On a day when Congress focuses on the deteriorating financial markets, John McCain has given up his pledge to stay in Washington to get a deal done. Instead, back on the campaign trail, he wants to talk about coal. McCain is selling a fantasy of a coal- and oil-based economy, in ads airing in Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia:

“Clean coal” is important to America. And to Colorado. For Coloradoans, coal means thousands of jobs. Economic growth. More affordable electricity. For America, coal means energy independence. And “clean coal” means cleaner air. But Obama-Biden and their liberal allies oppose “clean coal.”

Listen here:

In fact, coal is a dirty, deadly fuel that is becoming increasingly expensive. And a coal-based economy doesn’t promise real job growth, either. The coal industry has in fact been cutting jobs while increasing production and profits. Finally, continued use of coal — as the most concentrated global warming pollutant — is threatening the future of human civilization, something McCain himself seems to recognize.

McCain’s ads confuse coal with “clean coal” — the industry’s preferred term for technologies still in development to sequester coal’s deadly pollution. Such advanced coal technology may promise “cleaner air” — in comparison to the continued use of traditional coal plants — if and when it is developed. The “clean coal” propaganda campaign must not substitute for real technological innovation. This is what Al Gore meant when he said last week:

If the coal companies can actually sequester CO₂ safely, then okay. But don’t, don’t pretend to do it. Don’t, don’t, don’t give us this illusion. Because that’s what they did on Wall Street. “The risk isn’t there. Don’t worry about it. Just keep focusing on the short term profit.”

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The American Physical Society has released a major study on the crucial role that energy efficiency must play to achieving energy security and reducing global warming.

According to the APS, Energy Future: Think Efficiency “differs from other energy efficiency reports in its emphasis on scientific and technological options and analysis.” The report has three overarching conclusions:

• Improving energy efficiency is a relatively easy and inexpensive way to significantly reduce the nation’s demand for imported oil and its greenhouse gas emissions without causing any loss of comfort or convenience.
• Numerous technologies exist today to increase the efficiency of U.S. vehicles and buildings in ways that could save individual consumers money. But without federal policies to overcome market barriers, the U.S. is unlikely to capitalize on these technologies.
• Far greater increases in energy efficiency are available in the future, but realizing these potential gains will require a larger and better focused federal research and development program on energy efficiency than exists today.

The two biggest quantitative conclusions concern the transportation and building sectors:

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I have an article in today’s Guardian online, “Is the Chevy Volt just hype?” I argue that the key to the near-term success for plug ins in this country is government incentives and mandates, which in turn will critically depend on the outcome of the presidential election. But that should not be a surprise, since no country in the world has achieved significant market penetration of an alternative-fuel vehicle without major government incentives and mandates.

I noted that one alternative fuel vehicle expert told me that GM has “already sunk at least $1bn into the Volt and cannot reasonably expect a profit from a $45,000 new car in an economy which is imploding. The actual cost of the vehicle may be higher.” And that leads to two key, related points:

If this country doesn’t strongly embrace plug-ins, Europe may well become the leader. After all, gas prices are considerably higher in Europe, which means plug-ins will provide consumers there far larger fuel cost savings. Also, Europeans drive about half as much as Americans, so they may be able to avoid gas consumption almost entirely with a well-designed plug-in, perhaps one with a smaller all-electric range.

And this leads directly to the question of whether of the Volt is overdesigned:

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I am (slightly) less pessimistic than David Letterman. If, however, it is indeed “too late” as he says, then he has certainly nailed the reason: “We have had no leadership.”

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The goal of carbon capture and storage (CCS), also called carbon sequestration, is to take carbon dioxide that would have been emitted into the atmosphere from new or existing power plants (usually coal) and instead store it someplace, hopefully forever. It is an attractive idea across the political spectrum because it might allow us to continue using a major fossil fuel, but in a way that does not destroy the climate.

Unfortunately, CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role:

1. Cost: Coal plants with CCS are very expensive today. The total extra cost for this process, including geological storage in sealed underground sites, is currently quite high, $30 to $80 a ton of carbon dioxide, according to the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy, “Carbon Sequestration R&D Overview.” And that is on top of the cost of new coal plants, which have become very expensive. In the future, it seems rather unlikely that CCS would be a low-cost solution. The modeling work done for the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) on how to comply with the AB32 law (California’s Global Warming Solutions Act), online here, puts the cost of coal gasification with carbon capture and storage at a staggering 16.9 cents per kWh. Energy efficiency along with lots of low-carbon generation sources beat that easily now or will very soon.
2. Timing: The world does not even have a single large-scale (300+ MW) coal plant with CCS anywhere in the world. The first moderate-sized (30 MW) pilot plant with CCS just started up this month in Germany. Earlier this year, President Bush dropped the mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project. In the past year, most governments and most U.S. utilities have scaled back, delayed, or cancel their planned CCS projects (see below). As Howard Herzog of MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment said in Feburary “How can we expect to build hundreds of these plants when we’re having so much trouble building the first one?“
3. Scale: We need to put in place a dozen or so clean energy “stabilization wedges” by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes — see “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 1.” For CCS to be even one of those would require a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. That would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure, no mean feat.
4. Permanence and transparency: If Putin’s Russia said it was sequestering 100 million tons of CO2 in the ground permanently, and wanted other countries to pay it billions of dollars to do so, would anyone trust them? No. The potential for fraud and bribery are simply too enormous. But would anyone trust China? Would anyone trust a U.S. utility, for that matter? We need to set up some sort of international regime for certifying, monitoring, verifying, and inspecting geologic repositories of carbon — like the U.N. weapons inspections systems. The problem is, this country hasn’t been able to certify a single storage facility for a high-level radioactive waste after two decades of trying and nobody knows how to monitor and verify underground CO2 storage. It could take a decade just to set up this system.

The bottom line is that we should continue to pursue CCS research, development, and demonstration in a serious effort to turn this long-term strategy into a medium-term one. But efficiency, wind, solar PV, and baseload solar are where we should be placing the big deployment dollars right now (see “Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?“)

For those who want to become more knowledgeable on CCS, the rest of this post will cite and excerpt a dozen or so of the recent articles and studies on the subject below.

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