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90% of U.S. coal should stay buried to curb global warming

If nations want even a 50 percent chance of avoiding dangerous global warming, they’ll need to keep more than 80 percent of current coal reserves in the ground. And in the United States, more than 90 percent of coal reserves would need to stay buried, according to a new study from University College London.

The study is the latest effort by researchers to put numbers on just how much coal, oil, and gas humanity can safely burn without committing the planet to temperature increases above the 3.6 degree Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) goal agreed on by international negotiators. Previously, scientists have estimated that the amount of current fossil fuel reserves exceed what we can burn by about a factor of three. In this new paper, published Wednesday by the journal Nature, researchers tighten the focus of this global carbon budget by breaking the global numbers into regional ones.

The new work combines existing carbon budget estimates with the economics of the energy sector — where, and under what conditions, is it least expensive to produce fossil fuels? The results lay bare the climate dilemma: The estimates may be entirely reasonable, but the implications are wholly impracticable under current political and economic conditions. In the Middle East, producers would have to forego 38 percent of their oil and 61 percent of their gas. China and India would close off 66 percent of their coal. Former Soviet states would keep 94 percent of their coal underground.

And, unfortunately, that’s the good news. A surprising finding of the study is that a powerful technology that countries are studying to fight climate change would help by only a marginal amount — if it ever works at all.

The technology, really a suite of them, is called “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS. It’s the process by which power plants capture the carbon dioxide emissions they put out, and shuttle them off to a permanent geological storage site. The above estimates assume that power plants and industry will be able to capture and hide much of their carbon dioxide beginning in 2025. Without that rosy assumption, idled coal reserves jump to 95 percent in the U.S., 77 percent in China and India, and 97 percent in the former U.S.S.R. And these numbers may be the safer bet: CCS is in its earliest stages of research development, and may not ever exist commercially at the scale required.

“There is an inconsistency here, and it’s important that policymakers are aware of that inconsistency,” says Paul Ekins, a co-author and professor of energy and environmental policy at University College London. He also said, in a briefing yesterday, that those very policymakers may want to think about that inconsistency as major climate negotiations in Paris approach at the end of this year.

The new research puts the climate dilemma into very sharp focus: Environmentalists point to science and say, correctly, that the warming has too much momentum for humanity to continue flushing heat-trapping gas into the atmosphere without running headlong into disaster. Industry players point to patterns of energy use and say, correctly, that the economy has too much momentum for humanity to voluntarily stop using the fuels on a dime.

“The one thing the coal-producing countries are certainly going to want to discuss in any agreement” for stringent climate change action, Ekins said, “is, 'Why should we not burn our coal resources?' And the countries that are most concerned about climate change should have a good answer to that.”

That’s central problem to keep an eye on in 2015: What nations bent on fighting climate change can offer nations that burn coal for a living, and what coal-producing nations can do to take a practical share of responsibility for the problem.

Source: Bloomberg