Learning to live with fossil fuels

The debate about global climate change has shifted from whether it's happening to how it's affecting our world — and what to do about it.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. In May, President Bush announced a five-year climate-change initiative to increase research and technology development in partnership with other countries. In Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire has launched an effort with other Western states and Canada to reduce carbon emissions.

As much as we welcome this rising tide of global-warming awareness, it is drowning out a disturbing reality: our world's likely dependence on coal, oil and gas for the next 50 years. What's more, our discussions with well-informed people show that most are unreasonably optimistic about the role alternative energy sources will play in the near term.

Today, more than 85 percent of the nation's primary energy comes from fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal; 8 percent comes from nuclear and 6 percent from renewable sources, mostly hydropower from dams. Most of the nation's existing nuclear reactors will wear out by 2030. Even with life extensions, they'll eventually shut down.

Much as we might wish otherwise, alternative sources such as solar and biofuels are not ready today to replace the fossil fuels or nuclear reactors that supply most of our electricity and transportation needs.

We're moving toward a cleaner energy future — but gradually. Electricity producers are adding more green energy sources to their portfolios. Current proposed federal legislation calls for emissions caps, energy efficiency and more research to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the air.

To its credit, Washington already is one of the most forward-looking states. We lead the nation in hydroelectric power generation, which supplies nearly three-fourths of our electricity. In fact, our state's share of nationwide carbon-dioxide emissions from electric power is a modest six-tenths of a percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Recent state legislation has boosted the future role of ethanol, and Washington's Climate Advisory Team will recommend ways to help Washington reduce its carbon footprint even further.

Our state also is well-positioned scientifically. Beginning this month, scientists from the University of Washington and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will undertake a $1.5 million study to assess environmental and economic impacts of climate change in specific regions around the state.

The laboratory's regional climate-change models already have been used to help Northwest decision-makers understand the impacts of choices about energy technologies and water and crop management in their areas. The Bioproducts, Engineering and Sciences Laboratory at Washington State University-Tri-Cities, which will include biofuels as part of its research programs, will open early next year.

Yet, these regional and national efforts, though an important start, fall short when held up to economic and technological realities. Here's the dilemma. Alternatives are not ready to use on a large scale, and we're nowhere near ready to capture carbon dioxide at the scale at which we're producing it.

Meanwhile, worldwide energy demand creeps steadily upward. The international Global Energy Technology Strategy Program predicts that, with increasing economic activity, energy demands could more than triple over the course of this century. Even with energy diversification, efficiencies and emission reductions, the world's abundant fossil-fuel resources will remain the largest source of energy throughout this century and into the next.

More than 8,100 facilities worldwide already release more than 26 gigatons — that's 26 billion metric tons — of carbon dioxide each year. Even more fossil-fuel capacity will come on ine over the next two decades to replace aging and less-efficient units and to meet growing electricity demands. Without dramatic technology and policy changes to curtail emissions, greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to rise to unprecedented levels.

So we have increasing fossil-fuel use but no large-scale solutions in place to address the inevitable impacts. It will take a Herculean effort to derail this potential train wreck, but it can be done. We need a "bridge" solution: an intense, accelerated, worldwide effort to manage the carbon cycle, dramatically reducing greenhouse gases from fossil fuels now while alternative sources catch up.

The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has outlined a broad portfolio of technological and human solutions to climate change. One of the most promising approaches is capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and storing it underground.

Carbon capture and storage systems offer the potential for continuing to use the Earth's ample fossil-fuel resources while keeping the carbon-dioxide output from reaching the atmosphere. Under this approach, carbon dioxide is captured from power plants and other industrial sources, transported to reservoirs deep underground and monitored over the long term.

The best sites are geological storage formations that lie thousands of feet below the Earth's surface, are far away from drinking-water sources, contain coarse-grained rock with pores where carbon dioxide can be stored, and are topped by impermeable caprocks that keep trapped carbon from escaping over time.

Properly sited, engineered and managed geological reservoirs could retain more than 99 percent of stored carbon dioxide for more than 1,000 years, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.

Studies have identified up to 11,000 billion tons of potential carbon-dioxide storage capacity — roughly the amount of water in Lake Superior — in deep geologic formations around the world. That's likely many times more than what would be required to respond to even the strictest climate-mitigation policies over the course of this century.

Despite the availability of such sites, experience with large-scale, integrated storage systems is limited, at best. Some system components are commercially mature. The energy industry, for example, has a long history of injecting carbon dioxide into declining oil fields to coax more oil out. But, other parts of the system are still in the research phase, while some are pre-commercial or first-generation technologies.

Dozens of small-scale capture and storage projects are under way or planned worldwide. Later this year in southeast Washington, a Department of Energy-funded multistate partnership will inject, store and monitor carbon dioxide placed in basalt formations. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that several hundreds and even thousands of capture systems would need to be installed at industrial sites over the next century to achieve their full potential.

Because of scientific and economic uncertainties, commercial deployment is in its infancy. More than 99 percent of the world's existing electric-power-generation operations have not yet adopted carbon capture and storage systems, nor have the vast majority of new power plants that are being built or on the drawing board.

Proposed legislation in Washington state and elsewhere is steering the energy industry toward carbon management, but much uncertainty remains about how this would happen. Electricity producers are concerned about the costs and potential efficiency reductions that come with such systems.

What will it take to transition the current field demonstrations from potential solutions to safe, effective and trusted cornerstones of the global energy system?

We need a more-definitive inventory of potential carbon storage sites worldwide, especially in developing countries. We need to develop more-efficient and cost-effective carbon-capture technologies and ensure that they will work as expected on an industrial scale. No technology is without risk. Before we inject massive quantities of carbon dioxide deep underground, we'd better be certain it won't migrate to other places, or escape into the atmosphere.

We need to integrate what we learn from science with policy, the marketplace and society. The energy industry needs a strong science basis and a stable regulatory environment to justify the investment in carbon-capture systems. And society must be willing to accept the costs and risks of carbon storage or any other solution, as we have with the current energy mix.

Admittedly, it's an ambitious goal: to achieve fully integrated, industrial-scale carbon capture and storage systems that are economically viable, environmentally sound and publicly acceptable.

The good news is that Washington is already positioned to address this challenge in a big way. Given the state's already-small carbon footprint, our most significant and enduring contribution going forward could be new science and technology for carbon capture and storage that could be used regionally, nationally and internationally. And our state — with its national laboratory, research universities and support at the governor's level — has the intellectual capacity to do this now.

Launching an effort of this magnitude is a daunting venture, but one we must embrace. Any potential solution for carbon management and renewables must work on a scale beyond anything we've ever built. And it must get us there in the next 50 years. Anything less will derail our nation's energy-driven future and with it, the global economy.

J. Michael Davis and Douglas Ray are associate laboratory directors for energy and fundamental science, respectively, at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. PNNL receives funding from the U.S. Energy Department and other public and private organizations for climate-change science and technology, including carbon capture and storage.