David Hone

The world is not on track to meet the target agreed by governments to limit the long term rise in the average global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius (°C).

International Energy Agency, June 2013

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is well known for its annual World Energy Outlook, released towards the end of each year. In concert with the WEO come one or more special publications and this year is no exception. Just released is a new report which brings the IEA attention back squarely on the climate issue, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map. The IEA have traditionally focused on the climate issue through their 450 ppm scenario. While they continue to do that this time, they are also going further with a more pragmatic model for thinking about emissions, that being the “trillion tonne” approach. I have discussed this at some length in previous posts.

The report looks deeply into the current state of climate affairs and as a result fires a warning shot across the bows of current national and UNFCCC efforts to chart a pathway in keeping with the global goal of limiting warming to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. The IEA argue that we are on the edge of the 2 °C precipice and recommends a series of immediate steps to take to at least stop us falling in. With the catchy soundbite of “ 4 for 2° “, the IEA recommend four immediate steps in the period from now to 2020;

1. Rapid improvements in energy efficiency, particularly for appliances, lighting, manufacturing machinery, road transport and within the built environment.
2. Phasing out of older inefficient coal fired power stations and restricting less efficient new builds.
3. Reductions in fugitive methane emissions in the oil and gas industry.
4. Reductions in fossil fuel subsidies.

These will supposedly keep some hope of a 2°C outcome alive, although IEA makes it clear that much more has to be done in the 2020s and beyond. However, it didn’t go so far as to say that the 2° patient is dead, rather it is on life support.

I had some role in all this and you will find my name in the list of reviewers on page 4 of the report. I also attended a major workshop on the issue in March where I presented the findings of the Shell New Lens Scenarios and as a result advocated for the critical role that carbon capture and storage (CCS) must play in the solution set.

As a contributor, I have to say that I am a bit disappointed with the outcome of the report, although it is understandable how the IEA has arrived where it has. There just isn’t the political leadership available today to progress the things that really need to be done, so we fall back on things that sound about right and at least are broadly aligned with what is happening anyway. As a result, we end up with something of a lost opportunity and more worryingly support an existing political paradigm which doesn’t fully recognize the difficulty of the issue. By arguing that we can keep the door open to 2°C with no impact on GDP and by only doing things that are of immediate economic benefit, the report may even be setting up more problems for the future.

My concern starts with the focus on energy efficiency as the principal interim strategy for managing global emissions. Yes, improving energy efficiency is a good thing to do and cars and appliances should be built to minimize energy use, although always with a particular energy price trajectory in mind. But will this really reduce global emissions and more importantly will it make any difference by 2020?

My personal view on these questions is no. I don’t think actions to improve local energy efficiency can reduce global emissions, at least until global energy demand is saturated. Currently, there isn’t the faintest sign that we are even close to saturation point. There are still 1-2 billion people without any modern energy services and some 4 billion people looking to increase their energy use through the purchase of goods and services (e.g. mobility) to raise their standard of living. Maybe 1-1.5 billion people have reached demand saturation, but even they keep surprising us with new needs (e.g. Flickr now offers 1 TB of free storage for photographs). Improvements in efficiency in one location either results in a particular service becoming cheaper and typically more abundant or it just makes that same energy available to any of the 5 billion people mentioned above at a slightly lower price. Look at it the other way around, which oil wells, coal mines or gas production facilities are going to reduce output over the next seven years because the energy efficiency of air conditioners is further improved. The fossil fuel industry is very supply focused and with the exception of substantial short term blips (2008 financial crisis), just keeps producing. Over a longer timespan lower energy prices will change the investment portfolio and therefore eventual levels of production, but in the short term there is little chance of this happening. This is a central premise of the book I recently reviewed, The Burning Question.

Even exciting new technologies such as LED lighting may not actually reduce energy use, let alone emissions. Today, thanks to LEDs, it’s not just the inside of buildings where we see lights at night, but outside as well. Whole buildings now glow blue and red, lit with millions of LEDs that each use a fraction of the energy of their incandescent counterparts – or it would be a fraction if incandescent lights had even been used to illuminate cityscapes on the vast scale we see today. The sobering reality is that lighting efficiency has only ever resulted in more global use of lighting and more energy and more emissions, never less.

An analysis from Sandia National Laboratories in the USA looks at this phenomena and concludes;

The result of increases in luminous efficacy has been an increase in demand for energy used for lighting that nearly exactly offsets the efficiency gains—essentially a 100% rebound in energy use.

 I don’t think this is limited to just lighting. Similar effects have been observed in the transport sector. Even in the built environment, there is evidence that as efficiency measures improve home heating, average indoor temperatures rise rather than energy use simply falling.

The second recommendation focuses on older and less efficient coal fired power stations. In principle this is a good thing to do and at least starts to contribute to the emissions issue. This is actually happening in the USA and China today, but is it leading to lower emissions globally? In the USA national emissions are certainly falling as natural gas has helped push older coal fired power stations to close, but much of the coal that was being burnt is now being exported, to the extent that global emissions may not be falling. Similarly in China, older inefficient power stations are closing, but the same coal is going to newer plants where higher efficiency just means more electricity – not less emissions. I discussed the efficiency effect in power stations in an old posting, showing how under some scenarios increasing efficiency may lead to even higher emissions over the long term. For this recommendation to be truly effective, it needs to operate in tandem with a carbon price.

The third and fourth recommendations make good sense, although in both instances a number of efforts are already underway. In any case their contribution to the whole is much less than the first two. In the case of methane emissions, reductions now are really only of benefit if over the longer term CO2 emissions are also managed. If aggressive CO2 mitigation begins early, and is maintained until emissions are close to zero, comprehensive methane (and other Short Lived Climate Pollutants – SLCP) mitigation substantially reduces the long-term risk of exceeding 2˚C (even more for 1.5˚C). By contrast, if CO2 emissions continue to rise past 2050, the climate warming avoided by SLCP mitigation is quickly overshadowed by CO2-induced warming. Hence SLCP mitigation can complement aggressive CO2 mitigation, but it is neither equivalent to, nor a substitute for, near-term CO2 emission reductions (see Oxford Martin Policy Brief – The Science and Policy of Short Lived Climate Pollutants)

After many lengthy passages on the current bleak state of affairs with regards global emissions, the weak political response and the “4 for 2°C “ scenario, the report gets to a key finding for the post 2020 effort, that being the need for carbon capture and storage. Seventy seven pages into the document and it finally says;

In relative terms, the largest scale-up, post-2020, is needed for CCS, at seven times the level achieved in the 4-for-2 °C Scenario, or around 3 100 TWh in 2035, with installation in industrial facilities capturing close to 1.0 Gt CO2 in 2035.

Not surprisingly, I think this should have been much closer to page one (and I have heard from the London launch, which I wasn’t able to attend, that the IEA do a better job of promoting CCS in the presentation). As noted in the recently released Shell New lens Scenarios, CCS deployment is the key to resolving the climate issue over this century. We may use it on a very large scale as in Mountains or a more modest scale as in Oceans, but either way it has to come early and fast. For me this means that it needs to figure in the pre-2020 thinking, not with a view to massive deployment as it is just too late for that, but at least with a very focused drive on delivery of several large scale demonstration projects in the power sector. The IEA correctly note that there are none today (Page 77 – “there is no single commercial CCS application to date in the power sector or in energy-intensive industries”).

Of course large scale deployment of CCS from 2020 onwards will need a very robust policy framework (as noted in Box 2.4) and that will also take time to develop. Another key finding that didn’t make it to page one is instead at the bottom of page 79, where the IEA state that;

Framework development must begin as soon as possible to ensure that a lack of appropriate regulation does not slow deployment.

For those that just read the Executive Summary, the CCS story is rather lost. It does get a mention, but is vaguely linked to increased costs and protection of the corporate bottom line, particularly for coal companies. The real insight of its pivotal role in securing an outcome as close as possible to 2°C doesn’t appear.

So my own “ 2 for 2°C before 2020“ would be as follows;

1. Demonstration of large-scale CCS in the power sector in key locations such as the EU, USA, China, Australia, South Africa and the Gulf States. Not all of these will be operational by 2020, but all should be well underway. At least one “very large scale” demonstration of CCS should also be underway (possibly at the large coal to liquids plants in South Africa).
2. Development and adoption of a CCS deployment policy framework, with clear links coming from the international deal to be agreed in 2015 for implementation from 2020.

But that might take some political courage!

In a report released just before Christmas, the UK Met Office lowered its decadal forecast for the expected average global temperature. The press release noted that:

 Global average temperature is expected to remain between 0.28 °C and 0.59 °C (90% confidence range) above the long-term (1971-2000) average during the period 2013-2017, with values most likely to be about 0.43 °C higher than average. The warmest year in the 160-year Met Office Hadley Centre global temperature record in 1998, with a temperature of 0.40°C above long-term average. The forecast of continued global warming is largely driven by increasing levels of greenhouse gases.

This was a noticeable change from previous forecasts and was the result of a new climate model being put into use. The upper chart shown below portrays the earlier estimate of temperature rise while the lower chart shows the new estimate. The dark blue lines show the mean, with the light blue lines indicating an upper and lower bound.

The revision was initially ignored in the Christmas rush, but with the festive season now over, the story has reappeared. Some media outlets interpreted this as evidence that “global warming had stopped”, given that the medium term forecast was no different to the temperature peak seen in the late 1990s. One particular columnist caused the Met Office to release a point-by-point rebuttal of his claim that the Office was “useless”.

Despite the acrimony, the revision does raise the question as to what is happening. On the one hand we are seeing an increase in the number of severe heat events globally, yet on the other there has been seemingly little change in global average temperature for much of the last decade.

The starting point must always be the fact that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere will create a global heat imbalance, at least until a new steady state is reached (e.g. through changes in cloud cover, surface albedo etc. ). That steady state will also take many centuries to reach, given the huge inertia in the climate system. Current estimates put the size of the imbalance at about 3 W/m2 (Hansen et. al., 2009), which although small compared to the total heat arriving from the sun is significant compared to swings over the past million years that have resulted in large shifts in planetary ice cover.

The imbalance is offset to a degree by the effect of aerosols, which scatter incoming solar radiation and therefore act as coolants. There remains considerable uncertainty in the science community regarding the extent of the aerosol impact and how it might be changing over time. For example, the recent (10 years) sharp increase in coal use in China, much of which does not have sulphur emission handling, may well be adding enough sulphur (an efficient coolant) in the atmosphere to dampen the warming trend that would otherwise be seen. The charts below show the various forcings and the net effect. The large error bar illustrates the uncertainty linked with aerosols, to the extent that the red line (GHGs) and blue line (Aerosols) could cancel if at the extremes of their respective ranges.

The proxy we use to “measure global warming” is the surface temperature record, because both a recorded history and derived history of this measurement exists and because it’s relatively easy to take the necessary measurements. In the case of the recorded history, it is typically 100-150 years, but in the UK it starts in 1659 (1772 for the daily series). But real “global warming” is far broader than this and includes ocean heating (surface and deep ocean) and land ice melting.

Take as an example land ice melting. There is good evidence that this has risen considerably in recent years, with both Greenland and Antarctica showing a combined reduction in ice mass of some 400 billion tonnes per annum. The amount of energy required to melt this much ice (to overcome the latent heat of fusion) is in the same ballpark as the energy required to raise the temperature of the atmosphere by 0.02 deg.C in a single year (a tenth of the expected decadal increase of 0.2 deg.C). A very simple (probably too simple as someone is bound to comment) analogy is a glass of iced water, which on a hot day will remain cold until the ice melts. Then the temperature starts rising rapidly – but this is not to argue that the climate system will do the same.

As the additional heat building up in the atmosphere distributes through the ocean/ice/atmosphere system it is unlikely that a uniform and unchanging temperature rise in one particular part of this system would be the result. The interaction between them and the impact of short term aerosols will likely result in volatility in the surface temperature record. This has been seen before, most recently in the post war period when temperature remained flat for about 20 years. Some have attributed this to the aerosol loading from the rapid increase in coal burning in the USA and Europe over that period, none of which had sulphur scrubbing. As sulphur emissions fell sharply with the arrival of scrubbers, so the masking effect was removed and temperatures began rising.

To simply argue that “global warming has stopped” is short sighted. The evidence to support such a claim is not there.

Late last week Point Carbon reported that the Executive Board of the UNFCCC’s Clean Development Mechanism has (re)agreed to allow energy efficient coal fired power plants to be included under the mechanism. Point Carbon said:

The governing body of the U.N’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has agreed to allow the most energy efficient coal-fired power plants to earn carbon credits under the scheme, causing outcry from green groups who claim the carbon market could be overrun by millions of low-quality offsets. The CDM Executive Board’s decision to lift its ban that prevented coal plants from seeking credits could allow some 40 projects, mostly based in China and India, to earn Certified Emission Reductions (CERs).

The credits are awarded to projects that cut emissions of greenhouse gases and can be used by companies and governments to meet carbon reduction targets.

. . . . .

. . . . .

The Board approved six coal plants for CDM registration before agreeing in November 2011 to suspend and review the methodology that outlines how many credits the schemes could earn, effectively stopping new projects from earning credits.

While it is always good to use a resource more efficiently, this move has potentially negative consequences for the very issue it is setting out to address, a reduction in the total emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere.

In this instance the CDM is not acting as a carbon pricing mechanism, rather it is simply incentivizing energy efficiency. In a recent paper written by a colleague (featured in a July posting), the secondary impacts of energy efficiency policy as a climate change response are explored. This particular action by the CDM Executive Board falls right into one of the problem areas.

The paper presented the argument that energy efficiency action on its own could actually result in an increase in CO2 emissions. The diagram below explains this. On the vertical axis is the cost of providing an energy service, such as electricity. At the margin, this may be driven by non-fossil provision operating within the economy, such as a wind farm or the like. On the horizontal axis is a measure of the available carbon resource base. As the price of non-carbon alternative energy rises or falls, so too does the long term availability of the fossil alternative for a given technology set. At high alternative prices, more money is available to spend on expanding the fossil resource and vice versa. As the fossil resource expands, the cumulative number of tonnes of CO2 emitted will also grow, even if it takes longer for this to happen.

Assuming a given alternative cost of providing electricity (p_non-fossil), the more efficient the power stations that burn coal, the more the electricity provider can ultimately afford to pay for the coal that is used. As more coal is used and the price rises (all other things being equal), so the resource base expands (from UC₁ to UC₂ in the figure above) and so does cumulative CO2 in the atmosphere. Further, as the CO2 issue is basically an atmospheric stock problem, this then drives up long term warming, even if the rate at which CO2 is emitted happens to fall in the short term.

From a climate finance perspective the CDM has been a successful mechanism, albeit with some significant operational difficulties. It has paved the way for carbon pricing in many countries and has been an important catalyst for change in some areas (e.g. landfill methane). But subsidizing more energy efficient coal fired power plants, while well intentioned, may in fact have negative environmental consequences. The CDM needs to act in its purest sense, which is as a carbon price in the energy system of true developing economies.

N.B. Just prior to posting this, a colleague noted that the Executive Board may have only allowed the issuance of CERS against already approved projects to proceed, rather than allowing future projects to apply by releasing the current hold on the underlying methodology. Hopefully this is the case, but in any case the argument still stands.

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.

Climate change is one of those subjects that is awash with data, leading to an almost endless capacity for analysis and ultimately conclusion drawing. The same data can be used to create different analytical output and a single analysis can lead to more than one conclusion. This comes about not just from the climate data itself, but from energy use data, energy use projections and the combination of all of these into both simple and highly complex models which seek to map out climate scenarios for the balance of this century and beyond.

A recent paper from Carnegie Institution, Stanford, CA looks at the differential climate impacts for the transition away from coal to various lower greenhouse gas energy systems, ranging from natural gas to hydro electricity. The authors modeled the temperature impact by 2100, based on a shift of 1 TW of coal generation capacity over the balance of this century. 1 TW was about the global coal capacity in 2000. Coal was picked as the base case because it is the most widespread method of generating electricity and is the most CO2 intense way of doing so. In the base case, warming from the continued use of 1 TW coal generation through to 2100 gives a temperature rise of 0.3°C.

The paper clearly illustrates the transition challenge inherent within the energy system, both from the perspective of the time it takes to replace the existing infrastructure stock and the latency of CO2 in the atmosphere. As a result of this, even the complete switch off of 1 TW of coal through conservation in the medium term does not deliver a 100% benefit. It would take some time to achieve such conservation during which the coal plants continue to emit and that CO₂ then remains in the atmosphere. By 2100, the benefit is about 0.25°C out of a possible 0.3. Various other alternatives are also considered.

This is an interesting analysis, but it only looks at the 1 TW case, whereas current coal capacity is 1.7 TW and forecast by IEA (Current Policies Scenario) to reach 3.0 TW by 2035. The conclusions from this analysis vary depending on the reporter. The actual conclusion of the paper was given in the final paragraph and is as follows;

Despite the lengthy time lags involved, delaying rollouts of low-carbon-emission energy technologies risks even greater harm in the second half of this century and beyond. This underscores the urgency in developing realistic plans for the rapid deployment of the lowest-GHG-emission electricity generation technologies.

But  one coal blogger came to a very different conclusion when reporting on this paper.

. . . . . studies such as this one, which recently appeared in Environmental Research Letters, which show the limited impact eliminating all coal-fired power generation would have, according to the study eliminating coal from the mix would only reduce global temperatures by 0.2 degrees over the next 100 years. Such a change would come at a massive economic and no doubt social cost, with no real change in climate outcomes.

That post implies there is questionable benefit in tackling coal because of the claimed limited climate impact that results from doing so (0.2°C) and the potential high (but not quantified) cost of the transition, but it does not appear to account for the expected growth of coal use to three times the level used in the analysis (presumably a 0.9°C impact if we do nothing). The Carnegie analysis also assumed that the starting point was a new coal fleet, whereas the reality today is that nearly half the global coal fleet is quite old (particularly USA, EU, Australia) and therefore ready for replacement in the near term.

Conclusions aside, the paper notes that “No previous study has predicted the climate effects of energy system transitions”. I don’t think that this is the case in that the 2008 Shell Scenarios which incorporate a major energy transition were modeled by MIT  to show the climate impacts. I have shown the charts below several times in the past (including last week), but they clearly show that a substantive transition (Blueprints) can make a difference by the end of the century. What it also shows is that the transition will be very long and that we won’t really see the climate benefit until the second half of the century. Even then, the 2°C goal is missed in 2100, although the climate system is beginning to stabilize.