Hello, Hard Core; Goodbye, Annex I An overview of “integration” research

1. Hello, Hard Core; Goodbye, Annex IAn overview of “integration” research Robert Socolow Princeton Universitysocolow@princeton.edu Ninth Annual Meeting Carbon Mitigation Initiative February 9, 2010

2. Talk Outline • Hello, Hard Core • Engineers and scientists respond to planetary alarm • Nuclear Power • CO2 removal (CDR) from the atmosphere • Goodbye, Annex I • Emerging economies are dragged to the table • Innovative analyses of China policy (two Ph.D. theses) • “One-billion high emitters”: allocating global targets across nations • Safe and Fair: Quantifying heritage emissions

3. Hello, Hard Core • The louder the alarm, the greater the number of people who will drop what they are doing and try to help. Some scientists and engineers are urging a broader agenda: • If the problem is CO2 emissions, surely nuclear power is part of the solution. • If the problem is planetary, fix the planet.

4. Nuclear Power • Nuclear power could make a significant contribution to climate change mitigation. • A global scale-up of nuclear power is unwise until an international management regime for nuclear power is in place that makes both nuclear war and nuclear terrorism less likely with nuclear power than without it. • The next decade is critical.A world considerably safer for nuclear power could emerge as a co-benefit of the current nuclear disarmament process. • Nuclear power will not benefit climate change if its contribution is withdrawn a decade or two after global scale-up begins, as a result of the coupling of nuclear power to nuclear weapons. • Making climate change the world’s exclusive priority is dangerous. New Paper: Robert H. Socolow & Alex Glaser, “Balancing risks: Nuclear energy & climate change,” Daedalus, Fall 2009, pp. 31-44. Special issue: The Global Nuclear Future, Volume 1.

5. Separated plutonium: Bane of global security Separated plutonium (military and civilian) today; military plutonium in weapons after reductions of nuclear arsenals.

6. 1500 GW nuclear power by 2050 One view of nuclear expansion to 1,500 GW. 58 countries use nuclear energy, but only about 40% of the capacity is outside the OECD. Reference: MIT, The Future of Nuclear Power, 2003

7. Every strategy can be implemented well or poorly • Every “solution” has a dark side. • Conservation Regimentation • Renewables Competing uses of land • “Clean coal” Mining: worker and land impacts • Nuclear power Nuclear war • Geoengineering Technological hegemony • Risk Management: We must trade the risks of disruption from climate change against the risks of disruption from mitigation. We and our children and grandchildren will search for an optimum pace.

8. Hippocratic Oath I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures that are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.* * Modern version, Louis Lasagna, 1964,http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath_modern.html

9. CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere Source: David Keith, MIT talk, Sept. 16, 2008

10. Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) studyAmerican Physical Society • Robert Socolow (Princeton), co-chair • Michael Desmond (BP), co-chair, since Oct 2009 • William Brinkman (co-chair, start - 3/09), now Director of the Office of Science, DOE • Arun Majumdar (3/09 – 10/09), now Director of ARPA-E, DOE • Karma Sawyer (UC Berkeley) • Jennifer Wilcox (Stanford) • Roger Aines (LLNL) • Jason Blackstock (IIASA) • Olav Bolland (NTU, Bergen, Norway) • Tina Kaarsberg (Office of Policy, DOE) • Nate Lewis (Cal Tech) • Marco Mazzotti (ETH, Zurich, Switzerland) • Allen Pfeffer (Alstom) • Jeffrey J Siirola (Tennessee Eastman) • Berend Smit (UC Berkeley)

11. Preliminary conclusions (personal, not yet the committee’s, and off the record) • It is too soon for policy. The world needs to stay technically focused until more is understood about the cost: • If direct capture is cheap ($50/tCO2), investment will soon flow. Diminished resolve to pursue conventional mitigation results. “Overshoot” emissions trajectories become credible. • If it’s horribly expensive ($5000/tCO2), the world should not be distracted by it. • Today, we guess that it would cost above $500/tCO2 if deployed at scale. • Note: Options costing even more than $500/tCO2 influence the optimum price schedules generated by century-scale integrated assessment models. (Air capture is a “back-stop technology.”)

12. Industrial-scale capture with amines creates the reference system In Salah gas field, Algeria. Early demonstrations are invaluable! A significant impact on climate requires immense storage volume below ground. Storage was not studied in the POPA report.

13. Fast binding Box 3.5, Figure 1. Rate constant (M-1s-1) versus the absolute value of the reaction enthalpy (kJ/mol) for a series of chemical absorption and adsorption processes. A sweet spot for new materials:Fast kinetics, modest enthalpy of binding Ideal NaOH MEA Tight binding, expensive retrieval We may recommend limited, fundamental, materials-focused air capture R&D “blended into” post-combustion capture R&D. Compare with Obama’s Fossil Energy budget request, Feb 1, 2010: “Transformational Technologies for Carbon Capture to identify and focus on innovative carbon capture technology breakthroughs for point sources and the atmosphere” (my italics).

14. Goodbye, Annex I • AQUILA MATH: At Aquila last summer the G-8 announced two percentage-reduction goals for 2050 (relative to some recent time): • 50% reductions in global emissions, and • 80% reductions in OECD emissions. • Hardly anyone observed that these two goals require a third, because almost exactly half of global emissions today come from outside the OECD: • 20% reductions in non-OECD emissions • The point isn't the numbers. Rather, it is the manners. The non-OECD was told. It was not asked. • The same two goals reappeared in Copenhagen.

15. The post-post-colonial world Copenhagen was supposed to be the event at which the two-tier world of the 1992 Rio Convention and the Kyoto follow-on (featuring Annex1 and NonAnnex1 countries with "common but differentiated responsibilities") would morph quietly and quickly into a one-tier world of closely coupled obligations. What astonished me was that anyone was "surprised" that the task proved difficult. 1992 to 2009: a post-colonial worldview. Former colonial powers feel guilt, former colonies expect compensation. 2010: the world is seeking to invent a post-post-colonial world. Copenhagen brought home that the developing countries will determine what kind of planet human beings live on. Over the coming century they will dominate world wealth and consumption, resource depletion, and environmental damage. Western influence is limited and will wane, yet Western leadership is essential now.

16. Innovative analyses of China policy LI Jie’s map shows the five provinces of China with largest emissions reduction assignments in a scheme based on “high-emitting individuals.” XU Yuan at a new 600 MW coal power plant burning high-S coal and removing 97% of S via scrubbers (summer 2009, southwest China).

17. One billion high emitters New paper: “Sharing global CO2 emission reductions among one billion high emitters.” Shoibal Chakravarty, Ananth Chikkatur, Heleen de Coninck, Stephen Pacala, Robert Socolow, and Massimo Tavoni. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 21, 2009, vol. 106 no. 29, pp. 11884-11888. Available at: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/29/11884

18. 1- Per-capita fossil-fuel CO2 emissions, 2005 World emissions: 27 billion tons CO2 AVERAGE TODAY STABILIZATION Source: IEA WEO 2007

19. Beyond per capita We can’t solve the climate problem without moving beyond “per capita” – looking inside countries.

20. 1.2 billion “high emitters” in 2030, 60% of global CO2 emissions “High emitters” 4.3 billion “low emitters,” 8% of emissions. Bracket units: tCO2/person-year. Shown: global population, CO2 emissions only from fossil fuels. Dark: value in 2003. Light: added, 2003 to 2030.

21. Safe and Fair: Quantifying heritage emissions It is widely asserted that “fairness” should take history into account (heritage emissions). New concept: Cumulative Per Capita Emissions for some group over some time-interval partially past and partially ahead. (Use the group’s average population over the interval.) Fairness principle: Equal Cumulative Per Capita (ECPC) emissions for two or more groups and the same time interval (e.g., 1850-2100).

22. Cumulative Per Capita Emissions (1850-2005) 990x109 tCO2 1.5x109 people 540x109 tCO2 7.5x109 people Included: Fossil fuels and most deforestation Not included: All non-CO2 greenhouse gases and pre-1950 non-Annex1 deforestation emissions (150 GtCO2, or 20 tCO2/capita)

23. A1 falls to zero in 2050 The ECPC Scheme at work:Compensating Emissions for the 1850-2100 Interval Every additional ton of future Annex1 CO2 emissions legitimates five tons of future CO2 emissions from the NonAnnex1 countries.

24. 780 ppm 680 ppm 560 ppm Approximate 2100 CO2 concentration for the ECPC scheme and three start-times How helpful CO2 removal would be! Each 800 GtCO2 removed lowers concentration by approximately 100 ppm (assuming neutral natural sinks).