Things I Learned, Feb 22-23, 2021
I decided I’ll just keep a page open and add interesting notes as I encounter things over the course of the day. Will try to do this somewhat regularly.
Carbon Offsets Industry:
Carbon offsets are when people or companies pay someone else to store carbon to “offset” activities like flying, driving, etc. The most common form is paying for an area of forest to remain intact, which is both done through organizations like The Nature Conservancy as well as private companies.
It’s very hard to tell what types of carbon offsets are legit, vs. which are just “greenwashing” techniques. I think it’s possible that it’s short-term greenwashing but opens long-term opportunities for conservation organizations, on a decades-scale prevention strategy. Critics often say “they didn’t want to cut down the forest anyway.” That’s easy to say - but in 10 or 20 or 40 years, a property owner may sell the land, may face financial pressures for clear-cutting, or may be unable manage a forest properly without support. I’ll explore this more in the future but here are some interesting things I’ve come across.
Companies like Terrapass allow individuals and businesses to buy carbon offsets, and have a built-in calculator. If you dig deeper, this is owned by an energy utility. (Which may be ok, but,noteworthy regardless)
Here’s an interesting paper from the Congressional Research Service: Tree Planting for sequestration. Note that one thing that’s even easier than tree planting is keeping trees in the ground.
Bloomberg did what’s essentially a hit piece on carbon offsets a few weeks ago: How the Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental group, became a dealer of meaningless carbon offsets. Important note: The author is not an anti-conservation lobbyist or climate change skeptic. He is questioning the value proposition of carbon offsets, and is particularly skeptical about the relationship between The Nature Conservancy and big corporations like Disney or Delta Airlines. This seems like a worthwhile question to ask, though I don’t think he goes deep enough into the positives, and the editors wrote clickbait scare headlines. Anyway, some highlights:
“The Nature Conservancy recruits landowners and enrolls its own well-protected properties in carbon-offset projects, which generate credits that give big companies an inexpensive way to claim large emissions reductions. In these transactions, each metric ton of reduced emissions is represented by a financial instrument known as a carbon offset. The corporations buy the offsets, with the money flowing to the landowners and the Conservancy. The corporate buyers then use those credits to subtract an equivalent amount of emissions from their own ledgers.”
“While some of these credits are paying for projects that are truly reducing emissions, an unknown number represent inflated claims.”
Nature Conservancy revenue in 2019: $932 million
“The Conservancy is often preserving forested lands that don’t need defending.” and “If the Conservancy is enrolling landowners who had no intention of cutting their trees, he adds, “they’re engaged in the business of creating fake carbon offsets.
“The approach has produced some enormous victories. In 1998 the Nature Conservancy spent $35 million to buy pristine forests surrounding much of the 130-mile upper St. John River in Maine. A decade later it acquired 320,000 acres of forested land in Montana from a timber company before developers could get their hands on it.”
“Some nonforest projects clearly show how offsets can be effective. For instance, Stripe, a San Francisco-based technology company, recently paid $775 per ton to Climeworks AG, a Swiss company that uses renewable geothermal energy to capture CO2 from the air, concentrate it, and store it underground in rock formations. In this case, the carbon payment from Stripe is causing the reduction to happen, because there is no other reason for Climeworks to carry out this expensive process.”
An important statement that would e worthy of more elaboration is: “the agreements require municipalities to put an easement on the lands.” This ties back to my initial point above. TNC’s overall strategy may be much broader than the short-term benefits that make headlines and are easier to articulate.
Keep trees in the ground where they already are
“Although tree-planting initiatives are popular, protecting and restoring existing forests rarely attracts the same level of support. As an example, forest protection was notably missing from the US$447 million Energy Act of 2020, which the U.S. Congress passed in December 2020 to jump-start technological carbon capture and storage.”
“The U.S. has more than 800 million acres of natural and planted forests and woodlands, of which nearly 60% are privately owned. USDA/USFS”
“Forests pull about one-third of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere each year. Researchers have calculated that ending deforestation and allowing mature forests to keep growing could enable forests to take up twice as much carbon.”
“More than half of U.S. forested lands are privately owned, so strategic forest carbon reserves should be established on both public and private lands. The challenge is paying for them, which will require a major shift in government and societal priorities. We believe that transferring public investment in oil and gas subsidies to pay private land owners to keep their forests growing could act as a powerful incentive for private land owners. “
Making Good Use of Brownfield sites: Brownfield into Brightfield
“Abandoned properties have littered the landscape, particularly in the region around the Great Lakes, which for many years was the hub of the nation’s industrial sector. States such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin bore the brunt of the declining iron, steel, and other industries.”
26 Acre solar plant in Kokomo Indiana
“Inovateus Solar, a solar energy provider based in South Bend, Indiana, helped redevelop a site in Kokomo, Indiana, that for years housed a manufacturing plant operated by Continental Steel Corp.”
“The project includes 21,348 Suniva 335-watt DC panels, along with five Ingeteam PowerMax 1110TL inverters.”
The EPA and IDEM spent several years cleaning up the site that housed the steel plant after placing it on the Superfund program’s NPL in 1989. The EPA in a case study said “Improper materials handling and waste disposal practices and regular facility operations at the 183-acre site resulted in extensive contamination of soil, sediments, surface water and groundwater with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and several metals, including lead, arsenic, cadmium and chromium.
The EPA and IDEM helped the developers understand the cleanup process, to address concerns about the site’s Superfund status.
“Fast forward to today. Years of cleanup, part of a $40-million remediation effort led by the EPA and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM), have turned the location into a showcase of community pride. The site includes soccer fields as part of a recreational complex; clean creeks for fishing, kayaking, and canoeing; a stormwater retention pond; wind turbines; landscaping; and road infrastructure improvements. It also features a solar array that provides power for the city’s residents, and revenue for the city’s coffers.”
“It’s estimated that there are over 450,000 brownfields in the U.S.,” said Tyler Kanczuzewski, vice president of marketing and sustainability for Inovateus Solar. Kanczuzewski told POWER that solar projects are among the ways these sites can be repurposed, helping “to increase property values and the local tax base, while facilitating job growth, and many more benefits.”
Danish Shipping Companies To Use Green Ammonia for Fuel
It’s called “Power to X”
The project will convert power from offshore wind turbines to green ammonia which will be used as marine fuel for vessels as well as fertiliser for the agriculture sector.
The excess heat from the project, which will consist of 1GW electrolysis, will be used to provide heating for around one third of the local households in Esbjerg.
We are optimistic that ammonia, along with methanol and alcohol-lignin blends, will be powering Maersk vessels in the future.’
Tobin Carlsen, CEO of DFDS: ‘The ability to establish a vision of an industrial-scale sustainable fuel production facility is due to the power of partnerships. The cooperation of fuel users and producers along with scientists and society is the fastest way to make sustainable fuels available as realistic alternatives to the fossil fuels we combust in our vehicles and vessels today.’
Gas Utilities Fight Back (NPR, 2/22)
“A critical part of Flagstaff's climate plan proposed that all new construction get to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 and that the city promote "aggressive building electrification" to decrease reliance on fossil fuels. As in many places, buildings are a big source of Flagstaff's greenhouse gases, mainly because many are heated by burning natural gas.”
“But in February 2020, the Arizona Legislature blocked much of Flagstaff's plan for its buildings. With the backing of the state's main gas utility, the Legislature passed a bill that prevents municipalities and counties from banning new gas infrastructure and hookups.”
The state blocked local governments from making their own decisions! Apparently this is quite common, and has also been done for tobacco.
“President Biden's ambitious climate plan includes a goal to cut the carbon footprint of buildings in half by 2035 through incentives to retrofit homes and businesses with electric appliances and furnaces.”
Might not matter. Developers may switch to electric anyway: “"You eliminate gas taps, you eliminate running all those gas lines through your building," says Tyler Hollon, sustainability director for Wadman Corp., a construction company in Utah. Hollon says his company did its first all-electric building because an environmentally minded developer, Giv Group, demanded it. Wadman's executives thought it would cost a lot extra, but they were wrong….At the two companies' latest collaboration, a six-story affordable housing project in Salt Lake City, there are efficient electric heat pumps instead of gas furnaces in each unit. Heat pumps also deliver hot water.”
“A new report, “Shaping a sustainable energy future in Asia and the Pacific: A greener, more resilient and inclusive energy system”, released on February 22 by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) shows that the energy demand reductions have mainly affected fossil fuels and depressed oil and gas prices.”
“Renewable energy development in countries across the region, such as China and India, has continued at a healthy pace throughout 2020.”
“By directing stimulus spending to investments that support the achievement of the SDGs, we can build back better.”
(Build Back Better seems to be common phrase: UN, WTO, US, etc)
Financial Times on Climate Change - Deceptive Messaging and Soft Denialism
Focuses on Michael Mann, Bill Gates, and Jonathan Franzen.
“Yet the scale of the climate problem makes it hard to know what constitutes a meaningful response. Is it enough to give up meat and flying? Do we need a slew of technological breakthroughs? Or is disaster now inevitable and any sort of action too late?”
Mann: “Outright denial of the physical evidence of climate change simply isn’t credible any more,” he writes in The New Climate War. The war on the science has ended, he says. But in its place has come a war on climate action, or “a softer form of denialism” in which “inactivists” deploy a mix of deception, deflection and distraction to delay cuts in emissions.”
“Many readers will be surprised to learn that one of Mann’s chief complaints concerns flight-shaming, vegan diets and other types of individual behaviour widely thought to be central to tackling climate change. Personal actions can help, and often set a sensible example. But, as Mann writes, they cannot rival broad, systemic measures such as carbon pricing or ending fossil fuel subsidies. For all the scrutiny of flying, it currently accounts for about 3 per cent of global carbon emissions.”
“Oil companies were early promoters of the personal carbon footprint calculator and there is a well-thumbed playbook for industries seeking to divert attention from their own activities to individuals using their products.”
Mann pushes back against “doomists” (Franzen) and inactivism (Gates) who is a backer of technologies, in particular raising doubts about using green energy in developing countries. Mann calls “non-solution solutions” offering illusion.
Mann: “Esisting renewable energy and storage technologies could meet up to 80 perr cent of global energy demand by 2030, and 100 per cent by 2050.”
Gates has a folksy tone focused on “net zero” while Mann is more aggressive.
Climate Change is Making Drought Worse:
Drought means a lot of different things, and impacts different places in different ways. It’s not just rainfall, it’s snowfall, it’s soil moisture, it’s runoff and groundwater, etc.
How to reach Net Zero Emissions:
There is a lot of debate in the environmental world about where we should focus our efforts in attempts to reach “net zero” carbon emissions in the next 10-30 years. This article from TheBreakthrough.org reviews some of the most plausible models:
“While the models differ in important ways, they all paint a broadly similar picture. Wind and solar expand rapidly in the next three decades. US coal use falls off a cliff, reaching zero by 2030 or 2035. At the same time, natural gas use stays rather flat — or even increases modestly — between 2020 and 2030, as it serves a key role in filling in the gaps in variable renewable generation.”
A way to think of this: Kill coal, use natural gas (which is relatively clean) as a bridge).
The three models for Net Zero 2050 are:
Vibrant - Vibrant Clean Energy, LLC has a “Zero by Fifty” framework which uses the WIS:dom model. Assumes massive wind/solar deployment (especially wind). In other words: existing technology. Assumes nuclear and hydrogen decrease in price considerably by 2050. Assumes rapid switch to EVs, and aviation/shipping use better fuels by 2045.
NZA - Princeton’s Net Zero America - “A critical issue for driving this clean-energy agenda is where new solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing facilities are built, and where the solar and wind farms themselves are sited, along with biofuel production plants. The research provides city and regional maps that show where it is least costly to build these facilities and where they integrate into the energy system most efficiently. But this does not account for the social and human aspects of where to construct new infrastructure.” They have an 350 page PPT style document available here that identifies 6 pillars of the transition.
Williams et al - Carbon Neutral Pathways for the United States - “using only commercial or near‐commercial technologies, and requiring no early retirement of existing infrastructure.” “Least‐cost pathways were based on >80% wind and solar electricity plus thermal generation for reliability. A 100% renewable primary energy system was feasible but had higher cost and land use. We found multiple feasible options for supplying low‐carbon fuels for non‐electrifiable end uses in industry, freight, and aviation, which were not required in bulk until after 2035. In the next decade, the actions required in all pathways were similar: expand renewable capacity 3.5 fold, retire coal, maintain existing gas generating capacity, and increase electric vehicle and heat pump sales to >50% of market share. “