www.guardian.co.uk
Sunday 3 May 2009
Move to share technology may help Britain meet Kyoto promise but could be seen as squandering business opportunities Britain will share the benefits of its investment in carbon capture and storage technology with China and other developing countries, the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said today. The move may help Britain to belatedly meet its Kyoto Protocol promise to pass on low-carbon technology to help poorer countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
However, questions may arise over how much should be given away for free and how much the UK should exploit the business opportunities of being a potential leader in the industry. "We're approaching this from the mindset where we can co-operate more with China on things like carbon capture and storage," Miliband said.
While not abandoning the industrial potential of being a leader in the field, he said Britain could benefit from transferring knowledge. "Eventually we hope to see this technology across the world because coal is something that is used in many countries and the key to that is making it a clean fuel of the future."
Miliband is visiting Beijing to try to forge common ground with Chinese officials ahead of crucial climate change talks later this year in Copenhagen. Britain hopes China will set voluntary targets to reduce the energy and carbon intensity of an economy that recently overtook the US as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. The central goal of China's mandarins is financial support and the transfer of clean coal and other low-carbon technology from richer nations. China is also pioneering its own solutions, as Milliband saw at the world's only commercially operating carbon capture facility, Huaneng Beijing cogeneration power plant.
Developed with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and opened last July, the facility is on a relatively small scale but it claims 85% efficiency in capturing 3,000 tonnes of carbon each year. The recycled product is used for carbonated drinks and dry ice. "The technology has been successful here so we can say it will be successful in other coal-fired plants," said the general manager, Cai Hongwang. "We could scale this up. We are now considering the market demand for carbon dioxide."
If production is ramped up, the captured carbon could be used for enhanced oil recovery or, in the longer term, possibly pumped into the deep ocean. Britain is considering sequestration of carbon in cavities under the North Sea bed that have been emptied of oil. Several similar experiments will soon be launched in other parts of China, which is investing heavily in research into reducing the climate impact of coal. More than 70% of China's electricity is generated by coal. Over the next 10 years, the amount burned is expected to double.
According to the Chinese Academy of Science, a plant in Shanxi will capture carbon and use it as fertiliser, while another in Shaanxi may pump captured carbon into oil deposits to extract the fuel. "It is better to convert carbon dioxide into products, but the demand is limited," said Xiao Yunhan, a government adviser and energy expert at the academy. "Sequestration will be the final solution for carbon dioxide control. But before that we should try other things."
To enhance technology transfer and co-operation on low-carbon projects, Miliband will tomorrow launch a ￡10m joint venture with the Carbon Trust and the Chinese Development Corporation to encourage British firms to enter the Chinese market. He will give a speech at Peking University calling on China to take a leadership role in climate talks. "As an emergent great power, China, too, has the ability not just to act but to lead; to be great not just in size but in influence; to energise others around the world" he will say.
Monday, 4 May 2009
Wind farm's radar system stops birds getting the chop
www.guardian.co.uk
Mon, 4 May 09
Texas claims world first in using Nasa technology to spare migrating species
It could be considered an air traffic control system for birds who have flown perilously off course. A windfarm in southern Texas, situated on a flight path used by millions of birds each autumn and spring, is pioneering the use of radar technology to avoid deadly collisions between a 2,500lb rotating blade and bird.
US windfarms kill about 7,000 birds a year, according to a recent study. Other studies of individual windfarms suggest a higher toll on bats and birds, which crash into towers, blades, power lines and other installations. Estimates from a single windfarm in Altamont, California showed as many as 1,300 birds of prey killed each year - or about three a day.
Such direct threats to wildlife, and concern for habitats, have increasingly pitted conservationists against the renewable energy industry. A handful of wind energy projects in the US have been shelved because of wildlife concerns. But it is claimed that radar technology now in use at the Penascal windfarm in Texas has found a balance between competing environmental concerns - taking action against global warming and protecting wildlife - by protecting migrating birds at times of peak danger.
The 202 MW farm, operated by the Spanish firm Iberdrola Renewables, is the first in the world to use radar systems to enable it to shut down automatically if bad weather hits in peak migration times. The installation, which opened late last month, uses radar systems originally developed for Nasa and the US air force to detect approaching birds from as far as four miles away, analyse weather conditions, and then determine whether they are in danger of flying into the rotating blades.
If they are, the turbines are programmed to shut down, restarting once the birds are safely on their way, said Gary Andrews, the chairman of DeTect Inc, the Florida company which developed the technology. The system spots the birds and assesses their altitude, numbers and the visibility. "With all these pieces coming together properly ... the turbines will shut down," said Andrews.
The Penascal windfarm is located on the Central Flyway, a main route for migratory birds in the Americas. Millions of birds funnel through the narrow air corridor during the semi-annual migration. A study in the autumn of 2007 found 4,000 birds an hour passing overhead. More than 30 species of warbler alone fly the route, with water fowl, raptors and hawks.
In ordinary circumstances, the birds would be thousands of feet above the windfarm, passing the turbines without incident. But that can change dramatically in a sudden storm. "The birds may be very vulnerable," said Christopher Shackleford, an ornithologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Andrews says his radar systems can avoid such consequences - and the windfarm would be forced to close only between 40 to 60 hours during peak migration times.
But conservationists say that windfarms should still be sited away from migration routes, and that the technology does nothing to solve the problem of installations that disturb bird and animal habitats and nesting grounds. "The bottom line with wind energy is that it has great potential but it must be done correctly," said Doug Inkley. a senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation.
Mon, 4 May 09
Texas claims world first in using Nasa technology to spare migrating species
It could be considered an air traffic control system for birds who have flown perilously off course. A windfarm in southern Texas, situated on a flight path used by millions of birds each autumn and spring, is pioneering the use of radar technology to avoid deadly collisions between a 2,500lb rotating blade and bird.
US windfarms kill about 7,000 birds a year, according to a recent study. Other studies of individual windfarms suggest a higher toll on bats and birds, which crash into towers, blades, power lines and other installations. Estimates from a single windfarm in Altamont, California showed as many as 1,300 birds of prey killed each year - or about three a day.
Such direct threats to wildlife, and concern for habitats, have increasingly pitted conservationists against the renewable energy industry. A handful of wind energy projects in the US have been shelved because of wildlife concerns. But it is claimed that radar technology now in use at the Penascal windfarm in Texas has found a balance between competing environmental concerns - taking action against global warming and protecting wildlife - by protecting migrating birds at times of peak danger.
The 202 MW farm, operated by the Spanish firm Iberdrola Renewables, is the first in the world to use radar systems to enable it to shut down automatically if bad weather hits in peak migration times. The installation, which opened late last month, uses radar systems originally developed for Nasa and the US air force to detect approaching birds from as far as four miles away, analyse weather conditions, and then determine whether they are in danger of flying into the rotating blades.
If they are, the turbines are programmed to shut down, restarting once the birds are safely on their way, said Gary Andrews, the chairman of DeTect Inc, the Florida company which developed the technology. The system spots the birds and assesses their altitude, numbers and the visibility. "With all these pieces coming together properly ... the turbines will shut down," said Andrews.
The Penascal windfarm is located on the Central Flyway, a main route for migratory birds in the Americas. Millions of birds funnel through the narrow air corridor during the semi-annual migration. A study in the autumn of 2007 found 4,000 birds an hour passing overhead. More than 30 species of warbler alone fly the route, with water fowl, raptors and hawks.
In ordinary circumstances, the birds would be thousands of feet above the windfarm, passing the turbines without incident. But that can change dramatically in a sudden storm. "The birds may be very vulnerable," said Christopher Shackleford, an ornithologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Andrews says his radar systems can avoid such consequences - and the windfarm would be forced to close only between 40 to 60 hours during peak migration times.
But conservationists say that windfarms should still be sited away from migration routes, and that the technology does nothing to solve the problem of installations that disturb bird and animal habitats and nesting grounds. "The bottom line with wind energy is that it has great potential but it must be done correctly," said Doug Inkley. a senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation.
'Safe' climate means 'no to coal'
news.bbc.co.uk
29 April 2009
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
About three-quarters of the world's fossil fuel reserves must be left unused if society is to avoid dangerous climate change, scientists warn. More than 100 nations support the goal of keeping temperature rise below 2C. But the scientists say that without major curbs on fossil fuel use, 2C will probably be reached by 2050. Writing in Nature, they say politicians should focus on limiting humanity's total output of CO2 rather than setting a "safe" level for annual emissions.
The UN climate process focuses on stabilising annual emissions at a level that would avoid major climate impacts. But this group of scientists says that the cumulative total provides a better measure of the likely temperature rise, and may present an easier target for policymakers.
"To avoid dangerous climate change, we will have to limit the total amount of carbon we inject into the atmosphere, not just the emission rate in any given year," said Myles Allen from the physics department at University of Oxford. "Climate policy needs an exit strategy; as well as reducing carbon emissions now, we need a plan for phasing out net emissions entirely."
Forty years The UN climate convention, agreed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, commits countries to avoiding "dangerous" climate change, without defining what that is. The EU proposed some years ago that restricting the rise to 2C from pre-industrial times was a reasonable threshold, and it has since been adopted by many other countries, although some - particularly small islands - argue that even 2C would result in dangerous impacts. Temperatures have already risen by about 0.7C during the industrial age.
Dr Allen's analysis suggests that if humanity's CO2 emissions total more than about one trillion tonnes of carbon, the 2C threshold is likely to be breached; and that could come within a lifetime. "It took us 250 years to burn the first half trillion," he said, "and on current projections we'll burn the next half trillion in less than 40 years." Inherent uncertainties in the modelling mean the temperature rise from the trillion tonnes could be between 1.3C and 3.9C, Dr Allen's team calculates, although the most likely value would be 2C.
Oil change The "trillion tonnes" analysis is one of two studies published in Nature by a pool of researchers that includes the Oxford group and scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Impact Research in Germany. The second study, led by Potsdam's Malte Mainshausen, attempted to work backwards from the 2C goal, to find out what achieving it might mean in practice.
It suggests that the G8 target of halving global emissions by 2050 (from 1990 levels) would leave a significant risk of breaching the 2C figure. "Only a fast switch away from fossil fuels will give us a reasonable chance to avoid considerable warming," said Dr Mainshausen.
"If we continue burning fossil fuels as we do, we will have exhausted the carbon budget in merely 20 years, and global warming will go well beyond 2C." If policymakers decided they were happy to accept a 25% chance of exceeding 2C by 2050, he said, they must also accept that this meant cutting emissions by more than 50%.
That would mean only burning about a quarter of the carbon in the world's known, economically-recoverable fossil fuel reserves. This is likely to consist mainly of oil and natural gas, leaving coal as a redundant fuel unless its emissions could be captured and stored. Both analyses support the view of the Stern Review and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in suggesting that making reductions earlier would be easier and cheaper than delaying.
But according to Potsdam's Bill Hare, a co-author on the second paper, some key governments appear to favour pledging milder cuts in the near term in return for more drastic ones in decades to come. "We have a number of countries - the US, Japan, Brazil - saying 'we will emit higher through to 2020 and then go down faster'," he said. "That might be true geophysically, but we cannot find any economic model where emissions can fall in the range that this work shows would be necessary - around 6% per year."
Major intervention Myles Allen's group has made the argument before that focussing on humanity's entire carbon dioxide output makes more scientific and political sense than aiming to define a particular "safe" level of emissions, or to plot a pathway assigning various ceilings to various years.
Some greenhouse gases, such as methane, have a definable lifetime in the atmosphere, meaning that stabilising emissions makes sense; but, said Dr Allen, CO2 "doesn't behave like that". "There are multiple levers acting on its concentration and it does tend to accumulate; also models have to represent the possibility of some feedback between rising temperatures and emissions, such as parts of the land turning from carbon sinks into sources, for example."
The Nature papers emerge in a week that has seen the inaugural meeting of President Obama's Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, a new version of a body created under President Bush that brings together 17 of the world's highest-emitting countries for discussion and dialogue. During the opening segment, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton re-affirmed the administration's aim of cutting US emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050 - a target espoused by some other developed countries.
But according to Malte Meinshausen's analysis, even this reduction may not be enough to keep the average global temperature rise within 2C, assuming less developed nations made less stringent cuts in order to aid their development. "If the US does 80%, that equates to about 60% globally, and that offers only a modest chance of meeting the 2C target," he said.
Last week saw the publication of data showing that industrialised countries' collective emissions rose by about 1% during 2007.
29 April 2009
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
About three-quarters of the world's fossil fuel reserves must be left unused if society is to avoid dangerous climate change, scientists warn. More than 100 nations support the goal of keeping temperature rise below 2C. But the scientists say that without major curbs on fossil fuel use, 2C will probably be reached by 2050. Writing in Nature, they say politicians should focus on limiting humanity's total output of CO2 rather than setting a "safe" level for annual emissions.
The UN climate process focuses on stabilising annual emissions at a level that would avoid major climate impacts. But this group of scientists says that the cumulative total provides a better measure of the likely temperature rise, and may present an easier target for policymakers.
"To avoid dangerous climate change, we will have to limit the total amount of carbon we inject into the atmosphere, not just the emission rate in any given year," said Myles Allen from the physics department at University of Oxford. "Climate policy needs an exit strategy; as well as reducing carbon emissions now, we need a plan for phasing out net emissions entirely."
Forty years The UN climate convention, agreed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, commits countries to avoiding "dangerous" climate change, without defining what that is. The EU proposed some years ago that restricting the rise to 2C from pre-industrial times was a reasonable threshold, and it has since been adopted by many other countries, although some - particularly small islands - argue that even 2C would result in dangerous impacts. Temperatures have already risen by about 0.7C during the industrial age.
Dr Allen's analysis suggests that if humanity's CO2 emissions total more than about one trillion tonnes of carbon, the 2C threshold is likely to be breached; and that could come within a lifetime. "It took us 250 years to burn the first half trillion," he said, "and on current projections we'll burn the next half trillion in less than 40 years." Inherent uncertainties in the modelling mean the temperature rise from the trillion tonnes could be between 1.3C and 3.9C, Dr Allen's team calculates, although the most likely value would be 2C.
Oil change The "trillion tonnes" analysis is one of two studies published in Nature by a pool of researchers that includes the Oxford group and scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change Impact Research in Germany. The second study, led by Potsdam's Malte Mainshausen, attempted to work backwards from the 2C goal, to find out what achieving it might mean in practice.
It suggests that the G8 target of halving global emissions by 2050 (from 1990 levels) would leave a significant risk of breaching the 2C figure. "Only a fast switch away from fossil fuels will give us a reasonable chance to avoid considerable warming," said Dr Mainshausen.
"If we continue burning fossil fuels as we do, we will have exhausted the carbon budget in merely 20 years, and global warming will go well beyond 2C." If policymakers decided they were happy to accept a 25% chance of exceeding 2C by 2050, he said, they must also accept that this meant cutting emissions by more than 50%.
That would mean only burning about a quarter of the carbon in the world's known, economically-recoverable fossil fuel reserves. This is likely to consist mainly of oil and natural gas, leaving coal as a redundant fuel unless its emissions could be captured and stored. Both analyses support the view of the Stern Review and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in suggesting that making reductions earlier would be easier and cheaper than delaying.
But according to Potsdam's Bill Hare, a co-author on the second paper, some key governments appear to favour pledging milder cuts in the near term in return for more drastic ones in decades to come. "We have a number of countries - the US, Japan, Brazil - saying 'we will emit higher through to 2020 and then go down faster'," he said. "That might be true geophysically, but we cannot find any economic model where emissions can fall in the range that this work shows would be necessary - around 6% per year."
Major intervention Myles Allen's group has made the argument before that focussing on humanity's entire carbon dioxide output makes more scientific and political sense than aiming to define a particular "safe" level of emissions, or to plot a pathway assigning various ceilings to various years.
Some greenhouse gases, such as methane, have a definable lifetime in the atmosphere, meaning that stabilising emissions makes sense; but, said Dr Allen, CO2 "doesn't behave like that". "There are multiple levers acting on its concentration and it does tend to accumulate; also models have to represent the possibility of some feedback between rising temperatures and emissions, such as parts of the land turning from carbon sinks into sources, for example."
The Nature papers emerge in a week that has seen the inaugural meeting of President Obama's Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, a new version of a body created under President Bush that brings together 17 of the world's highest-emitting countries for discussion and dialogue. During the opening segment, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton re-affirmed the administration's aim of cutting US emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050 - a target espoused by some other developed countries.
But according to Malte Meinshausen's analysis, even this reduction may not be enough to keep the average global temperature rise within 2C, assuming less developed nations made less stringent cuts in order to aid their development. "If the US does 80%, that equates to about 60% globally, and that offers only a modest chance of meeting the 2C target," he said.
Last week saw the publication of data showing that industrialised countries' collective emissions rose by about 1% during 2007.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)