30 June 2017, Renew Economy, Another blow to CCS, as EU power giants bow out of Dutch project. European power giants Engie and Uniper have withdrawn from a test project to capture and store carbon dioxide generated by one of several major new coal plants in the Netherlands, dealing yet another blow to the prospects of “clean coal” technology, in which the Australian government and fossil fuel lobbyists still hold much stock. Reuters reported this week that the two companies – one of which, Engie, the majority owner of Australia’s Loy Yang B brown coal-fired power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, and who recently closed Hazelwood, – had told the Dutch government they no longer intended to participate in the CCS project, the biggest of its kind in Europe. Holland’s economic affairs Minister Henk Kamp said in a statement he would “examine whether legal steps can be taken to recoup” unspecified subsidies paid to the companies if they had not changed their minds by mid-September. The minister also said that the companies’ withdrawal from the project “changed nothing” in the government’s resolve to develop large-scale CCS demonstration projects. Read More here
Monthly Archives: June 2017
29 June 2017, Renew Economy, Coal on limited lifespan as CCS hopes go up in smoke. The coal industry is facing a new crisis point as a group of leading scientists call for the construction of new coal generators to cease within three years, and as the industry’s flagship “clean coal” and carbon capture and storage project went up in smoke in the US. As reported elsewhere on this web site, the US energy utility Southern Co finally gave up on its much-vaunted Kemper coal gasification and CCS project, after costs soared from $US1.8 billion to more than $US7.5 billion ($A10 billion), and it realised it wasn’t going to work. On Wednesday, US time, it announced it would cease operations immediately on the coal component of the project, and just use the asset as a gas generator. Shareholders already saddled with $US3.1 billion of losses face a further $US3.4 billion write down if Southern Co can’t convince regulators to pass those costs on to consumers bills. The spectacular failure of the Kemper facility – more than $US7.5 billion for a 582MW plant, the most expensive in US history per MW – comes amid a renewed call for new coal generation to be stopped in its tracks, and for existing coal generation to be wound back rapidly. In an article in Nature magazine, more than 60 scientists and prominent leaders, including the former UNFCCC secretary Christiana Figures, and former ACTU president Sharan Burrow, now general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, say the world has three years to set emissions on the right course. It recommends a six-point plan, including no new coal generators post 2020, accelerating wind and solar and other renewables, retiring all coal-fired generators and boosting electric vehicles. “The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020,” writes co-author Hans Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Read More here
28 June 2017, Climate Home, Even Boeing-747 tanker jets can’t win our total war on fires. The more effectively we suppress fires, the worse they become. As climate change makes the world more combustible, we need a new approach. In 1910 Ed Pulaski, a US Forest Service ranger, rounded up his men who were fighting a forest fire in dense conifer forests in northern Idaho and forced them, some at gunpoint, to take refuge in an abandoned mine shaft. The Pulaski tunnel (now a tourist site) represents the dramatic historical moment when ad-hoc approaches to controlling wildfire were shown to be utterly inadequate – this heroic failure provided the impetuous for the US Forest Service to declare total war on fire. Nearly all of Pulaski’s men survived the conflagration, one of thousands of fires that burnt across Idaho during an extremely hot and dry summer, an event now known at the ‘Big Burn’. The sheer ferocity, geographic scale and destructive power of the 1910 Idaho fires shifted the focus of the US Forest Service (USFS) from forestry toward fire fighting. This led to the development of networks of fire towers to identify wildland ignitions. They would be extinguished by teams of trained forest fire fighters, many of whom use a combined ax and mattock invented by, and named after, Ed Pulaski.The iconic mascot Smokey Bear was created by the US advertising industry to promote forest fire awareness. The USFS fire fighting policy evolved to a mandated extinguishment of any new forest fire ignition by 10am the following day, with some managers demanding that the fire size was kept below 10 acres. This total war on fire also drove innovation. In the early 1960 the USFS established Fire Lab at Missoula where an aeronautic engineer, redeployed after the defence department project he was working on was cancelled, developed the first mathematical description of fire, creating the foundation for predictive fire behaviour modelling….But there is a very big catch. The US approach is proving to be ecologically and economically unsustainable – especially in an era of increasing fire threat due to climate change.1 Total fire suppression has created the ‘fire suppression paradox’: the more effective suppression is the worse fires become. Fuel that would historically have been burnt by lightning or indigenous people builds up, resulting in catastrophic fires that are uncontainable regardless of the available technology. The fire suppression paradox also has another unintended and counterproductive consequences: communities come to believe flammable landscapes are safe, resulting in increasing urban sprawl into wildlands that are primed to burn. This massively increases the risk of loss of life and property and the inevitable, tragic loss drives further investment into aerial fire fighting. Climate change is turbo-charging this feedback – fire seasons are worsening, fire disasters are becoming more destructive, and hence demands for more investment in aggressive fire fighting are growing worldwide. Collectively this is creating a dangerous and economically and ecologically unsustainable fire-suppression spiral. Read More here
28 June 2017, The Conversation, The world’s tropical zone is expanding, and Australia should be worried. The Tropics are defined as the area of Earth where the Sun is directly overhead at least once a year — the zone between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. However, tropical climates occur within a larger area about 30 degrees either side of the Equator. Earth’s dry subtropical zones lie adjacent to this broad region. It is here that we find the great warm deserts of the world.Earth’s bulging waistline Earth’s tropical atmosphere is growing in all directions, leading one commentator to cleverly call this Earth’s “bulging waistline”. Since 1979, the planet’s waistline been expanding poleward by 56km to 111km per decade in both hemispheres. Future climate projections suggest this expansion is likely to continue, driven largely by human activities – most notably emissions of greenhouse gases and black carbon, as well as warming in the lower atmosphere and the oceans. If the current rate continues, by 2100 the edge of the new dry subtropical zone would extend from roughly Sydney to Perth. As these dry subtropical zones shift, droughts will worsen and overall less rain will fall in most warm temperate regions. Poleward shifts in the average tracks of tropical and extratropical cyclones are already happening. This is likely to continue as the tropics expand further. As extratropical cyclones move, they shift rain away from temperate regions that historically rely upon winter rainfalls for their agriculture and water security. Researchers have observed that, as climate zones change, animals and plants migrate to keep up. But as biodiversity and ecosystem services are threatened, species that can’t adjust to rapidly changing conditions face extinction. In some biodiversity hotspots – such as the far southwest of Australia – there are no suitable land areas (only oceans) for ecosystems and species to move into to keep pace with warming and drying trends. We are already witnessing an expansion of pests and diseases into regions that were previously climatically unsuitable. This suggests that they will attempt to follow any future poleward shifts in climate zones. Read More here