Page 2 of 2 Energy reality starts to bite
By Dilip Hiro
engine (ICE), it was not always so. At the turn of the 20th century, cars were
also powered by steam engines or batteries.
Now, our salvation lies in finding a way back to the pre-ICE era. It is
incumbent on the automobile companies in rich nations to accelerate the process
of divorcing vehicles from the internal combustion engine. Cars of the future
can be powered by batteries, hydrogen cells, or solar panels - or a combination
of the above.
Typically, Japanese companies are in the forefront of research and development
on this. It was Toyota which first introduced a "concept" hybrid car in 1995,
combining batteries with the internal
combustion engine, and began mass producing them some years later.
This June, Honda set up an assembly line for producing a hydrogen-powered car,
the FCX Clarity. This model already can travel 448 kilometers on a tank of
liquid hydrogen. But it will go into mass production only after there is an
infrastructure of liquefied hydrogen stations in place in Japan and in
California, which will take time. So far there are only 13 hydrogen stations,
funded by the government, in the Tokyo area. Meanwhile, aware of the enormous
cost of its product, it is initially planning to lease the FXC Clarity to
drivers for $600 a month.
Another Japanese corporation, Mazda, has come up with a hybrid car using
hydrogen cells as well as an internal combustion engine.
As the mass production of non-ICE cars takes off in rich nations, the cost will
fall, and such models will find markets in the fast expanding (yet
comparatively poor) economies of China and India.
Medium-term: The nuclear option
Besides powering transport, oil is a major source of fuel for
electricity-generating plants. With even Royal Dutch Shell chief executive
officer Jeroen van der Veer conceding publicly that we are nearing peak oil
production (after which oil reserves will decline irretrievably), attention is
increasingly turning, in the West, to coal and nuclear power as medium-term
solutions.
The very mention of nuclear plants revives nightmarish memories of the partial
meltdown of a US reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, and the
catastrophic burning of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986. On the
other hand, nuclear stations now provide 79% of France's electricity and have,
so far, been accident-proof. That country's leading nuclear company, Areva,
expects to sell 100 power stations, fueled by third-generation Evolutionary
Pressure Water Reactors (EPWR), worldwide by 2030.
Areva also heads a consortium that is building the first nuclear power station
in Europe in more than a decade - in Finland. On nuclear waste management and
safety, the Finnish nuclear authority Posiva seems to have found a workable
solution. After 12 years of public debate, it has allowed the construction of a
$3.5 billion nuclear plant equipped with an EPWR reactor, on an offshore
island.
The new plant is designed to last 60 years, twice the average life of a nuclear
power plant today. If its control rods should fail, triggering a core meltdown,
a special basin of concrete will be there to hold the debris, thus
theoretically preventing the release of radioactive material. The nuclear waste
will then be set in cast iron, encased in copper, and dropped down a bore hole,
half a kilometer deep, which would, in turn, be saturated with bentonite, a
kind of clay. According to Posiva's metallurgists, under such conditions the
copper barrier should last a million years.
Once this station is commissioned, nuclear-fueled electricity will rise from
27% to 37% of the total on the Finnish national grid.
So acute is the demand for electricity in India that three nuclear power
stations are to be commissioned this year. Once on line, however, these plants
will make but a marginal difference in meeting Indian energy needs. Only coal,
which abounds in India, can help meet exploding demand, as is true in coal-rich
China. There, an electric plant fueled by (dirty, conventional) coal is being
commissioned every week.
Medium-term: Cleaner coal
In the hydrocarbon family, coal is the least efficient energy source, providing
only half as much energy as oil, while producing twice as much carbon dioxide
(CO2). But coal has the longest history of supplying energy to modern
societies, and as the 21st century began, it was still one of the leading fuels
for power plants worldwide.
Today, coal provides 28% of electric power globally, only marginally less than
in the 1970s. Countrywide, percentages vary widely - from 20% in the United
States to four times as much in China.
Because coal isn't going away any time soon, the challenge is obviously to burn
coal more efficiently and, at the same time, capture its CO2 emissions before
they reach the atmosphere. One possible solution to coal's polluting problems
lies in producing de-carbonized coal - that is, in converting coal into
petroleum products, thereby also reducing demand for crude oil. A hybrid
technology involving de-carbonizing natural gas or coal already exists.
In a coal-fired integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) facility, coal is
broken up, extracting the hydrogen and leaving behind the carbon. Next the
hydrogen is burned, emitting heat that drives the electricity-generating
turbines, while carbon, in the form of liquefied CO2, is stored underground or
under the seabed.
But, at the moment, an IGCC station needs one-fifth more coal as fuel than a
conventional plant just to produce the energy needed to power the
carbon-capturing mechanism. The price of the electric power thus generated
would be a third to a half higher than that from dirty coal.
On the other hand, according to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), the CO2 capture and storage (CCS) system could someday
provide up to 55% of the emissions reduction needed to avoid the worst effects
of global warming. Last month, the Group of Eight (G-8)energy ministers,
meeting in Japan, called for the launch of 20 large-scale CCS projects globally
by 2010. Soon after, the British government invited four leading European
companies to submit tenders for such a project in the United Kingdom.
At the recent oil summit in Jeddah, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
announced that his country would work with Saudi Arabia on perfecting the
technology for carbon capture. The United States and Australia are already
committed to advance this technology with public funds. As it gets cheaper with
frequent application, it will become affordable by countries like India and
China.
With oil supplies peaking in the coming years and uranium following a similar
path as the present century unfolds, the weight of humanity's needs will
increasingly fall on coal. It is coal, for better or worse, that will provide
the energy to sustain higher living standards for a growing segment of
humanity, even as the search for, and development of, renewable energies
proceeds at a faster pace. Last week, recognizing this reality, the G-8 summit
renewed its commitment to advance carbon capture and storage systems with all
due speed.
This, in a nutshell, is the global energy future in the medium term. It is the
reality we face.
Dilip Hiro is the author of numerous books on the Middle East. His most
recent book,
Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources(Nation
Books) is a vivid history of how oil has revolutionized civilian life, war, and
world politics over the last century, as well as of alternatives to oil,
including renewable energy sources.
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