21 May 2008 - Carbon
"capture ready" means very little
to coal-fired power stations now being conssidered
in Britain, according to a report commissioned
by WWF-UK.
How ready is capture
ready? prepared by Edinburgh University’s
Scottish Centre for Carbon Storage (SCCS)
explored what the concept often touted by
the power industry actually means to the
industry, and found little in the way of
any substantial commitments.
“Currently, claims of
CCS readiness do little more than refer
to the need for power plants to leave space
on the site for CCS equipment to be retrofitted
in the future,” says Keith Allott, Head
of Climate Change at WWF-UK.
“There’s no deadline
for conversion to full scale CCS, let alone
any guarantee that this would then be met.
Reliance on an as yet unproven technology,
however promising it may be, is a risky
business - the future of the planet’s climate
cannot rely upon good intentions.”
Britain's power sector
was responsible for one third of the UK's
180 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2007,
and the government is considering an application
from power company E.On to build the country's
first coal-fired power station in 30 years
at Kingsnorth in Kent.
If built without CCS
in place, Kingsnorth will emit 8 million
tonnes of CO2 each year. Using the government’s
own shadow price for carbon, the economic
damage caused by the emissions would cost
more than £200 million ($US )per year
- a total of £13-14 billion ($US )
if it runs unabated until 2050.
SCCS expressed concern
that the “capture ready” label legitimised
a ‘build now,capture later’ mindset in the
UK, with the eventual retrofit highly uncertain
if governments did not add legal requirements
to the impetus from carbon trading and pricing.
With full retrofit at
Kingsnorth estimated conservatively at £1.1
billion ($US ) some analysis suggests it
would take a carbon price of £127
a tonne or three to four times any level
predicted as an outcome of carbon trading
to make CCS profitable relying on market
measures alone.
SCCS recommends that
the government sets a requirement that CCS
should be operational on all
‘capture ready’ plants by 2020. If plants
fail to demonstrate CCS by that date, or
if CCS retrofits are not operational by
the end of that year, SCCS recommends that
“government should force closure of that
coal or gas plant.
SCCS finds that policy
makers have given the least attention to
the most complex and critical factors in
successful CCS - preparing for storage,
achieving system integration and guaranteeing
effective and timely implementation of CCS
retrofits.
WWF-UK's preference
– and one which avoids the risk of “lock-in”
for new high carbon power souces is for
the prohibition of new coal-fired stations
until CCS has been proven on a large scale
and can therefore be installed from the
outset.
California does it better
Another alternative,
even more preferred, is the path being followed
in California where in 2006 limits were
put on the amount of CO2 that new and replacement
power stations can emit.
“An emissions standard
is a market-friendly approach that would
not specify any particular technology –
highly efficient gas stations, renewables
and coal with operational CCS would
all comply,” the report notes. “It would
also provide much greater certainty to investors
and
decision-makers than the alternative ‘capture
ready’ approach.”
An unfortunate history
of perverted compliance
An example from recent
history – flue gas desulphurisation (FGD)
requirements to reduce acid rain – is cited
to show how power utilities can and do commonly
subvert pollution reduction measures. Initial
requirements for FGD were reduced by a third
following industry lobbying and even these
reduced requirements were not fulfilled,
despite the cost of retrofits essentially
being paid by taxpayers. Another loophole
allowed companies to save on costs by giving
preference to running older, dirtier power
stations. Only EU requirements eventually
bought the utilities into line.
“The FGD story illustrates
the reluctance of utilities to invest in
technology that is not profitable
per se, and some of the difficulties in
imposing investments when regulation is
weak,” the report said.
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Climate Witness: Burr
Morse, USA
20 May 2008 - My name
is Burr Morse and I live in Central Vermont,
in the Montpelier area. I am 60 years old
and have been here my whole life. My family
have been in maple syrup farming since the
late 1700s.
In the last 20 years
we have had a number of bad seasons and
most of those I would attribute to temperature
that is a little too warm. Several of those
years we only made a third to a half a crop
of maple syrup.
A sugar farmer knows
best
I think that we sugar
farmers are the fussiest farmers in the
world about the weather that we need.
We need the perfect
weather. We can’t live with 31 degrees Fahrenheit
at night. In the springtime, when we want
sap to run, we need 25 degrees F, which
is well down below freezing. Then we got
to have in the 40s during the day, and anything
warmer than that is too warm. We have got
have a west wind. We have to have predictable
weather patterns. So when things change
around and the weather comes from the east
or comes from the south, the sap is not
going to run.
This year the bad season,
which is going right up into Canada, is
causing the price of maple syrup to go really
high. This price increase has to do with
the bad year and also that there is no longer
a surplus in Canada, which used to keep
the price artificially low.
Adapting to the changing
climate…but for how long?
I can’t say that the
state of Vermont is making less maple syrup.
We are pretty much keeping our production
up but we are changing the way we do it.
We are adding vacuums into the woods now
and that sort of counters the weather. So
we are able to make the volume of syrup
that we always did but we have to change
our ways.
The way the vacuuming
works is that the trees are all hooked up
with networks of plastic tubing and we put
a vacuum into the plastic tubing. Scientists
have figured out that sap will only run
out of the wound we make in the tree if
the pressure inside is greater than the
atmospheric pressure outside. So the vacuums
create more pressure inside the trees and
that tricks them into running.
But over a period of
15 years or so we could lose our maple trees
altogether and it may be that maple sugar
farming can only been further north.
Harvesting Christmas
trees in short sleeves
Ironically, in the last
two years the biggest cause of our bad season
was weather that was too cold. But I am
not ready to pull the plug on this thinking
that something is up with the climate just
because it’s colder than it should be now,
rather than warmer than it should be, because
it is unpredictable weather.
It seems to me that
the weather is more extreme. It seems as
though we get high wind storms and sometimes
torrential rain that I don’t remember as
a kid. I think that is all part of climate
change. I particularly notice the effects
of windstorms because our tubing stays in
the woods year round and every time there
is a windstorm limbs come down and trees
come down and knock our tubing down.
Two years ago we went
out to cut Christmas trees on our farm.
I was cutting them just before Christmas
in my short sleeve shirt over many days.
From reading old diaries and from talking
to my grandparents I know that we used to
get a lot more snow and colder weather around
here.
Working on solutions
I am one of the sugar
makers who are willing to talk about it.
Many sugar makers are of the old school
and they say there is no such thing as climate
change everything is fine, don’t worry about
it.
Though I am politically
conservative I honestly feel like climate
change is a threat, and that humans play
into the cause of climate change and the
emissions from the fuels we use are part
of the cause. So I would like to see advancement
on the development of alternative fuels.
Plus we are going to run out of petroleum.
It’s a proven thing so why wouldn’t the
sensible thing be to work on the development
of alternative fuels.
I have spoken to many
groups and reporters and I have been on
national television. I was on ABC news last
year and certain public radio programmes.
I feel like maple sugar makers are more
qualified than anyone else to notice changes
in climate because we need just the right
weather for our industry to work. A sugar
maker knows, because he needs the right
weather and he works with the trees and
when the limbs fall out of them too often,
he suffers with too much repair work.
Scientific review
Reviewed by: [NAME], [INTITUTION], [COUNTRY]
This story is consistent
with the literature. It is well documented
that intensity of rain fall has increased
by approximately 30% since 1900, and that
average annual air temperature has risen
in New England over the past 60 years (the
age of the witness).
There is not evidence
to support the claim of increased wind speed,
but this is a local phenomena and highly
variable. Given the complex conditions needed
to generate sap flow, syrup productivity
would be very sensitive to climate change.
It was interesting to
note the use of vacuum systems to draw more
sap to make up for the poor weather. There
could be very detrimental impacts from the
this method, because it could draw too much
sap from the tree (analogous to drawing
to much blood from a person) and thus not
leave the trees with sufficient sap to produce
leaves and roots. In turn, this would make
the maples even more susceptible to drought
and insect attack.
All articles are subject to scientific review
by a member of the Climate Witness Science
Advisory Panel.
