LANL scientists Hans Ziock and Rajan Gupta

No Quick Way to Develop Extra Energy Capacity

February / March 2008 Volume 6 Number 1

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Rajan Gupta, chairman of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Energy Council, and Hans Ziock, an expert on zero-emission coal and carbon-dioxide sequestration, discuss their ideas on providing clean energy to an energy-hungry world. This article was published originally in 1663, LANL's science and technology magazine.

How would you define the global energy challenge?
GUPTA: First, we have to recognize that growth in energy use goes hand in hand with development—€”whether it is measured using gross domestic product, education or the human development index. The challenge facing us is that every child growing up in an industrialized nation today expects to flick a switch and have the lights turn on, or the TV, or whatever. And every child in a developing nation is beginning to have the same expectation. To facilitate development globally, we need cheap energy, clean energy and energy for all.
ZIOCK: But with so many people in the world today using energy, the environmental impacts are beginning to show up on a global scale. Carbon dioxide (CO2), which is produced by burning fossil fuels such as oil, gasoline, natural gas or coal, is a known greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.
Since the start of the industrial age, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased by some 35 percent. If everyone had the standard of living we have in the United States today, and the population of the world doubled, as is possible in this century, energy use worldwide would grow to ten times what it is today. And past greenhouse emissions would be completely dwarfed by those of the future.

So what can be done?
GUPTA: The problem has both a short-term and a long-term challenge. In the short-term, the world needs a lot more energy, especially for rapidly developing countries like China and India. And there are no immediate large-scale solutions other than fossil fuels. The long-term aspect of the energy problem is, as Hans said, global climate change. Fossil fuels supply over 80 percent of the energy used today. Even if the use of fossil fuels levels out, at current numbers the concentration of CO2 will continue to grow, since the level of CO2 persists for hundreds of years in the atmosphere. This will lead to substantial warming over what we're seeing now.

But energy use is likely to increase, not level out.
GUPTA: Right. The global energy demand is growing at about 2 percent per year, which translates to a fossil-fuel energy equivalent of an extra three million barrels of oil per day and proportionately more every year. There is no easy or quick way to develop this extra energy capacity using today's "carbon neutral" systems—€”systems like solar, wind or nuclear, which don't increase the atmosphere's CO2 load.
If you tried to meet the growing energy demand by burning more oil, it would take at least five years to bring an extra three million barrels of oil online. Under this scenario, the cost of oil may continue to rise due to tight and uncertain markets, and because investors like quick and large paybacks.
An analysis of the scale of the global energy problem leads to a very pessimistic scenario: either the world burns a lot more coal, because that's the most abundant fuel among both developed and developing nations, or economic development will stall. Unfortunately, coal is the most polluting fossil fuel.

ZIOCK: It truly is the scale of our energy use that's the problem. For example biofuels, which are made from corn and other crops, are carbon neutral. When burned as ethanol (or biodiesel), they release only as much CO2 as they took in while growing. They also provide economic opportunity, since ethanol is a high-value liquid fuel. Biofuels would seem to be an ideal fuel source. Yet, to meet the world's likely energy demand at the end of the century, nearly all of the planet's land area, including its agricultural areas, would have to be converted into biofuel farms.
One could turn coal into a carbon-neutral energy source by capturing the CO2 it produces and storing it underground or in the form of rocks—€”CO2 sequestration. While a relatively low-cost solution, sequestration still adds to the overall price of the fuel. At this time, all carbon-neutral energy systems are more expensive than fossil fuels. For poor countries, that's sort of a double-edged sword. To afford to go carbon neutral, they have to develop economically, which requires them to use a lot of cheap energy.
The only solution is for society as a whole to come to grips with the cost issue and take action on it.

GUPTA: The problem is easier in Europe, Japan and many other developed countries, where there is essentially zero population growth. They do not need significantly larger amounts of energy, as is the case for the U.S. and the developing world, and they can more easily absorb the extra costs of transitioning to carbon-neutral systems. When a coal plant becomes decrepit or a liability, they can just replace it with a clean coal system, a nuclear plant, or even a large photovoltaic farm or wind farm.

So Europe will be shifting more toward renewables?
ZIOCK: Perhaps, but there are problems. Renewables are not yet cheap enough, and there's no cheap and compact way to store the energy for times when the winds are down or the sun is obscured. You would need huge banks of batteries or even another fuel that you could burn when you need to. That's why coal is so good. When you need it, you shovel it into the oven, put a match to it, and it burns and releases tremendous amounts of energy. Burning just one ounce of coal in a second generates about as much raw energy as you get from sunlight falling on a 30-by-30-yard area for one second. And you can burn coal anytime, not just when the sun shines.

So what are the options?
GUPTA: The first, obvious one is to become more energy efficient. Efficiency alone can cut U.S. gasoline consumption by about 50 percent, and today's technology allows us to increase the average fuel efficiency from 23 to 35 miles per gallon without restricting mobility. Similarly, going from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs would reduce the lighting budget to 25 percent of what it is now. Efficiency measures taken by the developed world could buy the world about 10 years of projected energy growth, during which time we could develop sequestration and alternate fuels technology.
Next, we need to develop global solutions for nuclear waste and proliferation problems so we can rapidly ramp up nuclear power.
The third option, and this is extremely important and urgent, is to invest very heavily in research and development of alternative energy systems. For example, we need to bring the price of solar panels down to one-fifth or one-tenth of what it is today if we are to realize large-scale deployment.

ZIOCK: We also need to start capturing CO2 from power plants and sequestering it underground at a large scale. Although today's projects inject about 25 million tons of CO2 underground per year, the world produces 25 billion tons per year. Furthermore, most of the CO2 being injected is from natural CO2 sources and hence does not represent sequestration.

GUPTA: Yes, fast ramp-up of CO2 sequestration is essential. Estimates of additional costs of electricity to the end user on implementing carbon capture and sequestration at power plants vary between 30 and 50 percent. I believe that, given the consequences of global-climate change, this is an acceptable cost for the developed world to bear. By doing so, we can show leadership and help the rest of the world transition to carbon-neutral systems.
The real show stopper is that we have not done the research, nor the risk analysis, on sequestering 25 billion tons of CO2 each year. But if we could ramp up and sequester one billion tons every year by 2017 and ten billion tons annually by 2030, that would be a phenomenal advance.

ZIOCK: We've been working on sequestration for some time, but there are no miracle solutions at hand. So the public has to demand that we stop emitting CO2 to the atmosphere and be willing to pay for the technology needed to achieve that.

What are the national labs doing about this problem?
GUPTA: The national labs remain our biggest resource for the development of safe, clean energy. They should collaborate and coordinate with academia and direct other organizations in the long-term research on alternative technologies and CO2 sequestration. They need to partner and work with industry to quickly deploy these technologies. The labs should also lead the large-scale systems analysis for each type of energy and help determine life-cycle costs, environmental impacts and the interactions between energy sectors. This can happen quickly if there is funding and a clear mandate for the national labs to work on energy—€”and if achieving carbon-neutral energy systems is a national and global priority.

How would you summarize what lies ahead?
GUPTA: As daunting as the energy challenges are, they are thousands of times cheaper than the possible consequences of doing nothing. If we don't start today, we are being very, very short-sighted. The solutions will take time, sacrifice, and global cooperation, but clean, cheap energy for all must be our goal for, say, 2050.

ZIOCK: That's right. I often liken the issue of energy and CO2 to buying an insurance policy: buying the policy after the accident does no good, especially when the potential long-term costs resulting from inaction are so large. That 2050 goal can be achieved, but only if we start right now in a serious way.