Leave coal, oil in ground for climate's sake (study)

The Middle East must leave 40 percent of its oil reserves in the ground, and China, the US and Russia most of their coal if global warming is to be curbed, researchers said Jan. 7.
    
Globally, a third of oil, half of gas and over 80 percent of coal reserves must be left untouched until 2050, according to a novel breakdown of "unburnable" fossil-fuel stocks published in the journal Nature.
     
This is the sole way to meet the UN target of limiting warming to 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, said co-author Christophe McGlade of University College London.
     
"Policymakers must realise that their instincts to completely use the fossil fuels within their countries are wholly incompatible with their commitments to the 2 C goal," he warned.
     
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that for a good chance of meeting the target, further emissions of Earth-warming greenhouse gases must be limited to about 1,000 billion tonnes (gigatonnes).
     
But global fossil fuel reserves, on current estimates, would emit three times this total if used, said the study.
     
UN members are negotiating a global carbon-cutting climate pact to be signed in Paris in December.       
At current rates, emissions are steering the world towards potentially catastrophic warming of 4 C or more, scientists say.
     
"Companies spent over $670 billion (565 billion euros) last year searching for and developing new fossil fuel resources," said McGlade's colleague and co-author Paul Ekins.
     
"They will need to rethink such substantial budgets if policies are implemented to support the 2 C limit, especially as new discoveries cannot lead to increased aggregate production."      

For their project, McGlade and Ekins made a best estimate of quantities and locations of oil, gas and coal resources, and then assessed how much could be safely used, per region, up to 2050.
     
They used two scenarios -- one with "widespread deployment" of carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities, a technology in its infancy, and one with no CCS.
     
Even if CCS is widely implemented, over 430 billion barrels of oil must be left unburned, the pair said.       
Under this scenario, the Middle East has over half the world's "unburnable" oil -- more than 260 billion barrels or 38 percent of its stock -- equal to about eight years of global production calculated at 2013 levels of 87 million barrels per day.
     
Central and South America must leave 58 billion barrels alone, Canada 39 billion and the former Soviet states 27 billion.
     
About 95 trillion cubic metres (3,354 trillion cubic feet) of gas should remain unburned, the study found -- again the bulk (46 trillion cubic metres) is held in the Middle East and 31 trillion by former Soviet states.
                     
Countries with large stocks of coal, including developing nations that rely heavily on the resource to fuel their fast growth, also face challenges.
     
China and India would have to leave nearly 70 percent of their reserves under a scenario with CCS, and Africa almost 90 percent, according to the findings.
     
Among developed nations, Europe would have to leave 78 percent of its coal and the United States 92 percent.
     
"These results demonstrate that a stark transformation in our understanding of fossil-fuel availability is necessary," said the study.
     
"Although there have previously been fears over the scarcity of fossil fuels, in a climate-constrained world this is no longer a relevant concern: large portions of the reserve base... should not be produced if the temperature rise is to remain below 2 C."      

Experts Michael Jakob and Jerome Hilaire, in an analysis published with the study, said the uneven distribution of "unburnable" reserves highlighted challenges to finding a carbon-cutting pact.
     
"Only a global climate agreement that compensates losers and is perceived as equitable by all participants can impose strict limits on the use of fossil fuels in the long term," they wrote.
 AFP - hurriyetdailynews.com
8/1/15
--
-
Related:

• Τελευταία Ελπίδα για το CCS από την Κομισιόν

• Chris Davies: "Η αποθήκευση διοξειδίου του άνθρακα κλειδί για το περιβάλλον"

• Η δέσμευση και αποθήκευση άνθρακα προκαλεί σεισμούς

China builds world's largest coal mine waste gas recovering project.

The world's largest facility to turn excess methane gas from coal mines into electricity has been completed in north China's Shanxi Province.

The facility was completed by the Lu'an Group, which owns the Gaohe Coal Mine in the coal-rich province.

The company announced on Tuesday it would soon start operating the generator with a capacity of 30 megawatts, capable of utilizing 99 percent of methane gas discharged from the coal mine.
The poisonous gas is a common emission during underground mining. Normally, mines will liquify the gas into methyl alcohol if it has a concentration higher than 30 percent, for concentrations between 10 percent and 20 percent it is captured and used to fuel internal combustion engines.

However, methane concentrations lower than 10 percent, which qualifies 81 percent of the gas released during mining, can not be consumed through direct combustion.

Jia Jian, deputy head of the Methane Gas Research Institute of the company, said the new technology has helped tackle the problem of how to dispose of the waste.

He said the project can decompose the gas into carbon dioxide and water under temperatures more than 950 Celsius, and use the heat and steam for power generation.

He said by recovering and utilizing the gas, the project can help reduce 1.4 million tonnes of greenhouse gases and produce 200 million kwh of electricity a year.

China's coal mines produce more than 10 billion cubic meters of low-concentration methane gas each year, which causes greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Jia said the project of making waste profitable has a good market potential. The demonstration facility installed at Gaohe Coal Mine has drawn interest from a number of coal mining firms, which have signed agreements predicted to reduce 15.8 million tonnes of carbon emissions.

Coal mining firms in China are under greater pressure than ever to control carbon emissions as the government continues to step up efforts to cut emissions.

China has set an ambitious goal of reducing carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 40 to 45 percent from the level in 2005.

By 2013, carbon emissions per unit of GDP dropped by 28.56 percent from 2005. In the first three quarters of this year, energy consumption per unit of GDP dropped by 4.6 percent from a year earlier and carbon emissions were down by 5 percent, data showed.
 Source: Xinhua - globaltimes.cn
  2/1/15
-- 
  *** Photo: www.gidynamics.nl