Gasify. Decarbonize. Mitigate. Restore.

The Biden Administration plans to strengthen regulations controlling methane emissions from oil and gas wells, pipelines, and refinery infrastructure.  This is a good action.  It reduces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions very cheaply and quickly.  The costs to the oil and gas industry--and therefore to the consumer--are tiny.

It fits in well with what I think should be the global strategy for managing climate change as well as we can, as cheaply as we can.  If climate change can't be managed cheaply, then it won't be managed.  We'll regret that, but there's simply no way to force half the planet to forgo the benefits of an industrial economy to mitigate something that hasn't really happened yet.  Humans are vulnerable to Boiling Frog Syndrome.

If you go back far enough in this blog, you'll probably find me expressing skepticism that climate change is a problem that needed to be addressed immediately.  I'm now convinced.  There's enough data that the medium-to-worst-case predictions from the IPCC are correct.  We need to act.

The question is how to act.  I believe that there are four overlapping phases of climate action:

Gasify.  The lowest-hanging fruit for reducing GHG is to replace coal with gas.  Coal is still the largest worldwide source of energy production, and it's by far the most greenhouse gas-intensive source of energy.  Getting rid of it is essential. 

Retrofitting coal-fired electricity generation with gas is incredibly cheap, and gas emits less than half the CO2 of coal.  Replacing all coal-fired generation with gas would reduce US emissions by half a billion metric tonnes of CO2.  I don't know what the worldwide number for coal emissions is, but I'd be surprised if replacing coal with gas didn't reduce world GHG emissions by at least 20%.

But this only helps if the natural gas infrastructure doesn't leak.  If methane leaks into the atmosphere, it has 80x the warming potential of CO2.  So a thorough inventory of leaking infrastructure and regulations requiring the leaks to be fixed are essential.

This isn't hard.  Big methane leaks can be detected by satellite.  Smaller leaks require some labor and detector infrastructure, but a small amount of labor yields a large amount of detection.  Then you have to fix the leaks, but that's mostly to the producer or distributor's advantage.  It's as close to a policy no-brainer as we'll get.

The time horizon on gasification could be as short as a decade.  That would require beating up on the coal industry pretty aggressively, but even modest incentives for gas conversion should crater demand for coal even more than has already happened.

Outside the US, this will be harder, because the regulatory landscape is rockier, and the gas distribution infrastructure is less mature.  It'll be a tough sell to convince developing countries to install pipelines that should only be used for 10-20 years, then eliminated.  That seems like an area where the developing world can provide some policy help.  But first, the developing world need to understand that short-term reliance on gas does the whole world a giant favor.  I can't say that I'm sanguine for this happening, but it'll give us a decent amount of breathing room if it does.

Decarbonize.  Ten years ago, I would've told you that nuclear power was going to be cheaper than renewables.  For existing nukes, that is still overwhelmingly true, and we should be doing everything we can to extend licenses on existing plants. Only an idiot would shut one down if it can still operate safely. But, sadly, the cost of new nuclear (greater than $5500/kW in overnight costs in the US), and the management of that construction, is so bad that the carrying costs during construction make them uneconomical.

The knock against renewables is that they're intermittent, and the cost of storing their overproduction to even out the periods of underproduction makes the levelized cost of a mostly-renewable grid higher than a fossil grid, and quite a bit higher than a gas-dominant grid.  

That's still true, but it probably won't be in five years.  The levelized cost of storage is plummeting, not only because battery costs are plummeting, but because the market is starting to adjust to the idea of a grid with massive overproduction at some times of the day.  This makes the business case for things like green hydrogen (and green methane--more on this in a moment) start to look rosy.

Then the big barrier to the roll-out of renewables will be permitting costs, NIMBY and environmental delays, and grid upgrades (which come with their own permitting costs and NIMBY/environmental delays.)

Decarbonization requires more than just producing a decarbonized grid.  There are still industrial applications that require massive amounts of process heat (e.g. metals production, concrete, ceramics), and of course there's transportation, where electric vehicles are dropping in cost but still nowhere near competitive with internal combustion.  And there's space heating.

There's a massive infrastructure of piping for carrying gasoline, fuel oil, aviation fuels, and, most importantly, natural gas.  Replacing that infrastructure will take decades, and doing it much quicker will be unaffordable (cf. Boiling Frog Syndrome, above).

But we can stop pulling new fossil fuels out of the ground, and replace them with green synfuels.

You can make hydrogen by electrolyzing water.  It's not particularly efficient, but if you have terawatts of excess solar capacity that costs almost nothing, you don't particularly care how efficient it is.  And once you have the hydrogen, you can use it as a primary fuel, for turning turbines to make electricity when renewables aren't available, or as a feedstock to make carbon-based fuels.  Pull CO2 from the atmosphere, run it and hydrogen over a catalyst, and you get green methane (no fossil fuels involved) through the Sabatier process, which has been in use since the late nineteenth century.  And with methane, you can use additional incredibly cheap energy to convert it to alkanes for transportation fuels and petrochemicals.

Note that this doesn't reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, because you're going to burn the green methane to make things go.  But it doesn't increase it either.  It's carbon-neutral.

This is all a bigger deal than gasification, but it's the road to zero net carbon emissions.  It'll take 20-40 years to do this.  There are substantial policy problems, with two standing out:

First, the fossil fuel industry will hate this, and will resist it with their substantial political clout.  This will be further complicated by the fact that we need their cooperation to get the gasification effort to work.  That's not straightforward, but it does have a political divide-and-conquer play built in:  get the oil and gas people to gang up on the coal people and wipe them out.  But that devil's bargain needs to be made explicit in policy: Oil and gas gets a brief reprieve to beat up on coal, but they're expected to manage their portfolio of assets so they're in the synfuel business in 20-40 years, and their assets in the ground stay there, pretty much forever.

Second, we simply can't afford the NIMBYism any longer.  The people who don't want giant solar and wind farms down the street are going to have to get over themselves.  Some people are going to have to live with high-voltage transmission lines on or near their property.  And all the environmental crap and litigiousness associated with building ridiculously cheap intermittent capacity--the kind that can be used by the synfuel business, as well as any other set of applications that require lots of energy but don't particularly care when it arrives--needs to be eliminated.  This requires legislative courage and leadership.

No problem there, eh?

If all of this goes well, humanity will have performed one of the greatest feats in history: for the first time since the industrial revolution, the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere will return to pre-industrial levels.

But the ones already there will remain.  And that'll eventually destroy civilization.  I believe that we're already past the point of no return.  It may take 50-100 years for things to unravel, but they will eventually.  2ºC warming, which is likely, even with fairly aggressive action, is too much stress for a civilization as complex as ours to withstand.  Do you think our politics are messed up now?  Just wait until we have another ¾ of a ºC baked into the system and see where we are.  There are going to be a lot more have-nots than haves, and they're not going to sit by idly and watch the lives they know disappear.

Mitigate.  The Paris agreement and the IPCC are all trying to get to carbon neutrality by 2040.  They'll fail.  And even if they could do so, the carbon in the atmosphere will produce significant economic hardship, which will result in mass migrations from the global south to the north, which will foment even more unrest than we've seen already.  And that can end civilization just as effectively as massive crop failures and temperatures so high that large chunks of the Earth become uninhabitable.

Typically, when we talk about climate mitigation, most people think of building dikes and flood-control systems, engineering crops that can withstand new climates, and otherwise learning to adapt to a bad situation.  All of those things are fine, but they won't be sufficient.

We need to invest in geoengineering.

Unlike adaptation, geoengineering makes the world artificially cooler than it would be if left to naturally warm with the burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  It's an imperfect band-aid, largely for three reasons:

1. It's a political and diplomatic heavy lift.  There will be winners and losers to geoengineering, and at some point we'll have to run roughshod over the losers without them starting a war.  I believe that's doable, but we should be under no illusions about how hard it will be.
2. It doesn't change the chemistry.  Bad stuff other than simple warming happens when there's lots of carbon in the atmosphere.  The most serious is ocean acidification.  But that takes a long time.
3. Once you start, you can't stop.  Failure for the world to continue to maintain geoengineering once it starts will cause the dreaded "termination shock", where we get no time to adjust to a step-function in global temperatures.

Nonetheless, there are fairly simple things we can do to bring down temperatures in the face of otherwise-overwhelming forcing functions.  These need to be investigated and experimented with now, so they can be deployed with confidence in 20-50 years.  And we'll probably need to maintain them for 100-200 years.

But not forever.  Bad things happen between now and forever.  If we wait long enough, there will be a termination shock, and it'll kill a stressed civilization.

Restore. So, eventually, we need to take the carbon we've put into the atmosphere over the last 200 years out of it, and fix it into limestone, where it can't come bubbling up out of old oil and gas wells, or rot away to produce methane, or otherwise sneak back into the atmosphere when we're in one of our periods when we're too stupid to keep our eyes on the ball.

This is a problem we don't know how to solve.  There are some proposals.  Some of them might be quite cheap, but in my view they're long-shots.

We should count on the problem only being tractable through the expenditure of massive amounts of energy.

The world generated 29 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022.  Let's double that for process and space heating and call it 60GWh.  As the rest of the world industrializes and becomes used to first-world living standards, we should count on that tripling in the next 50 years.  Call it 200GWh.  But that's without any estimate for how much energy will be needed to pull out the CO2.

We've put 1.1 teratonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began.  The thermodynamic requirement for removing CO2 comes out to about 250kWh/t.  We might be able to do better than that with artificial weathering and other geoengineering techniques, but let's use this as a worst case and plan to remove all 1.1Tt by brute force.  That'll require 2.75 x 10^17Wh of energy.  (For those of you playing along at home, that's 275 petawatt-hours of energy.)  If we amortize that over 200 years, that requires increasing yearly world energy consumption by a factor of roughly 7000.

That's sobering.

Is it physically possible to produce that much energy?  Sure.  It requires science fiction, but not magical science fiction:  solar power satellites beaming energy from space, fusion reactors, terrestrial solar panels with deployed costs of pennies per megawatt, geothermal energy available anywhere on Earth, supplied by shafts that cost a few hundred dollars per kilometer to drill and stabilize.

All of this is within the capability of a Kardashev Type I civilization.  If we don't destroy our civilization, either through a climate catastrophe or another of the existential threats we face, this is eminently doable in the next 200 years.  But that's the kind of timescale we're looking at before we can put the climate crisis behind us.

Putting it all together:

You'll note that I've been extremely vague about costs.  That's largely because they're unknowable.  However, I'll rephrase what I said at the beginning:  If people notice that the costs of climate mitigation affect them, they'll resist it.  On the other hand, it'll be very hard for them to attribute the costs of climate change to any one event in their lives that causes them loss.  It's irrational, but people are irrational about lots of things.

The thing that can save us is technology.  One of the reasons why I used to be a climate skeptic was that it didn't really matter, because there was a hierarchy of things that had to happen to care one way or another:

1. Is climate change happening?  (The answer to this has been "yes" for quite a while.)
2. Is it caused by human activity?  ("Yes" for not quite as long, but long enough.)
3. How bad is it? (I don't believe we really had a definitive answer to this until about 10-15 years ago.)
4. Is there anything we can do about it?

It's this last item where the answer was "no" until very recently.  Renewables costs were still too high, battery tech was kinda in limbo, and we didn't have a good idea of what a renewables-dominated electric grid looked like.

I'm still not sure that we've gotten over the "what can we do?" hurdle.  We can sprinkle photovoltaics all over the place pretty cheaply, but can't create instant infrastructure out of them, and the developing world wants the benefits of industrial society now.  If they can't get those benefits using renewables or some other non-emitting energy source, they'll use coal, gas, and oil.

So there are scaling problems with the technology we have, even though the cost curve looks good.  And the mitigation technologies are going to be insanely complicated to sell, and they're basically a problem in global collective action, which is, to say the least, an immature technology.

Through all of this, however, should be one overarching goal:  Make energy as cheap and plentiful as possible.  Only the profligate expenditure of energy can save us.  With enough of it, all problems are solvable.