How the Paris Agreement Will Impact EU Climate and Energy Policies

A broad topic but a good discussion panel organized by Bruegel.

There appears to be the view that emissions targets and ETS will have to revised. More importantly, innovation in new technologies and renewables and how to integrate it with the existing infrastructure will be key in setting up planned targets for 2050. Natural gas will have a bridging role in the energy transition.

Apart from the EU Commissioner for Energy and Climate Action Miguel Arias Cañete, the panel also has a GE representative Hendrik Bourgeois who provides the investment requirements and investment risks coming along the way to low carbon. 

In short, despite the optimism from some circles, the engineering, economical and social challenges for a low carbon economy makes implementing the Paris Agreement an extremely complex task. Below is just the EU viewpoint. 

The EU's Roadmap for a competitive low carbon economy in 2050 can be read here.

Laws of Thermodynamics (In Simple English)

First Law: It is impossible to obtain something from nothing, but one may break even

Second Law: One may break even but only at the lowest possible temperature

Third Law: One cannot reach the lowest possible temperature

Implication: It is impossible to obtain something from nothing, so one must optimize resources

This was obtained from one of my thermodynamics reference books from college days. I'm amused at the plain language in the three maxims. A lot of new discussion surrounding energy systems can be cut short if you invoked any of these maxims in it's simplest form and then thought again. 

Citation :
Advanced Thermodynamics Engineering, by K. Annamalai and I. K. Puri, CRC Press.

Ecological Impacts of Country Transformation

Unprecedented economic growth always comes with a cost. Recently I was playing around with some numbers on the HDR website to evaluate human development indicators by country. Some interesting numbers pop up.

Being the curious guy I am, I plotted anthropocentric CO2 emissions as a function of population. This lends a graphic perspective to this detail that some of the smallest countries in the world situated in the middle east rely 100% on fossil fuels to get their energy. U.A.E, Qatar and Kuwait also stand out as the worst performers in the per capita CO2 emissions metric.

The carbon emissions data apparently comes from "World Development Indicators 2012". So I quickly hopped over there and plotted CO2 emissions in metric tons as a function of time.

By 2009 standards, the U.A.E and Qatar were over 3 and 7 times worse respectively in per capita CO2 emissions than an enormous emerging country like China. The good news is the numbers are slowly sloping downwards, however it would be nice to have data from 2009 and 2013 to confirm.

The U.A.E and Qatar have been having massive development projects really only over the last two decades.  Infrastructure in developed countries such as United States and the UK is comparatively older and more mature.  So the question really is whether this data just reflects the normal development patterns of countries modernizing themselves over the time period for which we do have data.

The negative aspects of country transformation patterns maybe seen in another set of ecological health checks called ecological footprint and bio-capacity.

Ecological footprint, measured in global hectares, is defined by the Footprint Network as a measure of how much area of biologically productive land and water an individual, population or activity requires to produce all the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste it generates, using prevailing technology and resource management practices. Because trade is global, an individual or country's Footprint includes land or sea from all over the world.

Bio-capacity, also measured in global hectares, is the capacity of ecosystems to produce useful biological materials and to absorb waste materials generated by humans, using current management schemes and extraction technologies.

Ecological footprint and bio-capacity vs time plots for some countries are given below this post. It is not surprising to see by the green line that the available land per capita required to replenish consumed resources and absorb wastes for all these countries is on a decreasing trend. The point where the two cross each other is called overshoot beyond which there is a bio-capacity deficit to meet a country's footprint. Most, if not all countries, are under visible ecological deficits.

The U.A.E, Qatar and Kuwait have a wide disparity between available resources and per capita resource consumption. I would image that this points to region specific issues such as high immigrant influx, high population growth (UAE's is 12% average!), massive urbanization, expansion and associated development projects and the demands from a difficult desert climate for high amounts of energy for comfortable living. Significant amounts of natural resources are hence imported from outside to drive growth.

Its a good reminder that the monitoring site on a mountain in Hawaii that sets the world's benchmark for CO2 emissions told us in March 2013 that the earth has passed the 400 ppm milestone. The ugliness here is that CO2 could stay up for a long time and nations can't really stop developing. So don't hold your breath. We will keep pumping a lot of gas into the atmosphere and no one really knows what the real consequences are going to be. But we can always manage risk, if not reverse consequences.

Fortunately, the U.A.E is not blind about this issue. There are national initiatives here to try and better understand consumption patterns. All this said, this country is still a big beacon of hope & prosperity for many individuals in the middle east, where extremism and nationalism are destroying nations. In that regard, trade-offs of expansion, trade and of integrating foreign people who come here to live and work will inevitably crop up. It is far worse to sit with arms folded and do nothing about the negative aspects than it is to do something. This is encapsulated in the positive process of change.

Attached plots of ecological footprints. See source. 

 

Energy Risk and Why Politics Need More Engineers

I learn that 8 out of the top 9 government officials in China are scientists. I make this assumption in good faith that Chinese leaders are not stupid, so this technological giant is poised well for growth. I ask if other nations can do the same and elect more engineers and scientists to occupy office. At least they could understand data.

For many decades since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the world has been enjoying a steady rise in per capita GDP, much of it due to new technology, most of it has to do with cheap energy. Cheap energy makes all things possible. It holds the key to upping quality of life. Its that simple.

However, we're now firmly in the age of huge unsustainable consumption patterns, growing resource pressures and the challenge of finding cheap energy. No explanations needed there. We've found ourselves in a potentially colossal mess and have to think of how to manage risk.

So far in my career that has spanned 4 years, I've been involved in the non-renewable energy industry. What did I do? I provided my skills to companies that manufactured products that either helped extract oil/gas out of the ground or run prime movers that utilized fossil fuels to run vehicles and power generation equipment. Was it fun? Yes, I took a few things home that I can call good experiences. But as a steward of society and going forward into increasingly challenging times with our energy issues, I wonder whether it is time to think about steering my career in other directions.

I've been thinking about this matter quite holistically for sometime, but in effect its like riding a see saw. Your career aspirations change with the tides of time and I'm just about thinking whether I need to stop see sawing and hop off and focus on something that brings a sort of existential element to engineering. Atleast now, I feel like things are clear to me over the horizon.

The GCC region in which I'm currently based as an engineer maybe enjoying its time of substantial oil/gas reserves but the key question is - are revenues from exports guaranteed? I look at data everyday that tells me again that the United States has growing shale gas reserves. It will continue to enjoy a period of cheap natural gas for as long as the economics of production allow it.

I've been in the United States for 10 years. Even the average Joe has ideas, good ideas. What I mean is collectively, they are an industrious nation with ideas; sooner or later I'm assuming they are going to figure out a way to tap oil and gas from new unconventional reserves for lesser cost and reduce their import expenditures from OPEC. What makes you think that it won't happen?

How many more years has OPEC got to continue underwriting the market for fossil fuels? 10? 15? Ofcourse, you can say OPEC will tap into nations that transform slowly over time into net energy importers but internal growth within the OPEC countries is seldom stable. Far from the truth, as these emerging nations are going to be some of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels in the coming years. Past data is a future predictor.

The people of GCC countries have enjoyed subsidized energy for a long time. Many public welfare programs are made possible through the enjoyment of energy import revenues. Infrastructure development has gone on at the speed of sound, metaphorically. 40 years ago, the UAE was desert. Now its arguably at the center of the global map. People really want to come here you know.

Suppose OPEC loses its stronghold on the floor price of oil and hypothetically crashes to market pressures, I'm eager to know what GCC countries will do next?

Fortunately, countries like the UAE are strategic in their thinking, looking to renewables like solar and wind power to balance out their energy portfolio. This is going on world over. China, EU, U.S, Spain, Netherlands you name it. They're all looking to ride this new but thin line of renewables to buffer for uncertainties and venture into new cleaner technologies that just makes plain sense for the future. I mean, one of the things that really surprised me was that the headquarters for the International Renewable Energy Agency is based nowhere else but in Abu Dhabi! How is that for vision?

Nations don't like uncertainty. They certainly don't like a hit on their GDP. The world is operating in a time of Arab Springs, Anonymous hackers and Occupy movements. Surely that in itself is an impetus to do seek change.

If crisis management was ignored and nations went with the business as usual scenario, how in the world would we meet the estimated 100 million barrels of liquids the world could consume each day in 2020 from a realistic supply capacity of around 100 million barrels a day by the same time-frame? Beats me. On the other hand, the conservation approach makes total sense. What-if scenarios modeled by McKinsey & Company for eight industries is shown above.

This is why I have an earnest wish that countries would elect more engineers and scientists to its top government jobs. These are the people who can understand the exponential functions of a rising population and energy demand. They'll be able to understand various technologies and their development challenges and view them in light of policies, subsidies, funding. Armed with technical knowledge, I hypothesize that these are the people best poised to advice their bosses or make better decisions at the negotiating table on world stage.  

The Bhangmeter

Its not everyday that you wake up to learn that a small nation of perhaps 3 million is ready for nuclear war with anyone it can find close by.  Perhaps life is that boring in North Korea. Or did the Korean newspaper sales plummet in that last two months? I'm not sure.

However, I hope this does not inconvenience the rest of us, especially if those pesky shocks waves from the Korean Peninsula disrupts my normal running schedule. Man I'll be pissed.

Speaking of shock waves, I was obviously curious about one aspect related to all this nuclear doom and gloom. Suppose you were tasked with the job of measuring the energy of a nuclear bomb just from the explosion, how would you do it? Sounds like a handful.

Actually, yes and no. But one such technique interestingly takes advantage of a peculiar behavior of nuclear explosions. I did some reading on the subject.

It turns out that atmospheric nuclear explosions below 30km in altitude all have a light signal that is quite strongly related to the yield of the bomb. Thermal power of an explosion can be derived from a two peak light pulse that is very characteristic of nuclear explosions. This pulse contains two maximas and one minima, illustrated in diagram below. I stole it from an interesting write up on bomb physics (sources are listed below)

The two peaks have similar instantaneous brightness characteristics but the second maximum lasts 100 times longer and this is where most of the energy of the bomb comes from. At first glance at the plot on the left, you won't get that perspective but its on a logarithmic scale!

The numbers are stupefying obviously. Data from the same paper points out that the peak power generated during the first half second of a 1 kt nuclear bomb is around 4 x 10¹² watts! I mean, this is more than the actual installed electric generation capacity of the US for 2011!

Because no other power source on earth can match this pulse and power levels within such fractions of a second, it is distinct to nuclear explosions making it convenient to measure.

Scientists started making cheap prototypes of a pulse measurement instrument using photocells and oscilloscopes in the 1930's. The time to the minimum was measured and averaged followed by a derivation of the capacity of the bomb from established calibration curves. One such curve is displayed below, which I stole from another report.

What the firm EG&G constructed to measure yield in such a fashion was literally called a BHANGMETER! Simple as it was, it was ripe with measurement variation issues but apparently they tuned it well enough to obtain a +/- 15% tolerance band on the yield rating from reflected waves at fairly large distances.

Suffice to say, as dangerous as a nuclear bomb explosion is, its a fascinating thing to study. Perhaps the more dangerous, the more fascinating?

Man's ability to kill those of his own kind is evidently not unique to the human population. Primates do it well and do it efficiently too. But the stupidity of humans in avoiding the exercise of some amount of common sense regarding the use of nuclear bombs given past war data is spectacularly unmatched I think.

Sources :

Bomb Physics and Light Produced In a Nuclear Explosion
Bhangmeter Construction Report