Bad Coal, Good Alternatives

Coal is an important resource and is predicted to become of increasing importance in new energy production. In light of COP21 and a global push to keep carbon emissions to a minimum this is an important issue.

Coal has become a staple across the energy landscape (Source) 

Analysis which was presented at COP21 suggests that if all coal plants planned to be built by 2030 are built, coal emissions would increase by 400%. Even with no additional coal plant construction, predicted emissions from coal are 150% too high to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees.

Calculated carbon increase from analysis results (Source)

This is a slight issue... And considering temperatures have already gone up by an average of 1 degree since pre-industrial times, the threshold of 2 degree temperature rise is becoming more and more problematic.

For many countries, providing their citizens with electricity is of far more importance than cutting carbon emissions, even for those countries may have agreed Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (to cutting carbon), or INDCs. Ultimately, this can lead to a number of issues which will impact the final result of COP21: increases in carbon emissions and displacement of renewable energy. These countries, many of which are developing, such as India and China, are still investing in renewable energy sources, but the uptake, cost and generation is too small to be effective in bringing electricity to the masses.

So how do we approach coal? I believe we need to appreciate it is a cheap, very widely recognised and used technology globally. What can be changed is the types of coal and the technology used within coal plants to mitigate the issues. Furthermore, pushing cleaner technologies, such as gas may be a more suitable, cleaner and (potentially) more efficient solution (and one which will be dominating the UK energy space for the next 20 years).

Technology:

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)? I feel CCS is a utopian idea which is and will continue to be only suitable in a hypothetical world. CCS has had has limited testing. It provides us with an additional carbon sink. But continues to allow our exploitative approach to carbon for energy. There are also risks to CCS. The principle is to pump the carbon back into old oil fields, but contamination and leakages could present themselves as a large issue.

Renewables? Could be a solution for developing nations. Funding must be available, however renewables do provide grassroots-scale energy production without the need for expensive infrastructure development - an especially important issue in fast growing cities.

These two latter aspects are items I will look at and investigate in my next two blogs: carbon sinks (afforestation) and renewable production (solar farms) - how can our use of the sun and trees mitigate against our exploitative use of electricity?

Edit: the second photo was added at a later date to provide some visualisation to the figures discussed above

Bill Gates and Energy

It's always interesting hearing from world icons on subjects that will impact our future, and how we solve the issues of today for a better tomorrow.

With COP21 around the corner and this blog's focus on the exploitation of resources, Bill Gates' summary of the issues at the heart of the talks is current and helpful.

One of the interesting aspects Gates includes is the notion that providing the world's poorest with very cheap energy is a means of helping them out of poverty. This, along with government  and industry investment can provide long term clean energy solutions for the globe. 

The quest goes on!

Growing the solution?

In my previous post, I discussed a news article regarding the future of Britain's energy status. As with many EU states, the UK has pledged a reduction in CO2 emissions by 80% compared to 1990 levels by 2050. Many of the solutions which have and will be discussed will need to be implemented.

Whether or not the DECC's time, resources and energy has been entirely focused is debatable (and if your focus is strained at all whist reading this, you too can procrastinate by playing their carbon reduction game)! If you prefer a direct, informative (and less interactive and fun, in my opinion) understanding of how the government will approach its carbon targets, then the 2050 Pathway analysis is a great indulgence!

The aim of the game is to reduce, prevent, or reverse our CO2 emissions. There are various means we can do this, but ultimately it means moving to low- or no-carbon solutions. One fantastic solution which is carbon-negative are biofuels.

So biofuels! Biofuels are an interesting addition to the analysis report. I personally do not see the advantage of biofuels, they take away land which could be used for food security. Within the report, biofuels play a large role in mitigating against transport emissions, without the need for technological innovation in the form of electric cars and fuel cells, i.e. a low tech, low carbon solution. In industry, they could play a role, provided they produce enough energy for production.

Before writing this, my naïvety of biofuels extended to a romanticised image of wheat or another cereal crop growing under a blue sky...

Never a grey sky with biofuels.. (Source)

Although this is not far from the truth, this less beautiful and more informative image from the report gives a much fuller understanding of the alternative (and less glamorous) sources of biofuels.

A summary of biomass sources and processes for conversion to biofuels (Source: p148)

As you can imagine, this put a dent in my simplified understanding of biofuels. There are various sources? And different types of biomass? An hour of scanning various articles and abstracts on the topic, I came across a nice piece of analysis on the impacts of biofuels on land exploitation and the wider carbon cycle by Fargione et al (2008). 

It turns out the government's approach to biofuels to reduce carbon emissions depends heavily on the source of the biomass. Clearing rainforests, grasslands and other productive biomes for biocrop production creates up to 17 to 420 times more CO2 than the fuels that it replaces (so much for a negative-carbon fuel!). However, the analysis does acknowledge that biofuel production from food waste or abandoned farmland would have little or no CO2 impact, and could become a carbon negative fuel source in some cases.

Biofuels are interesting, it seems. They have the potential for being a sustainable source of energy for the future. We could quite literally grow our own energy! But the sources and overall environmental impact really need to be fully considered before opting for mass adoption of biofuels. Also, I think there might be a few petroleum companies, not to mention a few people in the Treasury that might have something else to say about biofuels... 

Natural Exploitation

Unlike plants, which approach resource exploitation as a 'dominate or die' principle, humans are less prone to that way of thinking. Natural resources, and most importantly fossil products are highly sought after, and there has been a various research and theoretical frameworks developed to understand exploitation and humans. Some of the theoretical frameworks developed are useful, others merely seek to understand the interactions between humans and resources in a shallow network-y way. But in a climate change paradigm, the interactions are not the most important part. What impact does our exploitation of fossil resources have on the environment?

One of the key impacts of fossil resource exploitation is their greenhouse gas emissions. I won't insult anyone's intelligence by explaining what greenhouse gasses are, which gasses are involved (water vapour is a greenhouse gas also) or the impacts of greenhouse gasses; instead I will allow BBC Bitesize to insult you instead!

The coloured portions of this map identify 86%
of carbon emissions, globally (Source)

An optimistic report produced by the International Energy Agency (IEA), and reflected by a report recently released by BP suggests that global carbon dioxide emissions from energy grew at their slowest rate since 1998. All this occurred whilst global economies grew, indicating a global investment in mitigation solutions against high polluting energy fuels. Of all energy sources, however, oil is still a global leader in production of energy, supplying 32.6% of the world's power.

I will explore the issues around energy production, as well as looking at low polluting methods of energy production and the issues associated with global energy understandings and low pollution energy generation methods. The impact of energy cannot be ignored in modern global environmental change.

Exploitation of niches

Arguably one of nature's best exploiters of resources (other than humans) are plants. Especially the invasive ones! They manage to sneak into the open niches of habitats, dominate native plants and exploit their resources...

Okay, that's a little dramatic. But it is a prevalent and note worthy issue that should be discussed.

Dlugosch (et al., 2015) recently summarised this form of exploitation nicely: "non-native plants" "often benefit from low competition for limiting resources that define niches". Dlugosch and her team's research question is to understand if an invading species, which tends to be larger in size than other native plants, is larger due to being invasive or larger due to being able to exploit a niche in the environment. The subsequent article explains the results succinctly and summarises than the availability of resources tends to be the key aspect involved. 

We limit the idea of 'invasive species' and "low competition for limiting resources" to plants and small organisms. An interesting distinction is made which almost creates a 'researcher and them' perception of the world. 

The initial idea for this blog was to look at all kinds of exploitation. However, looking back to my first sentence, I already identify the biggest exploiters and who the biggest culprits are of exploitation.

Maybe we should focus on ourselves? Source

Exploitation can be justified, and is justified by society. It is viewed as a necessity of life, culture and economies. The damage is widespread and the issues are prevalent. As a society, our exploitation is fuelled carbon. So let's see how that impacts the world!

Grounding the issue

It's abundant, vast and surrounds us. 

Yet it's finite, restricting and costly.

Land is a precious, finite commodity. Its value varies from person to place. It's arguably one of our most sought-after, used and exploited resources on Earth. The resources in, on and around it, however, are not (depending on the management practice).

The possibilities... (Source)

I could examine land exploitation at this topic from a range of viewpoints. I could look at land conceptually, understanding what it means to different people in different places (Massey, 20... basically anything that Massey has written would fall under this topic). Or I could look at exploitation of land from others, animals and plants for resources or land-use change.

A finite and valuable resource (Source)

All of these topics are valid and an important discussion topics, and I invite anyone who wishes to discuss land and its socio-environmental impacts to do so. However, what I wish to (briefly) look at is how to address the impact of humans on land. As land resources provide the basis for all living systems and are essential to future sustainable lifestyles, it is increasingly important to address.

The 1992 United Nations Sustainable Development conference in Rio resource and conservation management in Agenda 21, looked into the issues surrounding land exploitation (UN, 1992). Their (summarised) solution to managing and mitigating against exploitation of land is to implement supportive government-led policies which promotes sustainable land use through economic and institutional mechanisms and incentives, encouraging the best use of land.

Although the UN (1992) begin to discuss local-level management initiatives, it skims quite nicely over them, neglecting to acknowledge smaller level landowners and issues and instead taking a top down approach. It is the importance of private, small-scale ownership that can help preserve, maintain and sustain land and resources for a continued length of time (Hardin, 1968).

Preventing land exploitation is difficult. Hardin's (1968) Tradegy of the Common's highlights we cannot be trusted with the common resources we have, as humans do not look after them. Although the UN (1992) provides a solution to common resource management, bureaucracy and inflexibility restricts adaptation to new and different requirements of people who rely on the resources.

Until then, we will pollute away...

Resource exploration

In my last post, I took the opportunity to look holistically the way we view resources, and suggested an alternative way to utilise them. Although an interesting idea, the philosophical ideologies behind the economic structure we exist within is not something I wish to put any wealth of time or research into.

This blog series is intended to look at how we use the resources we have and the impacts we have upon the environment when utilising these resources.

To begin with, we should probably establish a few things. Resources, or more specifically natural resources are natural assets from which we derive a use. This includes land, food, oil, air and, unfortunately, people. Resources must be extracted, harvested or modified in order to provide value. We normally measure the sustainability of the resource's exploitation through whether or not it is renewable, and in turn, this can provide us with an understanding of its ability to naturally recover. These basic concepts of resource demand and supply are looked at in more (economic) detail by Aaron Hatcher. 

In true geographic fashion, I will now show you two maps (proportional maps, to be precise) which present the extent to which resources (Figure 1) and fossil fuels (Figure 2) have been extracted by countries across the world. One of the discernible things of interest you can glimpse from these maps is that resource extraction is a global phenomenon and fossil fuel extraction is geographically limited to countries which have access to reserves of fossil fuels (if I'm honest, I always find these maps useless, as they breakdown statistics based on country boundaries, which is far less useful than actually mapping (or giving) the statistic itself - but that's besides the point: they're pretty!).

Figure 1: Total resource extraction by country (From: Benjamin Hennig)

Figure 2: Fossil fuel extraction by country (From: Benjamin Hennig)

Exploitation can be generally defined as the utilisation or selfish use of something for one's own benefit. In the light of future sustainability exploitation should be reduced. The methods by which we as humans exploit resources will not be the focus of this blog, but carry considerable merit when discussing the topic. However, whether the more efficient harvesting and extraction of supply is the way forward, or the increasing the sustainable demand of the resources will be something I investigate. 

To fully disclose my stand point, I feel a more sustainable (and reduced) demand would be more beneficial, as this will have a greater impact on supply. If a more efficient harvesting and extraction of supply is utilised, exploitation-levels of demand will still be present. In the shorter term, however, with increasing populations and wealth, a sustainable supply of resources may be the most efficient solution to creating sustainable resource exploitation. At least until we reduce our greed for resources!