The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future (12 page)

That zero was not a typo. This is all very exciting and will surely inspire many investor fortunes in the stock market. But if you’ve been adding up the numbers as we went along, you’ve already figured something out: Fast-growing as they are, the blunt truth is that the clean, renewable energy sources we’d all love to have—wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal, and (sustainably grown) biomass—are in no position to replace nonrenewable sources by 2050.
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Despite blistering growth, by 2050 solar energy will just be starting to substantially dent our energy needs. It takes time to grow from a base of near-zero. Our present capacity is so minuscule that a fiftyfold increase of solar power in the next four decades will still supply about 0% of the world’s electricity. Even the most aggressively modeled expansion of solar sources suggests they can meet just 13% of the world’s electricity demand by 2050. So buy the stocks if you wish, but in forty years where will the bulk of the world’s energy be coming from? Very likely from the same sources they come from today. There is simply no realistic way to eliminate oil, coal, and natural gas from the world’s energy portfolio in just forty years’ time.

Natural Gas versus the Dirty Temptation

As oil supply tightens we will harden our gaze more than ever upon coal and natural gas, until that distant day when renewable sources can catch up. Both have their handicaps and benefits relative to oil and to each other. Neither approaches the value of oil for making liquid fuels and chemical products. However, these two fossil fuels already dominate the world’s electricity generation, with about 40% coming from coal and 20% from natural gas (in contrast, only 7% of all electricity is generated using oil). A transition to electric cars, therefore, would seem a natural one even without renewable and nuclear sources of electricity.

Should current trends continue unabated, coal demand will nearly triple by 2050, at which point it would capture 52% of the electricity market. Natural gas demand will more than double, at which point it would capture about 21%. However, nothing is fixed about these “business as usual” projections. Through aggressive conservation measures, and development of natural gas, nuclear, and renewable sources, for example, global electricity production from coal could be as little as a few percent by then.
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There are compelling reasons for the world to work toward this goal, as we shall see shortly.

Demand for natural gas is projected to more than double between now and 2050, and it is difficult to imagine any scenario in which we will
not
be aggressively pursuing it (and oil) between now and then. Natural gas is widely used for heating, cooking, and industrial purposes. It comprises about one-fourth of all energy consumption in the United States. It has a growing niche as a gaseous transportation fuel, and various gas-to-liquid technologies have good potential for providing liquid fuels. It is the prime feedstock for making agricultural nitrogen fertilizers. Of the big three fossil hydrocarbons, natural gas is by far the cleanest, with roughly one-tenth to one-thousandth the amount of sulfur dioxides, nitrous oxides, particulates, and mercury of coal or oil. When burned, it releases about two-thirds as much carbon dioxide as oil and half as much as coal. There is also considerable room to improve the efficiency of natural-gas-fired plants, mainly by replacing gas-fired steam cycles with more efficient combined-cycle plants.

The biggest drawback of natural gas, of course, is that it’s a gas. Unlike coal and oil, which can be simply dumped into tankers or a train car, it isn’t very portable. Getting natural gas from wells to distant markets requires either an intricate pipeline system or construction of a special refinery to chill it into liquefied natural gas (LNG). Because LNG takes up only about one six-hundredth the volume of natural gas, it can then be transported using tankers. At present, LNG comprises only a tiny fraction of world gas markets, but its use is growing fast. It is especially appealing for remote gas fields that would otherwise be uneconomic to develop. However, this does not come cheaply. A joint LNG venture begun in 2010 by Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell off the coast of Australia, for example, was expected to cost roughly USD $50 billion. The project will tap offshore gas fields for Asian markets and, together with other LNG projects, could make Australia the world’s second-largest LNG exporter after Qatar, with revenues in excess of USD $24 billion per year by 2018.
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A second drawback of natural gas, similar to a big drawback of oil, is that most of it is concentrated in a handful of countries. The world’s largest reserves, by far, are controlled by the Russian Federation (about 1,529 trillion cubic feet or 23.4% of world total), followed by Iran (16.0%), Qatar (13.8%), Saudi Arabia (4.1%), the United States (3.6%), United Arab Emirates (3.5%), Nigeria (2.8%), Venezuela (2.6%), Algeria (2.4%), and Iraq (1.7%).
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China and India, projected to be the first- and third-largest economies by 2050, have only 1.3% and 0.6% of world reserves of natural gas, respectively. These countries will require aggressive imports of foreign gas to meet their needs.

Like oil, gas fields are finite, so our transition to natural gas is something of a bridging solution to our long-term energy problems. But, as the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, with lowest greenhouse gas emissions and greatest room for efficiency improvements, it is by far the most environmentally appealing of the three. There are substantial world reserves remaining, a long history of exploitation, and additional markets for fertilizers and perhaps hydrogen feedstocks. In the coming decades natural gas will be an elite commodity, highly prized wherever it is found. There seems little doubt that natural gas, like oil, is a raw resource we shall pursue to the last corners of the Earth.

Coal, in contrast, is plentiful and found all over the world. Proved reserves of natural gas have R/P life-index lifetimes of only around sixty years, but for coal they are at least twice as long, often up to two hundred years.
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The largest reserves are in the United States (238.3 trillion tons, or 28.9% of world reserves), Russia (19.0%), China (13.9%), and India (7.1%), but coal is mined all over the planet. Coal fueled the Industrial Revolution and, despite popular perceptions, is the world’s single largest electricity source today. Half of all electricity in the United States comes from more than five hundred coal-fired power plants. In China it’s 80%, and the country is building about two new plants per week, equivalent to adding the entire United Kingdom power grid every year.
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Coal can even be gasified to make synthetic natural gas (SNG) or liquid diesel and methanol transport fuels. South Africa has been doing this since the 1950s and currently makes nearly two hundred thousand barrels of liquid coal fuel every day.
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Under our current trajectory, world coal consumption is projected to grow 2%-4% annually for many decades, surpassing oil to become the world’s number one energy source. Should current trends continue unabated, coal demand will nearly triple by 2050.

It’s enough to make you wish there was more oil. Coal is the dirtiest and most environmentally damaging fuel on Earth. Entire mountaintops are leveled to obtain it. Coal mining pollutes water and devastates the landscape, covering it with toxic slurry pools and leaving behind acidic, eroding deposits upon which nothing will grow. I studied one of these places for my rather traumatizing master’s thesis. An hour’s fieldwork would leave me covered in black grime, hands and clothing stained orange from an acidic creek full of chemical leachate.
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Coal mining also releases trapped methane, a powerful greenhouse gas and even more powerful explosive inside subterranean mines. Several thousand coal miners are killed each year in China.

Coal is worse than oil and much worse than natural gas when it comes to emissions of greenhouse gas, because its carbon content is the highest of all fossil fuels. To produce an equivalent amount of useful energy, burned coal unleashes roughly twice as much carbon dioxide as burned natural gas. It also releases a host of irritating or toxic air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide (SO
₂
), nitrogen oxides (NO and NO
₂
), particulates, and mercury. It makes acid rain. If converted to a liquid, it releases 150% more carbon dioxide than oil fuels. To people hoping to bring our escalating release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere under control, coal is Public Enemy Number One.

As my University of California colleague Catherine Gautier writes, “Were it not for its environmental impact, coal would be the obvious choice to replacing oil.”
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From a geological perspective, there will be no scarcity of the stuff anytime before 2100.
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And therein is the problem: From nearly all model projections, coal
is
slated to replace oil. By the year 2030 its consumption in the United States is projected to rise nearly 40% over 2010 levels. In China, which already burns twice as much coal as the United States, consumption is projected to nearly
double
.

Other than banning the stuff, the only thin hope lying between this future and a giant upward lurch in the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas concentrations is something called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), often called “clean coal” technology. There’s no such thing as clean coal, but CCS does appear technically possible and, at first blush, alluringly simple: Rather than send carbon dioxide up the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants, use chemical scrubbers to capture it, compress it to a high-pressure liquid, then pipe the liquid someplace else to pump deep underground. Oil companies already use a similar process to force more petroleum out of declining oil fields. Successful pilot demonstrations of CCS technology are under way in Norway, Sweden, and Wyoming, the longest running for more than a decade without mishap.

The main problem with CCS is one of scale, and therefore cost. First, the “capture” process consumes energy itself, requiring significantly bigger plants burning even more coal to generate the same quantity of electricity. Second, a vast network of pipelines is needed to transport staggering volumes of liquid CO
₂
away from the power plants to suitable burial sites (abandoned oil fields or deep, salty aquifers). The United States alone produces about 1.5 billion tons of CO
₂
per year from coal-fired power plants. Capturing and storing just 60% of that means burying twenty million barrels of liquid per day—about the same as the country’s entire consumption of oil.
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Small pilot demonstrations are one thing, but a demonstration of CCS at the scale of even one full-sized power plant has yet to be attempted. FutureGen, the only proposed prototype, was scrapped in 2008 when its estimated cost swelled to $1.8 billion (the project has since been revived). Finally, there are no guarantees that the stuff won’t leak back out to the atmosphere. A leakage rate of just 1% per year would lead to 63% of the stored carbon dioxide being released within a century, undoing much of the supposed environmental benefit.
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Carbon Capture and Storage has become a commonly accepted bullet point among proponents of coal, as if all of the above problems have somehow been worked out. Politicians and many scientists have dutifully lined up behind it. It figures prominently in all of our biggest blueprints for reducing greenhouse gases, including model scenarios of the Stern Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the International Energy Agency projections outlined above. CCS is embraced by Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, and other leaders of the G8. It is the single strand of hope upon which a thunderous increase in carbon emissions from our coming coal boom might possibly be restrained.

I’m not holding my breath.

CHAPTER 4

California Browning, Shanghai Drowning

“Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up: also he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth.”

—Job 12:15

I
n January 2008, the U.S. state of Iowa was on the front pages of newspapers all around the world. Ninety-four thousand voters of the Iowa Democratic Party had just propelled Barack Obama—a freshman Illinois senator who was virtually unknown just two years earlier—over the longtime national front-runner, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. The Iowa caucuses are the first major electoral event in the U.S. presidential race and are widely believed to influence its outcome. Iowa’s voters had delivered a stunning upset and the opening salvo of one of the most exciting and protracted primary battles in U.S. electoral history. Little did they know that only five months later, their state would be on the front pages of newspapers around the world once again.

Within weeks after the political campaigns had left for other battles in other states, the snow started to fall. Two big storms dumped more than three feet of it around the little town of Oskaloosa. By March, Iowa had tied its third-highest monthly snowfall total in 121 years of record keeping. Then came the rain. April’s statewide average was the second-highest in 136 years. Twelve inches deluged the town of Fayette, obliterating its previous record of eight inches set back in 1909.
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Snowmelt and water ran everywhere, flooding cornfields and swelling streams and rivers. On May 25, a category F5 tornado—the strongest category of tornado and Iowa’s first F5 in forty years—leveled a forty-mile swath through tiny Parkersburg, killing eight people, destroying hundreds of homes, and narrowly missing populous Cedar Falls. President George W. Bush declared four counties federal disaster areas and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dispatched thirty-nine relief workers to the state.
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Forty-eight other tornados followed in the month of June, killing four Boy Scouts and raising the state’s tornado fatalities to its highest since 1968.

Then things got nasty. The wettest fifteen days in Iowa history began on May 29. Global food prices soared as farm fields in America’s top state producer of corn and soybeans melted away in the rain. In Cedar Rapids, thirteen hundred city blocks were inundated when the Cedar River leapt its banks and climbed eleven feet higher than had ever happened in the city’s 159-year existence. In Iowa City, parts of the University of Iowa campus were underwater. When I arrived in mid-July the university’s magnificent arts buildings and museum were trashed. Cedar Rapids was piled high with gutted wood, dead cars, and molding drywall. A train dangled crazily from a crushed bridge into the river. The little farming town of Oakville was simply wiped off the map—its former green fields cratered or buried in sand by the flood. There was nothing left but wrecked homes and fields, with plumes of black smoke rising from piles of burning wreckage.

By August, eighty-five of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties had been declared federal disasters. FEMA’s response team had grown from thirty-nine to fifteen hundred. Two million acres of the world’s finest farmland had lost twenty tons or more of topsoil per acre; six hundred thousand acres of bottomland were simply scoured away.
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The statewide damage estimates had swelled to $10 billion—roughly $3,500 for every man, woman, and child in Iowa—and would later go even higher. By 2009 damage estimates to the University of Iowa alone were approaching one billion dollars.
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Forty thousand Iowans—almost half the number of voters who in January helped send Barack Obama to the White House—had been displaced from their homes.

Meanwhile, six states and eighteen hundred miles to the west, a very different water-related disaster was unfolding. On June 4, 2008—right in the middle of those wettest fifteen days of Iowa history—Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger strode to a podium in Sacramento to declare an official state of drought in California, the largest total producer of agricultural products in the United States.

Conditions in the Golden State had deteriorated rapidly in an already dry decade. The year before, rainfall in Southern California had been 80% below average. Statewide snowpack and rainfall levels were so low that farmers had begun abandoning their crops. By October, the extreme dryness had fueled a series of vicious wildfires, killing ten people and forcing almost a million more to evacuate. Thousands of homes were destroyed.
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By May 2008, northern California was also suffering. In many areas its rainfall, too, fell 80% below normal. Flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers were critically low. Reservoir levels were down across the state, and Lake Oroville, a key supplier to California’s massive State Water Project, was half gone. More than a hundred thousand acres in California’s sprawling Central Valley—the very heart of the state’s gigantic agricultural engine—went unplanted.

Schwarzenegger issued an executive order setting into motion water-transfers, conservation programs, and other measures to combat the crisis,
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but the drought deepened. Water levels fell further and more fires burned. Eight months later, in February 2009, he proclaimed a state of emergency. Citing “conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property” and “widespread harm to people, businesses, property, communities, wildlife, and recreation,”
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he ordered even more draconian measures to be taken. Experts were predicting that field fallowing would rise from one hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand acres—meaning that nearly 20% of the Central Valley’s farmland would go unplanted.
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Suddenly, on top of a historic economic crisis from collapsed housing and global credit markets, California was bracing to lose another eighty thousand jobs and $3 billion in agricultural revenue from drought.

Iowa and California were not alone in their water-related crises. As Schwarzenegger mobilized California, the
southeastern
United States, which is usually moist, was also in historic drought, triggering a wave of outdoor-watering bans, withered crops, and unheard-of water battles between states like Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.
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Mexico had been in severe drought, with only limited relief, for fifteen years.
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Exceptional droughts were under way in Brazil, Argentina, western Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Turkey, and Ukraine.
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Drought emergencies were triggering food aid in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, and Moldova.
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By February 2009, precipitation was 70%-90% below normal in northern and western China, threatening 10% of the country’s entire cereal production.
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That same month, extreme dryness primed “Black Saturday,” when six hundred blazes killed two hundred people in the worst Australian wildfires in history. By April, crop failures in Chattisgarh state drove fifteen hundred Indian farmers—unable to repay their debts without water—to commit suicide.
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Within days of the Iowa floods, heavy rains also struck eastern India and China, killing sixty-five people and displacing five hundred thousand in India. In China, floods in Guangdong and Guangxi Zhuang, Sansui City, and the Pearl River delta killed 176 and displaced 1.6
million
. While America’s eyes were fixed on Sarah Palin, hydrologist Bob Brakenridge at Dartmouth was watching floods from space, using satellites to track them all over the world.
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In the ten months between Barack Obama’s winning the Iowa caucuses on January 3, and the general election on November 4, Brakenridge documented 145 major floods carving destruction around the planet. As Barack Obama took down first Hillary Clinton and then John McCain, those rivers took down lives and property from Taiwan to Togo. They killed almost five thousand people and washed seventeen million more from their homes.