A good post exploring direct air capture →

This blog post, The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change, by Michael Nielsen is a good read, and contains some insight that puts some of my own feelings into words.

This quote in particular stands out to me (emphasis mine)

Still, it’s helpful to have a ballpark figure to aim for. If DAC is scalable at $100 per tonne, it starts to get very interesting. And at $10 per tonne, the costs start to resemble things we’ve done before for environmental concerns.

As we’ll see in a moment, the $100 cost estimate is at least plausible with near-future technology. $10 per tonne is more speculative, but worth thinking about.

What I like and find striking about this frame is that many people are extremely pessimistic about climate change. They can’t imagine any solution – often, they become mesmerized by what appears to be an insoluble collective action problem – and fall into fatalistic despair. This direct air capture frame provides a way of thinking that is at least plausibly feasible. In particular, the $10 per tonne price point is striking. The Clean Air Act was contentious and required a lot of political will. But the US did it, and many other countries have implemented similar legislation. It’s a specific, concrete goal worth thinking hard about.

One other thing I’d like to call out about this post that I really liked is the extent to which it’s a work of rough notes and speculation, but quantified. It’s about exploring a space and getting a feeling for the parameters for the discussion, which is in my opinion really valuable.

Running the Numbers on Car Efficiency

I recently came across this fascinating comparison from the US Department of Energy’s FuelEconomy.gov, comparing the amount of energy a car takes from its input, and actually gets to the wheels between a gas powered car (16-25%), a hybrid (24-38%), and an electric car (60-65% + 17% for regenerative braking).

Being a huge nerd, I thought it would be interesting to actually see how this computes out on the fuel economy published for a gas powered car, vs an electric car.

1	Energy Conversion factor: 3.6MJ per kWh	3.6 MJ/h kW
2
3	Toyota Corolla Fuel Efficiency: 7.5 L / 100km	0.075 L/km
4	Hyundai Ionic Fuel Efficiency: 25kWh per 100 mi	0.25 h kW/mi
5
6	Gasoline Energy Content: 47.5MJ/kg	47.5 MJ/kg
7	Gasoline Density: 0.755kg/L	0.76 kg/L
8	Gasoline Energy content by volume: 47.5 MJ/kg * 0.76 kg/L	35.8625 MJ/L
9
10	Toyota Energy consumption per KM (MJ): 0.075 L/km * 35.8625 MJ/L	2.69 MJ/km
11	Toyota Energy consumption per KM (kWh): 2.69 MJ/km / 3.6 MJ/h kW	0.75 h kW/km
12
13	Distance conversion factor: 100mi in km	160.9344 km
14	Hyundai Energy consumption per KM (kWh): 25kWh per 160.9344 km	0.16 h kW/km

(Thanks Soulver for helping make a cool table, though for some reason it prefers the ‘h kW’ syntax of saying kWh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

So if we compare the two vehicles, on a kWh per/km basis (lines 11 and 14), the electric vehicle is 4.6 times as efficient as the gas powered vehicle, which is right in the ballpark of the estimates provided by FuelEconomy.gov.

I wonder if that means that electrification of the transport sector could bring something drastic like a 2-3x reduction in emissions from that sector? That’s pretty cool.

This also helps me clarify some computations I’ve seen done that argue that an electric car is still cleaner than a gas powered car, even if the electric car is powered by coal: Gas cars are just really darn inefficient; and I suspect that even though coal plants create a lot of carbon, they’re likely more efficient at extracting energy than a gas vehicle.

Better than Bad News on Climate: Volume IV

• Decrement carbon: Stripe’s negative emissions commitment: Stripe is committing to spending twice as much on carbon sequestration as they do on carbon offsets (with a price floor of at least $1M / year. The idea is that by investing now in this technology, they can help to drive prices down for the future.

• Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy and Levelized Cost of Storage report for 2019 is showing that in parts of the world renewables are becoming cheaper to build and run rather than continuing to run old coal plants.

On a slightly tangential note: I thought these two pieces about living in the world were important to see.

Carbon Taxation on Gas Bills

I did a dumb thing the other day, and wandered into the comment section on an article about Alberta's new TIER carbon levy on large emitters.

One comment stood out (not linking, because I don't want to single out a particular person; I see this kind of talk often), where the pointed out: The estimated cost of gas over the next while is 2$/GJ, according to the futures market, and a price of 50$/tonne works out to 2.80$/GJ, means that the carbon pricing more than doubles the cost of gas. This is pointed out to be particularly unfair because heating is not something people can just "go without", and on a per GJ basis electricity is way more expensive.

I think a lot of people see this stuff and go "Oh my god, they're going to more than double my gas bill!". I just want to walk through our gas bill to show how this isn't the case.

Here's our most recent gas bill, where we were charged for

Charge	Price / GJ	Total
Natural Gas Charges	$0.82	$4.83
Administration Charge		$7.00
Transaction Fee	$1.00	$5.92
Rider		$0.09
Delivery Charges		$32.91
Transmission Service Charge Rider		$5.69
Interim Shortfall Rider (Fixed)		$1.56
Interim Shortfall Rider (Variable/Demand)		$0.28
Weather Adjustment Rider		-$0.48
Property Tax		$1.60
Franchise Fee Edmonton		$13.99
Total		$77.06

So of our $77 gas bill, only $4.83 was actually for you know, gas. The rest was administration, transmission fees and riders, none of which would be pushed up by a hypothetical carbon tax.

Let's add a carbon tax of 50$/tonne. That adds a row that looks like this:

Charge	Price / GJ	Total
Hypothetical Carbon Tax, 50$/tonne	2.81	16.61

Ok, so now I'm paying an extra 17.44$ (after GST). That's nothing to sneeze about for sure! Its' a 23% increase on the my bill, but it's a far cry from a 100% increase to my bill, despite the fact that given the price I pay for gas on that bill, a 50$/tonne carbon tax would be a 415% increase in the price I pay for my gas.

Now. After all that, is Carbon Taxation on consumers a good idea? I'm honestly not sure. It's something I need to dig into more. Another post for another day.

Playing with Numbers around Energy and Carbon Pricing

eleI've been learning a bunch about energy lately. A lot of this is reminding me of things I learned in ages past, refreshing from middle school science class.

However, these days I find a lot of this easier to learn because I have context that I didn't have when I was a kid. This is sort of a continuation of me really getting electricity usage hammered home by a home energy meter. This post is mostly me playing with numbers to understand things better- feel free to skip.

Take my gas bill here in Edmonton. We're billed by the Gigajoule (an interesting contrast by the way to Ottawa, where were billed for gas usage in cubic meters).

What is a Gigajoule? Well, a little googling reminds me that a Joule is a watt second; so a Gigajoule is a billion watt seconds. A bit of math then gets you to the Watt hour (10^9 J / (60 * 60) = 277,777 J), and divided by 1000 gets you 277 kWh.

I don't know what to call it when different energy sources have different levels of usability (ie; I can use electricity in my house to power my blender, but I can't really burn gas to do the same thing), but discounting that, 1 GJ of gas is equivalent to 277 kWh of electricity.

Alright, cool! We did a cool conversion, and now we can compare things on a level(-ish) playing field.

So, Andrea and I pay $0.0789 per kWh for electricity, and we pay $0.816 per GJ for gas. Knowing what we know now about that conversion, that means we get a price of $0.00293 per kWh for gas: Which means that electricity is roughly 27x more expensive than gas.

Ok, so that's not great (climate wise). Let's rejigger things a bit. Andrea and I intentionally are 1) Locked into an energy price 2) Paying extra for 'green' energy. Let's instead compare against "low cost" renewable projects. These days, records are being broken for low bids everywhere, but in Alberta we have wind projects with bids at $0.037 per kWh.

If we use that price instead of what Andrea and I are paying, we see a difference of closer to 12.5x.

In Alberta, before the election of our new conservative government, we had a carbon levy of $1.517 per GJ. So if we factor that into our cost calculation, using the lower cost electricity, and gas with the carbon levy, we get to a price difference of 4.5x.

So, according to this random website on the internet, natural gas produces 56.1 kg of CO2 per GJ. This means roughly 17.8 GJ of natural gas produces one tonne of carbon dioxide (and, the Alberta Carbon Levy was priced at $27/ton.)

To get to price parity with 3.7c per kWh for electricity, we would need a carbon levy of more than 150$ per tonne. This is a fascinating number to come up with, because I've heard the number thrown around before.

Anyhow. This blog post is long and boring, but for me it was a fascinating attempt to work the numbers and understand things better.

Pro Energy: Don’t Let it Become Synonymous with Carbon Emissions

I have noticed recently that the term “Pro-Energy” is a code word in Canadian politics for pro-oil and gas sentiment. Here’s three examples I found with approximately zero effort. Or perhaps even more obvious, take a look at this Facebook Ad I was served the other day:

I find this really frustrating, because I feel like it’s a co-option by oil and gas of the word “energy” for green-washing.

Here’s the thing: I am hugely pro-energy, in that I believe our society runs on energy, and that all things being equal, we can improve our quality of living, and address huge numbers of problems in the world with the application of cheap to free energy. Imagine a hypothetical world where fusion has become common place and the cost of electricity has dropped to approximately zero per kWh. Think about the way that world can work:

• We can eliminate the scarcity of fresh water by deploying desalination.
• We can harvest minerals from ocean water, reducing the need for mining.
• We can literally pull carbon dioxide from the air.

None of this “pro-energy” position makes me a supporter of oil and gas for energy. I think this conflagration of oil and gas with “energy” makes real harms, and is worth fighting against.

The biggest harm I think that comes from conflating energy with oil and gas is that people naturally then assume that if one isn’t supporting oil and gas, they’re advocating for scarcity: A contraction in living standards on all dimensions.

When we talk about sustainability, environmentalism, and action on climate change, mostly we hear about how we need to radically reshape our lives. I am terrified that is 100% right; I like my life, and I would like to keep living it. Let’s think ambitious for a moment (far more ambitious than is realistic — let us build some hope here). Take a peek at this amazing diagram from the World Resources Institute, where they draw the flows from sector to production of greenhouse gasses (slightly dated, as it was generated from 2003 data for the USA).

Of the end-use column in this, look at how little is inherently dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. Would it be easy to replace all this energy with sustainable resources? Heck no! Yet, I look at the diagram and I find an enormous sense of comfort: It’s not impossible to radically alter the emissions output of a huge industrialized nation like the USA. Sure, it’s a political nightmare; but the fact of the matter is: Almost nothing on that chart is intrinsically dependent on taking fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them for energy. That’s fantastic news.

Imagine a Thanos-like snap: We could stop worrying about climate change if we got rid of all the use of fossil fuels in that energy section. The world wouldn’t be a Star Trek-like utopia, and we’d still have problems galore (inequality, poverty, racism, sexism, war, and more), but, no one would necessarily have to lose the quality of living they’ve become accustomed to. In this Snap, of course we need to have a just transition for those whose livelihoods currently depend on oil and gas, but we need that in the real world too!

I feel that’s something we need to remind people of. Climate change is terrifying, and I feel like a lot of coverage and writing on it is causing people to freeze up. Only naturally, people want to protect what they have, and it seems like to battle climate change what is being asked of them is to give it all up, and live on a commune. Taking off my optimists hat for a second, I think most plans that take world emissions rates low enough to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming will be painful. Putting my hat back on, I think a huge amount of that pain is because we have allowed fear to rule, which means that we don’t consider the positive possible outcomes. I think a lot of people who fight action on climate change do it because they’re scared of what it means to them personally, something I totally sympathize with, but I believe we need to be fighting that. We need to give everyone hope that the future includes them, and their lives. It’s not something I think we’re very good at yet.

Returning to my original thesis, giving people hope means disconnecting “energy” from oil and gas. We need to be pro-energy in the sense that we need to produce large amounts of clean energy throughout the world, to help create prosperous society that limits our impact on the non-human aspects of the globe. We need to recognize that as much as climate change is a dangerous challenge to humanity, it’s also an opportunity to build a richer society that nevertheless ultimately has a lower impact on the globe. I think that’s worth fighting for.

Some Better-than-Bad News on Climate Change: Volume II

Another batch of Better-than-Bad News on Climate Change. In this batch I’m writing a little more commentary.

• Toyota and Panasonic are creating a spinoff company to invest in battery technology. This is good news because electrification of transport is going to require battery technology to continue improving.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Alberta these days. It’s a place I have a lot of fondness for, and could imagine living there again. However, it is a place whose future concerns me. In 2016 the Alberta government said that 42% of the economy was driven by the energy sector. While I understand it’s an enormous chunk of the economy, as an outsider for five years or so, I personally can’t see the energy economy continuing to drive the province the same way for the next 30 years… but I also don’t understand what the province’s plan is to handle that possibility. In an alternate reality, there would be money put away to help with this, but there’s not much.

That long ramble is a prelude to the next item.

• Germany has negotiated a plan to end its use of coal power plants by 2038. This is a fascinating example of how a consensus plan appears to be possible to do with enough political will. This plan appears to work hard to ensure those people in the coal sector affected by the divestment from coal generation will be helped, and tries to allow as light a touch as possible from the German government about how the actual shutdowns will proceed.
  
  I would love to see similar kinds of discussions happening in our provinces, but it seems like we’re going through a political backwash right now.

• In a federal system like Canada, it’s important that different provinces can pursue different plans. This is why I really liked the federal government’s system of “You have to make a system, or we will make one for you”. It gives provinces the choice to deal with climate change how they’d like, so long as they deal with it. I hope the Supreme Court ultimately rules in favour of the federal government.
  
  In the USA, despite presidential (can you use that adjective?) cries to bring back coal, there’s lots of interesting news happening at the state level.

• This last one, "The Case for ‘conditional optimism’ on Climate Change” is… only barely optimistic. However, in it, I find the adoption-of-technology curves graph to bring me hope on a personal level. Change can very quickly in the world these days, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Some Better-than-Bad news on Climate Change

Climate Change scares the shit out of me. It should scare the shit out of you too. But, sometimes I spot some good news stories that help me keep the hope up.

Let me share some of them:

• Bloomberg NEF suggests that electric cars are better emissions wise than an internal combustion engine, even when the grid is driven by coal. Furthermore, the advantages of electric cars improve as the grid gets greener, whereas a combustion powered car’s emissions don’t get better over time.

• Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy and Levelized Cost of Storage 2018 report shows how photovoltaic and wind energy costs continue to decline. For wind, a 9 year decrease of 69%, and for photovoltaic, a 9 year decrease of 88%.

• Vox writes about an energy modelling project that shows how Colorado could, because if its bountiful wind and solar resources, shut down all its coal-fired power plants and save 2.5 Billion dollars (and help remove all the pollutants and CO2 emissions of the coal plants).

I created a category for this, as I think I’m going to try to write more about this.