David Hone

The Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute has just released its 2012 report on the current status of CCS around the world. The headline is that CCS is clearly up and running and CO2 is being sequestered. Around the world, eight large-scale CCS projects are storing about 23 million tonnes of CO2 each year. With a further eight projects currently under construction (including two in the electricity generation sector), that figure will increase to over 36 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2015. This is approximately 70 per cent of the IEA’s target for mitigation activities by CCS by 2015.

The flip side of this is that the rate of deployment is far below anything that remotely passes for a 2°C trajectory. The report finds that in order to maintain the path to the 2°C target, the number of operational projects must increase to around 130 by 2020, from the 16 currently in operation or under construction. Such an outcome looks very unlikely as only 51 of the 59 remaining projects captured in the Global CCS Institute’s annual project survey plan to be operational by 2020, and inevitably some of these will not proceed.

I have discussed CCS many times in the past. Given the continued abundance of fossil resources, their ease of use for both mobile and stationary energy generation, combined with the fact that they continue to be very cost competitive as new extraction technologies are introduced, it is therefore highly likely that we continue to make use of them. But as the report notes, we need to limit the increase in the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere to 1000 Gt this century (giving a 50 per cent chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C) which in turn requires energy-related CO2 emissions to fall to zero by 2075. The only way to square this circle will be large scale deployment of CCS.

One of the surprising aspects of the report is the review of where CCS is actually happening. Conventional wisdom says the EU then North America and that is certainly true for many of the more advanced projects, but close behind is China which has a number of projects in the identification stage of development. In fact the report finds that more than half of all newly-identified projects are located there. Using CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is being investigated as a revenue option in all the projects.

• Daqing Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Project (Identify stage) – a super-critical coal-fired power plant that would capture around 1 Mtpa of CO2 through oxyfuel combustion, developed by the China Datang Group in partnership with Alstom.
• Dongying Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Project (Identify stage) – a new build coal-fired power generation plant with a planned capture capacity of 1 Mtpa of CO2, also developed by the China Datang Group.
• Shanxi International Energy Group CCUS Project (Identify stage) – a new, super-critical coal-fired power plant with oxyfuel combustion being developed in partnership with Air Products, with a capture capacity of more than 2 Mtpa of CO2.
• Jilin Oil Field EOR Project (Phase 2) (Identify stage) – EOR operations at the Jilin oil field, where around 200,000 tpa of CO2 from a natural gas processing plant are currently being injected, are scheduled to be expanded to more than 800,000 tpa from 2015.
• Shen Hua Ningxia Coal to Liquid Plant Project (Identify stage) – a new build coal-to-liquids (CTL) facility developed that would capture around 2 Mtpa of CO2.

Perhaps the most disappointing news comes from Europe, where the value of the main CCS capital support mechanism has been reduced to a fraction of its anticipated amount following the collapse of the EU carbon market to some €8 per tonne of CO2. The EC policy objective of having up to 12 commercial-scale demonstration plants operating in Europe by 2015 is no longer achievable, with 4–5 projects operating in the next 5–6 years being a more realistic scenario. I commented on this back in June.

As well as giving a comprehensive breakdown of all the current projects, the report does the same for policy development, support mechanisms, storage potential and the progress in the technology itself. If you want to know more about CCS then this is truly a “one stop shop”.

The report download page with laptop, iPad and Kindle versions can be found here. Alternatively, you can go directly to the PDF version here.

The IEA’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) is an annual tradition, the result of much work, data analysis and presentation. A formative volume is produced for all to read and digest, but few of  us have the time to do so in the detail required. As such we rely to some extent on IEA presentations and summary documents. One such presentation was given by IEA Chief Economist Dr. Fatih Birol in Shell Centre last week, not for Shell but for the British Institute of Energy Economics. Rather than a WEO “tour de force”, the format was closer to storytelling, or more correctly short stories. Here are five pearls that emerge from the most recent WEO:

1.  A new trend in energy efficiency

Much emphasis is placed on the need for energy efficiency from policy makers and business leaders. We hear about how well certain enterprises are doing and how we need to replace our domestic boiler, insulate our homes and use public transport. Some leaders have even argued that energy efficiency is close to a single solution to energy prices, emissions and access in developing countries. But the stark reality of energy efficiency trends at the global level is the opposite to that which is desired. There is doubtless an impact here related to the financial crisis, but even before that the trend had started shifting.

2.  Oil security concerns shift

Perhaps since the gasoline lines of the 1970’s but certainly since 9/11 in 2001, a focus of US foreign policy has been security in the Middle East and by implication oil supply security. Although Europe has long been a significant importer of oil its attention has been more focused on Russian gas supplies. But all that is due to change. In the timeframe of the WEO (to 2035) China will become the world’s largest oil importer and the US dependence on oil from outside North America will decline. With increased domestic (NA) production from oil sands and light tight oil (using a similar extraction technology to shale gas), in combination with much tougher energy efficiency standards for cars, light trucks and trucks, US import demand will fall. This could have an eventual impact on global governance as China starts to look at Middle East supply and worries about its security. 

3.  The winner was coal

In the first decade of this century, coal accounted for nearly half of the increase in global energy use, with the bulk of the growth coming from the power sector in emerging economies. Next was natural gas, then oil and after that renewable energy. Nuclear was a distant fourth. That’s an order which is almost the opposite of where we should be going with emissions reduction as a high priority.

4.   Modern energy for all

Basic energy services are an essential part of life today, yet 1.3 billion people in the world live without electricity and 2.7 billion live without clean cooking facilities. The need to correct this has become a global imperative and remarkably this could be done with almost no impact on global energy demand and global emissions.

The flip side to this story is the point that I raised back in December when the UNFCCC declared that alleviation of poverty and energy access would become a key priority with mitigation and adaptation. Although “energy for all” is a critical issue, arguably it shouldn’t be on the agenda of the UNFCCC. Their focus needs to be squarely on the other 99.3% of emissions. “Energy for all”, as the IEA have clearly demonstrated, is not a climate change issue.

5.  The weight of a world issue shifts to Chinese shoulders

One of the longstanding arguments in the global debate on climate change has been that the burden rested with developed countries in that they had created the problem during their long industrial development era. But that situation is rapidly changing. By 2035 cumulative emissions from China will have exceeded the EU and will be rapidly approaching the US. China’s per capita emissions will also match the OECD average by then. This by no means puts the USA and EU in the clear, but it does shift the burden solidly to a tripartite response. 

Thanks to Dr Birol and the IEA for a stimulating presentation.

2011 turned out to be a busy year for the development of carbon pricing. Long the cornerstone of EU climate policy, the approach continues to find favour with governments focused on the issue of managing emissions, rather than those trying to manage the shape of the entire energy mix. Since the EU system was introduced in 2005, carbon pricing has appeared in Alberta and British Columbia in Canada, in the North Eastern US states and remains under consideration in South Korea. Several other governments have raised the possibility of a carbon pricing system of some sort.

At the outset of the year there appeared to be little prospect for much movement forward, with some worrying signs that a retreat was possible. Proposition 23 may have been defeated in California, but other legal challenges had surfaced and the new Australian government was not expected to raise an issue that had only a few months earlier led to the fall of the Prime Minister.

But by year end Australia had a carbon price mechanism in place, South Africa had announced its intention to implement a carbon tax, China was apparently moving forward with a variety of pricing mechanisms and California was finalizing the details of its cap-and-trade system. In addition the inclusion of aviation in the EU-ETS had withstood numerous legal challenges and looked likely to go ahead in 2012.

While this is a positive set of developments, it can’t counter the fact that there was a major step backward during the year as well. The price weakness in the EU-ETS at the end of the year and the related difficulties facing the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) are worrying developments. Although COP 17 in Durban saw a lifeline of sorts thrown to the Kyoto Protocol (and therefore the CDM) and a key committee of the European Parliament voted in favour of a mechanism to bolster the ETS price, both these mechanisms remain in the balance.

2011 also saw a number of US States pull out of the Western Climate Initiative and New Jersey pull out of RGGI.

2012 could well be a pivotal year for a market-based approach to managing emissions.But with the prospect of new negotiations for an international agreement, the possibility of giving new life to carbon pricing is also with us.

So much is now written about electric car development and particularly the push in China for this mode of transport that I now have expectations of seeing something on the street, but the reality is different.

Such is the story in Shanghai, where I am attending the Annual Council Meeting of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). This is a remarkable city, with a Maglev train that travels at 431 km/hour to and from the airport (sadly only at 300 km/hour in off-peak times when I happened to use it), vast (and somewhat empty) highways, a first rate underground transit system and an almost brand new financial centre, built around the third tallest building in the world. But no electric cars (that I saw).

Nevertheless, electricity is making inroads into the personal transport system. Electric motorbikes are everywhere and appear to be in the majority when compared to conventional gasoline motor bikes. A simpler and presumably cheaper version of this is the electric assisted pedal bike. These are all eerily silent vehicles, gliding along the road at modest speed. The only warning the pedestrian gets is the horn or, somewhat too late, the sound of rubber on bitumen rolling along.

An extensive report on the scale of the industry and the technology behind these vehicles has been produced by Argonne National Laboratory in the United States. Key findings of the 2009 report are as follows:

• In 2006, 20 million E-bikes were made in China. At present, China has 50 million battery-operated bicycles on the road, of which a very small percentage operate on Li-ion batteries. The rest of them use lead acid batteries. In China, about 2,500 companies produce electric two- or three-wheeled vehicles. All of the large companies producing electric vehicles (EVs) have E-bike models that are powered by Li-ion batteries, but the performance-to-price ratio for those E-bikes is still not compatible with that for E-bikes powered by lead acid batteries.
• There are 10,000 enterprises, both large and small, involved in the Chinese national production of electric bikes. Small and mid-sized companies accounted for 35% of total national bike production in 2007. Most of the E-bikes use lead acid batteries, yet in 2007, the entire industrial production of Li-ion batteries for electric bicycles had surpassed 100,000 ETWs. In 2007, China exported about 395,000 electric bicycles; exports to Japan, the United States, and the European Union (EU) numbered 203,300, which was 58% of production.
• As an example, Shenzhen BAK Battery Co., Ltd. (BAK), produces 600,000 cells per day for cell phones, 150,000 cells (18650 type) per day for notebooks, and 20,000 polymer Li-ion battery cells per day for electric vehicles and electric bikes. Li-ion power batteries for E-bikes are still in the research stage; these batteries use four 2.5-A•h cells in parallel and then 11 cells in series to make a 10-A•h, 36-V battery pack. The range is 45–50 km per charge. BAK has patents for protective boards for the Li-ion battery pack. The positive material is LiFePO4.

What is visibly missing is the conventional bicycle (but there are some), once the primary mode of transport in China. I assume that as Chinese city centres have deurbanized to make way for office and industrial developments and urbanization has moved further out, the distances involved for daily transit of the population have defeated cyclists.

Meanwhile, all that is seemingly missing in Shanghai is appearing in London, of all places. With inner-London boroughs reurbanizing, bicycles are back in force, recently further supported by the city bikes provided by London Transport. Electric cars are just starting to appear and recharging infrastructure can be found in a few inner city streets and in some shopping mall carparks. I recently even rode on a trial electric bus service from Paddington Station to Bank, provided as an extension of the Heathrow Express rail service.