The glimmer of hope in COP21

In light of COP21 and this blog's (slowly developing) aims to investigate resource utilisation with regards energy production, it makes sense to look at renewables! Essentially, renewables can provide countries with unlimited, free electricity, if the conditions are correct. Therefore, it shouldn't be surprising to know that sunnier countries have pledged high levels of solar energy investment to contribute towards their carbon targets.

Morocco has made great strives towards reducing their reliance on coal. In 2011, Morocco was heavily reliant (47%) on coal for energy production. However, this has considerably reduced from 2001 (77%). Furthermore, they have made great steps through commitments at COP21, agreeing to reduce GHG emissions by 32% by 2030 through 50% renewable electricity generation by 2025 and reduced energy consumption of 15% by 2030. Finally, and most significantly, they have offered to host COP22, solidifying their drive and dedication to meeting their climate objectives.

To do this, Morocco requires support. The UN Green Climate Fund can be of some help; however investment by private companies is becoming increasingly significant in efforts. Saudi investment has been important in the Arab region.

The shining hope in COP21 (Source)

A solar thermal plant planned to open next month will aim to eventually supply energy for 20 hours a day from energy collected from the sun and thermally-stored in liquid salt. The potential renewable generation capacity could provide export capacity to Europe, instead of the heavy importation of electricity from Spain.

Another great blog post has questions the hopefulness of COP21, citing Morocco and Ethiopia as leaders in setting targets internationally. I agree that more needs to be done - but maybe the baby steps will eventually make more of an impact in the future? I think there is some hope from COP21, even if it is only the smaller and less developed countries providing that hope.

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... 

Positive energy crisis?

With our life-or-death reliance on energy, it might come as a surprise that the UK is struggling. For the first time, next year, Britain will not have enough "dispatchable energy generation capacity" (essentially, power plants which can be switched off and on to meet excess demand, contrasted against wind and solar energy which is a non-reliable, non-programmable energy source). 

Is this our future? (Source)

Over the last 5 years, Britain has lost 20% of its baseload dispatchable energy and have no replacements planned in the near, with the further hope of shutting down the remaining 13 coal power stations, which generate a third of the UK's energy. This would mean the potential to have power-cuts!

From this point we can go two ways. We can build cheaper, coal-powered stations and provide us with the energy we need in a short period of time. 

Alternatively, this gives us the opportunity to invest in cleaner more energy and carbon efficient fuels. The UK has a great opportunity to move into gas-fired and nuclear power stations, cleaner fuels with less environmental impact. A great blog on the intricacies of nuclear can be found (here). At this point, most people would say, "oh, but why not invest into wind and solar?". Well the government advocates no longer relying on subsidies, urging the private sector to take the burden of the investment. 

Maybe it's a good move? Only time will tell!

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!

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!