# 25 Patrick Moore lectured on carbon emissions.

After reading the entire text of a lecture which Patrick Moore, former director of Greenpeace gave in London England on Oct 15^th (see http://www.thegwpf.org/patrick-moore-should-we-celebrate-carbon-dioxide/ ), I have to show the other side of CO₂ emissions. From his lecture I learned a few new facts but already knew that the earth is colder than 50 million years ago, that some plants grow better at elevated CO₂ levels and that volcanoes lately only contribute 1% to the CO₂ emissions.  He concentrates, on plants without looking sufficiently at potential human suffering. He believes that, under the influence of the UN and the IPCC, scientists only look at how the CO₂ levels are influenced by humans during the last 2 centuries. He does not pay enough attention to what scientists say about rising sea levels 120 000 years ago .when the earth was approaching the same warmth. I will counter his views with articles hyperlinked on this blog  and add a number of significant developments related to climate change.

For first time readers I let you  know that early in 2013 I discovered how Canada’s oil exports were suffering from pipeline delays causing a $ 20-30 billion dollar revenue loss in 2012. Later on it was confirmed to be $24 billion. It was partly caused by Mr Harper’s objection to a national carbon tax and Enbridge’s reluctance to tell the public how the disasters in the US were caused and how they could be prevented. The problems I found are recorded in post 1. Mainly due to rail transport the losses have been decreased to $ 15 billion per year prior to the price crash. Since 2013 I kept on looking for interesting articles about carbon tax and related subjects, which I recorded as well.

Citing references on the blog I will not only show the other side of Mr Moore’s story but also how important taxing of carbon has become. It not only discourages the use of fossil fuel but can also finance badly needed carbon capture and storage (CCS). With an example I will show that the average politician does not has the time to get involved with the details of climate change, while the media  releases a lot about the effects but rarely covers the main cause. I will also list the energy return on investment EROI of energy sources, showing how profitable wind power has become and the improved efficiency of the Canadian oil sands. I will also comment on the safety and longevity of railroad transport, why in particular the coal industry is against a badly needed global carbon tax and the prospects of establishing refineries in Canada to keep more jobs at home. Here are my observations:

A

Mr Moore’s line of thinking

When you look at the third graph on post 24 you will see that during the last 400,000 years the CO₂ level went during the three previous ice ages up and down between 180 ppm and 300 ppm. Enough plants survived each time when levels dropped to 180 ppm. Since volcanoes lately only contribute 1% to the CO2 supply, Mr Moore feels we should keep on burning fossil fuel. As you can see that is not yet necessary because since 1950 we pushed the level up to 30% higher than it ever was in those 400,000 years.

Following the previous ice age sea levels rose to 9 metres above present levels. That is not only mentioned by Dr Hanson but confirmed by my brother who wrote a paper about pre-historic tide lines in the Netherlands.  Seeing how much ice is still around, ready to melt, a similar rise in sea level can be expected.  Fortunately we can postpone, or possibly eliminate such rising sea levels. During the 9 meter rise there were no people around. People prefer to live near the sea. Probably the earliest to be flooded were those who lived when Great Britain was still part of the continent. When you google “doggerland” you will be directed to Wikipedia, which shows with maps how those people had to endure a megaflood causing a sea level rise of 1.5 metres in 2 years time. When you google “Lake Agassiz”, which caused the megaflood you will find the history of 8 megafloods. Thanks to the watchful eyes of scientists we are assured that none of that magnitude will reoccur. When you read Dr Hansen’s article referred to on post 24 you can see that future sea level rise has been underestimated and that it won’t be linear.

Despite good progress in developing green energy, the demand for fossil fuel keeps rising because the population increases and the demand per person goes up. Without carbon capture and storage (CCS) we may be going faster towards that 9 meter sea level rise than would have happened without extra human emissions. From the fourth graph on post 24 you can see that human emissions started rising in 1850, just after the start of the industrial revolution. As documented in point G) of post 24, CCS from the air will also be required. Fortunately that is already in the development stage. So far most captured CO₂ has been pumped in liquid form a few kilometers deep underground, where, due to soil pressure, it stays liquid. New methods of storage are being developed and it will all be available some 100,000 years from now when we are cooling down again towards the next ice age and have to give some more CO₂ to the plants to keep them fresher than before. Maybe there will be enough to prevent another ice age.

B

How much do politicians know about climate change?

Since the media concentrates on the effects of climate change and seldom mentions the causes the average politician can only get informed via the internet, if they have the time to do it. This is best illustrated by what happened just prior to the Canadian Federal election in Kamloops BC. (post 24, point E) The conservative candidate said during a radio interview that only !.5 % of the global warming was caused by humans. He got flak from his opponents and one provincial  MLA. They all mentioned obvious signs of climate change but none of them mentioned that since 1950 humans raised the CO₂ level in the air to 30% higher than it ever has been in 400,000 years and that emissions started rising shortly after the industrial revolution began.

C

Cost of green energy versus that from fossil fuels

Coal is by far the cheapest source of fossil fuel energy. The US is a major producer, also a major user and therefore has a tough time to introduce a carbon tax. As shown in post 12 some oil companies want a carbon tax but the coal industry is dead against it. Wind power is the cheapest source of green energy and even cheaper than natural gas. Alberta  has for years been vilified because our oil requires so much energy to extract it and it creates horrible tailings ponds. Much has changed and we can use green energy as soon as a global carbon tax is in place. As shown in D) below, following acceptance of a global carbon tax we will be able to transfer vast amounts of surplus green electricity from British Columbia to Alberta. A carbon tax will also encourage more solar and wind power development in Alberta. Apart from that, the oil industry may soon increase recovery via the toe to heel air injection process (THAI). It will almost double the energy return on investment ( EROI). As can be seen from the figures below we are doing much better than oil obtained from shale and will certainly be better than what some people hope to recover from the vast offshore arctic reserves. It is ironic that President Obama cancels the Keystone XL pipeline based on our “dirty oil” while the US keeps producing much dirtier shale oil.

The EROI is explained by Ajay Gupta and Charles Hall. They emphasise that the return on investment varies widely with quality and location. Also oil and natural gas are lumped together because it often is extracted by the same companies. While a lot is presented as a range and in particular the hydro has a large range, the averages figures below show how much energy is obtained from an input of 1:  Hydro 139, coal 50, wind 25, oil and gas 18, wave/tidal 15, oil sands toe to heel air injection process 9, geothermal 7.5 nuclear  6.5, solar 6.5, oil sands conventional   without cost of land restoration 6, oil sands conventional   including cost of land restoration 5, shale oil 3.5, corn ethanol  I.5

The figure for hydro power is so high because their cost per KWh is based on 100 years of operation. Many plants were built at a fraction of the present capital cost. The highest EROI figure for hydro is 267. As shown in post 21 the cost for a new 1100 MW facility in British Columbia is, depending on operating hours per year, 8.5-8.8 c/KWh This is similar to the cost from existing wind farms. The EROI of wind farms is 30 but that includes offshore farms which produce at 22c/KWh while on shore wind power costs 8.5c/KWh That cost keeps falling as more efficient equipment comes on line. For new facilities wind will be cheaper than hydro. That is confirmed by the lowest EROI figure for hydro. It is 11.

D

Influence of a global carbon tax

It is obvious that a global carbon tax, which allows taxing exports without penalties will influence the above EROI figures substantially, As shown in post 17 at the BC tax rate of $ 30 per tonne of CO₂ the purchase price of coal would rise by at least 70% while even at the present low rate of $50 per barrel the cost of crude oil would go up by only 19%. No attempt has been made to figure it out for the Norwegian offshore tax which is $75 per tonne of CO₂

 BC has a carbon tax and a clean energy act. The latter was intended to make lots of surplus green energy available to less fortunately provinces and states.  Due to the absence of a global tax there is still far too much 4c/KWh power available on the North American grid so a lot of our green power has to be sold at a loss. A major portion of the cheap power is supplied by coal fired plants in the USA and their price would rise following the introduction of a global carbon tax. We have 31 hydro reservoirs which can even out the flow of irregular green power. Apart from Quebec we have better wind conditions than any other province. The act requires us to generate 93% green power and be self sufficient under all conditions. BC Hydro is obliged to buy all green power which independent companies provide. At times they can’t accommodate it so it is wasted by overflowing reservoirs. Also hydro turbines are forced to operate at lower capacity, which drives up the unit cost. As a result the green power they buy at 8.5 c-9.7c/KWh actually costs 11-13 c/KWh. Our surplus is enormous. We have an agreement with the US to regulate the flow of the Columbia River in exchange for half the extra power they produce as a result. It amounts to an average of 4400 GWh per year, which is 86% of the 5100 GWh per year which the recently approved Site C power plant will supply. We can’t use the Columbia River Entitlement for peak power and since it is subject to renegotiation 10 years after either party demands to do so, it can’t be included in long term planning. As a result we sell it to the US for low prices.  The requirement of self sufficiency also creates a huge surplus capacity leading to higher prices. On cold winter nights hydro turbines must be able to deliver the peak loads, which are at least 15% above average. During those cold winter nights there is no solar power available and it may be wind still, hence all power has to come from hydro. All the above facts are documented in post 21

E

Railway transport

The Quebec disaster gave it a bad reputation but it was caused by extreme cost cutting, which resulted in inadequate sampling and classification of the volatile North Dakota oil. Worse yet, a struggling railroad company was allowed to operate a 72 car, 5 locomotive fully loaded oil train with only one engineer without help of a conductor. In addition he was allowed to leave it parked unattended on a hill for several hours until his replacement would arrive. By far the safest way to transport Alberta oil is as raw bitumen, which behaves like tar and is reheated at the destination by steam coils installed in the special isolated railroad cars designed for that transport. Many are already in operation to transport oil to the Gulf Coast refineries. They are designed to handle our heavy crude and prefer it over the domestic supplies, which the US rather ships North for export through Canada, which is exempt from their export prohibition.  A main advantage  of shipping it raw is that the bitumen  does not have to be mixed with expensive condensate to produce diluted bitumen (dilbit) for transport in pipelines. That condensate has to be imported and that is why the Northern Gateway actually has two lines. Another advantage is that the cars can hold 30% more bitumen than by transporting it as dilbit. Railroads are also useful to deliver oil where there are no pipelines. In 2014 the US transport by rail was 493,000 carloads, which is fifty times more than six years earlier.

Post 18 shows with many references how the railways are taking over from pipelines. If indeed we manage to curtail oil consumption, pipelines will lose business in 30 to 40 years while railways will remain to transport the dwindling amount of oil and many other commodities. The best example is the G7G railway, which was originally planned to carry lumber, ore and general merchandise from the South to Alaska. It now has been redesigned to bring oil from Alberta to the underutilized port of Valdez. For about the same capital cost as the two contested BC pipelines it will be able to carry more than their combined volume. Valdez is 2 days closer to most Asian destinations than Vancouver and Kitimat, hence it saves on sea transport while avoiding the objectionable shipping through BC waters. It has the support and participation of first nations and when transporting raw bitumen, it will probably only require a short condensate line. I heard that it will be electric using cheap new wind power. Since,as described in D), BC Hydro has enough problems with windpower I don’t foresee a hook up to their net until there is a global carbon tax.

F

Carbon Capture and srorage(CCS)

Cutting emissions by developing green energy will take too long to prevent disastrous sea levels. CCS from all power plants, blast furnaces, beer breweries and other industries will be very effective and is already well developed, as shown in a few lines copied from D) in post 22:

“Canada has 2 of the 21 world’s operating CCS plants (14). China has at least 6 large scale fully integrated projects (LSIP), driven by state owned power companies with help from major international partners (15). A recent article describes the  GreenGen project, a billion-dollar facility built with support of Peabody Energy, a Missouri firm that is the world’s biggest private coal company. The author notes . “ Part of a coming wave of such carbon-eating facilities, it may be China’s—and possibly the planet’s—single most consequential effort to fight climate change”(16)”

The cost is expected to come down when the VELOXOTHERM™ CARBON CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY of

INVENTYS THERMAL TECHNOLOGIES INC. starts paying off.They use a large wheel similar to what is used in heat exchangers and a solid absorbent rather than messy liquids. The large wheel made of adsorbent turns about one revolution per minute. On one side of the wheel, the spokes collect carbon dioxide; on the other side, those spokes come into contact with counter-current steam, which releases the CO₂.

As documented under G) in post 24, capture and storage from the atmosphere will also be essential. At least 2 companies, Esenberger and Carbon Engineering have operating facilities to prove that it can be done.  Carbon Engineering, an Alberta company uses standardized scalable industrial facilities. Their full-scale design could absorb the emissions created by 300,000 typical cars. Obviously thousands of these facilities will be required around the world. It seems cheaper than building dikes around all low laying areas. Miami and other low lying cities in Florida could be lost to the sea in 80 years time because soil conditions make dike building extremely difficult there.

As shown in detail on several posts a global carbon tax would allow taxing of exports and all that money could via a global fund be used to help less fortunate countries and finance CCS.  A carbon tax is far less invasive than is often portrayed. When I talk to fellow British Columbians I note that most don’t know that we reduced the use of petroleum products by 17% while it rose by 1,5% in the rest of the country. Half of them don’t believe that we get all the money back until I show them the tables. Nobody complains that we have suffered due to the tax.

G

The G7 agreement to limit carbon emission

The G7 leading industrial nations, including Canada, have agreed to cut greenhouse gases by phasing out the use of fossil fuels by the end of the century.  The leaders have committed themselves to the need to “decarbonise the global economy in the course of this century”. They also agreed on a global target for limiting the rise in average global temperatures to a maximum of 2C over pre-industrial levels.

Environmental lobbyists described the announcement as a hopeful sign that plans for complete decarbonisation could be decided on in Paris climate talks later this year. They criticised the fact that leaders had baulked at Merkel’s proposal that they should agree to immediate binding emission targets.

 Coal is an essential reduction agent for steelmaking, Ships, airplanes and the petrochemical industry will for a long time be dependent on oil, hence carbon capture from stacks as well as from the air will be essential.

H

Why not process the oil here than rather than ship it out raw ?

Several people have asked me that question. The refinery business is very competitive and depends on what routes can be found to ship out the various products. I can only comment with a few points, which I read about but never recorded. Alberta has 4 refineries and a rather recent plan for an additional upgrader was canceled because it could not be justified. Most US refineries are designed to handle heavy Canadian and Venezuelan crude, so that is an established export route. Our Burnaby refinery may shut down because it does not make money. The two enterprises which are planning refineries in Kitimat and Prince Rupert have to find niche markets. Asia has  super refineries and distribution networks. They determine their product mix and are only interested in our crude unless we sell specific products at bargain prices.

A main point for any refinery decision will be how long it will operate at full capacity. According to the G7 agreement described above oil will soon become a sunset industry and the return on investment will suffer from it.