by Bill Becker

For those of us concerned about the future of the United States in an era of global climate change and international competition over diminishing natural resources, the new report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC) contains goods news and bad news.

The good news: The NIC predicts that in a “likely tectonic shift” the United States could become energy independent in the next 10 years. That’s a goal we’ve been trying to achieve since the oil embargoes of the 1970s.

The bad news: The NIC predicts we’ll get there by increasing our addiction to fossil fuels. In other words, we’ll stop importing oil, but we’ll export more greenhouse gases and make ourselves more vulnerable to rising seas and weather disasters. Surprisingly, the nation’s top intelligence agency doesn’t directly acknowledge this rather important trade-off.

That’s surprising because the NIC was established in 1979 to build a bridge between the intelligence and policy worlds. The analysis of global trends it issued earlier this month was produced with what the NIC describes as in-depth research, detailed modeling and a variety of analytic tools. Experts from think tanks, banks, government agencies and business groups in nearly 20 countries reviewed its report.

And it still got the future wrong.  Missing from the “black swans” the NIC considered are the unexpected technology breakthroughs and underestimated environmental traumas that are likely to prod us into a different energy economy than the NIC describes.

The NIC acknowledges that it can’t predict the future. But its best guess is that shale oil production in the United States, along with a continuing explosion in shale gas production made possible by horizontal drilling and fracking, means that “energy independence is not unrealistic for the U.S. in as short a period as 10-20 years.”  The undesirable environmental impacts of oil and gas production can be mitigated, the NIC says. It predicts that the benefits of more oil and gas production will include lower energy prices, more companies choosing to expand in the U.S., an increase in gross domestic product, an improved energy trade balance, as many as 3 million new jobs by 2030 and fewer carbon emissions than if we continued using coal.

Another outcome would be bad news for cleaner renewable energy resources. Cheap natural gas might result in “the lack of a major push on alternative fuels such as hydropower, wind, and solar energy,” the NIC says. “Under most scenarios, alternative fuels continue to provide a relatively small increase in the share of overall energy requirements.”

What’s wrong with this picture?  Here are a few problems:

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by Robin Webster, via Carbon Brief

Shale gas has received the official nod — David Cameron told an influential committee of MPs last night that there is a “gas revolution taking place across the world” and “I want us to be part of that revolution”. But the government’s support for shale gas has also been criticised over the past few days by experts who have labelled it ” misleading and dangerous” and “categorically and mathematically” incompatible with the government’s climate change targets.

The arguments over shale – often repeated in media coverage of the issue – seem to boil down to three key questions. We take a look at them.

1. How much shale gas is there in the UK?

In 2011, the British Geological Survey (BGS) estimated the UK has 150 billion cubic metres of shale gas reserves – that’s about two years of current UK gas consumption. It’s also around 5.3 trillion cubic feet, if we’ve got our conversion right. But then oil and gas company Cuadrilla announced that it had discovered 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas under Lancashire, near Blackpool.

This is obviously a much larger amount. How can the two figures be compared? It’s important first of all to note that the BGS figure refers to reserves – the amount of shale gas it believes can be extracted once economic and political limitations are taken into account.

Cuadrilla’s figure refers to the total amount it believes is in the ground, of which it might be possible to extract about 10 to 20 per cent. If correct, Cuadrilla’s find could still be globally significant.

The BGS numbers are also about to be updated. The BGS has been commissioned by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to make a thorough assessment of the onshore shale gas resource across the whole of the UK. It’s due to be launched in the New Year, but last Saturday the Times announced – presumably on the basis of a leaked copy – that the report will:

“…estimate that the 1,000 square kilometres covered by the Bowland Basin to the east of Blackpool contains 300 trillion cubic feet of gas, equivalent to 17 times the remaining known reserves in the North Sea.”

This seems to be a surprise to the BGS however. A press spokesperson told us yesterday that its assessment has not yet been released, adding “we don’t know where these figures have come from”. The figures are according to a BGS spokesperson currently a “closely guarded secret” and not even senior managers know what they are. (h/t to Leo Hickman who rang BGS first).

This is all second guessing and none of this really tells us what the BGS have concluded. But rumours have been circulating for some time that the number is going to be big. When it is finally released, it will be hailed by advocates of the fuel as proof that the UK has adequate resources to participate in David Cameron’s “shale gas revolution”.

2. Will UK shale gas cut energy prices?

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by Noreen Nielsen and Rebecca Leber

Voters this year rejected polluter-backed candidates in some of the most expensive races targeted by outside groups. In the final two months of the campaign, dirty energy allies spent more than $270 million on misleading TV ads in presidential and congressional races, and on industry ads promoting polluter interests. That tally includes more than $31 million in energy-specific TV ads.

Despite record outside spending, candidates that spoke out for clean energy and common-sense public protections won down the ballot. President Barack Obama alone faced more than $176 million of ads from pro-polluter groups including Americans for Prosperity, Restore Our Future, and Crossroads GPS since September, yet he still captured 332 electoral votes. Polluters’ picks for the Senate also lost, including in heavily contested races in Montana, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin, despite an impressive $60 million tally on TV ads. These same polluter interests also spent more than $50 million since September to influence House of Representatives races.

Voters have spoken in 2012 but the election is not the end of the efforts to obstruct clean energy, public health protections, and climate action. Oil, gas, and coal industries’ “branding” campaigns—a $7 million effort between September and November—have relaunched after the election. Groups such as the American Petroleum Institute—responsible for the “I’m an Energy Voter” campaign—and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity have pumped millions of dollars more into ads protecting their special interests.

The map below shows the states that were polluter allies’ biggest targets in the final two months of the 2012 election.

Noreen Nielsen is the Energy Communications Director for the Think Progress War Room at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Rebecca Leber is a Reporter/Blogger at the Action Fund.

by Adam James

As you may have noticed, the natural gas industry has undergone a bit of a boom in the last few years.

In April, generation from natural gas tied that from coal for the first time ever. The boom has some energy analysts hailing a natural gas “miracle.” But others are very concerned, largely because of the local environmental impacts and the long-term climate impacts. Letting natural gas displace coal is a net-benefit on carbon emissions, but there are still unanswered questions about methane release and the impact on renewables.

What we know for sure is that the climate threat is real and must be taken seriously in charting a path forward for energy policy. The amount of natural gas we burn for electricity is critical in determining whether or not we’re on the right path.  This post compares a few climate pathways related to natural gas, and then presents a recommendation for developing natural gas capacity — including balancing additions and retirements.

The bottom line is this: in order to meet climate targets, the United States needs to build only planned additions and, starting in 2023, retire all natural gas plants over 45 years old. This will allow the United States to develop renewable alternatives and not waste excess natural gas capacity through uneconomic retirements later in an effort to meet climate goals. Of course, there are little adjustments around the margins, but this approach represents the most likely solution given the data available.

Before diving into an explanation of this point, I’ll summarize some of the more interesting conclusions from the different projections of natural gas capacity from Energy Information Administration (EIA), EPA, and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL):

• There is a gap between the business-as-usual (BAU) pathway for natural gas capacity and where we need to be to hit climate targets, and that gap widens significantly over time. In 2025, capacity of natural gas exceeds the recommended climate target by 13.9 GW. In 2030, natural gas capacity exceeds the climate target by 83.6 GW. In 2035, it exceeds the climate target by 143.8 GW. Assuming no further retirements, by 2050, natural gas capacity exceeds climate targets by 218.8 GW.

• Coal retirements won’t make up the difference in this increased natural gas capacity. The coal retirements needed to continue business-as-usual natural gas development and meet the NREL scenario’s 80 percent CO2 reduction would be unlikely. Specifically, it would require taking 240 GW of coal out of the system before 2035, a feat that the NREL scenario does over 40 years to ensure reliability.

• Aggressive retirements of natural gas capacity later on to meet the climate target are pretty unlikely. Over half our current natural gas capacity is under 12 years old. 38 percent of our current natural gas capacity was built between 2000 and 2004. An additional 15 percent was built between 2005 and 2011. That means 53 percent of capacity is basically brand new. These plants aren’t going anywhere anytime soon — retirements would be incredibly uneconomical.

This post will walk through where we need to be to address climate change, where we are headed, and quantify the gap between the two. Next, it will dismiss a few of the common excuses for our business-as-usual path of natural gas development, including that coal retirements will make up the difference and that we can retire old natural gas later on. Finally, it will present a reasonable approach to natural gas development that will ensure we can meet a climate target of 80 percent emissions reductions by 2050.

Assessing the Status Quo: Where do We Need to be and Where Are We Headed?

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Photo: danoStL via Flickr

by Katie Valentine

America’s older coal generators are dirtier, less efficient and less utilized than the rest of the country’s coal fleet. And a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists has found they’re not economically viable either.

The report’s authors looked at each coal generator in the U.S. and determined whether its operating costs would be higher than those of a natural gas generator when updated with any of the pollution controls for sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury or soot that it lacked. It found that up to 353 coal-fired generators in 31 states are “ripe for retirement” – meaning adding upgrades important to the health of communities and the planet was more costly than retiring the coal plant or using natural gas and renewable energy.

The 353 generators, which account for about six percent of the nation’s power supply, are in addition to the UCS’s estimated 288 units that have already been scheduled for retirement in the U.S.  According to the report, the two groups of generators – those which are ripe-for-retirement and those which will be closing soon – have a lot in common:

• On average, the ripe-for-retirement generators are 45 years old – 15 years past the 30-year average lifespan of a coal generator and 5 years shy of the average age of the 288 generators slated for closure.
• The two groups of coal generators are dirty – more than 70 percent of the generators identified as ripe-for-retirement lacked at least three out of the four pollution control upgrades accounted for in the study. The same is true for 88 percent of the soon-to-be-closed generators.
• The two groups are under-utilized. On average, ripe-for-retirement generators operate at 47 percent of their power generation capacity, while the generators slated for closure operate at 44 percent. The total U.S. coal fleet operates at 64 percent of its capacity.

The report found the ripe-for-retirement generators were primarily located in the Southeast, with Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida containing the most, followed by Michigan. Southern Company, which operates in Georgia, Alabama and the Florida panhandle, owns about 27 percent of the 353 ripe-for-retirement units, but has announced the fewest number of closures when compared to other large energy companies, including Tennessee Valley Authority and Duke Energy Corp.

These findings make clear that, as America’s existing coal fleet ages and natural gas and renewable energy sources become more affordable, it will be the energy market – not environmental regulations – that plays the largest role in phasing out coal in the country. Even without accounting for needed pollution controls updates, the report found that about 40 percent of the ripe-for-retirement coal generators are more expensive to operate than existing natural gas plants.

“Consumers are hearing, especially during the election, about the EPA’s war on coal and how we need to keep coal plants open, and our analysis provides good information to show that that’s not necessarily the case,” Steve Clemmer, research director of the UCS’s climate and energy program and one of the report’s authors, said during a webcast Wednesday.

Replacing the 353 ripe-for-retirement and 288 scheduled-to-close generators with natural gas generators would reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 245 million tons per year — equivalent to 9.8 percent of U.S. power sector CO2 emissions in 2010. Of course, natural gas is not a long-term solution to climate change, and the report notes that if ripe-for-retirement generators are closed, state governments should incorporate renewable energy and energy-saving technologies into its replacement energy sources.

Katie Valentine graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism. She is an intern on the international policy team at the Center for American Progress.

by Lorne Stockman, via Oil Change International

The International Energy Agency released its annual flagship publication yesterday, the World Energy Outlook. The IEA made an historic statement in the executive summary.

It said, “No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 °C goal,” the internationally recognized limit to average global warming in order to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Let me rephrase that.  Over two-thirds of today’s proven reserves of fossil fuels need to still be in the ground in 2050 in order to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change.

We congratulate the IEA for recognizing this crucial point and encourage the organization to prioritize this message in its presentations and public messaging. It is especially important given that the world’s fossil fuel industry is working overtime to increase its proven reserve base.

Let’s take the Canadian tar sands industry as an example. As the chart below shows, the tar sands industry has enough projects producing, under construction and approved to blow well past the climate limits prescribed by the IEA. Nevertheless even more projects are lined up for regulatory approval leading to a possible trebling of production capacity over and above the IEA limit.

Globally, the oil industry as a whole is also lining up enough production capacity to cook the climate several times over.

According to one analysis, there could be as much as 110.6 million barrels of oil production capacity in 2020, while the IEA says that less than 90 million b/d is plenty, see the chart below.

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by Kate Gordon

It’s hard to even know where to start with the Institute for Energy Research’s attack on the regional energy report just released by The Center for American Progress and the Center for the Next Generation.

One easy response would be to simply point out the institute’s failure to even acknowledge the reality of climate change. Ignoring the fact that our report consistently points to climate change as the most important reason to transition to a cleaner energy future, the institute pretends that we’ve instead written a paper about the world running out of oil. They write:

Yes, it is certainly true that in a physical sense, there is a finite amount of energy located within the United States—or planet Earth for that matter—in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. But by the same token, even solar power is “finite”—the sun will eventually burn out.

The sun will, in fact, burn out in a few billion years. But the global tipping point on climate change—the point at which the Earth reaches a 2 degree Celsius increase in temperature above pre-industrial levels—will happen in as few as 16 years if we don’t take steps now to stop it, or at least slow it down.

IER also asks — not jokingly — “in what sense is ‘drilling’ unsustainable?”

To understand exactly why drilling is so unsustainable, take a look at the chart below documenting how the oil industry has pushed us far over our carbon budget. This should be a wake-up call for anyone considering the future of energy:

But even if we take a cue from the presidential campaigns and leave climate change out of it, just focusing on the institute’s central economic arguments about the advanced energy future, the institute is still dead wrong.

The central critique in their blog post is that oil, gas, and coal, are profitable industries, they pay taxes—a debatable point, but we’ll leave it alone—and therefore they are good for America. On the other hand, goes the argument, renewable energy programs “need support from the taxpayers … which is an implicit admission that these energy projects would not receive investment from people who voluntarily could put their money at risk.”

There are two immediate problems with this analysis. First, fossil-fuel companies are profitable in large part because they do not put an honest price on their goods. Instead, they pass the cost of adverse health consequences of a polluted environment and climate change directly onto consumers. The hidden cost of oil-and-gas consumption in the United States in 2011 amounts to a staggering $89 billion, based on the conservative findings of a U.S. Government Working Group that tallied the social cost of greenhouse gases to be about $21 per ton. Other studies say this figure is far too low.

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The American Petroleum Institute's vision for America.

If you’ve turned on the television, walked by a bus stop, or visited a social networking site in the last 10 months, there’s a very good chance you’ve been targeted by the American Petroleum Institute’s “Vote 4 Energy” campaign. It’s one of the most prominent and consistent ad buys amongst the tidal wave of spending from fossil fuel groups this election season.

Launched at the beginning of the year, the campaign was rolled out in conjunction with an energy plan that calls for unrestrained oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Outer Continental Shelf, onshore and offshore in the Arctic, and public lands around the country. The plan also calls for developing the Keystone XL pipeline and increasing production of tar sands — one of the most environmentally-destructive and carbon-intensive resources — by 250 percent.

API’s vision, which brings “drill, baby, drill” to the absolute extreme, is a one-size-fits-all energy plan that treats fossil fuel extraction as the only solution to creating jobs and economic progress.

The plan isn’t just a high-end guidepost. It has been copied by Mitt Romney, who recently laid out an energy plan featuring virtually identical proposals.

Oil expert Michael Levi has called out this strategy for being a “pipe dream” based on false promises that an all-out approach to fossil fuel drilling will dramatically lower gas prices and make America truly energy independent.

Whether or not it’s realistic, API’s messaging has put President Obama on the defensive.

In the 2008 election, Obama was very blunt about the environmental imperative for transitioning away from fossil fuels: “We can’t simply drill our way out of the problem. And we’re not going to be able to deal with the climate crisis if our only solution is to use more fossil fuels that create global warming,” he said in a presidential debate against John McCain.

Today, as the oil and gas industry spends more than $150 million on the presidential campaign to promote fossil fuels, Obama has completely stopped talking about climate change and is battling Romney over who will promote more oil drilling. This stunning reversal is a direct consequence of API’s public campaign and private lobbying in Washington.

The saddest part of the whole exercise is that talk about climate change has been completely lost. Because when you actually factor in the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, the API plan is revealed for what it truly is: a climate disaster in the making.

By building out a massive new round of fossil fuel infrastructure that will last for many decades, we’re locking in gigatons of new carbon dioxide emissions that we simply can’t afford to emit. But somehow, an extreme energy plan that completely ignores the reality of global warming is now the “center” of the debate in Washington political circles.

That’s why I really like a new report released today by my colleagues at the Center for American Progress and the Center for the Next Generation. In an attempt to strike a new middle ground and counter API’s powerful messaging, the authors break down a more realistic approach to energy production and job creation through regional-specific solutions like efficiency, advanced automobiles, coastal restoration, and renewable energy.

The report isn’t meant to be a one-for-one jobs plan that directly counters every one of API’s employment assumptions. It also recognizes that fossil fuels are an enormously important part of our economy and will likely play a substantial role for some time to come. Instead, it tries to center our sights on a path forward that addresses environmental realities and recognizes the diversity of the American economy.

Here’s the basic premise:

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by Tom Kenworthy

A national land conservation group has stepped in to save a rugged, isolated corner of northwestern Wyoming from oil and  gas development that had threatened the area prized for its wildlife habitat, mountain scenery and hunting and recreational opportunities.

Under the agreement being announced today, The Trust for Public Land will pay $8.75 million to purchase oil and gas leases on 58,000 acres in the Wyoming Range from Houston-based Plains Exploration and Production (PXP), and permanently remove the threat of drilling by retiring the leases. The trust has raised about half of the purchase price but must secure the remaining funds by the end of the year. The story was broken by the Associated Press.

The area, known as the Noble Basin or Upper Hoback Basin, is part of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and is located about 30 miles south of Jackson, WY.

The threat to the Noble Basin was portrayed in a video report by the Center for American Progress earlier this year:

Much of the region around the Noble Basin was protected by the Wyoming Range Legacy Act, passed by Congress in 2009, that shields 1.2 million acres of the Bridger-Teton from development. But existing oil and gas leases, including the leases obtained in 2005 by PXP, were honored. PXP had planned to drill 136 natural gas wells in the area, which would have involved the construction of 29 miles of new or upgraded roads, and 17 well pads.

The basin, which includes the headwaters of a wild and scenic stretch of the Hoback River, contains vital summer range and birthing and migration areas for mule deer, elk, moose and antelope. Some of the herds that use the area have been severely impacted by development of huge natural gas fields to the south near Pinedale, Wyoming. The basin is also critical habitat for lynx, a threatened species, and two subspecies of native cutthroat trout.

Residents of western Wyoming mounted a furious fight to save the Noble Basin from energy development and preserve the area for hunting, ranching, fishing, horseback riding and other pursuits. They banded together in an organization called Citizens for the Wyoming Range that pressed the Forest Service to block or mitigate the development, and explored ways to buy out PXP’s valid leases.

Dan Smitherman, a former Marine and hunting guide in western Wyoming who serves as a spokesman for Citizens for the Wyoming Range, told the Associated Press, “we always felt like a lease buyout was the cleanest, and a win-win solution. It’s a Wyoming solution to a Wyoming problem.”

Tom Kenworthy is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress.

In 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu best summed up the looming impacts of climate change: “I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen.”

Of course, Chu was talking about the problem. But his comments accurately reflect our perception of the solutions as well.

Steady reductions in global warming pollution don’t come from simply sprinkling a few renewables on top of our existing energy system. It’s going to take a pretty dramatic re-thinking of how we design cities, build transportation systems, adapt agricultural operations, and deploy efficiency and clean energy. And that takes an enormous amount of energy and time — far more than the four-year political time cycles we often think within.

However, with the very notion that we need to deploy these solutions now under attack on the national political stage, we’re still far from collectively realizing the scope of that change.

Enter U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Since 2005, America has seen a nearly 9 percent decline in annual CO2 emissions economy-wide. That’s due to a number of things: Appliances are getting more efficient, vehicles are using less fuel, companies are figuring out better ways to package and ship products, and we’re steadily transitioning our electricity sector from coal to natural gas and renewables.

Oh, the worst financial meltdown and economic crisis since the Great Depression had a pretty big impact too.

Aside from the whole economic crisis, all of these other factors are positive (depending, of course, on the true environmental impact of natural gas) and represent a broader shift toward a cleaner, more efficient economy. But they’re also somewhat worrisome.

First, they represent incremental change. Any change in the right direction is good. But in order to realize rapid de-carbonization, it’s going to take a lot more than a modest increase in the use of insulation and better-performing washing machines. It takes a pretty serious economy-wide undertaking — something that we haven’t quite “gripped in our gut” as Secretary Chu might say.

Second, most of the factors contributing to the decline in CO2 emissions have been enhanced by the economic slowdown. Those efficient washing machines, automobiles, and cleaner energy sources had a bigger impact because people were driving and consuming less.

So what happens when the economy really picks up steam? Are those carbon reductions going to last? A new report out from Climate Central argues no, they won’t necessarily last without some more dramatic changes.

Here are four charts showing why.

1. We are still utterly dependent on fossil fuels.

There’s no doubt about it, we’ve made great strides in deploying energy efficiency and bringing the cost of renewables down. But we have only scratched the surface on the kind of deep cuts in fossil fuel use that we need to see. (That’s part of the reason why scientists say building a pipeline like Keystone XL — a straw into one of the biggest and dirtiest pools of carbon on earth — is such a bad idea). Climate Central’s Eric Larson explains in the report:

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