Decarbonization: The Nuclear Option
February 14th, 2012 by Mike Fowler, Director, Advanced Technology, and Armond Cohen, Executive DirectorThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy & Environment Experts blog.
Three years ago, MIT’s Richard Lester published a simple analysis of what would be required to meet President Obama’s 83%-by-2050 greenhouse gas emission reduction target. The results were stark: Even if energy efficiency were to improve at rates 50% better than historical averages, and biofuels were able to meaningfully reduce transportation emissions in the near term (a proposition with which we disagree), meeting Obama’s goal would require retrofitting every existing coal plant in the country with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), building twice again that much fossil capacity with CCS, building close to 3,000 wind farms the size of Massachusetts’ Cape Wind, and building nearly 4,000 solar farms the size of California’s Ivanpah. And, having done all that, increasing the amount of nuclear power we generate by a factor of five.
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Let’s Fix Dangerous, Climate-Warming Methane Leaks From All Fossil Fuels: Coal, Oil, and Natural Gas
April 13th, 2011 by David McCabe, Atmospheric Scientist
A paper by Robert Howarth and co-workers comparing the climate impacts of natural gas to coal has made a huge splash this week, by arguing that natural gas may have a bigger climate footprint than coal for generating power—a finding that flies in the face of conventional wisdom that natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Howarth argues that it’s mainly leaks and venting of methane, the main component of natural gas, that makes gas impacts so high.
We’re very concerned about methane leaks from all fossil fuel extraction, especially natural gas. But this paper hasn’t convinced us that natural gas-fired power is worse than coal, for reasons discussed below.
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Hard Energy Paths
March 7th, 2011 by Armond Cohen, Executive DirectorThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog.
What will America’s energy mix look like thirty years from now? Thirty years is a long time, except that it isn’t. Energy is a big, inertial, capital-intensive system, and change comes slowly – even when government policy gets very serious, or technology and markets achieve step changes. For example, it took policy-driven nuclear power and the market-driven combined cycle gas turbine 30 years each to achieve 20% of US electricity supply.
In this context, then, there are three broad energy path types one can imagine.
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