Energy Supplies and Climate

David Rutledge, Caltech

Milestones in the Climate-Change Discussion

• 1997 Kyoto Agreement to reduce CO2 emissions by 2012 — most significant lack of support is from the United States (signed, but not submitted to the Senate for ratification), Canada (ratified, but has announced plans to withdraw), and Taiwan (did not sign)

• 1998 UN IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) — 40 scenarios for making projections that are business-as-usual with respect to climate change

• 2007 UN IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) publishes its 4th Assessment Report

• 2009 G8 at L’Aquila, Italy, sets a goal of reducing fossil-fuel CO2 emissions 80% by 2050

• 2009 UN Copenhagen Accord sets a goal of limiting the temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels

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A Conceptual Climate-Change Model

The range for total production in the long run in the 40 IPCC SRES scenarios is 10:1

Lifetime of “300 years, plus 25%

that lasts forever”— David Archer

Temperature Sensitivity in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report

90% chance that the temperature sensitivity is higher than

1.5°C/doubling of CO2 — essentially unchanged since the

Charney report in 1979

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Atmospheric

CO2

Fossil Fuel

Supply

1°C x log2(CO2) Direct

Thermal Delay

3x Feedback Amplification

UN Copenhagen Accord, 2009

• Agreement to limit temperature rise to 2°C above pre-industrial levels 5

The Kyoto Agreement

• World fossil-fuel carbon-dioxide emissions from the BP Statistical Review — the 2012 point is an extrapolation from 2010 and 2011

• For an 80% reduction by 2050– Imagine the collapse of the Soviet Union, repeated four times, for the entire

world, voluntarily– On a personal basis, visualize going back to life in 1881

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World Annual Per-Person Energy Production

• Gtoe = billions of metric tons of oil equivalent, 1 toe = 42GJ• Wood and water from Arnulf Grubler, 2003, Technology and Global Change• Coal, oil, gas, and alternatives from the BP Statistical Review and FAO (UN)• Population from the UN Population Division• Pattern is a rise followed by a plateau — no plateau yet for natural gas

GDP vs Oil Consumption — 1980-2011

• Oil from the BP Statistical Review and GDP from the World Bank (Russian GDP from 1989 on)

• Ratio $15.81/liter is improving at about 2% per year — not a large variation between countries

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GDP vs Electricity Generation — 1985-2011

• Electricity from the BP Statistical Review and GDP from the World Bank (Russian GDP from 1989 on)

• Ratio $3.67/kWh is relatively stable with time and across countries• China, Russia, Australia, US, Canada are below the line — coal producers 9

Fossil-Fuel Energy Independence

• Fossil-fuel independence is the ratio of production to consumption for oil, gas, and coal

• Source is the BP Statistical Review• North America and China are current coal producers • EU and Japan are former coal producers 10

2011 Fossil-Fuel Energy Independence

Independence 10-year changeChina 92% −9%North America 89% 4%EU + Norway 36% −15%Japan 0.2% −0.3%

• Source is the BP Statistical Review• China is becoming an important energy importer• North America is moving toward energy independence• EU oil, gas, and coal production are all dropping

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“New” Alternatives Electricity Shares

• “New alternatives — biogas, geothermal, solar, waste, wind, wood• Source is the BP Statistical Review• The EU was behind the US and Japan in 1990• The EU has strongly encouraged the growth of alternatives • Only for electricity, not transportation fuel!

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2011 “New” Alternatives Electricity Shares

Alternatives share

10-year change

Price ¢/kWh

Price index change

EU 11.0% 8.7% 35 27%

US 4.6% 2.8% 12 10%

Japan 3.0% 1.1% 27 −5%

China 1.7% 1.4% na na

• “New alternatives — biogas, geothermal, solar, waste, wind, wood• Source for shares is the BP Statistical Review• Source for price index is the IEA, 2000-201, inflation-adjusted (EU price is

Germany, EU price index is Europe OECD)• Subsidies for alternatives make it difficult to say what the price really is• The EU example shows that growth of about 1% per year is possible 13

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Alternatives Share in World Energy Production

• Re-plotted from the earlier slide• From the BP Statistical Review and the Food and Agriculture

Organization of the United Nations (FAO)• Since 1985, we have been in a range between 14% and 16%

Since the Kyoto agreement was signed in 1997, world fossil-fuel CO2 emissions have risen 40%, and the alternatives share has dropped from 15.5% to 15.0%

I will be considering projections that are business-as-usual with respect to climate policy

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Oil Production in the IPCC Scenarios

• Gb = billions of barrels, historical production from the BP Statistical Review• Still growing in 13 scenarios in 2100

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Outline: The Goal is to Reduce these Uncertainties by Replacing Subjective Estimates and Scenarios with Statistics

• Oil, gas, and coal– US crude oil — Hubbert’s peak – British coal — The Coal Question– World coal– World oil and gas

• Climate– CO2 concentrations– Temperature– Sea level– Crop yield

18The journal listed this paper as a “top review” paper for 2011

Characterizing Uncertainty• Residuals are the differences between data and models • The “best” model is used for projections• Uncertainty refers to the inconsistency in a group of projections• A range giving the upper and lower values is one measure of uncertainty

— a one-sided example would be designing for the 100-year flood• When residuals can be decorrelated, we can create bootstrap

replications, which are effectively alternative histories with the same statistical properties as the actual history

• Replications allow us to calculate confidence intervals — statements of the form “The 90% confidence interval is 1.6°C to 2.4°C” means that there is a 90% chance that the interval includes the actual temperature

• Limitations in confidence intervals (uncertainty index might be a better term) — they depend on the form of the models, some uncertainties are left out, and the models can break down

• Validation (testing the model) on partial historical data is critical — difficult to validate models with more than two or three variables 19

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King Hubbert

• Geophysicist at the Shell lab in Houston, Texas

• In 1956, he wrote a paper suggesting a range of peak years for US crude-oil production from 1965 to 1970

US Crude-Oil Production

• Gb = billions of barrels • Data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the North Dakota

Department of Mineral Resources and the Texas Railroad Commission• Does not include natural gas liquids — ethane, propane, and butane• Bakken and Eagle Ford Shales were 8% of production in 2011

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US Fossil-Fuels Production

• Oil, gas, and coal recent from the BP Statistical Review, early oil and gas production from Brian Mitchell International Historical Statistics, early coal production from the EIA — BP includes natural-gas liquids (ethane, propane, and butane) with oil

• Transition from coal to gas for electricity — coal miners exporting now

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Cumulative Production for US Crude Oil

• Top of the scale for the normal gives a projection for the long-term production — total production, past and future

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Probit Transform for US Crude Oil

• Cumulative production is linearized by the probit transform (inverse of the standard cumulative normal)

• The plot is for probit(q/Q), where q is cumulative production, and Q is the proposed long-term production

• Maximize r2 (correlation coefficient squared) — gives 0.99991• A one-parameter fit, 1 second in Excel

Residuals for US Crude Oil

• Residuals are expressed in the equivalent months of production — positive residuals show we are ahead of schedule, negative residuals show we are behind schedule

• Maximum residual from 1902 on is 10 months — 7 months in 201125

Historical Fits for Long-Term Production

• Range from 206Gb to 235Gb from 1946 on (13%)• Large circles are government estimates, small circles are non-government• Government median is 433Gb, non-government median is 230Gb• USGS = US Geological Survey, MMS = Mineral Management Service

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Kenneth Deffeyes on the USGS Assessments

“When USGS workers tried to estimate resources, they acted, well, like bureaucrats. Whenever a judgment call was made about choosing a statistical method, the USGS almost invariably tended to pick the one that gave the higher estimate.”

Kenneth Deffeyes Professor of Geology, emeritus, Princeton University

Deffeyes’ Law of Bureaucratic Resource Estimates

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British Coal Photo by John Cornwell

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Stanley Jevons, 1865 The Coal Question

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• Mt = millions of metric tons• At the peak, Britain exported 1/3 of its production — in recent

years the UK has imported more than half of what it burned

UK Coal Production

Historical Projections and Cumulative Production

• Fit uses a different s-curve, the logistic function, that gives a better fit than the cumulative normal

• Linearized through the logit transform r2 = 0.999531

Historical Projections Compared with Reserves

• Reserve numbers are available before long-term fits• Produced 18% of the 1871 Royal Commission reserves + cumulative• Criteria chosen were too optimistic ― 1-ft seams, 4,000-ft depth• Collapse in reserves in 1968 — the five collieries left with producing

longwall faces (down from 803 faces in 1972) were all producing by 196832

Summary for Mature Coal Regions

Region2011

production Mt

Cumulative production

Gt

Long-term production

projection Gt

Long-term production projection

range Gt

Early reserves + cumulative

Gt

Reserves year

Long-term production

projection as % of early reserves +

cumulative

United Kingdom 18 27.4 28.8 26.8 - 30.0

(11% span) 153 1871 19%

Pennsylvania anthracite 1.6 5.04 5.05 3.1 - 5.1

(40% span) 12 1921 42%

France and Belgium 0.1 7.2 7.6 4.3 - 8.5

(55% span) 33 1936 23%

Japan and South Korea 3.4 3.6 3.7 2.2 - 3.8

(44% span) 17 1936 21%

• Estimate of the long-term production based on the early reserves were four times too high, on average

• Curve fits gave good estimates of the eventual long-term production (20%)

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Western US Coal Production

• Early production cycle peaked in 1918 — centered on Colorado, extremely limited by lack of railroad capacity to customers

• New start after the 1970 Clean-Air Act Extension, which encouraged the use of low-sulfur coal, and the 1980 Staggers Rail Act, which deregulated the railroads

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Western Coal

• Long-term production fit is 43Gt (27% of reserves + cumulative)• Largest residual is 2 months in 2011

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Historical Projections Compared with Reserves for US Coal

• Marius Campbell of the USGS did the first reserves in 1913• Paul Averitt was responsible for the reserves from 1948-1975. He

responded to criticism from mining engineers by tightening reserves criteria — seams at least 28 inches thick, up to 1,000 feet deep, within 3/4 mile from a measurement, 50% recovery

• Now 16 times lower than in 1913 36

Chinese Coal

• World’s largest producer — passed the US in 1985• 46% of world’s production in 2010 — 3.6 times the US production• Even if some US coal plants are shut down, US coal miners may be

able to shift to exports — also should be noted that Wyoming coal miners make $10/t, while Australian coal miners make $90/t in the East Asian market

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Last 4 years equivalent to US capacity after closings

Plans equivalent to US capacity after closings

Cumulative Production with Curve Fits

• For the current fit, r2 is 0.9994• Long-term production fit is 191Gt (117% of reserves + cumulative)

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Historical Fits for Long-Term Production Compared with Reserves

• Reserves submitted to World Energy Council in 1989 and 1992 differ by 6:1

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World Coal Production

• Other regions not shown, but are available on line in an Excel workbook and in the paper

• 14% range from 1994 on• Current long-term fit is 755Gt, 65% of reserves + cumulative• IPCC range for production through 2100 is 355 to 3500Gt

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• The scenario report SRES (2000) references the 1995 and 1998 surveys• The IPCC chose to use additional recoverable reserves and they also

chose 1998 (3368Gt) instead of 1995 (680Gt) (Deffeyes’ Law)• Additional recoverable reserves are now 19 times smaller than in 1998• The 4th Assessment Report notes the reserves for the 2004 survey, and

“an estimated additional possible resource of 100,000EJ [5,000Gt] …” — with no reference

Where Does the IPCC Get Its Coal Numbers?World Energy Council survey

Proved recoverable reserves, Gt

Additional recoverable reserves, Gt

1992 1039 702

1995 1032 680

1998 984 3368

2001 984 409

2004 909 449

2007 847 180

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World Oil and Gas Production

• 7.33 barrels of oil = 1 metric ton, toe = metric tons of oil equivalent• Natural gas added as the energy equivalent

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Probit Transform for World Oil and Gas

• Slowdown in the production pace causes a change in slope

Historical Long-term Fits for World Oil and Gas

• 660Gtoe compares with BP’s reserves + cumulative, 650Gtoe• Residuals decorrelated by an AR2 process• 90% confidence band from 1000 bootstrap replications• Current confidence interval is 604 to 729Gtoe (19%) 45

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Carbon-Dioxide Emissions

• Carbon coefficients for oil, gas, and coal from the BP Statistical Review• Projection is less than any of the 40 IPCC scenarios (Deffeyes’ Law?)• For next assessment report, representative concentration pathways

(RCPs) are planned — RCP8.5 is the business-as-usual one, with long-term emissions of 6TtC (6 times larger than curve fits)

• RCP8.5 does not appear to be working with an explicit set of resource constraints, and no uncertainties have been given yet

• Projection includes 1GtC per year for land-use change• The 2067 peak at 459ppm is close to 2072, the projected 90%

exhaustion year for fossil fuels• 64% of the way to the top from the 1850-1900 average — only the

remaining 36% is accessible to policy• Maximum width of confidence band is equivalent to 0.13°C at the

IPCC recommended sensitivity of 3°C for a doubling of CO2

Projected CO2 Levels — Schmitz Model

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Temperature Projections

I will use a simple correlation model for the temperature projections.

“... essentially, all models are wrong. Some models are useful.” — George Box, University of Wisconsin

“The climate debate is a zoo, no getting around it, ...” — Judy Curry, Georgia Tech

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Atmospheric

CO2

Fossil Fuel

Supply

1°C x log2(CO2) Direct

Thermal Delay

3x Feedback Amplification

How Good is the Correlation between CO2 and Temperature? — Vostok, Antarctica

• A similar graph appeared in Al Gore’s Oscar-winning Inconvenient Truth• The temperature reference is the modern temperature• Generally the temperature changes happen before the CO2 changes — this

means that CO2 changes are not the trigger for the changes49

How Good is the Correlation between CO2 and Temperature? — Then and Now

• The recent 1.9°C/doubling of CO2 levels may not be a bad number– Thermal delay would increase the sensitivity– The rise from short-term greenhouse gases like black-carbon would lower it

• The recent r2 of 0.78 for CO2 level compares with an r2 of 0.66 for time50

HadCrut4 Temperature Data Set

• From the British Hadley Centre at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/download.html

• 90% confidence band for temperatures is 0.1°C wide 51

Correlation Model for Temperature

• Model is T = T0 + T1 log2(CO2) , where T0 is an offset, T1 is a sensitivity

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Confidence Band for the Sensitivity of log2(CO2) to Sea-Surface Temperature

• Stable for more than 60 years — 1.7°C to 2.5°C range• 90% confidence band from 1000 bootstrap replications — 1.7°C to 2.2°C• Confidence band is completely consistent with IPCC’s range for

temperature sensitivity, but narrower53

Temperature Projection

• The confidence band from 1000 bootstrap replications — includes both short-term fluctuations and model uncertainty

• Projection is below the IPCC range, because of smaller fossil-fuel production — confidence band is below the Copenhagen limit

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The Pacific Institute, 2009, Heberger, Cooley, Herrera, Gleick, and Moore

• Simulation for the IPCC A1FI scenario at Oxnard, north of Los Angeles — 1.4m by 2100

• Dark blue shows the results of a 1.4m sea-level rise, combined with a 100-year flood

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Sea Level From the Los Angeles Tide Gauge

• Data from PSMSL (Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level)• Fossil-fuel CO2 emissions during the 2nd half were 3 times the 1st half• National Academy of Sciences high scenario implies a rise rate that is

25 times the historical rate56

Subsidence in Long Beach, California, 1955 ― 9m

• From the Long Beach Historical Society• Long Beach is the second busiest port in the US, after the port of Los Angeles• The Wilmington oil field is the third largest in the US 57

Long Beach Subsidence —

9m

• Picture taken by Roger Coar in 1959 — his dog’s name was King

• With the permission of the Long Beach Historical Society

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World Cereal Yield and Area

• From the UN FAO, cereals includes corn, rice, wheat, barley, rye, oats, ...• Evolution of the food supply is complex — some corn now goes to ethanol

production 59

2009 Per-Person Food Supply

• From the UN FAO • For our projected levels of CO2 and temperature, the IPCC report judges

the effects of climate change (CO2 fertilization, longer growing season in high latitudes, increase in rain on average) as positive on balance, giving 10% to 20% cereal yield improvement with adaptation — how one weighs this increase against other climate-change effects depends on how much one likes eating

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Region Total Cal/d

Increase since 1961

Animal Cal/d

Increase since 1961

European Union 3456 15% 1003 21%Northern America 3659 27% 1001 -1%Africa 2560 28% 207 29%South America 2951 28% 665 60%Asia 2706 51% 429 294%World 2831 29% 501 48%

• US crude-oil production has been following a cumulative normal curve since 1902 — the 1995 USGS/2006 MMS assessment does not appear to be consistent with production history, but stay tuned on shale oil

• The projection for long-term world oil and gas production is consistent with the BP reserves

• Long-term production estimates for coal from geological reserves are available early, but they are too four times too high

• Projection for long-term world coal production is 2/3 of the reserves plus cumulative production

• Projection for 90% exhaustion for world oil, gas, and coal is sixty years from now 61

Summary ― Oil, Gas, and Coal

• So far climate policy does not appear to have affected world fossil-fuel CO2 emissions significantly

• Chinese coal production completely dominates US coal production — it is not clear that any US coal-plant policy can have an effect

• It appears that 2/3 of the eventual CO2 forcing has already occurred

• It appears that the Copenhagen commitment to a rise of less than 2C will be met without any climate policy at all

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Summary ― Climate

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Thank You• Sandro Schmidt at the BGR (the German Resources Agency)• Granger Morgan, Melissa Chan, Ed Rubin and Jay Apt at Carnegie-Mellon• Charlie Kennel at the University of California at San Diego• Kevin Bowman and Dimitri Antsos at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory• John Rutledge at Freese and Nichols, Inc. in Fort Worth, Texas• Kyle Saunders, Euan Mearns, and Dave Summers at The Oil Drum• Andrew Ferguson at the Optimum Population Trust• Tom Crowley at the University of Edinburgh• Alex Dessler, Andy Dessler, and Jerry North at Texas A&M• Steve Mohr at the University of Technology, Sydney• Steven Schwartz and Ernie Lewis at Brookhaven National Laboratory• Jim Murray at the University of Washington• Many Caltech colleagues, but particularly Bill Bridges, Paul Dimotakis,

David Goodstein, Nadia Lapusta, John Ledyard, Carver Mead, Tapio Schneider, John Seinfeld, and Tom Tombrello

Special thanks to Sandy Garstang and Shady Peyvan in the Caltech Library, Tony Diaz in the Caltech Geology Library, and Kent Potter and Dale Yee in the Caltech Engineering Division for their perseverance and ingenuity in locating historical coal production and reserves records

• David Rutledge is the Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, and a former Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science there. He is the author of the textbook Electronics of Radio, published by Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a winner of the IEEE Microwave Prize, and a winner of the Teaching Award of the Associated Students at Caltech. He served as the editor for the Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, and is a founder of the Wavestream Corporation, the leading manufacturer of high-power millimeter-wave transmitters for satellite uplinks. In recent years, his research interest has been in developing methods for estimating fossil-fuel supplies in the long run, and in understanding the implications.

• Copyright © 2007−2012 by David Rutledge• The site http://rutledge.caltech.edu/ has links to the current version of

these slides, an Excel workbook with calculations for the graphs, and a video from a public lecture. A book is in preparation.

• Permission is given to copy this work, provided attribution is given, and provided that the link http://rutledge.caltech.edu/ is included.

• Email contact: Dave.Rutledge@caltech.edu

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