic
development. This will require abundant and cheap energy. Another problem is
to minimise the environmental impacts of energy extraction, energy conversion
and energy consumption. First and foremost, this requires a solution to the
problem of climate change and of excess carbon in the environment. The need
for economic growth makes it unlikely that the world will give up on readily
available fossil fuels.
To nd a solution to these seemingly contradictory demands requires a
revolution in the energy infrastructure. Business as usual cannot resolve this
conundrum.
16
Today 81% of all energy comes from fossil carbon and the world
emits approximately 1.34 mol of carbon dioxide for every megajoule (MJ) of
primary energy consumed, or about 60 g of CO
2
for each MJ of primary
energy.
iv
The amount of CO
2
produced must be drastically reduced, while
energy consumption will continue to grow. The dierence between maximum
allowed world-wide emissions and per capita emissions in the developed
countries suggest that the long-term goal has to be carbon neutrality. As a
result, it is necessary either to avoid the use of fossil fuels, which are one of the
cheapest and one of the most abundant resources of energy, or to move to
carbon capture and storage, which would make it possible to continue the use
of fossil fuels as it removes the most immediate environmental threat associated
with their use.
5 Carbon Capture and Storage
The concept of carbon capture and storage is quite simple: for every ton of
carbon taken from the ground another ton of carbon has to be stored per-
manently and safely, and away from the mobile carbon pool. While the con-
ventional term for this concept is carbon storage, in reality we are referring
to a large-scale disposal problem. The only way the term storage rather than
disposal could be justied is that storage needs to be maintained and the
responsibility for keeping the carbon out of the mobile carbon pool will indeed
remain for a long time. Assuring continued storage may demand action from
now into the distant future. On the other hand, the most desirable storage
options are those that do not require long-term maintenance.
The creation of a waste stream is unavoidable. The world is consuming
energy-rich forms of carbon for the primary purpose of generating power. This
results in large quantities of energy-poor forms of carbon, i.e. carbon dioxide or
various carbonates. The oxidation of carbon is an unavoidable outcome of
extracting the energy available in carbon and thus it cannot be undone. The
consumption of hydrocarbons produces carbon dioxide and water.
The production of water in fossil fuel consumption does not pose a problem
because the amount is insignicant compared to the amounts already on the
earths surface. By contrast, the atmosphere is not a reservoir of sucient size
to accept all the CO
2
that is produced. It is therefore necessary to nd safe and
iv
Calculated from a world primary energy consumption of 468.671 quadrillion BTU, and world
CO
2
consumption of 29 195.42 Mt, as reported by the US Department of Energys Energy
Information Administration, http://tonto.eia.doe.gov (last visited July 4, 2009).
8 Klaus S. Lackner
permanent ways of storing the CO
2
, or possibly the carbonate that can be
formed, without investing large amounts of energy.
In a perfect world, industrial processes would not have waste streams, but
instead all outputs of a process would be used either directly as commercial
products, or as inputs for some other industrial processes that could take
advantage of these materials. Indeed industrial ecology strives toward this goal,
and often there is the possibility of nding a good use for a by-product.
22
Unfortunately, the scale of energy consumption is so large that by-product
utilisation becomes severely strained or outright impossible. The per capita
production of CO
2
in the US is 20 Mg per year. This far exceeds all commercial
demand for CO
2
or for carbonates, which would have more than twice the mass
of the equivalent amount of CO
2
.
For example, if waste carbonate from a coal-red power plant proved viable
as a substitute material for producing wallboard, then a single Gigawatt power
plant would create enough carbonate to saturate the entire wallboard market in
the United States.
23
Thus, fossil fuel consumption is one example of an industrial process that
unavoidably creates a waste stream and it raises the question as to the best
possible disposal strategy.
This problem is not unique to carbon. Similar issues also arise for sulfur.
Sulfur is found in excess worldwide, because it is embedded in most hydro-
carbons. As an indirect consequence of increased energy consumption, the last
sulfur mine in the US closed in 2001. Other examples include arsenic, which is
readily supplied through copper production. In this case, one can observe a
gradual reduction in demand for arsenic that is driven by environmental con-
cerns. Over the years, demand for arsenic has shifted from agricultural use to
wood preservatives, which are now also being phased out.
24
Waste streams that cannot be used as practical products must be disposed of
in a safe and permanent manner. For some streams this is easily accomplished,
because the materials involved are relatively inert and small in mass or volume.
The problem becomes challenging if the waste streams are highly toxic or very
large in volume. The latter is the case for carbon dioxide disposal from energy
production. In all cases, one must render these waste streams harmless. An
initial step in this direction is to transform these materials chemically, so that
they are changed into their thermodynamic ground state. This avoids their
gradual and uncontrolled conversion in an open environment. Often this
transformation process has the added benet of releasing useful energy, since
thermodynamically stable states are often the energetically lowest states.
For the actual disposal there remain two options: either dilution into a large
stream or reservoir, or permanent and safe storage in a closed site. Sometimes it
is possible to create thermodynamically stable forms of a material that are also
common in nature. In this case, it may be possible to dilute the waste material
to the point that it is of no further concern. This is an ideal outcome in that the
waste stream is simply hidden behind a large natural background. In some
cases this might be possible. For example, Rappold
25
has suggested adding
anthropogenic sulfur to the oceans in the form of dissolved sulfates. In this
case, the entire world production of sulfur cannot change the total sulfur in the
ocean by more than one part in a million. In the case of fossil fuel consumption,
the water by-product is simply absorbed into the natural water cycle; it is such a
small part of the water cycle that it can be safely ignored. Generally, dilution is
only possible if the waste material is already naturally present and the amounts
discarded are small compared to the amounts already present.
Unfortunately, in many cases, the human production of such waste streams
exceeds the capacity of natural environments to absorb the volumes produced.
Even large reservoirs with large natural occurrences of a waste product may not
be able to absorb more. For example, changing the CO
2
-content of ocean water
by more than a few percent would result in a dramatic change in pH.
There are only two practical reservoirs to add CO
2
or carbonate to and store
in diluted form. One is the atmosphere, the other is the ocean. So far, dilution in
the atmosphere has been the method of choice, but the capacity of the atmo-
sphere has proven to be insucient as CO
2
concentrations are increasing
rapidly worldwide. The second large-scale reservoir for dilution is the ocean.
Roughly a third of all anthropogenic emissions have moved into the surface
ocean. Here too, the capacity to store CO
2
, which dissolves as carbonic acid,
seems more limited than that which is required. A possible alternative could be
the storage of dissolved carbonates or bicarbonates. This could be accom-
plished by transforming gaseous CO
2
into a water-soluble mineral carbonate or
bicarbonate that could then be added to the ocean. The storage capacity of the
ocean for dilute magnesium bicarbonate or (as has been suggested) calcium
carbonate, completely dwarfs the oceans capacity for storing carbonic acid.
The total volume of liquid CO
2
that could plausibly be produced during the
course of the 21
st
century is on the order of Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan
contains 5000 Pg of water; the worlds CO
2
emission has reached 30 Pg per year,
or 3000 Pg per century. While large, such numbers do not create an insur-
mountable obstacle in nding long-term storage sites. Indeed humans produce
similar amounts of groundwater.
26
As a result, storage options for CO
2
have
emerged below the ground, either below the continents or below the ocean
oor.
Another alternative is to store concentrated carbon-rich materials as car-
bonate. Soluble carbonate, such as sodium and potassium carbonates, will end
up in the ocean. However, solid materials can be piled up in a large site. This is
the concept of ex situ mineral sequestration.
27
6 Stabilising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations
Rather than starting with climate change and phrasing the problem as one of
greenhouse gas emissions, in the energy sector it may be more fruitful to think
about the problem as one of mobilising excess carbon. Conceptually, thinking
in terms of excess mobile carbon in the environment simplies nding a solu-
tion. By itself, excess carbon will redistribute itself between the mobile pools,
but its removal rate, or rate of natural sequestration, is very small. Essentially
10 Klaus S. Lackner
all the carbon that has been mobilised since the beginning of the industrial
revolution is still part of the mobile carbon pool. Thus, setting a limit on the
excess in the carbon pool eectively sets a limit on the total amount of carbon
that can be released by human enterprises.
If one restricts ones accounting to the atmosphere, this argument does not
quite apply. Since atmospheric CO
2
interacts rapidly with the ocean reservoir,
much CO
2
deposited in the atmosphere will eventually be withdrawn; however,
at the price of ocean acidication. Nevertheless, even for the atmosphere it is
not a bad approximation to consider the excess in the atmosphere a more-or-
less linear function of the amount of CO
2
emitted. However, for this approx-
imation to be useful, one needs to assume that half of the CO
2
that enters the
atmosphere is withdrawn on a relatively short timescale. At present, the annual
rise in CO
2
is approximately 60% of the rate of emissions. Even when equili-
brium is eventually reached about a quarter of the CO
2
will remain.
Thus, setting a stabilisation level for the atmosphere is nearly equivalent to
suggesting a nite total budget for carbon dioxide emissions.
28
If CO
2
is to be
stabilised at 450 ppm, this budget is very small. The world would have less than
30 years to achieve the turnaround necessary.
29
What is an acceptable level of CO
2
in the atmosphere is likely to be debated
for some time. There is no doubt that the impact of excess CO
2
in the atmo-
sphere already has been detected and that its presence has environmental
consequences. The severity of these impacts will grow as the CO
2
concentration
in the air rises. Quantication of these impacts is complex. It is not sucient to
understand the physical consequences of excess carbon in the environment; the
evaluation of these impacts also depends on social constructs which tell which
impacts are tolerable and which are not. In eect, one needs to understand
peoples pain threshold and their willingness to absorb damage.
It is also far from settled as to what extent a modern society will leave it to
future generations to deal with damage that is caused by them today, but will
only become manifest much later.
In addition, one will have to consider the publics risk aversion, when it
comes to small, but not insignicant, risks of sudden and severe changes which
result in grave consequences. In this category, one could consider positive
feedback based on large-scale methane releases from the permafrost regions in
the Northern Hemisphere, or the collapse of the annual Monsoon in large parts
of Southern Asia, which rely on predictable rainfall for agricultural production.
What is considered a safe level of carbon dioxide emissions varies widely,
from numbers as low as 350 ppm (as suggested by James Hansen)
30
to numbers
well above 550 ppm. It appears that the current consensus is around 450 ppm. If
450 ppm is the right level, this represents an exceedingly ambitious target. The
often-quoted target of 450 ppm, which is the CO
2
equivalent greenhouse gas
forcing of all greenhouse gases combined, is virtually unattainable. The current
equivalent greenhouse gas level is already at 435 ppm
31
and it is rising by more
than 2 ppm
e
per year.
If we assume that roughly half of the CO
2
remains in the atmosphere, 4 Pg of
carbon represents an increase of 1 ppm in the atmosphere. A stabilisation target
of 450 ppm of CO
2
would thus leave a remaining budget of 260 Pg of carbon.
The world is consuming 8 Pg of carbon per year. With an exponential decay in
consumption and a decay time of less than 33 years, the total emissions would
indenitely stay below 260 Pg of carbon. This is a very ambitious target,
requiring an annual world-wide reduction in emissions of 3%. In the context of
electric power generation, this target implies not only that all new plants must
not emit CO
2
, but that existing plants have to be rebuilt or phased out, because
typical turnover times in the power-plant stock are substantially longer than the
required decay rate in emissions.
If the stabilisation level were to be set much higher, e.g. 800 ppm (which is
generally considered to be a harmful level), it would still be necessary to start
reducing emissions today. Even with such a relaxed target, the above analysis
suggests that annual carbon emissions would have to be reduced by approxi-
mately 1% per year, which stands in stark contrast to the current annual
growth.
A 3% annual reduction in emissions needs to be compared to the aspiration
of a 3% annual growth in economic activity, which suggests that the
improvements in the worlds carbon intensity have to be in the order of 6% per
annum. Even xing the target at 800 ppm would require steady improvements
in carbon intensity in the order of 4% per year.
Thus, at this time, a debate over the correct level of stabilisation is misguided.
The major focus of any eort has to be an immediate emission reduction. Even
if the level of stabilisation were as high as 800 ppm, it would still be necessary to
cease creating energy infrastructures which lock into additional emissions. For
example, a Gigawatt coal-red power plant basically commits to a seventy-year
long emission, which adds up to half a petagram of CO
2
.
We conclude that it is impossible to solve the climate change problem
without curbing carbon dioxide emissions. This requires not only capture at the
large sources, but also capture at the small sources, which ultimately is best
done by capture from air. In order to solve the climate change problem, the
world will have to achieve a large-scale transition from the current energy
infrastructure to one that is essentially carbon neutral.
There are three policy and technology options with which to approach this
goal. The rst option is to use less energy. Energy savings, energy conservation
and improved energy eciency can help in reducing the carbon problem, but
they cannot by themselves solve the problem considering the huge growth in
demand. The second option is to eliminate current fossil sources and replace
them with non-fossil sources of energy that can ll the gap. This option is, in
principle, feasible, but it would eliminate the foundation of the current energy
infrastructure. The third option is to prevent the carbon dioxide that is asso-
ciated with the consumption of fossil fuels from accumulating in the atmosphere.
It is likely that all three options will play a part in the transition from todays
energy infrastructure to that of a future world economy. It is exceedingly
unlikely that any one of these three options will completely dominate the
transition. For that, the constraints, even in the absence of climate change,
would just be too large.
12 Klaus S. Lackner
There are, in principle, two more options. The rst one is to adapt to the
temperature and climate change. The second is to look for engineering solu-
tions that can stop climate change in the presence of increased greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere: the so-called geo-engineering options.
7 Geo-Engineering as a Means of Stabilising Climate
There are several geo-engineering approaches to managing climate or to stop
climate change.
3234
In the context of climate change, geo-engineering attempts
to prevent or counteract the warming associated with the greenhouse eect.
This could be done by various means. For example, one could inject sulfate
aerosols into the higher atmosphere so as to reect more incoming sunlight
back to space.
35,36
It would even be possible to intercept some of the sunlight
aimed for Earth in outer space and reect it away from Earth.
37
The resulting
reduction in solar ux reaching the ground would cause a general cooling that
counteracts the warming due to greenhouse gases.
Another approach to managing climate is to modify the existing, natural
carbon cycles on earth so as to remove more carbon from the atmosphere. It is,
for example, possible to fertilise the oceans in order to increase their CO
2
uptake. Other options include changing the alkalinity of the ocean, or to
rapidly grow biomass on land and store the resulting carbon. For these
methods to be successful, it is important that they remove carbon from the
atmosphere and store it in other carbon reservoirs. For example, the produc-
tion of charcoal or Terra Preta
38
relies on the fact that certain forms of gra-
phitic materials are quite stable in the environment and can thus be used to
store enormous amounts of carbon.
Climate stabilisation or carbon-cycle engineering are only some aspects of
geo-engineering. In general, any large-scale engineering eort that aims to
modify natural dynamical systems on Earth should be considered geo-engi-
neering. Some authors consider it necessary that these changes are deliberate
and not coincidental.
33
Otherwise, the use of fossil fuels, with climate change as
an unintentional byproduct, would be considered geo-engineering. In practice,
even intentional changes on a global scale are usually not considered geo-
engineering unless the purpose has been a global change. Otherwise, agri-
culture, which has changed entire continents but with a distributed and loca-
lised decision-making process, should be considered geo-engineering.
Nevertheless, an argument could be made that geo-engineering is already on
its way. There are large-scale human operations which impact global dynamical
systems, sometimes purposefully, sometimes by accident. Of course, the
boundary between geo-engineering and large local operations is vague. For
example, restructuring ecological systems and water ow in nearly continental
scale basins, should qualify as geo-engineering, particularly if one considers the
goal to be the provision of agricultural goods at a truly global scale.
It is likely that geo-engineering will quietly be introduced for a variety of
purposes. Often these will be uncontroversial purposes. Consider the reduction
of impacts from hurricanes, the steering away of hurricanes from land, the
irrigation of large desert lands, the re-routing of rivers in order to improve
climate and weather. These are all examples of incipient geo-engineering.
However, the currently popular discussions of global engineering for avoiding
climate change are applying geo-engineering concepts to a problem to which geo-
engineering is exceedingly ill-suited. If the earth were simply too hot or too cold,
then geo-engineering might be able to create a world in which this imbalance has
been addressed. This, however, is fundamentally dierent from a geo-engineering
approach, which must compensate for an ever-increasing imbalance in green-
house gases. It is a little like solving a municipal waste and sewage problem not
by managing euents and waste streams, but by putting houses on stilts to make
room for the garbage and propose an annual raising of the stilts.
While countering the greenhouse eect may work for a while, the larger the
eect, the less likely the two countervailing drivers will actually cancel out. At
rst sight, global warming and global cooling cancel each other out. However,
second-order eects are likely to be quite dierent. For example, the green-
house eect will lead to the largest amount of warming in Polar Regions, while
a simple change in albedo will lower temperatures most dramatically where the
sun shines.
Geo-engineering methods that create a change and do not need to be main-
tained are more easily managed than geo-engineering methods that require
continuous maintenance. In the case of managing the climate, not only does one
require continuous maintenance, but also a constantly increasing level of albedo
modication. As long as greenhouse gas concentrations rise, the albedo mod-
ication must increase in order to match the increasing greenhouse eect.
Continuous maintenance is costly and introduces large risks. It should
always be considered a second-best option and one which puts larger and larger
demands on future generations. This raises issues of inter-generational equity.
Geo-engineering for climate change demands that future generations will work
to counter this generations environmental impact. It is perfectly acceptable to
suggest that future generations may want to continue geo-engineering eorts
that provide for a better climate for their era and for all future generations. It
may even be necessary for future generations to maintain such a climate
because their population size may not be sustainable otherwise. In this case,
these future generations contribute to an eort which benets them directly.
However, in canceling out the greenhouse eect, the burden on future gen-
erations is solely to clean up after the present generation. Does the present
generation have the right to force future generations into large-scale geo-
engineering eorts solely to cancel out climate forcing which the present gen-
eration neglected to eliminate?
The argument has been made that the requirement for a maintained geo-
engineering eort also creates dangers to a modern society. Consider, for
example, that in times of war or economic turmoil, the world may not be able to
maintain sulfates in the stratosphere for albedo management. Whatever crisis
befalls the world, it would be exacerbated by its inability to manage the climate.
Temperatures may suddenly jump to much higher levels.
39
14 Klaus S. Lackner
While this argument has some merit, it does not introduce a fundamentally
new exposure to danger for humankind. Modern societies depend completely on
the availability of advanced infrastructures; without them, the ability to sustain
large populations would collapse. For example, modern societies critically
depend on uninterrupted food supplies based on high-tech agriculture, on the
delivery of clean water and the functioning of modern information-processing
systems, without which, for example, the banking system would collapse.
Thus, maintaining an albedo shield would add yet another risk factor, but it
would not qualitatively change humanitys dependence on advanced technol-
ogy. A more serious argument is that if all generations simply pass their
responsibilities down to future generations the burden on those generations may
simply become too large. After all, the assumption that future generations will
be wealthier and more advanced than our present generation is questionable.
Geo-engineering approaches do not solve the problem of excess carbon but
instead mask the symptoms for a time. However, as a bridging strategy they
should be seen in a dierent light. For example, the world may decide that the
current level of CO
2
in the atmosphere is already higher than is aordable.
Even with advanced technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere, it would take decades to reduce the greenhouse gas concentrations
to an acceptable level. If, during this time, one could reduce global warming
eects, or ocean rise, by actively steering the planet to a cooler climate, then
geo-engineering could serve a useful purpose.
Even then, one must carefully consider the risks and the unintended side-
eects of large-scale geo-engineering. Climate change concerns may tempt the
world into jumping into geo-engineering with both feet. It is an untested
technology, however, and may not work as well as predicted, or it may intro-
duce unintended side eects which could be very dicult to manage. It is quite
possible that geo-engineering becomes commonplace over time. It should be
introduced in a gradual manner though, whilst always retaining the option of
retreating to a prior state as necessary.
Jumping into such a program in an emergency is likely to create unantici-
pated hazards that are dicult to manage. Geo-engineering provides an
attractive approach to tackling climate change because it is perceived as a low
cost option. However, geo-engineering is a low-cost solution precisely because
it tries to leverage small eects into large impacts. The consequence of such an
approach is that if things do go wrong there is no way to control the system.
Furthermore, since geo-engineering does not solve the root cause of the pro-
blem, it will still remain necessary to rebuild the worlds energy systems so that
they become carbon neutral. Thus, geo-engineering will create large risks
without the concurrent benet of large cost savings.
8 Energy Sources, Energy Carriers and Energy Uses
The entire energy value chain is about converting energy from one form to
another. One typically starts with an energy source that is naturally available
but needs to be collected or harvested. This raw form of energy is then con-
verted into a form of energy that can be transported to the point of use and is
made available as needed. It is typically far cleaner than the original form of
energy. It therefore seems useful to logically separate the energy chain into
energy sources, energy carriers and energy applications. To give a specic
example, the coal coming out of the ground is an energy source, the electricity
produced is an energy carrier, and the motive power generated at the users
location feeds directly into the energy application. This chapter mainly deals
with energy sources, but (as for example in the transportation sector) it is
important that the energy carrier is well suited to the application, and the
choice of the energy carrier will often predetermine the choice of energy source.
Energy sources can be categorised as:
Chemical sources.
Thermal sources.
Electromagnetic radiation sources.
Mechanical sources.
Nuclear sources.
There are many dierent examples for each of these categories. Most natural
chemical energy sources are in the form of reduced carbon found in nature.
These include: fossil fuels, like coal, gas, oil, tar or shales. Chemical energy
sources also include biomass products, ranging from wood to algae matter and
to municipal waste which is often rich in biomass. It is, of course, possible to
broaden the category of chemical energy sources to the food people eat, and to
the salt used in the colder regions of the world to melt substantial quantities of
snow and ice.
Thermal sources vary widely in terms of temperature, size and quality. In
eect, thermal sources of energy always involve at least two thermal reservoirs;
one of them is often the ambient surroundings.
40
Therefore, one is often only
concerned with the second thermal reservoir. Usually, but not always, it is at a
higher temperature. These reservoirs include geothermal sources, which often
involve very high temperatures, and ocean thermal resources, which take
advantage of the temperature dierence between the ocean surface and the deep
ocean.
Direct sunshine is the only signicant source of electromagnetic radiation
energy, but it overwhelms all other sources of energy by a considerable margin.
The Earth is exposed to 170 000 TW of solar radiation, which completely
dwarfs human primary energy consumption at about 15 TW.
40
Mechanical sources of energy are often derived from sunshine. These include:
hydro-energy and wind energy. Mechanical energy can also be derived from
other sources. Tidal energy, for example, is ultimately derived from the gravita-
tional energy stored in the EarthMoon system.
While an argument could be made that sunshine is fundamentally a nuclear
energy source, we distinguish it from energy sources that are directly based on
nuclear energy harnessed here on earth. These are virtually limited to the use of
16 Klaus S. Lackner
isotopes of uranium and thorium, and certain isotopes of hydrogen and lithium
that could provide the basis for future fusion energy.
Energy carriers come in two distinct forms: networks that carry energy, like
pipelines and electric wires, and the physical implementations of chemical
energy that may ow through pipelines or are carried in individual containers,
like the gasoline tank on board of a vehicle or the battery pack in a computer or
a hybrid car.
Batteries, ywheels and ultra-capacitors are all means of carrying energy. So
are liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The advantage of the latter is that hydrocarbons
can carry up to 50 MJ per kilogram of uid, or close to that amount if one
accounts for the weight of the storage container. By contrast, ywheels, bat-
teries and even hydrogen storage lead to storage capacities which are far less.
Electric storage and mechanical storage is usually substantially less than
1 MJ kg
1
.
Finally, energy applications involve a last transformation of the energy into
the form the consumer requires, as, for example, motive power, heat, light or
chemical energy.
9 A Matter of Scales
For an energy resource to be important and successful in the 21
st
century, it
must be able to provide substantially more energy than any of the large energy
sources provide today. This is a formidable challenge, considering that all
energy sources are already considered hard pressed to satisfy current demand.
Diculties arise not only because the resource base may simply be too small,
but also because it is dicult to maintain the high rate of growth necessary to
keep up with demand. Concerns of this nature are not new. Already a hundred
years ago, there was a substantial concern that oil shortages would develop
because supply could not keep up with rapidly growing demand.
41
Estimates of future demand vary, in part because of dierent assumptions
about how much of a reduction in energy intensity can be achieved and how
much economic growth the world can hope to see. However, a growth in energy
demand by a factor of four over the course of the century would be a con-
servative estimate. Even such a slow demand growth would drive the primary
energy consumption rate to approximately 60 TW.
Even though it is unlikely that a single source of energy will end up satisfying
nearly all of the demand, it is equally dicult to see how the world could stitch
together a global energy infrastructure that is a quilt of small sources of many
dierent types that are loosely held together. Today, 81% of all energy comes
from fossil fuels. Large slices of energy seem necessary to support a stable
global energy system. Such slices would be on the order of 10 TW of primary
power.
Very large slices that could, in principle, provide 100 TW of primary power
would be able to support the entire worlds energy demand and should thus
receive particular consideration in future energy research and development.
Most energy resources would simply be unable to support such large energy
consumption. In some cases, if such a source were harnessed at the maximum
possible rate, it would still fail to satisfy the energy demand. In other cases it
could rise to a large output rate, but would be consumed in a very short time.
Even if the scale of the available resource were suciently large, environmental
concerns could directly limit its use. Fossil carbon energy sources without CCS
technology would fall into this category. Even though there is plenty of carbon
in the ground, the associated emissions would not be tolerated.
It is dicult to predict the constraints that will aect large-scale use of a
potential energy resource that is currently used at only a fraction of its potential
scale. While it may be possible to identify some issues, others will only become
obvious during scale-up.
Some looming obstacles may prove to be much less of a problem than
initially thought. Technological changes can easily make simple extrapolation
to much larger scales obsolete. Indeed, one should expect that a straightfor-
ward extrapolation from todays systems to those which are larger by one or
more orders of magnitude would result in systems that are impractical. A
current design will aim at current scales and may not incorporate features
necessary to operate on a signicantly larger scale. Problems which one may
have identied, and which initially seem insurmountable, may have easy
solutions which may be addressed long before the new larger scale has been
achieved.
On the other hand, a critical constraint on a technology may simply not be
recognised until the system has reached a very large scale. For example, at a
small scale of operation an euent stream, that proves hazardous on a very
large scale, may have been too insignicant to matter.
Climate change again provides a good example. Climate change is a direct
consequence of having reached a limit where the dilution of CO
2
into the
atmosphere is no longer sucient. Before one reaches this scale, the problem is
virtually invisible. In hindsight, we celebrate those researchers who recognised
the problem early, but there is a tendency to forget that many others argued
that the ability of the atmosphere to absorb CO
2
was much greater than it
ultimately proved to be. It is worth noting that Arrhenius, who did understand
the greenhouse eect, welcomed it as a positive attribute rather than a down-
side of fossil fuels.
42
As operations grow from kilowatt test stands to gigawatt utilities, and move
on to terawatt energy infrastructures, new issues constantly arise. Issues that
seemed trivial or too small to notice can suddenly become signicant. For
example, it took a large number of cars to see the impact of cars on air pol-
lution, and it took even longer to understand the subtle connections between
sunshine and ozone production. These problems were not anticipated, but were
resolved once automobile trac had reached a large scale.
The use of lead in gasoline provides another good example, where an initially
reasonable idea implemented at full scale causes serious problems. In the end,
lead was removed from gasoline because it interfered with catalytic converters,
but the most important advantage may have been to public health.
43
The
18 Klaus S. Lackner
realisation that lead solder in discarded electronics could prove to be proble-
matic required large quantities of discarded computers.
44
In harnessing energy sources it is, of course, important to consider the total
size of the resource and, if this proves to be adequate, one should consider the
density of the resource, as it becomes dicult to harness a resource for which
the size of the collection facility dwarfs the size of other human infrastructures.
Finally, one should consider all the environmental impacts of new energy
infrastructure as much as one possibly can, and consider uxes of euent or
releases to the atmosphere which are literally orders of magnitude larger than
those of today.
If energy systems harness energy ows in large-scale dynamical systems, the
question of feedback needs to be carefully considered. For example, it has been
shown that a large tidal power plant in the Bay of Fundy would have noticeable
eects on tides in the Boston area.
45
In short, it is important to think ahead,
identify problems before they occur, but be willing to be exible if problems
nd solutions, and also be prepared to encounter problems that were initially
not even considered.
10 Small Carbon-Neutral Energy
10.1 Ocean Tides, Waves and Currents
Ocean waves, ocean currents and ocean tides would be unable to provide the
power the world is consuming today. Individually they will always fall far short
of a 10 TW slice. Even together they could not add up to 10 TW without
severely changing ocean dynamics.
The actual dissipation of tidal energy can be measured because the slow-
down in the Earths rotational speed is detectable. Estimates for tidal dis-
sipation are around 34 TW,
46
which is less than the worlds primary energy
consumption of around 15 TW.
Wave energy systems aim to intercept the energy that otherwise dissipates
along the shores. Typically the power delivered by ocean swells approaching a
coastline ranges from 20 to 70 kWm
1
of coast. A high wave power is in the
order of 50 kWm
1
.
47
Wind transfers energy into ocean waves, and waves can
travel the width of the ocean. Indeed, it requires a long fetch for wave energy to
build up. For example, the wave energy arriving at the US East coast is far
smaller than that arriving at the US West coast, reecting the prevailing wind
patterns.
48
The energy content of waves in small ocean basins is signicantly
smaller than along open coastlines facing prevailing wind. Smaller bodies of
water cannot support large waves.
To obtain a rough estimate, we assume that one can intercept the waves
along ve dierent longitudes, viz. on the North and South American West
coast, along Europe and Africa, across the mid Indian Ocean and once more
before getting back to the West side of the Pacic Rim. This would create a
linear collector size of 100 000 km, which at 50 kWm
1
of input power would
pass 5 TW of wave energy through the collectors.
49
Of course, only a tiny fraction of this energy could be practically harvested.
Otherwise one would eectively convert ocean shore into lakefront. Stopping
waves before they reach the shore or shallow water on a larger scale will impact
sedimentation and the ecology of beaches.
50
Ocean currents carry kinetic energy, but the total amount is too small to
qualify it as a large energy source. Kinetic energy levels average between 50 and
100 J m
3
(ref. 51). Much higher levels are limited to small regions in the ocean.
If we generously assume that this level of kinetic energy can be found in the
top 10% of the ocean, then we can estimate the total energy available.
v
The
total volume of the ocean is 1.35 10
18
m
3
, resulting in a total kinetic energy
1.35 10
19
J. If this were extracted in the course of 1 year, the total available
power would be only 0.45 TW. It is worth noting that most of this energy is not
in the large currents in the ocean, like the Gulf Stream, but that most of it is in
the smaller eddies. Larger rings have an estimated spin-down time in the order
of a year. This suggests that at 0.45 TW, one would be extracting a large
fraction of the energy that is injected into the ocean by external forces.
52
Even large-scale ocean current collectors situated in places where the ocean
moves quickly, at 2 ms
1
, would have to be very large. The ow provides only
4 kWm
2
. Hence a collector that goes to 100 m depth would still need 2500 m
width to encounter 1 GW. Accounting for the limited eciency of a turbine, the
width probably would exceed 10 km. In eect, in order to collect 1 GW of
power, one would need to stop the water in a 100 m-thick layer over a square
kilometer every three minutes.
Ocean currents, while locally useful, certainly do not add up to a large slice of
the worlds energy demand. Even here one has to carefully consider the foot-
print of such an operation, as it is quite easy to reach scales of operation at
which the feedback onto the ocean currents cannot be neglected.
10.2 Hydroenergy
Hydroelectricity is a well-established, cost-eective form of renewable energy.
Wherever it has been implemented, it has helped support energy-intensive
industries like aluminum smelters that rely on particularly cheap forms of
electricity. Hydroelectricity can also play a role in energy storage. However,
there is not enough hydro-energy potential to run the world economy on
hydroelectricity.
Simple back of the envelope calculations show that hydroelectricity supply
is fundamentally limited. For example, the entire potential energy of the rain
that falls on the ground in the US during a year is less than the energy people
consume in the US.
53
Indeed, it is remarkable how close the US has come to
harnessing the entire potential of this enormous energy source, and it may well
be that hydroelectricity is already overused.
As a result, hydroelectric energy is likely to be deployed wherever it is readily
available. Whether it is harnessed in large installations or in small run of the
v
Estimates similar to this back of the envelope approach can be found in ref. 44.
20 Klaus S. Lackner
river operations, the total energy available is simply not enough to solve the
worlds energy problems.
10.3 Wind
There are plenty of analyses that show that the worlds wind potential far
exceeds current consumption and even likely future consumption.
54
Yet, har-
nessing the wind pushes against various environmental limits. Even without
direct environmental consequences to consider, there is a noticeable backlash
that is driven by the large size of wind installations. Wind energy is very dilute,
and hence its collection requires large installations.
A more serious concern is the feedback that dierent wind installations will
have on the wind eld. Taking wind energy out of the atmosphere will change
the dynamics of the atmosphere. While it is true that the total taken out is still
small compared to the total wind power added by solar input, the change is
large enough to start feeding back on the dynamics of the system.
We estimated the total kinetic energy in the ocean currents at about 10
19
J.
The total kinetic energy in the air is about 1.3 MJ m
2
or roughly 7 10
20
J
(ref. 55), i.e. two orders of magnitude larger than for the ocean. Thus at a
10 TW extraction rate, it would still take two years to extract all the kinetic
energy present in the wind eld. This is substantially longer than the spin-down
time. The power dissipation from the wind eld to the ground is approximately
300 TW (ref. 40). Hence, a 10 to 60 TW wind power system could noticeably
aect the wind eld.
The interactions between energy extraction and energy injection into the
wind eld are quite complex. In eect, large scale wind installations increase the
roughness of the ground and thereby increase the rate of energy dissipation
from higher altitude to the ground. Rather than having to transfer energy
through very thin boundary layers, large installations are ecient in extracting
wind energy at larger vertical scales, increasing the eciency of energy removal.
This, in turn, will aect the wind eld, and model calculations have shown that
the indirect impacts on the climate of these changes are also signicant. Indeed
it has been suggested by Keith et al.
56
that gigawatt for gigawatt, the climate
eects of wind energy and fossil energy are quite comparable. This suggests that
wind, too, is unlikely to provide a 10 TW slice of power.
10.4 Biomass
Photosynthesis has proven itself as a large-scale carbon cycle in which
approximately 100 Pg of carbon move back and forth between the atmosphere
and biological matter on an annual basis.
57
Much of this carbon, like leaf
detritus, is only maintained for a very short time; some part of the biological
cycle is stored for many decades, and a tiny proportion is tied up on geological
timescales. Coal seams appear to be ancient biomass. On the other hand, the
entire reserve of fossil fuels represents the biomass production of a few decades.
Accelerating biomass growth, or inducing enlarged storage of biomass,
provides another avenue for eliminating the human carbon footprint. There are
several issues one needs to consider carefully. Firstly, will the added storage
lead to the production of dierent and potentially more potent greenhouse
gases? Crutzen et al.
58
have suggested that enhanced plant growth would raise
the emissions of N
2
O, which is a far stronger greenhouse gas than CO
2
and
would thus cancel out the total CO
2
reductions.
Another obvious concern is the production of methane that could be released
to the atmosphere. As biomass decays, a fraction will be released as methane
rather than CO
2
. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO
2
and even if only a few percent of this additional biomass nd their way into the
atmosphere as methane, the net advantage of storing organic carbon may be
cancelled out.
A third concern is long-term stability. The carbon stored in this way is not
thermodynamically stable and it needs to be protected from decay. It may be
possible to achieve long-term storage by carefully treating the biomass. The
production of charcoal has been suggested.
59
A special implementation of this approach is the creation of Terra Preta, a
particularly inert charcoal-rich form of soil that has been introduced in the
Amazon region. Whether the long-term stability of this method is sucient, or
whether bacterial action or, for example, termite action, could remobilise the
carbon so stored, is far from clear.
Lastly, there is the issue of how much land one would need to store CO
2
. For
example, all standing biomass contains around 600 Pg of carbon and soil
carbon adds around 1400 Pg of carbon. Hence, these reservoirs do not appear
large enough to absorb all carbon.
Finally, there is the option of reusing the carbon from biomass. In eect,
biomass can displace fossil fuels and be used to create more fuel. This is a
combination of CO
2
capture from air and fuel production. The question
remains whether one can do it on the necessary scale. Biomass conversion at
best occurs at 3 Wm
2
, which means that a 10 TW eort would require land
comparable in size to all the agricultural land. It is dicult to see how the world
could commit that much agricultural land at a time when food production itself
is considered under pressure.
10.5 Geothermal
The geothermal potential is very large.
60
At present, the technology is limited to
special locations with very steep thermal gradients, resulting in very large
temperature dierentials between the surface and the geological reservoir.
Iceland, Kenya and some locations in California are good examples. In such
locations of unusually high heat ux it may even be possible to treat the
reservoir as a renewable source of energy.
It is also possible to think of geothermal heat as a non-renewable resource.
One is in eect mining heat energy from rock. In principle this can be done
22 Klaus S. Lackner
anywhere, and the scale is large but not completely unlimited. A cubic kilo-
meter of rock contains roughly 3 10
15
J of energy for every degree Kelvin of
temperature change. In a densely populated area (4300 km
2
) and with 10 kW
of primary consumption, which amounts to an energy need of 3 MWkm
2
, this
could be satised with a 1 km-thick layer for approximately 300 years. The
unknown is the rate at which one could extract energy and the consequences of
the wholesale hydrofracture of entire regions. Note too, that this approach does
not lend itself to large-scale operations. A gigawatt power plant would have to
draw on a 25 km by 25 km area, if it were to reduce temperatures by 10 K
through a thickness of 1 km over the course of 60 years. Use of low-grade heat,
or heat at extreme depth, is at present not quite feasible. What impacts such
large-scale cooling of underground reservoirs would have is largely unknown.
Ocean thermal energy has similar scale limitations. Assuming one can utilise
a 25K thermal gradient at 5 percent eciency while causing a temperature drop
of 10K, one would require roughly 500 m
3
of water per second, or 40 million
tons a day. Nevertheless, OTEC has been estimated as a large potential source
of energy, in the order of 10 TW.
61
In summary, many of the possible energy resources are simply not large
enough to operate at the scale necessary to satisfy a substantial fraction of the
worlds energy demand. In some cases, like geothermal energy and wind energy,
they are large enough, but raise serious questions about the environmental
impact of large-scale deployment.
11 The Three Truly Big Energy Resources
There are three sources of energy that seem large enough to satisfy the worlds
energy demand without being stressed and without having obvious large-scale
environmental impacts that unavoidably would make their use at the global
scale impossible. These three options are nuclear energy, solar energy and fossil
energy combined with carbon capture and storage. All three are plausible
candidates for being the dominant energy source of the future, but none of
them is actually ready to provide energy at the necessary large scale without
substantial advances over the current state of the art.
11.1 Nuclear Energy
The closest to being ready for large-scale deployment is nuclear energy. Nuclear
energy already has been demonstrated on a large scale. In 2000, France covered
most (77%) of its electricity demand with nuclear energy, Japan generated 29%
and the United States 20% of its electricity from nuclear power generation.
62
Even though operation at large scale has been demonstrated, there still
remain serious questions about the nuclear waste material that is produced. No
country has reached a fully institutionalised and accepted solution of this
problem. While it may be technically feasible to dispose of the waste, in practice
this has remained an obstacle in most countries using nuclear energy.
Furthermore, natural uranium resources may not be large enough to support
the much larger demand, which would arise if nuclear ssion were to take on an
important role in the worlds energy supply. At ten-to-fty times current
consumption, the proven reserves would be depleted in a few decades.
63
On the
other hand, reserve numbers in the absence of demand should always be con-
sidered uncertain. A large expansion of nuclear energy may well go hand in
hand with a transition to fusion or, at a very least, with a transition to breeding
fuel from natural uranium and natural thorium. Fuel reprocessing combined
with breeding would greatly reduce the size of the waste disposal issue and it
would completely change the resource calculus. Utilisation of these two addi-
tional isotopes would raise resource estimates by two orders of magnitude,
mainly because of much higher fuel utilisation and the addition of thorium,
which is more abundant than uranium.
63
Breeding and fuel reprocessing raise serious questions about the security of
the fuel supply, and proliferation resistance of the technology becomes the
highest priority. There are technological and political issues that would need to
be sorted out, since it is, in principle, possible to create weapon-grade ssile
material in the reprocessing cycle and the dangers of this process need to be
addressed.
Security will likely require the internationalisation of the fuel cycle. This is
foremost a political problem. Thus, the future of nuclear energy, to a large
extent, will depend on the ability to create the institutional framework in which
it can thrive.
11.2 Solar Energy
The introduction of solar energy is mainly limited by cost and distribution
issues. It is likely that solar energy will begin to play a larger and larger role, but
its dilute nature makes it intrinsically more expensive than other options. For
example, at 20% eciency, a solar panel in a desert climate would still need
20 m
2
to produce on average power output of 1 kW.
vi
A car engine, which
comfortably ts under the hood of a car, is easily capable of producing in excess
of 100 kW of power. This suggests that solar power could always feel strong
competition from fossil fuels.
The intermittent nature of solar energy also requires that solar electricity be
cheaper than electricity that can be delivered on demand. How much cheaper it
needs to be will depend on the cost of electricity storage which, at present, is not
available at the necessary scale. On the other hand, chemical conversions
become feasible if the primary electricity that is produced at a solar panel is
roughly three times cheaper than the electricity that is generated to satisfy an
immediate demand. Thus the long-term goal of solar energy development
should not just be to reach parity with coal electricity, but to undercut coal
electricity by about a factor of three.
vi
Average insolation in a desert climate is between 200 and 250 W m
2
.
24 Klaus S. Lackner
The dilute nature of the solar ux brings with it a potential for environmental
limitations. Large installations will occupy large amounts of land which cer-
tainly will impact local environments. On the other hand, while the land-use
numbers are large, they are much smaller than for biomass production. Sur-
prisingly, they are not much larger than for coal mining operations, specically
for surface mining.
This land-use argument can be seen by comparing the energy collected by a
solar panel in 30 years with the energy content of a 1 m-thick seam of coal
below the land. In eect, the panel may produce about 30 GJ of electric power,
while the coal seam may contain 30 GJ of chemical energy. Therefore, the land
use in the two situations is not as dierent as it may appear at rst sight. In
mining a coal seam, it may take decades for the land to be reclaimed and in
some cases it will never be reclaimed. In a matter of decades a solar panel which
occupies a similar amount of land will produce a similar amount of energy.
At present, solar electric power is in nearly all situations still too expensive to
compete against other options. The only way for it to compete is with price
support as, for example, in Germany.
64
It is likely, however, that prices will
come down dramatically, particularly for the production of photovoltaic cells.
A more dicult question is whether these dramatic reductions will give solar
energy a competitive edge or whether other energy sources will take their
intrinsic advantages and also reduce cost.
Solar energy conversion technologies range from photovoltaic to low-grade
solar heat. Apart from the large land-use concern, it is dicult to anticipate
specic environmental issues as each approach to solar energy will raise its own
and idiosyncratic environmental concerns. Photovoltaic cells made of silicon
may create upstream environmental issues during production, as they involve
substances that are hazardous,
65
but silicon itself is a common element and it
poses no serious environmental concerns if it is left exposed to the elements. On
the other hand, gallium arsenide, cadmium telluride and similar heavy metals
will pose serious environmental concerns that will need to be addressed. As a
consequence, First Solar, a photovoltaic company, has promised that it will
take back the solar panels after they reach the end of their useful life.
vii
11.3 Fossil Fuels with Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage
The third option that is not limited by resource constraints is fossil energy.
While there may be a real worry about limitations in the oil and gas supply
there are no real limitations in the coal supply. Using the Hubbert curve
66
and
applying it to coal seems foolhardy, as there is plenty of evidence that the cost
of coal mining has been driven mainly by other concerns than resource lim-
itations. The fact that Britain, France and Germany have severely depleted
vii
First Solar Inc. has announced on http://www.rstsolar.com/recycle_modules.php that anyone in
possession of a First Solar Panel can return it for recycling free of charge. First Solar is setting
aside funds for this transaction. See also Reuters, First Solar to Supply Modules for Australias
Largest Solar PV Installation http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS11909+29-Apr-
2009+BW20090429.
their original coal supplies is not necessarily proof that coal is running out. In
part, the exploitation of coal in these countries with a small land area has been
so intensive that an extrapolation from their scale to the full world scale would
actually result in unrealistically high estimates of mineable coal.
If land areas all over the world could yield as much coal as land in Britain,
which has extracted 28 Pg of coal,
67,68,viii
the total world coal resources would
be 50 000 Pg of coal, roughly ten times larger than typical coal estimates.
Germany may have more or less mined out the coal seams in the Ruhr Valley,
but it still has much larger resources in terms of lower quality brown coal.
While higher grade fossil fuel resources may be more desirable, there are no
fundamental obstacles in introducing lower grade hydrocarbon fuels as the
basic source of energy.
Estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary and they are naturally highly uncer-
tain.
69
However, estimates uniformly suggest that the resource base is measured
in thousands (if not tens of thousands) of petagrams (1 Pg 10
15
g) of carbon.
This should be compared to a past consumption of around 350 Pg of carbon
since the beginning of the industrial revolution, which marks the start of the
fossil fuel era. Fossil energy resources are not running out. In spite of some
critics points of view,
70,71
it is important to realise that there is still a con-
siderable resource base even if the proven reserve is a very uncertain number.
This view of a nearly unlimited supply of fossil fuels is fully compatible with a
nite resource that eventually will run out. There is good reason to believe that
there is at least 5000 Pg of carbon that could be extracted from the ground.
72
Improved extraction technology, additional discoveries, or a combination of
these two, could easily drive these estimates even higher. Nevertheless, the total
consumption of fossil fuels would be limited at about 10 000 Pg of carbon, even
if more carbon were available. At this point oxygen depletion of the air would
become serious. A kilogram of oxygen supports approximately 14 MJ of heat of
combustion. (The variation between coal, oil and gas is small as the dierence
in their heat content scales directly with the amount of oxygen required). Hence
at 100 TW it would take ve thousand years to burn through the entire
atmosphere (10
6
Pg of oxygen). Thus, if we somewhat arbitrarily set the limit at
a 5% reduction in oxygen, the oxygen reserve would last less than 250 years. If
the oxygen were used for the combustion of natural gas (e.g. from methane
hydrates), this would have led to the consumption of 10 000 Pg of carbon.
Clearly, the carbon dioxide limit hits much earlier than the oxygen limit.
Therefore, access to fossil fuels is predicated on the availability of carbon
capture and storage technology, which in turn depends on a capacity to store
CO
2
. Rather than being limited by fossil carbon resources, access to fossil fuels
may well be limited by CO
2
storage capacity.
Within the community of researchers who investigate underground geolo-
gical storage of CO
2
, there seems to be a general consensus that CO
2
storage
volumes are sucient to store all the CO
2
that could possibly be produced.
73,74
viii
Total production of coal in Great Britain is obtained by adding up all entries in references 67 and
68 and interpolating log-linearly on missing data in the early years.
26 Klaus S. Lackner
It is necessary, however, to consider the sheer size of the storage volumes.
For example, the IPCC report on Carbon Capture and Storage
74
states expli-
citly that Alberta alone could store 4 000 Pg of CO
2
in the sedimentary basin.
This would inject a volume into the underground formation that spread over
the entire province of Alberta would be a layer 6 m thick. In a recent paper, we
suggested that an equivalent amount of water was removed and desalinated so
that it could be used as part of the conventional water cycle. The additional cost
would be small compared to the total cost of CO
2
disposal, but it would add
another cost item to the overall cost of fossil energy.
75
Ultimately, fossil fuels will have to compete with other energy resources in
the market. Today, fossil fuels are cheaper than most other alternatives, but the
price of fossil energy does not include the cost of dealing with climate change. If
fossil fuel consumption is combined with carbon dioxide capture and storage,
the environmental concern over carbon dioxide emissions is removed, but at a
nancial cost. At present this cost is considered quite high. Some suggest that
CCS will not be introduced until prices reach $100 per ton of CO
2
. Certainly in
the long term one can expect lower prices, somewhere between $30 and $50 per
ton of CO
2
.
74
If this cost goal is indeed reached, then fossil fuel resources could
compete with other energy sources.
The use of fossil energy resources raises other environmental issues, apart
from climate change, that also will need to be addressed. For example, mining
impacts, particularly for coal and tar extraction, tend to be large. The man-
agement of ash, sulfur, ne particulates and heavy metals will also need to be
considered. Combining CO
2
capture with zero emission power plants may
provide a particularly attractive way of solving these problems.
76,77
Under-
ground coal gasication may reduce the mining impact by avoiding the
extraction of unwanted material, but it also mobilises gaseous species that need
to be contained.
11.4 Summary
In summary, it is far from clear which of these three big energy resources is
likely to dominate future energy supplies. All three have the resource depth to
supply the necessary energy and, in this regard, they stand out among all
possible options.
All three require future development before they are ready to operate at the
full scale. Advocates of nuclear energy will have to solve its acceptance problem,
nd ways of dealing with a full-scale breeding programme and manage the
security and safety of nuclear material cycle, without signicantly raising cost.
Solar energy, particularly in the electricity sector, will have to become much
more cost ecient before it can compete with other energy resources. While
there is no obvious oor to the price of solar energy, progress in the last few
decades has been slow.
Finally, fossil fuel technology would have to rely on a largely untested car-
bon capture and storage technology that has not yet been proven at scale. Even
though CCS appears feasible, it needs to be proven that CO
2
capture and
storage can be performed at aordable prices.
12 Capture of Carbon Dioxide Directly from Ambient Air
The continued use of fossil fuels could be made more acceptable, if carbon
dioxide capture from the atmosphere proves to be a practical solution. Such air
capture would make it possible to leave the current infrastructure intact and
introduce carbon dioxide reductions without having to modify the existing
energy infrastructure.
It is technically feasible to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. The
technology has been used for decades to remove carbon dioxide from the air
inside submarines or spacecraft. Technologies for removing carbon dioxide
from ambient air have been used in the past to create carbon dioxide-free air
prior to air liquefaction. Processes using strong alkaline solutions have been
investigated by a number of authors.
7882
We have recently shown that it is possible to develop very low cost processes
for the capture of carbon dioxide from the air,
83
which could make carbon
management by direct CO
2
capture feasible.
The direct capture of CO
2
from air (or air capture) is in many ways ana-
logous to collecting energy from the wind. Windmills reduce CO
2
accumulation
in the air by avoiding emissions. Air capture devices extract CO
2
from the air
and thus also reduce the CO
2
load of the atmosphere. By removing all the
CO
2
from a cubic meter of air, one enables the carbon-neutral combustion
of a small amount of gasoline, enough to produce 10 000 J of heat. By capturing
all the kinetic energy from a cubic meter of air, one avoids the CO
2
which is
made in the generation of 20 J of energy. Hence, removing CO
2
from the air is
far more powerful than extracting kinetic energy from the air. By using the
heat of combustion of gasoline as a conversion factor, we nd that CO
2
collection requires about 500 times less air than producing an equivalent
amount of energy with a windmill. This suggests that contacting the air for CO
2
is far cheaper than contacting the air for wind energy.
84
The cost of the air
capture process is not in contacting the air, but in the cost of managing the
sorbent cycle.
The basic process is conceptually very similar to the scrubbing of ue gas in a
chimney stack. In both cases, one uses a chemical sorbent to bind carbon
dioxide as the gas ows over sorbent surfaces. Early attempts used sodium
hydroxide, but the binding energy of CO
2
to NaOH is unnecessarily high. The
challenge to the designer is to nd a sorbent that binds carbon dioxide strongly
enough to remove it from ambient air, yet does not bind so strongly as to make
the regeneration of the sorbent expensive. Since the minimum required binding
energy scales only logarithmically with the concentration of CO
2
in the euent
of the collector, the dierence in binding energy between what is required for
CO
2
capture in the ue stack and what is required at air capture is small. Indeed
most sorbents that work in a ue stack are also capable of collecting CO
2
from
28 Klaus S. Lackner
the air. One takes advantage of the fact that air capture does not need to deplete
the air of CO
2
, whereas the ue gas scrubber needs to remove essentially all
of the CO
2
that is present in the ue gas.
One of the most interesting sorbents used in ue gas scrubbing is ammonia,
which is cycled between ammonium carbonate and ammonium bicarbonate.
This approach to ue gas scrubbing takes advantage of the fact that it is far
easier to recover carbon dioxide from a bicarbonate, than it is from a carbonate
that would have to be converted into a hydroxide.
The air-capture sorbent we developed also takes advantage of a swing that
operates between carbonate and bicarbonate.
83
Here the base is a solid, an
anionic exchange resin, which is typically used for water preparation purposes.
The material is a strong base, with a quaternary amine attached to a poly-
styrene backbone. One can think of the quaternary amine ion as the analog to
an NH
4
1
, where every hydrogen atom has been replaced with an organic chain
that is anchored in the polymer matrix. Since the material cannot donate a
proton, it is a strong base that mainly diers from a strong sodium hydroxide
or sodium carbonate solution in that the positive ions are rmly attached to the
polymer structure. The charge density of the material is approximately
1.7 mol kg
1
. In its capacity to hold carbon dioxide, the resin thus resembles a
1.7 molar solution of sodium hydroxide.
The cycle is run by changing the resin from a dry state to a wet state. We
found experimentally that the resin when it is dry wants to hold CO
2
, and when
it is wet it gives it back. Therefore, we refer to the cycle as a humidity or
moisture swing. The moisture swing is performed by moving the sorbent lter
from an open air stream into a closed chamber. After pumping the residual air
out of the chamber, the resin is exposed to moisture and subsequently it releases
CO
2
into a low pressure gas stream, which is then pressurised, cleaned and
made ready for re-use or sequestration.
83
Air capture becomes naturally a part of a more broadly applied CCS strategy.
Air capture is a form of capture and it is the capture of last resort. If capture at
the point of emission is not possible or excessively expensive, air capture at any
other place in the world oers a real alternative. Since air mixes rapidly, it is
possible to cancel out an emission in North America in the Australian desert.
Air capture would typically occur at the disposal site. The additional cost of air
capture can thus be partially oset by much smaller transport costs.
The price of air capture would put an upper limit on the price of managing
carbon. If all else fails, air capture is always a viable capture option and thus it
can be applied to all types of emissions. It can even deal with emissions that
occurred in the past.
Once the price of air capture becomes aordable, the cost of dealing with all
CO
2
emissions becomes manageable. Rather than ending up with a cost curve
that moves steeply up as the world economy approaches carbon neutrality, the
cost curve with air capture will rise from the low cost of other forms of capture
in small niches to eventually the cost of air capture. This cost should be more or
less independent of the total amount captured and the total amount stored.
Presumably the price of air capture will gradually drop if more is done. In any
event, air capture which provides a method of last resort can be used to mop up
after cars, air planes, or any other emitters with a dicult local capture situa-
tion. On occasion that could include a power plant which cannot be aordably
retrotted, because the space to do so is not available, or because it is located in
an urban setting, which makes running a new pipeline prohibitively expensive.
Generally speaking, the lower the cost of air capture, the larger its potential
market in sequestration. If it comes close to the cost of retrotting, then it could
develop into a viable alternative to retrotting. Otherwise it may be limited to
special applications where no other options are available. Air capture is par-
ticularly well suited to recapture the carbon dioxide released from the trans-
portation sector.
Air capture has been categorised as a form of geo-engineering in the public
press and by a number of authors.
85
However, air capture in its simple initial
applications should not be considered geo-engineering. It is far more akin to
capture at the tailpipe than geo-engineering. It is about balancing out specic
emissions rather than engineering the composition of the atmosphere. The
purpose of air capture is to prevent the accumulation of excess carbon in the
environment. The only unusual feature of the approach is that one can take the
CO
2
back, even after it has been released into the atmosphere.
However, air capture becomes a tool of geo-engineering when it is used as
part of a control system that attempts to set the carbon dioxide in the air to a
particular level, especially if this level is dierent from the pre-industrial level.
For example, the world could decide that going back to 280 ppm is not only too
expensive, but also not desirable. If that were the case, air capture which allows
one to hold a constant CO
2
level regardless of changes in the natural carbon
cycle would become a tool for geo-engineering.
This, however, is futuristic. Such control can only be achieved, once all the
carbon in the modern human infrastructure is managed in some form or
another. Only after all emissions have been compensated for would it become
possible to hold the CO
2
concentration in the atmosphere constant or to drive it
toward a particular level.
Any emission to the atmosphere will stay in the air for a very long time.
Hence, it is not possible to close the carbon cycle in the presence of air emis-
sions of CO
2
, unless one deploys air capture technologies. In eect, air capture
is a necessary part of the anthropogenic carbon cycle as long as fuels are
combusted and the CO
2
is released to the air. The cycle may be closed by taking
carbon out of the ground and sequestering it after capture, or the cycle may be
closed, just as in the case of biomass, by recreating the fuel which produced the
CO
2
with the input of additional non-fossil energy.
The basic concept of fuel re-use is that there are well established means of
creating synthetic fuels from carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H
2
). A
mixture of these two gases is commonly known as synthesis gas (or syngas)
and it provides the starting point for many dierent synthesis routes to various
energy-rich compounds which can be used as fuels. FischerTropsch reactors
can produce synthetic diesel or gasoline from synthesis gas. Synthesis gas, or
even a mixture of CO
2
and H
2,
can be used as the starting point for methanol
30 Klaus S. Lackner
synthesis. Pure carbon can be produced from carbon monoxide through the
Boudouard reaction. (2CO " C+CO
2
). Plenty of other substances can be
produced from these starting points.
There are a number of ways of creating H
2
and CO from water and CO
2
. We
believe that the thermal decomposition of H
2
O or CO
2
is expensive and thus
should be avoided. However, technologies have been developed for the thermal
decomposition of CO
2
.
86
Electrochemical separations are usually more e-
cient. One requires at least one electrochemical step in the cycle, where one
produces H
2
from H
2
O, or CO from CO
2
, or possibly a combination of the two
from a mixture of CO
2
and H
2
O.
In eect, one uses an electrochemical means of freeing the oxygen that is tied
up with carbon and hydrogen. It is only necessary to perform electrolysis on
one of the two compounds because it is quite easy to shift the remaining oxygen
from carbon to hydrogen or vice versa. Moving oxygen from water to CO, to
produce CO
2
, is known as the watergas shift reaction. The transfer of oxygen
between hydrogen and carbon is feasible in either direction. As a result, one can
produce H
2
and CO, by electrolyzing either H
2
O or CO
2
.
Creating synthetic fuels from carbon dioxide that has been collected by
technical air capture would parallel the concept of a hydrogen economy,
resulting in a non-fossil, but carbon-based energy economy. In this case, air
capture would move away from carbon capture and storage and instead sup-
port carbon capture and re-use. Since CO
2
is a gas that, at least in the trans-
portation sector, is best released into the air, the only practical way to close the
carbon cycle is the use of air capture. Fuel production is the only viable re-use
option, as otherwise the accumulation of oxidised carbon will unavoidably
result in a large waste stream.
The advantage of making carbon-based fuels is that they have more desirable
properties than any other form of energy storage. They are typically liquids
and, even counting the weight of the container tank, they can reach remarkable
energy densities when compared to hydrogen tanks or batteries. The ease of
handling and the high energy density of liquid fuels make them highly desirable.
If the world were running on hydrogen or batteries, liquid carbon-based fuels
would be considered a major advance.
Air capture thus becomes an important building block in the development of
sustainable energy options. Air capture combined with carbon sequestration
makes it possible to let the current infrastructure live out its natural life.
Combined with renewable energy, air capture can build a new carbon energy
infrastructure. In a world where primary energy comes in the form of electric
power, liquid chemical fuels will be at a premium. Air capture makes it possible
to create these fuels without recourse to fossil fuel resources.
13 A Revolution in the Energy Sector
To move from a carbon-emitting energy infrastructure to a carbon-neutral
energy infrastructure requires a revolution in the energy sector. If we follow
Pacala and Socolows suggestion, then it is necessary at the very least to hold
CO
2
emissions constant for the next fty years.
87
This is not a very ambitious
goal, which would leave us with about 480 ppm of CO
2
at the end of fty years,
and with an additional increase to about 550 ppm over the following fty years
being almost unavoidable. Thus, it would lead at minimum to a level of
550 ppm for the stabilisation point.
Even with this rather unambitious scenario, however, one still will need to
build a new energy infrastructure over the next fty years which is substantially
larger than the existing energy infrastructure, and which has
to be, for all practical purposes, carbon neutral. The new energy infrastructure
may emit some CO
2
if the existing infrastructure is upgraded to reduce its
emissions by an equivalent amount. More likely than not, the total energy
demand in fty years from now will have more than doubled. A simple dou-
bling would imply an anaemic annual growth rate of 1.4%. In the last 20 years
this rate was closer to 2% per year,
ix
which would result in a total growth in
demand by a factor of 2.7.
In laying out a scenario for the future one can discern several stages.
21
First,
the electricity sector will have to move toward carbon neutrality. Then one will
have to address emissions in the commercial sectors. Cement plants and steel
plants must become carbon neutral. Emissions from homes and oce buildings
have to be reduced gradually to zero. Finally the transportation sector must be
addressed, either by introducing dierent fuels or by introducing air capture
technology.
For the electricity sector to move toward carbon neutrality, one is in eect
proposing a transition to power plants which have no carbon dioxide emissions
to the atmosphere. This could be because they are nuclear power plants, or are
based on renewable energy, or because they capture the carbon dioxide that
they produce. Such a transition, in itself, is a major challenge, because it is
counter to the current, worldwide trend of building preferentially the lowest-
cost, pulverised coal-red power plants.
While developed countries are wringing their hands over Chinas ambitious
electrication project, in proportion to their population size they are not doing
much better. Consider, for example, Germany, a stalwart of environmental
protection, which apparently has 25 large coal-red power plants on the
drawing board or in the early stages of construction.
88
Most of these plants will
be built within the next three years, giving the country 78 new power plants
per year. Prorated by its size of population, Germany has a similar rate of
construction of power plants to China.
Thus, the world has not yet seriously embarked on the transition of the
electricity sector, which is just the rst step toward holding CO
2
levels at about
550 ppm. If stabilisation goals were to become more ambitious, it would clearly
be insucient to simply make new plants carbon neutral, a complete transition
ix
During the 26 years in the EIA data set, the growth has been 1.9%, leaving out the rst six years
eliminates the economic slowdown of the early 1980s and results in an annual growth of 2.0%.
http://website www.eia.doe.gov.
32 Klaus S. Lackner
to carbon neutrality for all plants would be required. However, even with
carbon capture and storage installed, todays power plant designs are not
carbon neutral. Currently, scrubbing in existing power plants aims to get 90%
of the CO
2
back. If a power plant lost 30% eciency, the avoided CO
2
is in the
order of 85% of current emissions. Hence the residual emissions are still 15% of
the original emissions. Assuming that the entire electricity sector reduces its
CO
2
emissions to 15% of the current level, overall emission reductions will
reach about 35%.
Further reductions are necessary, and this requires the gradual intro-
duction of other options. The concept of capture at the source can be easily
extended to cement plants, steel plants and to some renery operations.
However, for small sources, the introduction of carbon capture and storage
becomes quite dicult.
For the commercial and the home sectors it is possible to achieve a sub-
stantial amount of decarbonisation by switching to electricity, or carbon-free
fuels. One might expect that the introduction of the all-electric home is more
likely than the hydrogen-heated home. Either approach would greatly reduce
CO
2
emissions, provided that the central generation station eliminates or
greatly reduces its CO
2
emissions. This transition does not necessarily result in
lower energy eciency. For example, heat generation could be covered by heat
pumps, which for small temperature dierences tend to have coecients of
performance well in excess of one, and often the heat transfer exceeds the
chemical energy content of the fuel consumed at the power plant.
High temperature applications may be an exception to this rule. Except for
very large installations, the use of hydrogen or electricity may be the only
alternatives to decarbonising the process directly on site. Another option to
consider in such cases is air capture technology.
Decarbonising the transportation sector is more dicult than decarbonising
other sectors, because here the advantage of liquid hydrocarbon fuels are evi-
dent. Gasoline has a substantial advantage over batteries and hydrogen both in
the way it is stored and can be used. Air planes depend on jet fuel and it would
be extremely dicult to take its advantages away. For cars, gasoline is clearly
the preferred choice. The advantages of liquid hydrocarbon fuels not only make
it dicult to decarbonise the transportation sector, it is also the root cause of
the worlds excessive dependence on oil.
If it proved too dicult in the past to move away from petroleum to avoid
the political costs of an over-dependence on oil, one must wonder whether the
concerns over climate change will be sucient to succeed where oil cartels
failed. It may, however, be argued that both concerns together will be more
successful in reducing the use of oil in the transportation sector.
Hydrocarbon consumption by cars could be signicantly reduced even
without abandoning fossil fuels. Fuel mileage has improved over the years, and
the introduction of high eciency diesel engines in Europe and hybrid cars in
Japan and the US has created a noticeable improvement in eciency. Better
battery technology and the introduction of plug-in hybrids may herald a time
when liquid fuel consumption on board of cars will be limited to long trips.
Short trips, which represent the bulk of all travel, could well be covered by
electric power supplies.
On the other hand, the convenience of liquid hydrocarbon fuels should not
be underestimated. To make their use carbon-neutral requires air capture,
either in the guise of biofuels or in a system that is based on synthetic fuels.
However, realistically, synthetic fuels will not be introduced until the price of
non-fossil electricity has come down signicantly or, alternatively, until the
price of carbon has become much higher than it is today.
In short, the energy infrastructures supporting electricity generation, large
industrial users, commercial and residential energy uses, and energy use in the
transportation sector will have to be completely revamped in order to stabilise
CO
2
levels in the atmosphere. The need for a large-scale transition will force
change. Change, in turn, will make it possible to rethink energy systems in
many dierent ways. It is rare that the entrenched competitor is unable to
compete; as a result, new ideas can be introduced and old ideas that could not
compete in the past may be given a second chance.
14 Conclusions
There is no serious shortage of energy because of resource limitations.
Shortages could be precipitated by reckless policies or by creating supply
bottlenecks in an economy that is driven by long business cycles. Large energy
sources that could support the world energy demand for centuries include solar
energy, nuclear energy and fossil energy. Even if other energy sources may gain
importance, there likely will remain a role for fossil fuels for quite some time,
because the rate of growth is limited for all options.
The limits to sustainability will come not from resource depletion, but will
ultimately derive from the environmental impact of the use of these resources.
Technologies can help overcome these limits.
Fossil fuels are a serious competitor for other energy sources. At present, cost
considerations and the availability of a large resource base drive energy
infrastructures towards fossil fuels. The major problem for fossil energy sources
is their large environmental footprint. This footprint is large not only in terms
of the amount of carbon mobilised and emitted as carbon dioxide, but also in
terms of other environmental impacts.
After carbon dioxide emissions, mining is probably the second biggest impact
which will need to be addressed if carbon dioxide capture and storage is to be
developed. It is important to think ahead, because it would not be politically
wise to spend large eorts on making fossil fuels climate-neutral, if one had no
possibility to overcome the next levels of impacts.
However, it is worth realising that the environmental impact of any energy
technology that operates at the tens of terawatts level must be seriously con-
sidered. The reasons that wind and biomass energy have little environmental
impact is mainly attributable to the fact that they do not yet produce signicant
amounts of energy. In a world where all other energy competitors are an order
34 Klaus S. Lackner
of magnitude smaller than fossil fuel sources, it is easy to overlook their
potential for environmental harm.
It is critical to develop options for the future. Neither the energy industry nor
society as a whole has fully realised the urgency of the situation, which is far more
precarious than is usually acknowledged. In the realm of energy development,
technological advances are necessary. In contrast to water and food supply, in the
energy sector the worldwide implementation of the state of the art would not be a
solution to the problem but would exacerbate it. Energy development is on a
collision course between energy demand and environmental constraints.
A brand new infrastructure needs to be built within the next fty years. The
technological and institutional obstacles are formidable. Yet the urgency of this
situation has not yet sunk in.
In developing solutions one must keep in mind the sheer scale of the problem.
There are very few energy options that are big enough to cope with world
demand. A scenario, in which solar energy resources, nuclear energy resources
and fossil energy resources fail to provide a basis for the energy infrastructure,
will be a scenario with drastic reductions in economic output and one in which
living standards will fall back to much lower levels. This, in turn, has the
potential for creating economic and political strife on a global scale.
It would be oversimplied to argue that the big three options for energy boil
down to three simple well-dened paths. Indeed, under the large umbrellas of
fossil fuels, nuclear energy and solar energy are many distinct sub-options that
all could be pursued independently. For example, nuclear energy includes
conventional ssion plants, inherently safe Generation-IV plants, which
encompass a large family of options, various breeder designs and, last but not
least, fusion. On the other side, solar energy can be pursued as photovoltaic
energy with a plethora of photoelectric materials, or as solar thermal energy,
where again one can pursue a path of relatively cheap low-temperature heat, or
high-grade high-quality heat.
However, even outside this limited set, there are many more options that
need to be considered, and should be considered even though their priority
for governmental support should be lower as they, by themselves, cannot
solve the energy conundrum. Nevertheless, adding these energy sources to the
palette of options oers diversity in approach, competition and cost reductions.
The presence of these other options will ultimately help in pushing the entire
energy system toward an optimum. Furthermore, one cannot entirely rule out
that a large number of small solutions ends up carrying the day.
Finding a global sustainable energy solution is a complex task. It involves
solving technical problems, creating institutions and changing peoples attitude
toward the need of energy. Overly simplistic solutions are unlikely to work. It is
very unlikely that a solution to the energy conundrum will develop solely from
a change in attitude about energy. Indeed, if anything, the prevailing attitude
that energy consumption is the problem hinders an approach which sees energy
as an important ingredient in solving the sustainability problem. To support a
stable population near ten billion people will require large amounts of energy;
probably much more than the world consumes right now.
The issue is not the use of energy, but the environmental consequences of the
current approach to providing this energy. Its the environmental footprint of
energy consumption that is unsustainable, not the energy use per se. As a
consequence, technological xes ought to be welcome, as they can remove
obstacles without eliminating access to energy.
The opposite approach, which starts out by eliminating energy consumption,
will close doors that may need to be kept open. For example, access to water
and food may be made easier by providing energy. In a world in which energy is
made expensive, the adequate supply of food and water may simply prove
impossible. A break-down of the transportation infrastructure due to lack of
fuel would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions.
The often-disparaged end-of-pipe solutions may well be the ones that can
provide the largest improvements and at the lowest cost. If the goal is to
eliminate the environmental impact of energy use, they may provide the most
ecient and most direct path toward solving the problem.
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