Tag Archives: Pollution

Tesla's Powerwall - Not Economical

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Tesla Powerwall

I'm gonna open by saying that I really like Tesla's powerpack. Technology isn't pushed past the bleeding edge without loss-leaders pioneering. That being said, the numbers, as usual, don't lie. On a per-unit-energy cost basis, these things aren't economic in most of the US. Once you consider the externalities, however, the overall benefit does make them "profitable." Likely you will see subsidies to internalize these externalities, thus making the powerpack work.

Unless the inverter costs too much. More on that later.

One major implication I haven't seen anyone talk about? Utility companies currently have to pay people with solar panels who produce excess electricity at market rates. They've been trying to get rid of this for years. This technology gives utilities every reason to demand they no longer pay people for their excess produced solar power. This has enormous implications. It's now indefensible to force utilities to buy at market rates the extra power produced by homes with solar. Read more near the bottom.

It's in my weight class!

Tesla's Powerwall next to a car. Small-ish and sleek. 7 inches deep, weighing 220 lbs

What is this Powerwall?

Powerwall is a power pack that you hang on your wall. It costs $3,000 for a 7kwh pack designed for a daily cycle, meaning it's charged and used once per day. This is the cost without installation. Also, this is the cost if you already have solar cells and an inverter. If you want to work with the grid alone, you have to buy an inverter*. Even if you already have solar cells and don't need an inverter, this seems like it's a product designed for the wealthy. Let's look at the math (my favorite part!)

*Inverters. Batteries and solar panels produce DC current, or Direct Current. This means it doesn't change phase. What we use in our homes is Alternating Current or AC. The alternating current means that the positive and negative terminals switch sides of the power plug. In the US, they switch sides 60 times per second. DC means that the terminals do not switch sides. Hence batteries having a + and - terminal, and all your non-battery electronics not having these.

The Maths!

We are going to make some of the rosiest assumptions in the world. First, though, let's get some solid data lines up. Take a peak at NPR's cost of electricity infos.

1. On average, people pay 12 cents per kwh of electricity

2. In Hawaii, they pay 33 cents. We'll use this as a case study.

3. The Northeast and California, two other case studies, pay about 16 cents.

4. The average American uses 900kwh of electricity per month in their home (from eia.gov).

Really rosy assumptions

1. The sun shines for 300 days a year and provides enough electricity to power your house during shining and to fully charge the battery

2. The electricity grid doesn't buy back your excess solar*. If they do have to buy it back, then the economics discussed here don't play out

3. You've already paid for all of your solar installation and you aren't concerned about those costs of that electricity going into this powerpack

4. These things don't degrade over time (extremely rosy assumption)

Hokay!

300 days per year of 7kwh of electricity provided by this beast is:

So 2100 kwh/year. What's that get you in most of the US?

So $252 per year. For a $3000 battery pack. In most of the US, if your solar panels worked perfectly for 300 days a year, it'd take you 12 years to pay back your investment. This is a 6% annualized ROI (Return On Investment). In other words, you'd make more money in the stock market, so it's a bad investment, not even accounting for installation costs and with impractically rosy assumptions, in most of the US.

What about in the Northeast and California, where electricity is $0.16?

Or payback in 9 years. This is an 8% ROI, making it a decent investment.

Let's be realistic, though. In the Northeast, we have storms and winter. Solar panels don't work so great here. We aren't getting 300 cycles per year out of this. We'd be lucky to get 150, making it an 18 year payback, or about a 3% ROI. What about California? They actually might get 300 days of viable sun a year. So in California, you could be break-even.

Now what's the problem here? Normal people don't look for 8% ROI on their home upgrades. They look for 15%. Pretty much they want 3-5 year payback periods. So pretty much, someone has to have a very green outlook on life to buy one of these. Or there have to be subsidies (more later)

Hawaii

Hawaii has sunshine and electricity costs 33 cents. Let's say you've paid off your solar panels in Hawaii.

In Hawaii, with our rosy assumptions and no installation cost, the powerpack will pay for itself in 4.25 years, for a whopping 18% return on investment, without any subsidies. There is a viable business model here.

Seriously, someone go start a powerpack/solar panel installation company in Hawaii.

Anywhere else, and these things will need hefty subsidies.

Subsidies

Why would you subsidize these things? Easy. There are only two reliable power sources that can compensate for variability in solar power: hydro and natural gas. Every other power plant takes far too long to spin up to be useful. In other words, nuclear power doesn't stop producing pretty much ever. Coal power takes about a day to get to capacity, so it can't cycle well.
Hydro power is a limited resource. We are pretty much tapped out in the US, and what we have is already being used, so it can't ramp. We'd have to replace what's currently being used with coal, natural gas, or nuclear to use hydro for solar-grid reliability, so that entirely defeats the point.
Natural gas ramps quickly, and we have excess capacity in the US. Natural gas still produces CO2 that spreads globally, and NO2 that spreads locally. NO2 becomes a strong acid when you breath it in, so we have healthcare reasons to reduce it. Thus it might make sense to subsidize these powerpacks to make people more likely to buy them.
Second, this is good tech. It's pretty much where it needs to be in order to make sense to buy in many parts of the country, if you already have solar. Subsidizing it will cause further advancement in battery tech, making it that much more viable in a wider array of applications. Battery tech is one of the things holding us back from so many viable technology applications, so if there is something to subsidize that will more than pay for itself, it is battery tech that is nearly cost-even now.
Some Extra Thoughts on my Rosy Assumptions
*If Solar Companies don't need to buy back Electricity
In most places, if you produce excess electricity that you don't use, the solar company has to buy it back at market rates. So buying this powerpack and storing energy for commercial purposes is useless. All of the economic discussion above is bunk if the grid needs to buy your excess power. In other words, only greenies would buy it.
One important thing to consider. This product makes storing electricity from solar into a break-even cost in any sunny part of the country. Utilities have always hated paying for this. They lose money on it. They've fought legal battles to get it repealed. And now they have the ammunition they need to repeal it, because it's now no longer a burden to consumers to store their excess electricity for later use themselves.
Maybe consider buying utility stocks if you find a company that is over-exposed to paying for home-solar-produced power? I'd tell you to look towards California here.
Inverter Costs
If you don't have solar already, you have to pay for the inverter to make this thing convert DC back to AC for your home. I can't see any reason to do this. The cost differential between peak power and non-peak is about 4-6 cents in most places. Far too little to justify the expense of both an inverter and a powerpack. A gas generator is a better bet if you need reliable power.
Large Scale Efficacy
I'm betting the large-scale systems are more cost-effective. They don't need to be as small and as sleek. And you can have one large inverter for all of the daisy-chained power packs. Who would buy these? Commercial electricity buyers, like stores.
Who wouldn't buy these? Industrial complexes. They make deals directly with electricity companies and pay $0.07 to $0.10 per kwh.
Thanks for reading!
 - Jason Munster

Air quality limits, Geographic Air Pollution Causes

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Hi everyone! Last week I wrote about air pollution, where it is bad, what causes it, and the main harmful components of air pollution.This week I am going to give you some exact numbers. First, though, let's start with a scary fact. Then I'm moving into how pollution goes away once it is in the air.

US limits on PM2.5 are 12 micrograms per cubic meter averaged over a year. In Europe, the limit is 25. Note that for every increase of 10 micrograms, there is an associated 9% increase in lung cancer incidence, and a .6 years decrease in life expectancy. Scary, right? China has an annual average limit of 40, and India has an annual average limit of 50. They don't do so well in some cases. Beijing averages 56, and Delhi averages 150. In other words, Delhi's population has somewhere in the vicinity of 10 years less of life from air pollution alone.

What about other pollution? SOx, NOx, and ozone tend to accompany each other. Wherever you have SOx, you have the other two. Even clean-burning natural gas power plants produce NOx, just as a by-product of combustion is our nitrogen atmosphere. NOx becomes ozone and smog when mixed with sunlight and organic radicals (the latter of which exist just about everywhere). In other words, these three things are difficult to separate. Moreover, they are often accompanied by PM2.5. Research is having trouble teasing them apart and figuring out what might cause what. But, again, SOx and NOx become strong acids when they react with the water in your lungs, and ozone is toxic to life at ground level (always remember, ozone 15km overhead blocks out the bad parts of the sun, ozone at ground level damages living things).

SOx and NOx, once emitted, are typically cleared out by rainstorms, creating acid rain. It's better than breathing it in, right?

SOx and NOx, once emitted, are typically cleared out by rainstorms, creating acid rain. It's better than breathing it in, right?

The US has pretty good air quality overall. But if you look at the US government website that shows current levels of pm2.5, you'll see some cities in the US are straight up awful. While their annual average might be around 20-25, on the day I checked, San Bernardino, CA, had 137 micrograms per cubic meter. This is absurdly high. On days like this, people will have difficulty breathing.

Los Angeles on a polluted day. Thanks Curtis Barnes for the correction! Site.

In other words, you can go almost anywhere in the world and find places that are tough to breath in. That being said, there are some countries that are really bad almost everywhere. Bangladesh, India, Nepal, China, and Pakistan are all very polluted. Much of the middle east is as well.

So what makes these things hang out? The most common reasons are inversions. It's when warm air sits on top of colder air. Since air likes to rise when it is warm, if there is a layer of cold air that is polluted that also happens to be capped by warm air, that cold layer will sit there and stagnate. Instead of blowing up or away, it will simply accumulate pollution. Another cause is being surrounded by mountains. Mexico City, for example, is right in the middle of a bunch of mountains. The pollution cannot rise above the mountains, so it lingers and builds. It is also common for coastal areas, or areas next to high deserts, to have times when air refuses to vacate. Those mechanisms are a bit complicated, so we won't discuss them. Finally, being near 30 degrees North or South latitude tends to make air pollution stick around. LA, for example, is at 34 North. The reason for this being bad is that the Earth has the giant airflow patterns. Air is heated at the equator by the sun, then it rises. Eventually it cools and falls near 30 degrees north. The result is that inversions happen more frequently, cause there is air pushing down on the cities.

Diagram of temperature inversion. Site

That's about it for the major causes of air pollution buildup. Of course there has to be pollution to start with for these effects to matter.

Hokay, so, what makes PM2.5 go away when it starts hanging around? Either a wind comes through and blows it out, or a rain comes through. Rain scrubs PM2.5 by absorbing it, and it chemically converts SOx and NOx to acids that become solutes in the rain. Hence acid rain. Also hence why skies are most clear after rains, and how they can smell so fresh and clean after rain. So, if you are going to go for a run in Beijing or Delhi, wait til after a big rainstorm 🙂

Let's talk about that last point a little bit more. China is dry nearly all the time. It doesn't rain much there, so it has a bigger problem of building up air pollution. India has the monsoon season, but is also fairly dry otherwise. What about LA? If you have ever driven in a slight rainstorm in LA, you will see that everyone freaks out and has no clue how to drive in the rain. It's hilarious for about 5 seconds until you realize you are now in a traffic jam. It doesn't rain there, either.

So. Your most polluted places will be near 30 degrees latitude, potentially on the coast or in mountains, dry, and in the vicinity of polluting vehicles, industry, or power plants. Neat. right? I bet you thought it was just pollution alone that caused pollution to linger.

Hokay, that's all for now. Thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster

 

Which Country has the Worst Air Pollution in the World?

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Before I get into anything, this is a first in a series of three articles I am going to be releasing. Instead of my monthly release rate, I am going to be releasing them one each week. If you are traveling to or live in a polluted environment, I highly suggest you subscribe to the blog or do it as an RSS feed.

Now to the article!

If you guessed China, you guessed wrong. Did you get it wrong? If you say you didn't, I am going to call you a liar. Every person I know, when asked which country in the world has the worst air pollution, answered China. This includes experts on China, experts on air pollution, and experts on countries that are more polluted than china.

Also, the number of people that die per year from air pollution is staggering, more on that after the math.

China isn't even close to being the country with the most fouled air. That distinction belongs to India, by a huge margin.

Okay, well, let's delve further into it. Of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world, how many would you guess are in China? Okay, that was a trick question. China doesn't have any of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world. And India holds the distinction of having at least 10 of them.

A gate in India that can't be seen through air pollution.

Before getting to the science grit, one more important thing. Owing entirely to city air pollution in India, at least one study shows that Indian citizens living in cities have 30% less lung capacity than Europeans living in cities. So, pretty much, pollution makes it so

Okay, let's back up and discuss air pollution a bit.

What is Air Pollution? (This is the technical part of the post)

In this above mentioned study, air pollution is strictly PM2.5. Why is that? Because PM2.5 is particulates smaller than 2.5 microns, roughly 1/30th the width of human hair. They are small enough that they penetrate deep into the lungs, where they cause permanent damage and can lead to cancer. PM2.5 is produced by powerplants (mostly coal-fired) and any combustion-based motor vehicle. The EPA has a great guideline for PM2.5 if you want to read more.

There are other pollutants that everyone seems to ignore. Back in the day, you heard a lot about acid rain. Acid rain is caused by and . Combusting anything creates NO, cause there is so much in the air (78% of the stuff we breath is ) that some of it combines with oxygen during combustion, creating NO. NO reacts with to produce NO2 and O-, the latter of which produces ground-level ozone (more on that soon). Let's look at what happens to and in air:

So that's sulphuric acid.

And that is nitrous and nitric acid. Another fun reaction is:

VOCs are Volatile Organic Carbons. It pretty much means organic matter in the air. It comes from plants. , or ozone, is bad for people and plants at ground level.

So let's review what happens here. Power plants burn fossil fuels, they produce PM2.5 which causes cancer, coal-fired powerplants produce which becomes acid in your lungs, and all combustion plants produce which also becomes acid in your lungs. PM2.5 is the worst, but the other pollutants are also bad. Burning coal causes the most of all of these pollutants. Lower grade coal, the stuff burned more often in China and India (the US has high grade coal), has less energy relative to pollutants, so it makes more pollution.

Now, exactly how bad are ozone, NOx () and SOx ()? They are all similar, so lets just look at SOx health effects according to the EPA. In short, exercising in an environment with this stuff is bad for you, and sends people to the emergency room. In the worst case scenario, it exacerbates or triggers asthma, heart attacks, and aneurysms, killing people nearly instantly. Long term exposure increases asthma and other health hazards. Now keep in mind that this stuff is considered less of a problem than PM2.5.

Back to the Qualitative

Okay, now that we know what the stuff is and what it does, let's get to some specific numbers. The World Health Organization indicates that air pollution is "single biggest environmental health risk in the world" the largest health hazard in the world, killing 7 million people per year.

What's the best way to deal with this stuff? Staying indoors helps a lot. Your house acts as a good barrier against it. Having a filter also helps. If you live in China or India, build one of these at your home. The filter will stop working eventually, so it will have replacement costs, but you can probably get clean air for around $100 per year for a single room in your house. Now keep in mind, this is a HEPA filter, which filters out only particles. Good luck with that SOx, NOx, and ozone. The guy who stapled together the filter and the fan states that it's the only thing you need for clean air in his blog. Clearly the PhD he is learning in psychology does not qualify him to know a lot about air quality. It doesn't disqualify him from knowing about it, but being completely unaware of the chemicals I described above does.

HEPA + fan. Good for PM2.5, useless vs. ozone, SOx, and NOx.

 

In other words, this filter will work inside, but you are still going to get bad chemicals living in your lungs. If you want to filter more, be prepared to shell out thousands of USD. Also, if you plan on going outside, or you want to exercise, if you work outside, you're pretty well screwed. There are a few masks that work, but all have their flaws or are expensive. More on this later, we've hit 1000 words and it's time to go.

Before we let me repeat one thing. If you are in a polluted area: Do. Not. Exercise. Anywhere. That. Isn't. Filtered. And no mask on the market filters out SOx, NOx, and Ozone.

Thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster

China, Accounting Pollution in Manufacturing, and Greenwashing

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A Call for a Consumption Based Pollution Levy: Pollution from Chinese Export Manufactures Drift to US West Coast

Pictured here is a NASA image of smog in China. Nearly all the gray is smog. This is a result of the rise of manufacturing, and rapid production of low-quality power plants

Guys, no science in this one. Also, stay tuned for a better treatment of this topic from Archana Dayalu over at Policylab. I originally wrote this for policylab, but it turns out Archana had the same idea earlier. Hence you'll notice a completely different writing voice (it's not the fun one I use in my blog).

As I wrote in the past, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs allows the US to push all the pollution in manufacturing into other countries while enjoying lower prices of goods manufactured by cheap labor. Thanks to Kate Wang for bringing a recent NYT article to me attention.

An early edition report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that a significant amount of pollution drifts from China to the west coast of the United States. The authors argue for a changing of attribution of the associated pollutants to the consuming countries, rather than China, the producing country. The authors gloss over any potential impacts this would have on world trade. Lead author Jintai Lin writes:

Atmospheric modeling shows that transport of the export-related Chinese pollution contributed 3–10% of annual mean surface sulfate concentrations and 0.5–1.5% of ozone over the western United States in 2006. This Chinese pollution also resulted in one extra day or more of noncompliance with the US ozone standard in 2006 over the Los Angeles area and many regions in the eastern United States. On a daily basis, the export-related Chinese pollution contributed, at a maximum, 12–24% of sulfate concentrations over the western United States.

In other words, goods manufactured in China and consumed by the United States directly cause pollution in the western United States. The upside is that the former heavy manufacturing centers in the Eastern United States have outsourced to China, cleaning up the air of the Eastern US. The article points out that, given the dense population of the east coast, this is a net win for the US, at slight expense of the west coast and great expense of pollutants in China.

Air pollution in Beijing. One picture taken on a clear day, another on a smoggy day. This is the capitol city of China. This is the ugly side of outsourcing.

It remains unclear what the author's ultimate goals are. There is no international accounting of pollution. Either the authors are greenwashing--the practice of trying to make manufacturing or other industry look environmentally more friendly through the process of bullshitting--or they are anticipating some accounting system, either internal to China or external, in the future.

The authors argue for a different method of accounting for pollution associated with manufactured goods. Currently, all pollution is attributed to the producer. Chinese factories build the goods, China gets assigned the pollution in international ledgers. Consumption based attribution, they argue, would make more sense. The goods are made for American (and otherwise) consumption, and the pollution should therefore be attributed to America.

Disregarding whether this is right to do, or whether it would accomplish anything more than green-washing China’s economy, let’s explore several of the implications of this policy change. Specifically in a hypothetical world that has to account for pollution contained within products, which, aside from green-washing, would be the major reason to worry about pollution attribution. Manufacturing of these export goods requires significant amount of energy. The sulphur and black carbon that reaches the west coast specifically come from coal-fired ower plants. China puts few controls on emissions from these power plants, and the required rate of construction results in power plants that are significantly less efficient than those in the US. This means that every bit of energy produced and used in China, for manufacturing or otherwise, contains more pollution than it would in the US or any other developed country. Moreover, Chinese manufacturing is less efficient than developed countries for a variety of reasons.

The end result is that a good manufactured in China embodies more pollution than the exact same good manufactured in the US, Japan, Korea, Europe, or any other advanced nation. If policies were put in place to move to a consumption-based attribution of pollution, and that attribution had real-world implications on the cost or value of a product, Chinese goods would face a competitive disadvantage. The implications are pretty straightforward: either China cleans up its manufacturing and energy sector, greatly benefitting China and slightly benefitting the rest of the world from a pollution standpoint, or goods are produced in countries where they can be made for less environmental cost, hurting China’s exports while healing its air quality and benefitting the rest of the world financially and environmentally.

While this attributing of pollution on the consumption side seems to mostly have net benefits, it only works if purchasers or producers are forced to pay for pollution they bring about. We are not currently in a world where either are held accountable for the pollution associated with manufacture of Chinese exports. In this, Jintai Lin’s suggestion seems only like greenwashing: an attempt of finger-pointing for the destruction of China’s air quality and environment.

Thanks for reading

- Jason Munster

Is Nuclear Power Really the Most Expensive Technology?

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No. It isn't.

Let's explore this more. In a country that already has a well-developed electrical grid / electricity distribution system (sorry, much of Africa), doesn't have ideas based on fear about how dangerous nuclear power is (European and North American countries, +Japan), and doesn't have a terrorism issue (proliferation), nuclear power is the cheapest and least polluting type.

Okay, so where can we find a country that meets this description? How bout Croatia, where some scientists did some probabilistic modeling on this?

From the results of the simulations it can be concluded that the distribution of levelized bus bar costs for the combined cycle gas plant is in the range 4.5–8 US cents/kWh, with a most probable value of about 5.8 US cents/kWh; for coal-fired plants the corresponding values are 4.5–6.3 US cents/kWh and 5.2 US cents/kWh and for the nuclear power plant the corresponding values are in the range 4.2–5.8 US cents/kWh and a most probable value of about 4.8 US cents/kWh.

Let me sum this up. In Croatia, nuclear power is likely going to be the cheapest source. Plus is doesn't pollute and kill people like gas or coal.

Admit it, you needed this.

Why do we face a different situation in the US and Europe? Easy. I've mentioned it before. There is so much concern about the safety of nuclear power that each construction gets mired in legal battles. The legal battles themselves don't cost much. What costs a ton is that these power plants took out $8 billion in loans, meant to be paid back over 10 years. Those loans accrue interest. If legal hurtles slow the construction of the plant down and it takes 15 years instead, those extra 5 years of loans are gonna have several extra billions in interest to pay. Suddenly the cost of power produced goes up.

These costs need to be paid back. The only way to pay back higher than anticipated costs would be to charge more for nuclear power.

So it's safe to say that stalling the construction of a nuclear power plant can effectively prevent it from ever getting built. Now we are in a situation where no one wants to fund a power plant, because the chance of it being slowed and made unprofitable is a bit higher.

Sometimes there are just plain time overruns. The US hasn't build nuclear power plants in years. Our companies barely know how to do it. Our people haven't been trained in colleges and universities to build nuclear power plants. We just don't have the nuclear engineers we would need to make a nuclear renaissance happen, and we'd need several nuclear power plants built before we finally get the hang of it. So there will be a learning curve. Would you want to fund that learning curve? Probably not when natural gas is so cheap in the US.

Are we gonna get there any time soon? Not without a major policy shift. Let's look at planned nuclear power plants worldwide:

Planned nuclear power plants. Image mine, constructed from data available at

Planned nuclear power plants. Image mine, constructed from data available  here

So um... Good job, China. US? Not so much. 32 of the 72 nuclear power plants scheduled to come on-line in the next 5 years are in China. 4 are in the US.

Nuclear power will be more expensive than gas (and coal) power in the US unless 3 things happen:

1. We account for the annual loss of life and increase in asthma and heart disease associated with gas power plants.

2. We start building nuclear power plants now, training a cadre of engineers and speciality construction personnel to finish power plants quickly, safely, properly, and on time (the first few will be finished slowly, behind schedule, but still safe and properly complete, cause lots of eyes will be on them)

3. We continue to build enough of them so that the future ones are build on time and for less expense, driving down the cost of nuclear power to competitive levels (especially when accounting for the external costs of pollution and CO2 from gas and coal).

Thanks for reading!

- Jason Munster

 

Nuclear Power: Savings lives

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Nuclear power has saved over 1.8 million lives by replacing fossil fuel power sources.

A nuclear power plant!

I've mentioned that fossil fuel power plants kill people and shorten lives by emitting not only particulate matter and smog normally associated with pollution, but also NOx (natural gas power plants produce almost no particulate matter, but any time anything is combusted, the combustion process in a nitrogen rich atmosphere (78% on Earth) produces NOx, so natural gas power plants do produce NOx).

Coal fired power plants, even clean ones, belch yuckies into the air.

Shortly after harping on exactly this for several posts, a journal article came out that exonerated my aggressive stance on how nuclear power saves lives rather than ending them through nuclear disasters. Nuclear power has saved over 1.8 million lives, according to this peer-reviewed research. The authors didn't include long-term health ailments and non-death causing heart attacks related to climate change. Only death: full stop. They go on to say that replacing nuclear power with natural gas would cause 400,000 deaths by 2050. Replacing them with coal would cause 7 million. Meanwhile, the best estimates of long-term deaths caused by radiation exposure from the Chernobyl meltdown, mining uranium, and building nuclear power plants stands at about 5,000 No deaths arose from Three Mile Island or Fukushima. What about the radiation that Fukushima is spilling out into the ocean? It's less than 1/20th the radiation levels found in a banana.

I am a banana. Eating one of me makes you ingest more radiation than Fukushima ever will.

I am a banana. Eating one of me makes you ingest more radiation than Fukushima ever will.

Critics are quick to point out that renewables like wind are cheaper and more effective at reducing CO2 emissions than nuclear. Great. Let's build more wind power. Except that there are not sufficiently good places to make wind effectively and cheaply. In an exhaustive (and depressing) article on the state of nuclear energy construction, it is pointed out that Germany has an installed capacity (recall, installed capacity is simply the name-plate power generation of a plant/turbine at best-case scenario) of 76GW of renewable energy. They then compared this to all of France's installed capacity of Nuclear at 63.1 GW. But, as we have talked about, renewables don't always work. While France's nuclear generators put out 407 TWh in 2012, Germany's renewables generated 136 TWh despite their larger capacity.

"Except like Jason's former manager at JPMorgan, I only work under ideal conditions!"

"Except like Jason's former manager at JPMorgan, I only work under ideal conditions!"

Moreover, Germany pledged to phase out nuclear power after Fukushima. What did they replace it with? Not renewables. Coal fired power plants. Meanwhile, as the US expands power generation from natural gas and ceased buying coal from the US, US coal producers are finding a new market for coal in Germany.

So let's look at Fukushima a bit more. Several things are bad about fukushima. First, it melted down when a tsunami overtopped its protective walls. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had told Japan 20 years ago that their Fukushima walls were too low and they could be overtopped by a very realistic earthquake scenario. And now after the disaster, groundwater contamination with (less than 1/20th of a banana's levels) radiation is all a concern. Guess what? The NRC warned Fukushima to get their groundwater issue under control three years before the Fukushima meltdown.

That's right. The US NRC predicted that Fukushima was going to happen, and told Japan to get their house in order.

NRC: Telling Japan what to do since 1980. "We don't have much of a job to do in the US anymore since we haven't built a power plant in decades"

The US has a nuclear meltdown, too. You know what the consequences were? Pretty much nothing. It cost a billion dollar to clean up. That is a huge sum. But the meltdown was well-handled. And a lot was learned from the meltdown.

My point is, the US has it's matters sorted out when it comes to nuclear safety. And we are good at identifying risks in other parts of the world.

Finally, here's the big one, new reactor designs wouldn't allow for either three mile island or Fukushima to happen. With these new reactors, in the event of mechanical failure of the passive systems, the worst case scenario of the new designs is that it would take 3 full days before even needing to worry about meltdown beginning, leaving plenty of time to deal with the situation.

So yes. There are risks with nuclear. But there are guaranteed deaths with coal and natural gas.

The best solution by far is avoiding building new power plants and to massively increase efficiency and conservation. But people are slow at changing, and we aren't gonna change our lifestyles fast enough in the western world to avoid expansion of power use, and the developing world needs to build a ton of power capacity.

So let's stop being scared of nuclear power, cause it's saving lives rather than costing them.

Thanks for reading,

- Jason Munster

Appendix

Oh, but what is this section? Just a bunch of extra information. Check out how long it takes for various countries to build nuclear reactors:

What are Pakistan and India doing that they can build nukes in 5 years?!?

Average, min, and max times of nuclear plant construction for countries that have built them. Source

Hokay, so. I need to acknowledge the bad parts of nuclear power. The real ones, not the fear-mongering that happens.

First, nuclear power is more expensive than on-shore wind (which is a limited resource, there are not infinite good places to put wind farms), coal, and natural gas. There is no doubt about that. If we switched everything to nuclear, many parts of the US that don't have high electricity prices will experience a rate shock. That is, their electricity bills will rise. But hey, remember what we said earlier about efficiency and conservation being the best way to save lives and to arrest climate change? Slightly higher electricity prices would promote this conservation. The initial rate shock would be a bit of an issue, but I am betting that nuclear power's opponents overstate it.

Second, there is an alternative to nuclear that I want to acknowledge, with a caveat. Renewables can't provide baseload power. But renewables paired with load-following natural-gas fired plants can (recall from a prior article that gas turbine based power plants can spin up very fast, and no other major power plant type can) (we don't count hydro as a major power type because we can't build more hydro in the US, we are tapped [punny]). This is by far better than coal, and better than gas alone. But it still burns gas, which produces CO2 and kills people and causes asthma.

Geoengineering

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So. Science can fix anything, right? Only if we have lots of time and money. And grad students that function as indentured servants in a pyramid scheme to get tenure.

Back to the point. The truth is that science can't fix everything on short time scales. Climate is one of them. Geoengineering can help to a degree, but it will only get us part of the way there to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Let's discuss some.

White roofs, white roads, white buildings.

Two articles back, we discussed albedo, or reflecting sunlight. Ice reflects 90%, water reflects 90%. Whatever is reflected tends to go to space and not stay in the Earth system and warm it up. In fact, whatever is absorbed then gets in the greenhouse trapping loop, warming up the Earth a good bit. Dark surfaces (our roofs, our roads, most of our buildings) reflect little and absorb a lot. So, paint them all white, and more light is reflected. Excellent!

"But Jason," you say, "Cities are only a small percentage of land area. How could this possibly help? I mean, the rest of the Earth will still absorb just as much heat. Right?"

And to you I say, "Excellent, sir! That is true. Making all our stuff white won't do much for the overall heat budget of the Earth. I am so proud of you for reading most of my website so you quickly figure stuff like that out."

So what does it do?

 

The heat island effect is based on the fact that cities are covered in dark buildings and pavement, and have a very low albedo, so they absorb heat

Cities are fucking warm. They suffer from this thing called the "heat island effect." That is a fancy way of saying that they are so dark, they absorb the sunlight and are easily 10 degrees F (around 5 degrees C) warmer than they should be. Turn everything white, and you can cool the city. This will actually have a very large effect on how hard our AC units have to work in the summer. Imagine if your city was suddenly 10 degrees F cooler. How sweet would that be? I posit that it would be pretty rad.

This one seems to help a bit, but we will still be using tons of energy and producing CO2 in all other ways. Moreover, it won't solve the problem of the agriculture, ice caps, and acidifying ocean.

Putting CO2 in the ground

There are two ideas of sequestering CO2 in the ground. The first is capturing it at the source. Like power plants. This sounds like an easy idea, but the first problem is the energy it takes to capture it. Thermal power plants take in atmospheric air. Which is 78% nitrogen, and 21% O2. Even if all the O2 were converted to CO2, what comes out of the power plant stack is still 78% nitrogen. Separating the two to store the CO2 takes more energy. In fact, the power plant is roughly 30% less efficient. So it needs to burn a lot more coal or natural gas to produce the same amount of power, and will cost a lot more to build. And any fancy idea you have to get around this 30% efficiency hit won't work. No matter what, you either have to pre-concentrate O2 to get a pure stream of CO2 on the other side, or separate the CO2 on the emission side.

The next problem is where to store it once you get it. Gases like to leak out of things. Some companies are trying to store the CO2 underground, much like petroleum is stored underground in a lot of places. This is why you need to separate it from the nitrogen in the air. There just isn't enough space to store both the CO2 and the nitrogen, and also it is expensive to pump stuff underground. Another issue is that it is unclear how long storing CO2 will last in the ground, since it more or less needs to be done indefininately.

Finally, since 35% of our energy use is from cars driving down the road, and it is impossible to capture that CO2. So Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) from the source still won't do everything we need.

Direct Capture
The next idea is to capture CO2 directly from the air. We have increased CO2 in the atmosphere from 280 parts per million (.028%) 400ppm. The idea of direct capture is to do the opposite. Draw down the CO2 and then store it somewhere. Some might suggest we store it in trees, but that is an awful lot of trees, and unless we bury them trees somewhere underground, they are just gonna get consumed by bacteria and become CO2 again. Other options are to mechanically and chemically separate CO2 from the air, and them store it underground as above. This is very expensive. It might work in the future, but for now it won't.

The bonus of this, if it ever works, is that it is the best way to reverse our issues from an engineering standpoint. We can turn back the clock.

Stratospheric Injection

Injecting small sulfur or other particles into the atmosphere cools the entire globe by reflecting some small portion of sunlight before it hits the rest of the Earth. We know this cause when mountains like Pinatubo and St. Helens explode, they launch particles into the stratosphere and we get a cold year.

SO2 increase in the stratosphere by exploding volcano

Some people have suggested that we could do this. Just inject stuff into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. The problem? It turns out that everything small enough to cause the proper scattering just happens to be the right size to promote adsorption of water particles. Which then allows for rapid recycling of CFCs in the stratosphere.

"But Jason," you say, "I thought recycling was good!"

Recycling plastics is good. Stratospheric recycling of CFCs is bad. Cause what happens is a CFC reacts with ozone, breaking it apart, wrecking the ozone layer, and then usually is all like, "Man, I am exhausted from catalyzing that reaction, I am gonna take a break." But that water that adsorbed onto our reflective particle provides an excellent place for it to re-radicalize. Which means it is ready to take out another Ozone particle. That's right, our CFC goes to chill out on some water droplets, effectively taking a restful timeout at a pool, and gets ready for work again destroying the ozone layer.

Let's pull this all back together. We try to put stuff in the upper stratosphere, if could make CFCs more effective at destroying the ozone layer, and then we are all screwed in a much much larger way than climate change. Cause the ozone layer is what protects us from getting fried by a lot of UV rays.

Here's where things get fun. Imagine you are a small country of 1 million people living on an island. And that island is going to get inundated with water in 20 years unless climate change is reversed. You don't give a damn about a chance of destroying the ozone layer. You only care about saving your people and your country. Stratospheric injection isn't exactly nuclear science. We aren't going to have rogue nations stumbling through how to do this, and failing all the time.

I'll leave you to ponder what all that means, cause it is more fun that way, and we are already at 1200 words.

The upshot of this is that it also fails to solve the acidifying of the ocean, we don't know how well it will work, and we don't know what will go wrong.

Solar Reflector

Another idea is to put huge mirrors in space and reflect a chunk of the sunlight coming in. This could work. Wasn't this a plot in some Bond movie, though? Also, it would be mad expensive. Probably much more expensive than some other options. And much like the option directly above, we still acidify the ocean.

Review

Hokay, so. Most of the technologies for fixing our problem don't exist, don't work, are too expensive, or could kill us all. And if they do work in the future, they won't solve all the problems we are creating. Even the one that does solve all the problems, direct capture from the atmosphere, won't do crap for our plight if we rely on that alone. As a species, we can easily outstrip any CO2 removal measures just by burning more things. Even if after rigorous testing proved all these work, we would need to some combination together to get anywhere. And even with that, we need to reduce the continued growth of emissions worldwide, otherwise no science or engineering solution will stop climate change.

Depressing, eh?

Thanks for reading,

- Jason Munster

Nuclear Disasters

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Nuclear meltdowns are scary things. Most people don't understand what a nuclear reaction is. They just know it is big. Three major meltdowns have occurred: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Most people know about the last two; Chernobyl was a true disaster, and Fukushima still is leaking radiation into the ocean. Fukushima in particular would have been easy to prevent at two stages: building a higher protective wall around the plant, and flooding the reactor early. Zero people died in Fukushima and Three Mile. Compare that to the disaster that is 11,000 premature deaths and 24,000 heart attacks per year caused in the US alone by burning coal. Moreover, modern nuclear power plants are designed to prevent these accidents from happening.

Three Mile Island

Three Mile Island occurred in 1979 in PA. A problem began, and human error allowed it to persist. A pressure release valve was stuck open. The valve allowed some irradiated coolant to escape. A poorly trained operator was not familiar with the interface and confused the warning for the loss of coolant (the human-computer interfaces were new and not well designed). When the reactor began to overheat, the control rods were fully inserted. Remnant decay heat persisted, but the chain reaction was halted. Unfortunately, the plant had its emergency cooling pumps shut down for maintenance. You would think that there would be a rule saying that if the emergency cooling pumps were shut down for maintenance, that the plant itself should shut down, right? Well, there was such a rule. It is one the the key rules that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission laid down. The plant was in violation of this key rule.

A series of events followed where the cladding of the nuclear fuel rods melted. Some radioactive gas was released into the environment. The average person living within a 10 mile radius was dosed with about 8 millirem (a measure of radioactivity). This is the equivalent to a single chest x-ray. The average person living in a high altitude city, like Denver, CO, gets 100 extra mrem a year just by being closer to the sun. The average US citizen gets 300mrem a year from the environment. A round-trip flight from New York to Europe will dose you with 3mrem. In other words, this was negligible. The consensus of epidemiological studies since shows no increase in cancer rates from this event.

One a 1-10 screw up scale, this was about a 6. The operators failed to recognize it as a loss-of-coolant event, and allowed the core to overheat. Not a single person died as a result. All the containment methods, which are 1970s technology and design, worked. The only loss was an economic one. To the tune of about $2 billion.

Chernobyl

Location of the Chernobyl plant, and the spread of radiation contamination afterwards

Location of the Chernobyl plant, and the spread of radiation contamination afterwards

Chernobyl. April 26, 1986. A real, unshielded nuclear meltdown occurred. Chernobyl did not have the containment building that most other reactors had. In other words, outside of the reactor pressure vessel, there was nothing to contain leaks or explosions. 31 people died that night, and most serious epidemiological studies indicate the total death toll (counting increased incidences of cancer) has caused about 5000 premature deaths in Europe to date. Total increase in cancer by 2065 is estimated to be about 40,000 (not all of these lead to death). Let's be very clear on this. The worst nuclear disaster in history, which has proven to be avoidable just by building a concrete building around it, will have caused 40,000 cancer-related premature deaths in 80 years. This also happens to be the sum total of deaths caused by nuclear. If you look at actual deaths caused in the US alone by coal in the past 80 years, you are looking at numbers close to 1.6 million (about 20k deaths annually in the 70 years prior to strict limitations in 2004, 11k annually since then). This is a conservative estimate, not accounting for likely increase in death through the years when there were no emissions limitations. The number of heart attacks caused by coal emissions over this period is likely double this. Also compare those 40,000 increased cancer incidences to the literally hundreds of millions of unrelated cancer cases that will have occurred over that same 80 year period in Europe alone. 40,000 compared to 1,600,000, the latter produced in an era of much lower population, is pretty staggering. These numbers speak for themselves. Also compare this to the 17,000 deaths that have occurred from airplanes in the 13 years of 1999-2011.

Now that we know the death toll of Chernobyl, and we have a comparison of other deaths, let's talk about this catastrophic failure. It was a very complicated series of events, one that I could write several posts about. Instead, I will direct you to the Wikipedia article. The short version is that they were running some safety tests. They were instructed by Kiev to hold off their tests by 12 hours, making the test run during the overnight shift instead of the shift that was trained to run the test. At the end of the safety tests, they tried to insert the control rods back into the core. Because of several anomalies caused by having moved the test time, there was a minor explosion in the core as the rods were inserted. They were only 1/3 of the way in, and they broke off, preventing full insertion. Unlike modern control rods, these control rods were made of graphite. Graphite is a good moderator, but it also burns really well at high temperature. The lack of control rods allowed a small nuclear chain reaction to happen. This reaction was self-limiting; the energy from the reaction blew the fuel rods apart, making it so there was not enough uranium in one place to continue the reaction. The explosion, however, ripped through the pressure vessel and allowed atmosphere to come in. Air contains O2. Graphite is carbon. Carbon is what burns in coal to produce heat. The heat of the overheated reactor combined with the influx of oxygen was enough to make the graphite burn. This helped spread out the radioactive material. There was no giant concrete containment structure to contain it (remember how Three Mile island had a containment structure, and it worked? So did Fukushima.). The burning graphite spread radioactive material very far.

On a 1 to 10 scale of screw up, this was a 10. Bad idea to do safety tests.

Fukushima

The reactor that blew. https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/images/2012/Fukushima.jpg

Fukushima is still being studied. The latest reports indicate that people living within the immediate vicinity of the plant received 10mrem dosing. Again, this is the dosage a person gets every 10 days just for living on Earth. There have been no increases in cancer, nor is there expected to be any. There are some serious ecological impacts to be dealt with. There are some regions in the immediate vicinity of Fukushima that won't be able to produce agriculture for as much as 20 years. Other areas are uninhabitable for that amount of time. The region groundwater around Fukushima Daiichi is still contaminated and likely will be until a 100 foot deep wall of concrete and steel is built as a containment wall around it. It still leaks radiation into the ocean today. Nonetheless, no one has died from the incident. It could have easily been prevented in two circumstances. An event like this wouldn't even be possible in a modern nuclear power plant, as we will see.

Fukushima Daiichi's emergency backup generators kicked in after the 9.1 magnitude earthquake shut down the power grid. The ensuing tidal wave washed over the protective barrier of the power plant and inundated the generators. They shut down. The emergency backup batteries lasted 8 hours. Then cooling pumps stopped. This is known as a triple power failure. It is something that had been written about in the past for many plants, with measures taken against in. It was something written about with this particular plant, with no measures taken against it. TEPCO was warned by a governmental agency two years prior to this event that their sea walls were not tall enough.

Fukushima Location. http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/radiation/images/JapanMap.png

What happened next is that the core melted down. They should have flooded the core with seawater and destroyed the reactor (seawater is pretty corrosive), but the plant operator thought they could contain the situation without destroying the reactor. They were wrong, and the consequences were a full nuclear meltdown. Heat and pressure built up and the explosion could not be easily contained. The surrounding area had to be evacuated. Even in all of this mess, no one was exposed to sufficient radiation to matter, and the situation is handled. It is an environmental disaster, yes. But let's compare this to coal fired power plants. Where do you think all that mercury in the fish over the entire planet comes from? Coal fired power plants.

More importantly, the new generation of power plants would prevent this type of event from happening. The emergency cooling water reservoir is contained above the core. In the event of power loss, the water can dump into the reactor using gravity. No Fukushima, no explosion and radiation.

This post is getting long, but before we go, let's visit one point we have touched on. Nuclear power has risks. Coal power has definite consequences. Far more people die from coal than from nuclear power. Grossly more. Nuclear is still scary to most people, and likely not to win the PR battle in the short run. And all these safety features make nuclear power pretty expensive. What are the other options? We haven't discussed hydro yet, nor wind and solar. For now, let's leave it between the big power plants. I personally believe that Fukushima was the last major learning point in nuclear power. Coal power is pretty gnarly, even at its best. Another solution is to use less energy. This is pretty tough one to make happen, and I don't see it happening any time soon. A post far in the future will grapple some of this.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading my longest article to date.

-Jason Munster

Hydraulic Fracturing!

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Fractured Shale and pipe

Schematic of what hydrofracking does to the surrounding rock. Source

This is one of my favorite topics! Hydrofracking (short for hydraulic fracturing) is used to extract both natural gas (Barnett and Marcellus Shales) and oil (Bakken Shale, a few other places) from regions that used to be too dense to extract hydrocarbons from, or that would otherwise not produce much.

These dense rocks, called “tight formations” (formations meaning rock beds, tight meaning not having connected holes) are not permeable enough for hydrocarbons to move out of them at high flow rates. (Permeability means fluids can flow through something. Paper towel is permeable, plastic is not.) Believe it or not, many types of rocks are very permeable. They have lots of interconnected cracks. Shale is not such a rock. It may have space inside it with oil or gas, but these spaces are not connected by the cracks that would allow these hydrocarbons to flow out to a well. A well drilled vertically into this shale would produce almost nothing. These hydrocarbons stayed in the ground. Hydrofracking changed that.

Hydrofracking

Hydrofracking, in short, is exploding cracks and holes in the ground with shaped charges and water and then pounding sand into those holes. Hydrofracking requires 2 to 3 million gallons of water and 2 to 3 million pounds of sand per well.

Hydraulic Fracturing first requires drilling a hole in the ground. These holes can be kilometers deep. The advent of horizontal drilling allows for drilling horizontally by bending the steel tubes of the well. Sounds crazy that steel can bend? Given 300 feet of pipe, the steel pipes can bend  at a right angle. Horizontal drilling can cost up to 4x what normal drilling costs, so it is only used in places where it can greatly increase production. Like hydrofracking applications, where it makes a well go from zero production to up to 2000 barrels of oil per day.

This is where the magic happens. Formations that hold oil and natural gas are often horizontal. First a vertical well is drilled, then it goes horizontal for up to 10km. For hydraulic fracturing, shaped charges are planted inside the pipe in the horizontal section. They are then directionally exploded into the rock, creating large cracks in the rock extending away from the pipeline.

Next they pressurize a viscous fluid and cram it into the drilled hole using dozens of pumps to create massive pressure. This process can take dozens of trucks work of fluid, pipelines, and pumps. The trucks gang-pump fluid into the hole. The fluid finds the cracks in the pipe and rock made by the shaped charges. The fluid rips through the rock, rending the cracks, expanding them in length and volume and connecting them. These cracks become very widespread. The former tight shale or sandstone formation that prevented the flow of fluids is now a series of connected cracks leading to the pipeline. Fluids can flow.

Hydrofracking pump trucks

Dozens of hydrofracking trucks pump hydrofracking fluid into the hole. Source.

When the hydrofracking fluid is drained, the cracks can close up again. To prevent this, something called a proppant is used. A proppant props open the cracks, much like leaving a door stopper in your door. Typically sand was used for this, but new proppants with special shapes and properties are being used as well, like ceramic beads covered in resin for deeper wells. The proppant is put in at the same time as the hydrofracking fluid. When the trucks reverse the flow of hydrofracking fluid and pump it back out, the proppant remains behind.

Fracking Proppant

Proppants hold the cracks open after the hydrofracking fluid is drained. Source

Proppants hold open the rock and allow flow, but this is not permanent. Flow reduces over time. The first year after hydrofracking happens is the most productive. Drilling and hydrofracking a hole, then closing it, reduces the hydrocarbons you will get out of the hole compared to drilling and pumping. If you frack a hole and then close it, the hole will ultimately produce a lot less hydrocarbons than if you drill and pump. In other words, once you have fracked, you gotta make use of that hole or you will lose a lot of money.

Natural Gas hydrofracking

Natural gas hydrofracking in the US is one of the more polarizing topics. The chemicals in fracking fluid are of such low concentration that it does not matter if it gets in the local water supplies. But they mix concentrated versions of these incredibly toxic chemicals into the fracking fluid. In other words, the fracking fluid may not be toxic, but the pure chemicals they keep on-site to mix into these trucks sure are. If any of this leaks into the environment (it has), it can be quite damaging. One can hope that this sort of thing is both rare, and well-controlled in the future.

There is the leaking associated with hydrofracking for natural gas. Howarth (2012) estimated there is an upper limit of 8% of methane leaking from natural gas extraction and transport for hydrofracking. Given the factor of 23 greenhouse warming potential of methane, this is a problem. Compounding the problem is that mineral and resource policy are states rights in the US.  NY and PA do not have the law history in place or the resources to figure out how to deal with the potential pollution from fracking, nor the resources to enforce the policy. This, in part, is why fracking has been stalled in the Marcellus in many places.

Oil hydrofracking

The Bakken formation. Here the sandstone contains the oil. It is sandwiched between two impermeable layers of shale.

The Bakken formation. Here the sandstone contains the oil. It is sandwiched between two impermeable layers of shale.

There are other important implications for fracking specific to oil production. In order to drill, a company has to lease drilling rights. When a company leases drilling rights, they have obligations to produce certain amounts of hydrocarbons within a short time-frame, or they lose the lease. So they drill. A lot. Remember how we talked about holes losing productivity over time? Once a fracked hole is open, they are unlikely to close it. The problem? In the Bakken shale, they co-produce natural gas with oil. There is no infrastructure to pipe the natural gas away. They burn it instead. Some of it may leak. In other words, they are producing massive amounts of pollutants and GHGs. North Dakota does not have the ability to quickly build infrastructure to capture and transport this natural gas. And North Dakota doesn’t quite have a population that is accustomed to or capable of having a lot of bureaucracy to deal with these issues and enforcing policy. It’ll be a while before this is handled. In the meantime, North Dakota will light up the night sky like a mega-metropolis.

Bakken at night edit

The flaring of natural gas 24/7 in Bakken makes North Dakota look like it has one of the largest cities in the US. If you look at the picture below, you can see a stark contrast.

 

That light in North Dakota didn't used to be there. Courtesy Nasa

Implications

You may have heard that Hydrofracturing for natural gas is a phenomenon that is not repeatable outside the US. This is untrue. It likely cannot be repeated in Europe, but China is just discovering shale gas deposits that could rival or outsize that of the US. There are also likely large deposits in Africa. As far as shale oil goes (not to be confused with oil shale!), it is also likely available outside the US. We are just really good at getting stuff out of the ground here.

You may have also heard that this could make the US energy independent by 2035. If we don't grow our appetite for oil, this could possibly happen. It is unlikely, but that is a topic for later. The US is already one of the largest producers of oil on the planet. Is this a good thing? It is a mixed bag. It will definitely be a boon to the economy if we are not sending nearly $1 billion a day overseas to satiate our demand for oil (we use 18 million barrels a day in the US, importing 10 million of those @ $100/barrel, or a billion dollars a day). It would not prevent the middle east from getting a ton of money from oil still, as Asia and Europe will still buy all the middle east oil. It likely won't decrease the price of gas in the US, since any increase we make in production will be matched or outstripped by increased demand in China (1.3 billion people), then India (1.2 billion people), then Africa (2 billion people) in the 2nd half of the century. In other words, it won't change much on a world scale. Producing this much oil domestically also will keep the US addicted to oil, rather than transitioning to cleaner energy sources and more rational lifestyles that don't burn tons of resources. But the whole quarter of a trillion dollars per year that we aren't sending overseas, if handled properly, could easily boost our economy and help subsidize our way out of oil addiction. It's clearly a thorny topic, and beyond the scope of this post.

Conclusions

Fracking will change the energy landscape in the US by providing a lot more natural gas and oil domestically. It has downsides, from increased flaring of natural gas to domestic pollution, but it does have upsides that can be harnessed for the good of our future.

Coal Power Plants

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Expect a lot of updates on this post. Thanks to Buck Farmer, who told me that I needed to learn LaTeX to make this prettier.

COAL FIRED POWER PLANTS

A coal fired power plant.

Coal fired power: it provides a lot of our energy, is less expensive than petroleum by far, makes cheap electricity, and causes all sorts of health ailments and pollution. Coal power plants produce particulate matter, sulfur pollution, and other pollution, resulting in deleterious health effects.

Coal fired power plants provide a huge chunk of the world’s energy. It provided almost 50% of US electricity in 2009. Today, the math section is a review of how much energy is in coal, how much coal we need to operate a single power plant, and how much coal we need to operate all the coal fired power plants in the US and China.

The topic of coal fired power plants used to be simple. Thanks to fracking, natural gas prices are now approaching coal prices. This post is written with 2009 information. It is largely relevant today, but this landscape may change in a few years as more power is produced via natural gas in the US. Suffice it to say that natural gas has become considerably cheaper in the US:

Oil be getting expensive, NG be getting cheap!

The price ratio per unit of heat in natural gas prices compared to oil in the US. The ratio used to be around 1. Now you get a lot more heat out of natural gas per dollar, thanks to the abundance from hydrofracking.

We will discuss this more in a future post.

Maths! Warning, this is pretty shocking!

High grade coal has an energy density of about 32MJ/kg (For our math, lets assume the best coal is used everywhere. In reality it is about 24, so my world with coal is 33% nicer than the real world). Compare this to a gallon of gasoline, from my very first post, at 120MJ. A gallon of gas weighs about 3kg, with an energy density of 40MJ/kg, slightly higher than coal, or nearly twice as high an energy density of a majority of coal.

A watt is a joule per second. A megawatt is a megajoule per second. A coal fired power plant can produce 1GW per second, which would be a gigajoule expended per second. But remember from our thermal efficiency post, these powerplants are not all that efficient! Let’s say a coal one averages 35% for thermal efficiency.

 

Coal_eqn1

31.25kg of coal used per second to produce 1GW of heat! But remember from the thermal plants post, thermal plants tend to only be about 35-40% efficient!

Coal_eqn2

A 1000MW coal fired power plant burns nearly 200 lbs of coal PER SECOND to provide power. That is my weight in coal for every second.

Let’s continue blowing your mind. There are 86,400 seconds in a day, yes? (yes).

Coal_eqn3

2.8 megatons of coal per year for a single coal-fired powerplant! Okay, 200 lbs. per second leaves a bigger impression. Here is another way to look at it. How much coal does it take to keep a 100W lightbulb lit for a year?

Coal_eqn4

 

280kg! Per year! This is about 2 lbs. of coal per day to power a 100W lightbulb. “But Jason,” you say, “We don’t get all our electricity from coal!” This is also true. We get almost ½ of our electricity from coal. But say ½ is from coal, the other ½ is from hydro power. If you turn off your light, we get back the ½ from coal, saving a pound of coal from being burnt. What about the ½ from hydro? Welp, that can go and power another light. The ½ of the light that would have been powered by coal. So yeah, even though ½ of our power comes from coal, the opportunity cost of using that light is the equivalent of getting all of it from coal.

Let me repeat that. If you have a 100W incandescent bulb, and you leave it on for a day, you just burnt 2 lbs. of coal. Good job. If turning off your lights to save on electricity is not enough to get you to shut em off, just picture that much coal burning to keep that light on. Your laptop computer uses about 2-3 pounds if it runs the entire day. Your TV, if left on, will burn more like 10 lbs. of coal a  day.

One last part. China provided 500GW of coal power provided in 2012. The US provided 200GW in 2009 (note: thanks to shale gas and fracking and using the gas to produce electricity, the amount provided by coal has dropped!). 200GW of coal power in the US means 600 megatons of coal per year in the US using our numbers, and 1500 megatons of coal in China. And remember, my numbers are rosier than the real world.

Turn off your lights.

The qualitative stuff!

Emissions from coal-fired power plants, and health trade-offs

Smog. Not fun to breath.

Burning coal emits sulfur (which can be mitigated through special filters, but often is not), CO2, NO and NO2, mercury (also can be mitigated, usually is in the US), other metals, and fine particles (called PM2.5 and PM10 for Particulate Matter of radius 2.5 microns and less, and radius 10 microns or less, respectively). Sulfur causes irritation and lung problems, smog, and acid rain. CO2 and NOx contribute to global warming, NOx also to smog. Mercury emissions are the reason we can no longer eat fish every day. PM2.5 causes cancer, asthma, and severe lung problems. Coal power plant emissions can lead to ozone at ground level, which causes smog and serious respiration issues.

Later we will discuss black carbon vs. sulfur here, since they have opposite effects on regional warming vs. cooling. Today we discuss the health effects of a coal fired power plant.

In the US, where coal-fired power is relatively clean, it causes tens of thousands of deaths per year. It causes hundreds of thousands of heart attacks, asthma attacks, ER visits, and hospital admissions per year. A compilation of EPA and heavily peer-reviewed articles estimates 13,200 deaths and 20,000 heart attacks were caused by coal-fired power plants in 2010. In 2004, before the EPA starting getting aggressive, these numbers looked like 24,000 deaths per year in the US.  The rate of asthma is drastically increased in the area of coal fired power plants. The US even then had relatively stringent requirements on power plants. When you factor in the population and lax controls of countries like China and India, I have heard estimates of premature deaths caused globally by coal fired power to be in the millions, and even larger numbers for asthma.These adverse effects are much more likely to be caused by the wealthy regions that use more electricity per capita than the poor regions that host the power plants and the adverse effects. In other words, the electricity used by large mansions in wealthy neighborhoods often comes from powerplants placed near poor neighborhoods.

The coal used by the US and China directly contribute to global warming on a huge scale. In a future post that describes the composition of the atmosphere and how greenhouse gases work, we’ll get directly into those numbers.

Satellite image of pollution in China. From: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=76935

Beijing's got a bit of a particulates in the air in the winter. I was in an airplane in Beijing on this day. They announced "The fog is too thick to take off." Except it was below freezing and the air was dessicated, making fog unlikely.
A more clear day near Beijing

 

Let’s be pragmatic for a second.What’s worse than deaths and heart attacks caused by coal-fired power? Not having electricity to power your hospitals and other vital services. If you are a poor or developing country that can’t afford fancy nuclear or renewable electricity, and you don’t have access to hydro power, putting up a coal plant to power cities enough for basic services is a no-brainer.  Wealthier countries have a choice: suffer the pollution, or spend more money and avoid it by building more expensive yet cleaner electricity sources. The US as a whole can easily afford to do this. Pakistan and India? Not so much.

Take-aways: Turn your lights off, they require a lot of coal. Avoid breathing or raising children near coal-fired reactors.

-Jason Munster