Fueling the Future

Energy security and climate security are two issues that will dominate global politics for the foreseeable future. It is time for action to provide fuels that will allow greenhouse gas emissions to be cut but time is short. Hurricane Katrina was not caused by climate change. But climate scientists have long forecast that extreme weather events become more likely in a changing climate. The latest analysis suggests that hurricanes have indeed become more intense in recent decades.

More than two billion people live without access to secure supplies of electricity. when the price of petrol goes up for the west it is an irritation, an extra call on the family budget. When it goes up in the poorest countries it means that food rots because farmers cannot get their crops to market. Just as the poorest citizens of New Orleans were unable to escape the hurricane, so the poorest citizens of the planet will be unable to avoid the manifold threats of changing climate. Adaptation to climate change may be an option for the richer and most organised societies, though New Orleans is a warning not to overestimate what is possible in even the richest and most organised, but it will certainly not be possible for hundred of millions in the most vulnerable.

For all its intricacy in detail, the central task facing governments in this century can be stated simply. It is to deliver secure supplies of energy to some eight billion people without destabilising the climate. The first part has two main elements; delivering the transport fuel to move people and goods and providing electricity for space and water heating or cooling, lighting and communications and industry. The second part means doing both while simultaneously, and rapidly reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses eventually to zero. The $70 barrel has begun to concentrate minds on the dangers of a global economy over dependent on oil for transport. for some analysts, the immediate price spike is a temporary response to Katrina’s destruction of oil facilities in the gulf of Mexico. For others and fall back from this level will itself be temporary as underlying structural change drives the price ever up wards. Previous oil price highs have been the result of supply constraints. Up until now these have been readily remedied by increasing supply. Two factors may make this time different. First there is the continuing growth of Chinese demand. Beijing is now the second largest importer of oil after the United States. It currently ships in just over six million barrels a day. This could easily rise to ten million barrels a day before 2030 - the same as the US imports and Saudi Arabia produces. Second is the growing view that the point of peak oil production may be near possibly within this decade. We are not going to exhaust, oil or indeed any other fossil fuel, anytime soon. As former Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Yamani famously pointed out the stone age did not end because we ran out of stones. But oil can exist without being available this may be the end of the age of cheap oil and it is the cheapness that has mattered most in creating our over dependence.

None of this is cause of cheer for those whose concern is climate security for all its pervasiveness in our lives, oil is not the most pressing issue when it comes to dealing with climate change certainly everything we do to reduce our dependence on it for transport will help maintain climate security . But even eliminating all the carbon dioxide emissions from vehicle use would not make the climate safe. Climate change is not like any of the other problems that politicians must solve. Throughout history humanity has relied on succeeding generations to correct the mistakes of their predecessors. Failure could always be redeemed by lessons learned the hard way.
Climate change is different; the huge geophysical systems that keep our climate stable respond to change slowly many of the climate processes we are setting in motion today will take centuries or longer to reveal their full impacts but once start these processes are irreversible succeeding generations will not be able to redeem our mistakes. They will have to live with them. Global average temperatures have already risen o.6 degree C above pre industrial levels. This hardly sounds awesome but the average conceals a far greater increase in some parts of the world, especially the poles. The effects of this rise can already be seen in retreating glaciers, collapsing ice shelves, thawing permafrost and changing patterns of animal behaviour. Even if all green house gas emissions stopped today we are already committed to another o.6 degree C rise in the next few decades. The European union and climate scientists now say that the eventual temperature rise must be kept to below 2 degree C if we are to remain safe. Recent research suggest that there is less than fifteen years to put in place the necessary measures to be sure we can stay within this limit.

The world will invest many trillions of dollars in energy technologies in the next 25 years as things stand, the bulk of this investment will be in carbon intensive technologies, especially for electricity generation that will make climate stability impossible changing the trajectory of this technology deployment is the single most urgent political imperative of climate policy. Doing so will cost less than has already been spent on the war in Iraq. Events will not stand still while politicians consider their options china is building a new large coal fired power station every five days to meet its burgeoning demand for electricity. Over the next 25 years it plans almost six hundred more. India will construct close to two hundred in the same period. The rest of the world will build another six hundred. if all these power stations have conventional coal technology there is no prospect at all of ensuring climate security

The 1973 oil price hike also raised considerable fears about energy security the response then was partly a drive to decouple economic growth from growth in energy consumption and partly a rush to nuclear power. The nuclear industry has been quick to find opportunity in the twin crises of energy and climate security there is a constant drumbeat of headlines offering more nuclear power as the answer to our prayers.

In reality the nuclear option now as it was in 1973 is a distraction. And a dangerous one at that. Even if all of the problems of economic viability and public acceptability could be solved a very large if more nuclear power does little to help either here in Britain or in the wider world.

Even with the most heroic assumptions about the time to design permit and build new nuclear power stations in Britain most existing reactors will be closed before a new nuclear station is commissioned, the electricity they provide will have to be replaced in some other way. China has the most ambitious nuclear programme planning to build forty new reactors by 2030. Even if it does such is the pace of economic growth that it will still only provide about six percent of the country’s electricity . Most of the rest will come from coal.

Although there may be technically and economically possible routes for china to generate electricity without using coal these are not politically available in today’s energy insecure world. This means moving very rapidly to using coal as gas and storing the emissions underground. The same coal gasification process used to generate electricity without damaging the climate is also the starting point for producing transport fuel that is not imported.

We know we can do both, we have considerable experience in the gasification of coal and in the management of the deep geological reservoirs in which to store the emissions. The oil and gas industry has been managing those reservoirs for over a century. Technology developments in the processes for turning gas into liquid fuels have made them affordable at current let alone future oil prices.

The single most urgent priority in meeting the twin goals of energy security and climate security is to invest in accelerating the deployment of advanced coal technologies with carbon sequestration and storage, both here and in China. This does not guarantee security in either case but it does keep open the door to an energy secure future in a stable climate that will other wise shut in the next two decades.

Tom Burke, Visiting Prof at Imperial and University Colleges, London, and co-founder of E3G third generation environmentalism

The World Today, page 15, Vol. 61, No 10, Oct 2005