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103 comments on DrumBeat: January 17, 2008

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Darwinian on January 17, 2008 - 10:50am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

A very high percentage of the Caltec Streaming Theater lectures recently have been on oil, energy, global warming or other related subjects. The very last one was on ”Sunlight to Fuels”. It describes how sunlight could be converted and stored as chemical fuel. I watched that one a couple of days ago. Highly technical but some really eye opening facts concerning biofuels and other renewables. That is the data presented gives us very little hope that biofuels will ever make very much difference worldwide.

Last night I watched another really great one. It is the ninth one down from the top:

David Rutledge: Hubbert's Peak, the Coal Question, and Climate Change 10/17/2007 52 minutes. David Rutledge, Caltech's Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering, presented a Watson Lecture called "Hubbert's Peak, the Coal Question, and Climate Change." Rutledge discussed whether oil, natural gas, and coal resources will be sufficient in the future, and explained efforts to predict the changes in climate that will result from consuming these fossil fuels.

A lot of things in this lecture will blow you away. Professor Rutledge applies the Hubbert Linearization method (or something very similar) to all fossil fuels combined, coal, gas and oil, as Tboe, (trillion barrels of oil equivalent) and comes to the conclusion that they will be 90% exhausted in 2076. We have a whole lot less recoverable coal than most people believe.

Near the end of the lecture there is a very good presentation on Solar Thermal power. Looks promising.

The lecture ends with a presentation on global warming. One point is that all coal consumption will raise the earth’s temperature by about .3 degrees centigrade. All fossil fuels raise it about 1.7 degrees C. And it does not matter when you burn this coal because it takes the world about 800 years to recover. That is it does not matter if you cut coal consumption in half, the end result will be the same if all available coal is eventually burned. The same is true for all fossil fuels, or any other type of carbon base fuel that is burned, it simply does not matter when it is burned it will eventually have the same effect.

Note, all opinions and data stated in this post are not mine but those of Professor David Rutledge.

Ron Patterson

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Sterling on January 17, 2008 - 1:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Here is a working version of the link.

Rutledge is TOD member DaveR and the presentation in question was covered as a featured post earlier this year.

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LevinK on January 17, 2008 - 4:11pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

One point is that all coal consumption will raise the earth’s temperature by about .3 degrees centigrade. All fossil fuels raise it about 1.7 degrees C.

This can not be true. Even now coal accounts for about the same CO2 emissions as oil (and catching up) and roughly twice more than Natural Gas. Here is a nice graph illustrating this:

Coal price per BTU is many times lower than the other FFs and hence its usage rises much faster recently. What is more worrisome are the ultimate coal reserves:

At the end of 2006 the recoverable coal reserves amounted around one exagram (1 × 1015 kg or 998 billion tons), approximately half of it being hard coal. The energy value of all the world's recoverable coal is 27 zettajoules, which is expected to last 164 years.[33] At the current global total energy consumption of 15 terawatt,[34] there is enough coal to provide the entire planet with all of its energy for 57 years

1 trillion tonnes of coal will emit 7-800bln.tonnes of carbon, or more than 100 years worth of carbon emissions at current emission levels. A rough calculation: if 50 years of burning FFs at about half current emission levels on average brought us 0.6C temperature rise, 100 years, twice that emissions should bring 4 times, or 2.4 degrees C temperature rise (forgetting about feedback loops etc.).

Even if we are pessimistic and half of that coal turns out unrecoverable, this is still 1.2 degrees or 4 times what your source suggests.

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DaveR on January 18, 2008 - 11:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hi LevinK,

For coal, everyone use the World Energy Council surveys. They are at

http://www.worldenergy.org/

They were 847Gt in the 2007 survey. These have been reduced repeatedly since the 1992 Survey, when they were 1,039Gt. These have been dropping, as countries become more realistic about how much coal they will mine, like Germany, and switch from quoting coal in place to recoverable coal, like India. In the simulations I have run, which do include climate feedback to the carbon cycle, the contribution to the peak temperature rise from coal burning is roughly linear, with a proportionality constant of 0.0007 degrees C/Gt. Multiplying this by half the coal reserves, which is probably reasonable for mined coal, gives 0.3 degrees C rise.

There are slides and spreadsheets at

http://rutledge.caltech.edu/

Historically coal reserves have not been a good estimate of future production, just as oil and gas reserves have not been a good estimate of future production. However, while oil and gas reserves have been lower than future production, coal reserves have been higher than future production.

Dave

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westexas on January 17, 2008 - 6:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

David Strahan has an article about coal on the EB, in which he discusses David Rutledge's work:

http://www.energybulletin.net/39236.html

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Matt on January 18, 2008 - 9:51am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

All these discussions about coal reserves are completely academic. The limiting factor is not the coal reserve (resource side) but the absorption capacity of the atmosphere for CO2 (sink side). In fact, our atmosphere is already overflowing with CO2. Carbon dioxide concentrations are now much higher than they were in the warmest interglacial period during the last 500 k years when sea levels were several metres higher than now. So we are clearly in overshoot mode already.

Lessons from the Arctic summer sea ice melt in 2007:

A doubling of climate sensitivity would mean we passed the widely accepted 2°C threshold of
"dangerous anthropogenic interference" with the climate four decades ago, and would require us to
find the means to engineer a rapid drawdown of current atmospheric greenhouse gas.

If, for example, instead we were to apply a 0.5°C (or lower) precautionary warming cap, it would be
necessary for the level of target atmospheric greenhouse gases at equilibrium not exceed about 320 ppm CO2e, a point we passed more than half a century ago.

www.carbonequity.info/PDFs/Arctic.pdf

NASA climatologist James Hansen is working on a new paper:

Remember This: 350 Parts Per Million
By Bill McKibben
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/27/AR200712...

We are now at 383 ppm and rising.

The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Nino – La Nina cycle.

Discussion of 2007 GISS global temperature analysis is posted at Solar and Southern Oscillations
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20080114_GISTEMP.pdf

The additional warming from increasing solar irradiance is 0.3 W/m2 over the next years.

When the Arctic summer sea ice is gone in a couple of years time, the whole weather and climate pattern of the Northern hemisphere will change. We have no idea what that will mean.

Causes of Changes in Arctic Sea Ice; by Wieslaw Maslowski (Naval Postgraduate School)
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/May032006_Dr.WieslawMaslows...

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DaveR on January 18, 2008 - 12:52am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hi Ron,

Thank you for your comments. The numbers get revised a bit from time to time. Here is how the various parts of the peak temperature rise break out. The reference year is 2005.

Future US coal 0.05 degrees C
World coal 0.3 degrees C
World fossil fuels 0.8 degrees C
Total 1.4 degrees C (largest additional components are CH4 and N20)

The slides and spreadsheets are at

http://rutledge.caltech.edu

and the plot for the simulated temperature rise is given below.

Dave


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DIYer on January 18, 2008 - 9:46am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Caltech is apparently a hotbed of PO/GW hippies.

The Mechanical Universe guy appeared in a peak oil video a while back, it was linked from TOD but I've forgotten the name of it. It's nice to see he is still there; I loved his physics lectures on the PBS channel here a couple decades ago.

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DaveR on January 18, 2008 - 10:56am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hi DIYer,

That would be David Goodstein, who wrote the book "Out of Gas," which I recommend.

Dave

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