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Quick, which nation has the most nuclear power? France, right? Everyone passingly familiar with the energy scene knows the one-liner that France gets about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, which is the main reason it has the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions of any major industrial nation (about 6.5 tons per capita, compared to about 19 tons per capita for the United States).

Wrong! The United States has the most nuclear power by total output—nearly twice as much as France in 2010. (See Figure 1 below.) People forget that France is a much smaller nation than the United States, even if it has a bigger attitude.

Equally revealing is who is most aggressively building new nuclear facilities. Right now, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the 12 nations with the most nuclear power have 55 new nuclear plants under construction, but 27 of these are in China alone; Russia accounts for another 11. Figure 2 displays the amount of new generating capacity in megawatts under construction, with the number of new reactors at the top of each column. Germany has already announced plans to phase out its existing nuclear capacity as the result of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Japan, however, is continuing construction of two new plants.

Figure 1: Total Nuclear Power Output, 2010 (GW of Electricity)

Figure 2: New Nuclear Capacity Under Construction (MW) and Number of Plants

Source: IAEA, Power Reactor Information System.

Reason magazine’s splendid science correspondent Ron Bailey offers a useful summary of the state of play with natural gas, which has suddenly become controversial now that environmentalists have discovered that natural gas might be an abundant and cheap form of domestic energy. (I had my own short look at the New York Times’s bad faith on this issue in the Weekly Standard last week.)

Ron’s article is especially good in noting the competing possibilities for natural gas use (especially replacing coal-fired baseload electricity generation versus its use as a transportation fuel), and totaling up how much natural gas production will need to increase to meet projected future demand.

At the current time, brand-new advanced combined-cycle natural gas plants are the cheapest form of electricity generation—even cheaper than coal. Combined-cycle natural gas plants run a turbine—essentially a jet engine bolted to the ground—and then use the waste heat to drive a conventional steam turbine, which is why they are more efficient than old-fashioned steam turbine plants. The electricity generation industry has been adding natural gas plants at a fast pace: Since 2000, 80 percent of total new U.S. generating capacity (239 gigawatts out of a total 294 gigawatts) came from natural gas, most of this in the first half of the decade, before natural gas prices spiked and made a hash of the industry’s cost expectations.

As we discovered with a close look at the coal fleet a few weeks ago, there is wide variation within the existing natural gas fleet. As of 2008 (the date of the most recent Department of Energy inventory), there were 1,631 gas-fired power plants in the United States. As Figure 1 shows, half of these plants are very small—under 100 megawatts in summertime output (the peak demand period). Many of these are “peaker” plants that are only used during times of peak demand in the summer, or are co-generation plants for industrial facilities. As was the case with coal, a small number of plants provide a large portion of gas-fired electricity. The largest 80 gas plants produce as much electricity as the smallest 800.

Sources: Department of Energy and author’s calculations.

Only 27 percent of gas-fired power plants (439 in total) are combined-cycle plants, but they produce nearly half (48.4 percent) of total gas-fired electricity. Most are less than 20 years old. We still have over 200 old-fashioned gas-fired steam turbines, with an average plant age of 50, and 741 combustion turbines that lack the second-stage combined-cycle capability, which together produce 51 percent of our electricity. In other words, combined-cycle plants produce twice as much electricity per plant as non-combined cycle plants.

Implication: While retiring old coal-fired power plants gets most of the attention these days, there is a large portion of the gas fleet that needs to be modernized or upgraded too, if the sector is going to achieve its promise.

Much is being made of China’s world-leading investment in “clean, green” energy, especially wind and solar power, though much of this is being done to create another export industry to the nations obsessed with climate change.

When measured in percentage terms, China’s growth in renewable energy from 2000 through 2010 certainly sounds impressive—up 1,545 percent!! Yes, China built a lot of new coal plants, too, but its coal-generated energy only increased 132 percent.

But when measured in terms of absolute energy output the numbers game being played here becomes apparent. When viewed in terms of additional total energy output by source, measured in the common unit of million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE), we see that energy from non-hydro renewable sources (mainly wind and solar) grew by only 11.4 MTOE from 2000 to 2010, while new energy supply from coal grew 976.4 MTOE—85 times as much new energy came from non-hydro renewables. New hydro power did much better than wind and solar power (up 112.8 MTOE), but much of that increase came from the massive Three Gorges dam that the global environmental community deplores. But in the absence of Three Gorges, China might well have built an additional 50 to 100 coal-fired plants.

Net Growth in New Energy Supply in China, 2000–2010 (MTOE)

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2011.

A break in an ExxonMobil oil pipeline on July 1 near Billings, Montana, released about 1,000 barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River and has deepened the controversy over the proposed Keystone II pipeline that will bring new supplies of Canadian oil to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. The EPA reported last Friday that its water pollution sampling of the affected area of the river found “no petroleum hydrocarbons above drinking water standards in that region,” while its air pollution tests finds that “there continues to be no public health concerns resulting from the release of oil into the river.”

As with air travel, automobile fatalities, and other mass risks, the long-term trend of oil spills from tankers and pipelines alike has experienced a long-term declining trend.

Figure 1: Average Annual Petroleum Industry Oil Spillage

Source: American Petroleum Institute

According to research by Dagmar Schmidt Etkin, the leading researcher on oil spill statistics, between the decade of the 1970s and today, average annual oil spill amounts from all sources (oil well blowouts, tanker accidents, refinery spills, rail transit accidents, etc.) fell 77 percent, and spills from pipeline accidents fell 70 percent (Figure 1). (See Analysis of U.S. Oil Spillage, API Publication 356, August 2009.)

A couple weeks ago in this space I noted the growth in China’s total energy use compared to energy use by the United States from 1980 projected through the year 2035. Let’s continue with this theme for a moment, and add in a crucial extra variable—the relationship between China’s energy use and its effect in raising hundreds of millions of people—hundreds of millions—out of poverty. According to World Bank figures, the number of people living in absolute poverty (defined as living on less than $1 a day) in China has declined from 652 million in 1981 to about 80 million or fewer by 2009. In other words, more than a half billion people have been lifted out of poverty over the last 30 years.

China’s total energy consumption during this period increased 406 percent. In concrete terms, it means that for every increase of 1 quadrillion BTUs, 8.2 million people were lifted out of poverty. Everyone likes to wring their hands over China’s coal use, but these figures work out as follows: for every additional 4.5 million tons of coal used in China, or for every additional 450,000 barrels of oil consumed, 1 million people were lifted out of poverty.

The motion graphic below demonstrates the relationship between rising energy use and falling poverty from 1981 through 2009. The vertical axis represents the number of people living on less than $1 a day in China, while the horizontal axis plots China’s total energy use.

Nothing provokes a tantrum from the climate campaign quicker than pointing out that global temperatures flattened out after 1998, following a two-decade period of more or less steady increase of about 0.4 degrees Celsius. A couple years of temperature variability would be consistent with the General Theory of the Apocalypse, but a whole decade of flat temps starts to cause problems for the Narrative. Hence, the climate campaign has been in “denialist” mode about this anomaly, and keeps saying “hottest year ever” as often as they can, conveniently noting that the current decade represents a plateau in temperatures, while the models say that on a decadal scale temperature should continue to rise steadily.

Comes now the National Academy of Sciences, which yesterday published a new paper that sets out to explain “why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008.” Apparently the NAS didn’t get the memo from the Center for American Progress that we’re not supposed to acknowledge that global warming has not happened over the last decade.

But not to worry. The NAS has it covered. As the rest of the abstract explains:

We find that this hiatus in warming coincides with a period of little increase in the sum of anthropogenic and natural forcings. Declining solar insolation as part of a normal eleven-year cycle, and a cyclical change from an El Nino to a La Nina dominate our measure of anthropogenic effects because rapid growth in short-lived sulfur emissions partially offsets rising greenhouse gas concentrations. As such, we find that recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and cooling effects.

Translation: China is saving us with their soaring emissions from coal use (sulfur dioxide particles reflect solar radiation). The effect of sulfur dioxide particles, and other atmospheric phenomena (including clouds) is a matter of huge uncertainty in the official climate models the UN employs, but I’ve seen at least one prominent alarmist scientist make a case that sulfur dioxide emissions amplify warming, so this is another good example of the climate campaign being unable to keep its story straight. But a couple other items from the article provoke wry smiles as well, especially the fragment about “declining solar isolation.” The warmenists have for years furiously denounced the idea that fluctuations in solar activity have much to do with temperature variation on earth, and solar “forcings” are given a very tiny weight in the formal climate models. But here it’s listed as an excuse for the missing warming.

Just another example of the endlessly shape-shifting, non-falsifiable world of politicized climate science.

If you want to get a grasp of China’s coal-fired emissions, I’ve done the following motion graphic of China’s coal production from 1980 and projected out to 2035 with data from the International Energy Agency. Looks like the Chinese are already practicing de facto geoengineering, and will be for a long time to come.

Everyone, including me, is talking about the boom in natural gas currently under way, and the technological revolution that has brought it about. While the price of natural gas has fallen from a peak of nearly $14 per thousand cubic feet a few years ago to about $4 today, the technology that has enabled precise directional drilling at greater depths for both oil and gas is not cheap.

Figure 1 displays the average depth of natural gas wells by year in the United States from 1949 to 2008. The average depth nearly doubled between 1949 and the mid-1960s, and has undulated between then and the mid-1990s depending on market conditions. These older conventional gas fields tended to be large and unlocked more or less by drilling straight down into the ground. The sharp upswing in the series between 2001 and 2008 reflects the arrival of directional drilling and “fracking,” which unlocks smaller pockets of gas deeper underground in shale and coal bed formations.

Source: Energy Information Administration.

Figure 2 reflects the cost of this technology: the real cost of oil and gas drilling has more than doubled over just the last five years. Combine this cost with the falling market price of natural gas, and it is no wonder that there is a shift under way from gas drilling to oil drilling, as we noted here before. Shale gas production is still very profitable in some “plays,” such as the Marcellus shale in the northeast, but the next big surprise in domestic energy may well be a much larger than expected increase in domestic oil output.

Source: Energy Information Administration.

American Electric Power’s announcement last week that it will soon begin shutting down one quarter of its coal-fired power plants, combined with the news that replacing just a fifth of coal-fired power in Illinois could raise utility rates by as much as 65 percent over the next six years, is making the long-simmering issue of coal suddenly red hot.  If the Illinois projections are true, it also appears to give the lie to the refrain that cap and trade, or other efforts to phase out coal, would be cheap and easy.  On the other hand, there is something slightly odd about this story, as natural gas-fired power is now very competitive with coal on price.  Shouldn’t we be able to replace coal with gas at a more reasonable cost than these news stories seem to suggest?

A look through the basic numbers of the coal-fired power fleet may contain the rough outline of an answer to this question, and it may turn out that the costs of phasing out coal power will be front-loaded instead of back-loaded.  In other words, we’re going to take our biggest cost hits now, with the costs declining as time goes forward.  At the same time, however, the numbers suggest the likelihood that a significant portion of coal power is likely to survive for a long time, such that coal-hating environmentalists will be very disappointed with the results a decade or two from now.

There are 595 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. in the Department of Energy’s 2008 database (the most recent available), providing 337 gigawatts of electricity, nearly half the nation’s total.  Right now the consensus estimate is that we’re going to close down about 21 gigawatts of coal capacity (about 6.2 percent to the total) in the very near future, as perhaps as much as 60 gigawatts by 2017 (about 18 percent of total).

The average age of the coal fleet is 42 years; the oldest operating plant, Interstate Power and Light’s Linn unit in Iowa, first began operating in 1921.  Figure 1 shows the share of coal plants by the decade of their first operation and their cumulative power output; over one-quarter of the fleet was built in the 1950s, though as can be seen, the coal plants built in the 1970s were much larger by capacity.

Figure 1: Number of Coal Plants Built by Decade and Total New Power Output

Source: Department of Energy and Author’s Calculations

The age of coal-fired plants is misleading, however, as most plants have been constantly upgraded over the years, and can be compared to a house built in 1950 that has a remodeled kitchen, bathrooms, new attic insulation, heat and A/C, and a new roof.  In the case of power plants, improvements emphasize better turbines and more efficient boilers. Maybe a better comparison is an old car with a rebuilt engine and fuel injection replacing carburetors, or an aging film starlet with plastic enhance . . .  never mind.

The more important variable is the size of the plants.  Figure 2 displays the distribution of our 595 coal-plants by power output.  The 130 largest coal-fired plants—22 percent of the total fleet—produce 65 percent of total coal-fired electricity. (The two largest coal plants are Georgia Power’s two 3,500-megawatt behemoths, the Bowen and Scherer units, each with four boilers.)  By contrast, the 373 plants that produce less than 500 megawatts generate only 16 percent.  In fact, the ten largest coal-fired power plants produce nearly 9 percent of total coal electricity; the ten largest plants produce more power than the 310 smallest coal plants combined.  If the bottom half of the output distribution of coal-fired plants in the nation were shut down, it would only reduce coal use by about 15 percent.

Figure 2: Number of Coal Plants by Megawatt Capacity

Source: Dept. of Energy and Author’s Calculations

While some large, 1,000-megawatt-plus coal plants may be closed down, it is more likely to be the smaller plants that will be shut down for the simple reason that the fixed capital costs of additional pollution abatement will be too high, while the costs will not be excessively high for the larger plants.  (Would the University of Alaska Fairbanks, for example, really want to spend the money to abate pollution from its 13-megawatt coal units?  Will it make any sense to attempt carbon capture and sequestration on tiny coal plants?)  Conversely, although new gas-fired power has become very cost competitive on average, the replacement cost of small coal units with small gas units (or renewables such as wind and solar that require gas-backup) is likely to be higher than average in many cases.  Hence, the kind of numbers we’re seeing out of Illinois.

This discussion leaves out of account whether new environmental regulations for coal-fired mercury emissions make sense purely in terms of health and environmental benefit, something I’ve commented on in this space before.

OPEC opens its meeting today in Vienna amid the usual reports of divisions among its members about what the cartel should do. The Iranians and Venezuelans want to restrict output because they want higher prices, while the Saudis reportedly want prices to moderate somewhat from the current $100 a barrel level. It’s always hard to read the chicken entrails (camel droppings?) of these matters, so I won’t make a prediction, except that whatever they decide, there will be cheating.

It is worth noting that the relatively high price of oil is driven mostly by rising global demand, as Econ 101 would teach. And where is that demand coming from? Not the United States, despite our silly hand-wringing about our “addiction” to oil. Figure 1 shows that between 1980 and 2010, total oil consumption in the United States rose 12.3 percent, about one-third the total global increased of 35.1 percent. The real driver these days is China, where consumption has increased 375 percent since 1980.

It might be said that a 1980 baseline is misleading in the case of China, since it was still a very poor country then. Figure 2 shows changes in oil consumption since the year 2000, and you will see that China’s oil consumption increased 74 percent over the last decade, while U.S. consumption has actually declined 2.8 percent (a function mostly of the 2009 recession), and global consumption increased 11 percent. Overall, China’s total energy use went from about one-third the U.S. level in 2000 to just slightly more than the U.S. level in the year 2010—an astonishing increase that shows no signs of abating. Most projections have China’s energy use growing to twice the level of the United States over the next 25 years. Which means OPEC is likely to be enjoying fat margins for a long time to come, and may find it easier to keep its cartel together.

This story about Shell’s new offshore gas production ship caught my attention this week. The enormity of the ship—it is the world’s largest offshore facility of its type in the world, longer than four soccer fields and heavier than the largest aircraft carrier in the world—suggests the capital-intensive nature of oil and gas production still works out very well, as I doubt there were many subsidies involved in the building of this ship. (Actual production subsidies may be another matter.) The ship will produce about 110,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day when it gets up and running off the coast of Australia, and Shell expects the ship to be in operation in the region for 25 years. The company press release does not say how much the ship cost to build, but they do mention that it is just a part of Shell’s expected $30 billion in capital investment in offshore oil and gas development over the next five years.

I got curious about how this might compare to investment in “clean” energy (I put “clean” energy in scare quotes because we don’t have a consistent and rigorous definition. Natural gas, which this Shell ship will produce, is often called “clean,” but generally “clean” energy is meant to be non-carbon or carbon-neutral energy such as wind and solar and hydropower.) Good numbers on total investment in either “clean” or “dirty” energy are hard to come by for the usual reason of definitions, data limitations, and so forth. The United Nations Environment Programme thinks, at least as of 2009, that clean investment is now greater than fossil fuel investment. If this is true it is an embarrassment for clean energy, since it still provides only a small fraction of total energy use. In other words, a dollar spent on fossil fuel delivers a lot more energy than a dollar spent on clean energy sources.

Source: Pew Charitable Trusts, “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race”? 2010 Edition.

One of the better sources for “clean” energy investment totals is the Pew Environment Group’s annual report on energy investment. The latest Pew report pegged global clean energy investment in 2010 at $243 billion, up from about $50 billion just five years ago. In the United States the figure comes to $34 billion, up from $22.5 billion in 2009, much of this from the infamous “stimulus” program. (In fact, only $7 billion of U.S. investment came from private venture capital.) By far the largest share of the money spent by the United States and other G-20 nations was for wind power. See here for a nifty interactive world map showing how much each G-20 nation invested and what they have got for it.

For this and past sums of money spent, the United States has a grand total of 58 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity according to the Pew report. (You’ll find different figures elsewhere.) That represents only 1.4 percent of total U.S. electricity generating capacity as of 2009. At that price per gigawatt it will only cost us about $3.8 trillion to replace our current electricity infrastructure with renewable sources. We can probably just roll this into the high-speed rail budget.

Suddenly that huge Shell offshore ship looks like an energy bargain, when you realize how much more energy it will produce per dollar invested.

Everyone knows just how much higher oil prices hurt at the gas pump, but just how does OPEC make out when oil prices soar? The most recent estimate from the Energy Information Administration, displayed in the figure below, was done back in December and as such is out of date, probably underestimating both the 2011 and 2012 revenues OPEC can expect. Still, even with a lower projected oil price last December, OPEC revenues were expected to grow from $571 billion in 2009 to $847 billion this year. This is one reason why OPEC has been resisting pleas from the United States to increase production and push down the price of oil.

Over on RealClearMarkets.com today, I have a column on why we might not expect too much help from OPEC when it meets next in two weeks, and what the United States ought to do if it is serious about dealing with this problem.

Typically, we measure energy efficiency in transportation—especially automobiles—in a simple metric of miles per gallon (MPG). It is a little more complicated in the freight world of planes and trains, however. If you look only at MPG for locomotives, you would think we haven’t made much progress in energy efficiency. Since 1960, the MPG for rail cars has only improved 23 percent (from about 8 to 10 gallons per mile), while automobile gas mileage has more than doubled.

But this is highly misleading, because the weight of the average rail freight car has increased by 44 percent, and the amount of total freight miles (which is not the same thing as rail-car miles traveled) has tripled. In fact, the energy intensity of locomotives has improved substantially, with BTUs per freight mile falling by 65 percent since 1960. In other words, although total freight-rail miles have tripled since 1960, total railroad fuel consumption has remained about flat. If railroad locomotives had made no efficiency improvements since 1960, we’d have needed 9.2 billion gallons of fuel in 2009 instead of the 3.1 billion gallons actually consumed.

This illustrates two points: first, improvements in energy efficiency often translate into greater consumption of the energy-consuming good—what energy economists call the “rebound effect.” Second, unlike other areas where government mandates drove efficiency improvements (i.e., refrigerators) there were no government mandates driving locomotive engine efficiency gains.

Last week’s Energy Fact explored the inverse trend of rising coal consumption and falling sulfur dioxide emissions. This week we observe the same inverse relationship between gasoline consumption in cars and trucks (up 58 percent since 1970) and emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs, chiefly unburned or incompletely burned hydrocarbons, which are a principal “precursor” of ozone), which have fallen almost 80 percent since 1970, as shown in Figure 1 below.

Now, lest David Doniger get his knickers in a twist again, let’s point out here that much of this reduction would have occurred as a result of market forces in the absence of a regulatory mandate. One large chunk of VOC reductions from cars came from the move to fuel-injected engines, which vastly improve engine efficiency and combustion. What would not have occurred without a mandate are the sealed caps on auto fuel tanks that prevent evaporation, and the evaporation abatement nozzles on gas pumps. This is why, for example, a pre-1970 car parked in the driveway with its engine shut off will emit more VOCs through evaporation than a new car running at 60 mph on the highway.

Since it’s Earth Day this Friday, it’s worth having a look at one especially instructive energy-pollution linkage—in this case, the trend in the amount of coal used to generate electricity and in other industrial processes, and sulfur dioxide emissions from that use of coal.

As the figure below shows, the amount of coal used in the United States has more than tripled since 1970 (up 225 percent); as mentioned here previously, we moved heavily to coal starting in the late 1970s as a means to discontinue using imported oil to generate electricity. But over this same time period, sulfur dioxide emissions from coal have declined by 54 percent. Moreover, the Environmental Protection Agency projects a further 50 percent decline in SO2 emissions from current levels over the next 25 years, as shown in the second figure below.

This is one of the best examples (I’ll show others next week) of how fossil fuel consumption can increase while pollution can fall at the same time. The chief causes of this decline are technology—cost-effective “scrubbers” to remove sulfur dioxide from the waste stream—and resource substitution: we started using much more low-sulfur coal from the western United States. (Deregulation of railroads in the 1980s also plays a part in this story.

From television and print advertisements, one might form the impression that the United States has experienced substantial growth in renewable energy sources, especially wind and solar power. Wind power, for example, can boast of a 3,000 percent increase since 1990. But wind and solar power start from a very low (almost nonexistent) base, such that increases are tiny when measured in units of actually energy output such as BTUs.

Even with the heavy emphasis on renewable energy over the last 30 years, today the United States still generates 83 percent of its total energy from fossil fuels, and only 8 percent from renewables, a figure that includes hydroelectric power. Non-hydro renewables (wind, solar, and biomass) only account for 3 percent of total electric power generation in the U.S., despite billions in subsidies and years of policy encouragement. Moreover, since 1990, nuclear power has increased its energy output more than twice as much as total output from renewables, without adding a single new facility, as shown in the figure below.

Source: Energy Information Administration.