Oxford's 2050 Pathway (created 2014-15)

I'm giving the Charles Simonyi Annual Lecture tonight (14 November 2014) and during my talk about Why climate change action is difficult, and how we can make a difference, I will mention the 2050 Calculator, a tool to help people have constructive conversations about Britain's energy options, and to support consensus-building.

The options in the calculator include lifestyle changes, and all sorts of technologies for saving energy and sourcing low-carbon energy. I would love to help Oxford crowd-source its own 2050 pathway, but there won't be time in this single lecture to do it; so here is the plan: I'll come back to Oxford in March 2015, and, with Mark Lynas and other celebrities at the Oxford Literary Festival, we will find out what pathway the Oxford audience would like to choose, to keep the lights on, have energy security, and meet the UK's legal climate change targets . To ensure that we have a really good deliberative discussion, the Oxford community is welcome to use the comments area of this blog page as a place for discussion.
Commenting rules: Please discuss options in the calculator, and what you would like the UK to do. Please don't have a pub brawl. Please discuss pathways that add up. It's fine to say you dislike an option, but you should feel an obligation to describe how you would propose to get by without that option, taking into account other people's views about the other options.
At the Oxford Literary Festival event we will take all your comments into account and use them as a springboard for a really constructive discussion. Thank you for joining in!

You may be interested to see what pathways other cities chose, when they took on the "British Energy Challenge" - here are those cities' choices, and my reflections on the British Energy Challenge roadshows of 2013 and 2014.

I look forward to listening in and supporting Oxford's energy pathway discussion in 2015!

My Simonyi lecture slides are here, and Sustainable Energy - without the hot air is free online too. The 2050 Calculator also contains lots of well-written documentation [click on the blue "i" icons] to help guide your decisions.

Solar power from space?

When I published Sustainable Energy - without the hot air, there were quite a few topics I could have included but didn't because they seemed a little too blue-sky. For example I have draft chapters on Osmotic Power and on Kite Power (and if I were to rewrite the book today I think that I would now include Kite Power after all). Another idea I dismissed at the time was "what if we put solar panels in space, in geo-synchronous orbit?" I dismissed that idea on the grounds that "the advantage of space over the deserts of Libya and Nevada as a location for solar panels is only roughly a factor of 4, and surely that's outweighed by the difficulty and cost of getting panels (and associated power-re-transmission systems) into space, compared with just plopping them on the ground in a desert?" However, Keith Henson has for some time been working out the details of a scheme that might prove me wrong.

It involves many clever ideas, and some ambitious ones - such as the idea of powering a Skylon freight-delivery space-craft by space lasers that are powered from the ground with GW-scale microwave transmitters! I encourage people who are interested to read Keith's 'dollar a gallon' post and his follow-up post.

---

Further reading: Solar energy in the context of energy use, energy transportation, and energy storage - a paper in which I provide data for the power per unit area of real solar farms, and discuss the need for significantly cheaper energy storage if ground-based solar power is ever to contribute a significant fraction of energy consumption.

Shale gas in perspective

How would the footprint of a shale gas operation compare with the footprint of other ways of delivering a similar quantity of energy?

There are many dimensions to a "footprint". In this blog post, I'll look at land area, vertical height, and vehicle movements.

I'll compare a shale gas pad (which might produce 0.9 billion cubic metres of gas over 25 years) with a 174-MW wind farm and a 380-MW solar park, both of which would deliver roughly 9.5 TWh of electricity over 25 years ­– the same amount of energy as the chemical energy in 0.9 billion cubic metres of gas.

In this table I've highlighted in green the "winning" energy source for each of the footprint metrics.

	Shale gas pad	Wind farm	Solar park
	(10 wells)	87 turbines, 174 MW capacity	1,520,000 panels, 380 MW capacity
Energy delivered over 25 years	9.5 TWh	9.5 TWh	9.5 TWh
	(chemical)	(electric)	(electric)
Number of tall things	1 drilling rig	87 turbines	None
Height	26 m	100 m	2.5 m
Land area occupied by hardware, foundations, or access roads	2 ha	36 ha	308 ha
Land area of the whole facility	2 ha	1450 ha	924 ha
Area from which the facility can be seen	77 ha	5200-17,000 ha	924 ha
Truck movements	2900-20,000	7800	3800 (or 7600*)

The total land area of the facility is smallest for the shale gas pad, and largest for the wind farm. The land area actually occupied by stuff is smallest for the shale gas pad, and largest for the solar park ­– the wind farm has lots of empty land between the turbines, which can be used for other purposes.

In terms of visual intrusion, the wind turbines are the tallest, and could be seen from a land area of between 52 and 170 square km, depending how they are laid out. (To roughly estimate an area of visual influence, I computed the land area within which the drilling rig or a wind turbine would be higher than 3 degrees above the horizon, assuming a flat landscape.) By this measure, the shale gas pad creates the least visual intrusion. Moreover, the drilling rig might be in place for only the first few years of operations at the shale gas pad. The solar panels are the least tall, but the solar facility occupies 450 times as much land area as the shale gas pad. (I've assumed that the wind farm and solar parks wouldn't require any additional "intrusive" electricity pylons.)

When it comes to truck movements, all three energy facilities require lots! I've assumed that solar panels are delivered at a rate of 800 (originally 400^*) panels per truck; for the wind farm, my estimate is dominated by the delivery of materials for foundations and roads at 30 tonnes per truck; the estimates for the shale gas pad are from DECC's recent Strategic Environmental Assessment and from the Institute of Directors' report "Getting Shale Gas Working". The shale gas pad might require the fewest truck movements, if all water is piped to and from the site. But if water for the fracking is trucked to and from the site, then the shale-gas facility would require the most truck movements.

What can we take from these numbers? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no silver bullet ­– no energy source with all-round small environmental impact. If society wants to use energy, it must get its energy from somewhere, and all sources have their costs and risks. I advocate deliberative conversations in which the public discuss the whole energy system and look at all the options.

Thanks to Jenny Moore, Martin Meadows, and James Davey for helpful discussions.

Photo: Wytch Farm, on the perimeter of Poole Harbour in Dorset, is the largest onshore oil and gas field in Western Europe. It is located in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The photograph shows the 34-metre-high extended-reach drilling rig, from which boreholes longer than 10 km have been drilled.

Comments and clarifications

All estimates are for energy production facilities located in the UK. The estimate of energy produced from a shale gas pad is highly uncertain, since there are no data for actual shale gas production in the UK.

The comparison in the table is based on deeming 1 kWh of electrical output from the wind to be 'equivalent' to 1 kWh of chemical energy in the form of gas. This is the conventional equivalence used for example in DUKES and in Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. The following differences between the energy sources should be noted.

1. The three sources of power have different profiles of power generation. On an annual scale, a single shale gas well produces most power when it is newly fractured, whereas a wind-farm produces a relatively constant average power over its life. On an hour-by-hour scale, the gas from the well is dispatchable – its flow can be turned up and down at will – whereas the power from a wind-farm is intermittent.
2. In a world in which the only conceivable use for gas is making electricity in a power station with an efficiency of about 50%, one might prefer to deem each 1 kWh of gas as 'equivalent' to just 0.5 kWh of electricity.
3. On the other hand, in a world that values gas highly relative to electricity that is generated at times when the wind blows, one might imagine planning (as Germany is said to be planning) to use electricity from wind-farms to synthesize methane (with an efficiency of 38-48%); then one might deem each 1 kWh of wind-electricity as being 'equivalent' to 0.38-0.48 kWh of gas.
4. If one wished to make a comparison in which both power sources are constrained to have very low carbon emissions, the shale-gas well must be accompanied by other assets. For example, if the gas is sent to a power station that performs carbon capture and storage, the gas-to-carbon-free-electricity efficiency might be about 42%, and the land area for the power station and the carbon transport and storage infrastructure should be included; assuming that these assets have an area-to-power ratio of 100 ha per GW(e), each 43.4-MW gas well (which would yield 18.2 MW of electricity) would require an extra 1.82 ha of land, which roughly doubles the 2-ha land area mentioned in the table.

My estimate for vehicle movements for large wind-farms is based on Farr wind-farm. I'm sure there is considerable variation from project to project, and I would welcome more data. For the number of truck movements required for a wind farm, I reckoned there would be about 870 movements to bring in the turbines themselves [counting an in-bound and out-bound trip as two movements], and significantly more movements to bring in the materials for roads and concrete for foundations. Some of these materials may be mined from quarries located on the wind-farm, which would then involve no vehicle movements on public roads; based on Farr wind-farm (where three quarters of the road materials were sourced on site) [sorry, I don't have a link for this fact], the road building would require 2774 vehicle movements for a 174-MW windfarm, and the foundations would require another 4140 or so – in total, about 7800 vehicle movements.

Further reading

Potential greenhouse gas emissions associated with shale gas production and use.

Embodied energy in a car - update under way

John Biggins sent me a helpful email querying a number in my book's chapter on "Stuff".
I have a question about the embedded energy in a car, which you quote at 76000kWh. That seems awfully high to me. To a first approximation a car is a tonne of steel, with a raw material energy of 6000kWh: an order of magnitude less.The (admittedly biased) Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders report quote an even lower figure of 2000kWh per car (page 17), which I suspect is probably meant to be simply the energy used per car by the car plant, neglecting materials.
The guardian also wrote about this in 2009 .
They asked a few manufacturers, and arrive at a figures in the ballpark of about 1-4 tonnes of C02 to produce a car, which we might reverse engineer guessing most of the CO2 comes from coal burning in either steel production or electricity generation, to get ballpark figures of probably no more than 10,000kwh per car.
Since these estimates actually differ from your figure by a magnitude, I thought I'd write and ask whether you particularly believe your 76,000kWh figure. Do you have any back-of-the-envelope type way to understand it?

This blog post is where I will record my working on this question. I will aim to justify or adjust my answer within a month, and will add to the book's Errata if necessary. If anyone wants to send me good references on embodied-car-energy to add to my own, please post a comment. Thanks! David

2014 Longitude Prize Water Challenge

Clean water is crucial not only for humans' direct use but also for agriculture. Attention often focuses on drinking water, but agriculture is far bigger. Let's put it in numbers. How much drinkable water do you require for drinking and for cooking? Perhaps a few litres per day per person. In the UK, urban consumption of water is about 160 litres per day per person. And in developed countries, even if they are being careful with water, agriculture requires about 340 litres per day per person. [Israel uses roughly 1000 million m3 of water per year for agriculture, and it has a population of roughly 8 million. That's 340 litres per day per person.] Some lucky countries have plenty of rainfall, so this agricultural requirement can be provided at very low cost. But what if the water for agriculture must be produced by desalinating sea-water? Part of the reverse-osmosis facility at Jersey Water’s desalination plant. The pump in the foreground, right, has a power of 355 kW and shoves seawater at a pressure of 65 bar into 39 spiral-wound membranes in the banks of blue horizontal tubes, left, delivering 1500 m3 per day of clean water. The clean water from this facility has a total energy cost of 8 kWh per m3. From Sustainable Energy - without the hot air Standard reverse-osmosis facilities have an energy cost of 8 kWh per m3, so an agricultural water requirement of 340 litres per day per person implies an energy requirement of about 2.7 kWh per day per person, if we had to make it all by desalination with today's technology. To put that in UK terms, 2.7 kWh/d/p is roughly 17% of the average UK electricity supply; delivering 2.7 kWh/d/p of electricity to the UK would require roughly 7 extra nuclear power stations the size of Sizewell B, or 13,500 2-MW wind turbines. For people in a less-developed country, the cost of desalinating that much water would be significant - 2.7 kWh/d/p might cost about 30 pence per day per person. More than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. This is why the Longitude Prize Water Challenge sets the goal of desalinizing water with significantly less energy than today's technologies. We are especially interested in approaches that could be low-enough in cost not only at large scale but also when rolled out in small-scale facilities. For an example of an inventive approach to the Water Challenge, Stephen Salter has published a wave-powered desalination invention (2007) using vapour-compression desalination in place of reverse osmosis. Voting for the Longitude Prize Challenge closes at 7.10pm on June 25th 2014. See also: 2014 Longitude prize FLIGHT Challenge David MacKay FRS is a member of the 2014 Longitude Committee. He is the Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is well known as author of the popular science book, Sustainable Energy — without the hot air. David MacKay FRS

2014 Longitude Prize Flight Challenge

The aviation industry has made amazing progress. In just 111 years since the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flying-machine flew in North Carolina, innovators and industry have produced a spiralling succession of biplanes, monoplanes, jet aircraft, helicopters, airliners, and faster-than-sound planes. Thanks to steady advances in engineering and materials science, aviation records are repeatedly broken; aircraft are getting steadily lighter and more energy efficient. The Boeing 747 travels 20 times faster than an ocean liner, but uses less than half as much energy per passenger-kilometre; if all its seats are occupied, a 747 is as energy-efficient as a standard (33 miles-per-gallon) car with two people in it, even though the plane goes ten times as fast as the car. And the latest ATR72 turboprop is said to be 40% more energy-efficient than the 747. But if the world is serious about tackling climate change, these fantastic engineering achievements are not enough. Whereas, in the year 2000, aviation contributed 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, it is projected that by 2050, aviation's growth will increase its carbon emissions five-fold, even allowing for continued improvements in efficiency. Moreover, today's planes emit other greenhouse gases whose effect on climate is estimated to be between two and four times greater than their carbon dioxide emissions. The Longitude Prize 2014 Flight Challenge sets a new goal for aviation: to design and demonstrate a near-zero-carbon aircraft, which travels fast (though not necessarily as fast as a jet), which has a substantial range (at least London to Edinburgh!), and which is significantly more energy-efficient than a 747. There is no simple solution to this demanding set of constraints, but there are promising approaches that fulfill some of these requirements. NASA's 2011 Green Flight Challenge was convincingly won by a four-seat electric battery-powered aeroplane, the Pipistrel Taurus G4, which flew nearly 200 miles in less than two hours, with an energy efficiency equivalent to a 120 miles-per-gallon car. This astonishing achievement delivers all the requirements of the Longitude Prize Flight Challenge except for the range requirement — it may take significant breakthroughs in battery technology if such an aircraft is to win the Challenge. The Solar Impulse is an electric aircraft in which heavy batteries are replaced by huge solar panels spread over the wings and tail. It can fly for more than 24 hours and could easily make the trip from London to Edinburgh. But with a speed of only 43 miles per hour, the Solar Impulse is too slow. Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines have a completely different approach on their drawing board. They are designing liquid-hydrogen-burning engines that could be used to launch satellites into orbit. The same engines could also power a hypersonic passenger aeroplane, the LAPCAT, which (thanks to the very high calorific value of hydrogen) could fly from London to Brisbane in a single hop. It doesn't seem likely that the LAPCAT will be more energy-efficient than a 747, but perhaps a lower-speed hydrogen-powered approach might work. Cranfield-based Hybrid Air Vehicles are developing aircraft that are a cross between a regular plane and a blimp. The helium-filled Airlander uses a combination of buoyancy and aerodynamics to generate lift. Their current prototype has adequate speed and range, but its fossil-fuel-powered engines emit too much carbon and use too much energy. Perhaps a redesigned hybrid aircraft, optimized to work at a lower speed, might be significantly more energy efficient. We intend the Challenge to be accessible to small creative teams. Here I've described four current activities that indicate the wide range of perspectives from which the Flight Challenge might be approached. I'm confident the Flight Challenge will stimulate brilliant inventors to develop other exciting ideas for the future of aviation.

criteria zero carbon emissions in flight energy-efficient speed range carries passengers vehicle Pipistrel Electric plane ✔✔✔ ✔✔ ✔✔ ✘? ✔✔ Reaction Engines' LAPCAT Hydrogen plane ✔? ✘ ✔✔✔ ✔✔✔ ✔✔✔? Solar Impulse ✔✔✔ ✔✔✔ ✘✘ ✔✔ ✘ Hybrid Air Vehicles ✘? ✘? ✔? ✔ ✔✔

See also: 2014 Longitude prize WATER Challenge Voting for the Longitude Prize Challenge closes at 7.10pm on June 25th 2014. David MacKay FRS is a member of the 2014 Longitude Committee. He is the Chief Scientific Advisor at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is well known as author of the popular science book, Sustainable Energy — without the hot air.

Frequently asked questions... What's the expected progress under business as usual, or if best efforts are made? The Advisory Council for Aeronautics Research in Europe (ACARE) have published their vision for 2020, in which there is a target of a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions per seat-km by 2020, relative to a base year of 2000. Of this 50%, 40% is attributed to aircraft-level improvements [in new aircraft], while 10% comes from operational improvements. From 1961 to 2000, aircraft engines have become roughly 40% more efficient [Comet 4 to B777-200], and aircraft have become 70% more efficient overall (in fuel per seat-km). However, improving an engine's fuel efficiency tends to make its NOx emissions worse. Future Aircraft Fuel Efficiencies - Final Report Gareth Horton (92 pages) Horton reckons the upper bound of likely efficiency improvements, in 2050, relative to 2000, is 71% for single-aisle aircraft. ESTIMATION OF POTENTIAL AIRCRAFT FUEL BURN REDUCTION IN CRUISE VIA SPEED AND ALTITUDE OPTIMIZATION STRATEGIES Jonathan A. Lovegren and R. John Hansman - MIT Report No. ICAT-2011-03 February 2011 focuses on the potential efficiency benefits that can be achieved by improving the cruise speed and altitude profiles operated by flights today in the USA. Their results indicate that a maximum fuel burn reduction of 3.5% is possible in cruise given complete altitude and speed optimization, which corresponds to 2.6% fuel reduction system-wide. Isn't this a solved problem? Can't we just use biofuel, especially drop-in bio-replacements for kerosene? Biofuels are often assumed to be "the answer" for aviation, and they may play an important role. There are three reasons for looking for other solutions. A biofuel-derived kerosene substitute, even if truly carbon neutral, will still cause the other [non-CO2] greenhouse-gas emissions (for example NOx), which are estimated to have at least as big a climate-change impact as the CO2 from planes. The land requirements for a biofuel solution would be substantial: if we take the IPCC's projection for global aviation's fuel demand in 2050 [equivalent to 2.5 GtCO2/y], and assume that biofuel [equivalent to 240 g/kWh] is produced with a land-productivity of 0.5 W/m2, we find the land required for biofuel production would be 2.4 million km2, which is (1/4) of the USA, 10 times the UK's area, or 100 Waleses. (1 Wales is roughly the same as 1 New Jersey.) These land requirements may be in tension with other desires for environmental sustainablity and food production. Biofuels are not necessarily "zero-carbon". Some biofuels require substantial energy for their production; and some forms of biofuel production may involve changes in carbon stocks in the landscape, compared to alternative uses of the land, such that the use of the biofuel causes substantial net carbon emissions. These land-use-change emissions may be "one-off" emissions [i.e., incurred once only], but that does mean they can be neglected. How can electric or hydrogen planes be counted as zero-carbon? Where does the electricity or hydrogen come from? Yes, "decarbonizing" by switching to electricity makes sense only if there is a proportional additional increase in low-carbon electricity generation. For hydrogen to be considered zero-carbon, it would eventually have to be produced from zero-carbon electricity by electrolysis, or at a carbon-capture-and-storage facility. What if we make artificial kerosene from CO2 and a zero-carbon energy source? Yes, artifical fuel synthesis is an important technology option to develop. It avoids the land-requirements and sustainability concerns about biofuels, and instead requires substantial additional energy inputs. "Zero-carbon" artifical kerosene will still cause the other [non-CO2] greenhouse-gas emissions (for example NOx), which are estimated to have at least as big a climate-change impact as the CO2 from planes. Also, it is important to be clear whether the artifical kerosene is truly carbon neutral; it may be [especially if the CO2 is captured directly from the air], but it depends on the source of the carbon that goes into making the fuel. Consider for example a fossil-fuel power station with CO2 capture. If this CO2 is fed to a aeroplane-fuel-synthesis plant, then we cannot declare both the power station and the aeroplane "zero carbon"! The right way to think about this set-up is that it would be getting two uses out of each fossil-fuel carbon atom, before it is released as CO2 by the plane. Some fuel-synthesis proponents will suggest getting all the required CO2 from biological sources instead - for example by capture from the chimney of a sustainable-biomass-powered power-station. Such an arrangement can certainly be imagined at small scale, but would there be enough biomass for it to work at large scale?

David MacKay FRS

Energia sostenibile - senza aria fritta [Italian translation of Sustainable Energy - without the hot air!]

I'm very grateful to volunteers Alessandro Pastore, Javier Oca, Valentina Rossi, Alberto Marcone, Paolo Errani, and Simone Gallarini for completing the Italian translation of Sustainable Energy - without the hot air.

There is an announcement of the translation, and a synopsis, at this link, and the first draft of the translation is available on the book's translation page.

Energia sostenibile - senza aria fritta — Nel caso ci fossero sfuggite delle imperfezioni o errori, all'indirizzo email: energia.senzaariafritta@gmail.com, saremo ben lieti di riceverne segnalazione. Il libro in italiano può essere scaricato liberamente da internet all'indirizzo http://www.withouthotair.com/translations.html.

Grazie!

Crowd-sourcing the IET's 2050 Pathway

I am giving the Clerk Maxwell Lecture for the IET on 6 March 2014 at the Royal Institution, London, UK. This post and its discussion area are for the IET audience who are coming to the lecture.

I'm aiming to make a highly interactive presentation in which we will try to crowd-source an "IET consensus pathway" in the UK's 2050 Calculator. To help the discussion go well, I'd like to encourage people who are planning to be in the audience, before the lecture, to play with the calculator, and to identify the levers they would most like to discuss during the lecture. Please use the comments area at the foot of this blog-post now as a discussion area. Please feel free also to discuss your preferred pathways or preferred settings of individual levers, and to discuss particular issues or trade-offs that you think should be part of a useful conversation using the calculator.

For background reading, please see my posts about version 3 of the calculator and about some other people's preferred pathways.

---

The outcome - Here is the pathway that we got to after one hour - I will write a few notes and propose possible tweaks in a moment. Top things that needed doing: (a) check which fuel mix for the CCS power stations works best; (b) check which choice of fuel from bioenergy works best; (c) explore space-heating options - the audience asked for a 15:25:60 mix of fuel-in-home (eg gas boilers):district-heating:heat-pumps, and the "CD" heating mix doesn't match this perfectly. Thank you to the audience for a fun evening!

Update - After the lecture I made a few adjustments to the above pathway which I think the audience would have been content with. The resulting final IET London pathway (March 2014) is here. The changes I made were as follows: (a) I checked which choice of CCS power station fuel (solid/gas) was best for emissions, and selected "D". (b) I checked which "type of fuels from biomass" was best for emissions, and selected "B" (mainly solid). (c) I adjusted the commercial heating choice to "D,A" so as to make the overall heating mix for homes and commercial closer to the heating mix that the audience voted for. (d) I double-checked whether choices (a, b) were still optimal. The resulting pathway achieves a 77% reduction in emissions on 1990 levels (pretty close to the 2050 target of at least 80%), and requires no backup generation in mid-winter when the wind doesn't blow.