2050: Things you can do now, and why you should do them now.

Note: This was also posted on my new Substack page (click here). Please bookmark that page as I may eventually stop posting here.

The last two or three posts have been heavy on the data, and being a nerd, I was intending to dive a little deeper into the numbers in this post. But I realised I have probably presented enough information in the last few posts to wrap this up with some advice and guidance for citizens (spoiler alert: VOTE!) and governments, backed by high-level facts and information.

So what does the literate but non-scientific citizen in a democracy need to take from all this as we all head to elections over the next few years?

The IEA report described in this series of posts promotes the idea that technology will save us, so we won’t have to change our habits, much.

But the problem is that several of the technologies required are unproven, expensive energy hogs. If any one of them doesn’t pan out, we may have to change our habits to a much more significant degree, in a much bigger hurry than anticipated now. This in turn requires convincing governments and politicians that citizens will support these painful changes. And the time available may be shorter than we thought, if recent floods across the US South, Europe and elsewhere are any indication of how quickly things are changing; people caught up in these disasters have indeed had to change their habits much more suddenly and drastically than anyone expected.

Figure 2.32 in the IEA report (click here) shows gigatonnes of CO₂ abated, sorted by technology, and further shows the state of readiness of these technologies. The objective is to eliminate 460 Gt CO₂ of cumulative emissions over the next 25 years. The good news is that 292 Gt CO₂ can be eliminated using technologies that are available and commercial today, with the only constraint being how fast we can implement them: these are solar and wind power, electric cars, and heat pumps.

The less good news is that most of the remaining technologies are at demonstration or prototype scale today. Technologies at the demonstration stage include electric trucks (arguably just about commercial as I have seen electric delivery vehicles from IKEA and others on my city’s streets); carbon capture (CCUS) for the production of cement, legacy fossil fuel energy, steel, and chemicals; and liquid biofuels via the Fischer-Tropsch pathway (a subject for another day). These technologies are expected to abate about 79 Gt CO₂.

Technologies at the prototype stage are expected to abate 60 Gt: biofuels or bioenergy with CCUS where there is a “double counting” allowed if the biomass is regrown; steel production including electrified primary steel, shipping, and direct air capture (DACCS). DACCS in particular is expected to take out 12.5 Gt, even though it is still at the prototype stage and is, furthermore, among the costliest approaches in terms of dollars per tonne removed. I am sure the costs will drop as it is scaled up, but again the issue is whether we can afford to wait that long.

Another pathway is hydrogen, made from water using green electricity. But the electrical energy needed for hydrogen by 2050 (Figure 2.16) is a staggering 12,314 TWh, more than building heat, cooking, light duty vehicles and heavy-duty trucks combined (11,156 TWh). By way of comparison, energy use for my 100 m² apartment in a 1920’s vintage rowhouse, with heating and cooling entirely by electricity, was 12,724 kWh in the 12 months ended November 6, 2024. Hydrogen generation is thus predicted to be a billion times (1,000,000,000 times) larger than this. (I had to go back to the data to be sure I hadn’t accidentally added a few zeros here.) The justification for spending so much of our precious green power, close to 40% of total wind and solar power in 2050, on hydrogen generation needs to be made much more clearly.

So what will increased societal change look like?

First, it is all very well to say we will replace all cars with electric cars. But urban gridlock isn’t going to allow for all those cars, regardless of energy source. While citizens in smaller communities will still need individually-owned private vehicles, congested urban cores need massively improved all-electric public transit systems (rapid rail systems supported by local trams and busses) which make better use of the available electrical power. Between cities, high-speed rail, well integrated with urban transportation infrastructure, will be more effective than short-haul aviation. Meanwhile, if you can, drive less, take public transit or a car-sharing service, walk or cycle.

Second, the current housing shortage across the industrialised world is not going to get better without billions of square metres of new residential floor space. In turn this is going to mean smaller homes in the industrialised world. Approximately a third of the new urban population will be in Africa, where residential space per capita needs to grow; but in the industrialised world it is no longer sensible to pave over good agricultural land so families of three or four can live in suburban homes built on 60’ by 120’ lots (670 m²). While I am not advocating 36 m² per capita, I think there is room to increase space efficiencies which will lead to reduced heating and cooling loads per capita. And apartments or townhouses, with fewer outside walls exposed to the elements, require less energy per square metre than the classic standalone bungalow or split-level home which is exposed on all sides. So are you planning a move? Consider an urban space with easy access via non-carbon mobility approaches to essentials such as employment, parks, schools, churches and shopping.

And while on the topic of your current or future home, investments in heat pumps and better insulation, windows and doors will improve your carbon footprint and save you money in the long run. The problem is the savings will take a long time to pay back the costs, given today’s electricity prices. This is an easy fix that requires government subsidies and incentives to move forward more quickly, fixes that should be implemented because they are relatively cheap per tonne of CO₂ abated, but meanwhile when shopping for home improvements, it might make sense to upgrade to the more climate-friendly solution.

Finally, there is the issue of nuclear power. If your over-riding concern is carbon and climate change, then nuclear holds a lot of promise. But the issues remain, mainly that a small accident leaves a huge mess behind, witness Chernobyl and Fukushima. Building these huge plants is also very expensive and very time consuming, and the cost of power generated is much higher than with other options. Should we be spending so much time and money here, for a costly and dangerous solution? A vigorous debate is needed.

Essentially this all describes many large European and Asian cities today. So it is all possible, if governments take the steps needed. Voters are the ones who will convince the politicians.

So if you are worried about the world your children and grandchildren will inherit, push back when you hear about the latest and greatest technological saviour just over the horizon, and look to local solutions where you can make a change, even a small one, in the short term. Small improvements made early will add up over the years and may be better than a large improvement in 2048 or 2052; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. 

I recall thinking, when Katrina destroyed New Orleans, that surely that was the incentive needed for the industrialised world to start changing tack. Here was a climate disaster in the heart of the USA! I was obviously hopelessly naïve in this; the question is how many Hurricane Helenes or videos of torrents carrying houses and cars downriver will it take to change the public mood. I remain cautiously optimistic.

Reference: International Energy Agency (2021), Net Zero by 2050, IEA, Paris: Net Zero by 2050 Scenario - Data product - IEA. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

 

2050: What the experts are saying about population growth, and some implications.

Note: This was also posted on my new Substack page (click here). Please bookmark that page as I may eventually stop posting here. 

My last post outlined climate change mitigation technologies that arguably aren’t ready today, and which may not be ready in time to make a difference – 25 years is not a long time in the annals of new technology development and deployment. And some of these remediation approaches are energy hogs when we should be looking at increased energy efficiency. Here are some other ideas, based on increased energy efficiency.

Over the period 2020 to 2050, the IEA predicts total energy supply per capita declines from 76 gigajoules per year (GJ/y) to 56 GJ/y, a decline of 26%; but in spite of population growth, total global energy use actually decreases by 7.5% from 587 exajoules (EJ) to 543 EJ. This is an excellent result if it could be achieved, as it represents a serious decoupling of economic growth (up by almost 150%) and population growth (up 25%) from resource extraction and use.

This brings us to population growth, the other major driver I identified in my first post in this series. 

The United Nations predicts an increase in world population from 7.8 billion to 9.7 billion by 2050, an increase of 25%. Furthermore, the percentage of the population living in cities will increase from 50% to 70%. The global urban population will thus increase from 3.9 billion to 6.8 billion, an increase of 75%. Most of this is likely to take place in the developing world; Africa alone will see a population increase of 1.1 billion, from 1.340 to 2.489 billion; if the 70% worldwide urban average holds across the continent, this implies urban Africa’s population will increase from 938 million to 1.742 billion in 2050. These people will need housing and transportation options.

The IEA has energy consumption in transport declining from 102 EJ/y to 80 EJ/y by 2050, a welcome 22% reduction. But passenger car travel increases from 14,260 billion person-kilometers (bpk) to 24,520 bpk. Distance travelled per capita thus increases from 1840 km/y to 2523 km/y. Total number of personal vehicles is predicted to increase from 1.2 billion (one car per 6.4 people) to just under 2 billion (one car per 4.8 people). This is consistent with the decline in transportation energy use, as the fleet will be largely electric with the attendant efficiencies compared to internal combustion engines.

But gridlock will arise regardless of energy source. Congestion charges, carbon and fuel taxes (which do not work on electric vehicles) and distance-based insurance and registration fees (the sticks) are among the policy levers for reducing gridlock, along with improvements in public transit (the carrot). Examples are congestion charges in London and New York; in Tokyo one must prove one has a parking spot as a prerequisite to licensing a vehicle. As the average personal vehicle is parked well over 90% of the time, the amount of space required for all these automobiles concentrated in cities is huge.

Note that carbon savings from ridesharing, cycling and walking are relatively small, and disappear once the competing options are all electric, but that gridlock remains a function of number of automobiles regardless of propulsion system.

So: more cars, driven longer distances. But this is inconsistent with gridlock.

Moving on to residential floor space, the IEA estimates that worldwide average residential floor space per capita will increase from 25 m² in 2020 to 35.6 m² by 2050. Given the predicted increase in urban population, total urban residential floor space is expected to increase from 102 to 242 billion m², an increase of 137%. In Africa, assuming the floor space figures apply equally here, the increase is from 23 to 62 billion m², an increase of 170%.

Population growth will be concentrated in developing and emerging nations, where increased floor space per capita will rise with economic growth; nonetheless it is reasonable to wonder where all this extra floor space is going to come from in urban settings. As urban sprawl is not compatible with public transit or land use change imperatives, perhaps societal changes could reduce the energy demand for both residential space and personal transportation in a synergistic fashion. This would be best accomplished through multistory residential complexes clustered around light rail or other rapid transit hubs, where space for parking is likely to be at a premium, if it is available at all. Other options for transport include systems where automobiles are used more intensively than in private ownership. This could include car sharing schemes, Uber or similar services, taxis, rental cars or other similar systems.

The result, hopefully, would be a reversal of the trend to more automobiles driven more kilometres, with the attendant savings in gridlock, energy use and land use change due to suburbanisation. 

These new homes, furthermore, need to be built with the latest in passive heating and cooling systems, local or distributed energy systems such as roof-mounted solar panels and battery storage, heat pumps, electric cooking, state of the art building envelope systems for insulation, etc.

The author’s residence, small for North America, closely matches the world average floor space per household today; but as the author’s household is made up of only one person, its space per capita is just over four times the world average. (The author consumed a comfortable 0.518 GJ/m² in 2020. Embarrassingly, this is 10% higher than today’s world average.)

The role of urban planning and permitting, which would play a role in moderating the growth of so-called McMansions in suburban or rural belts around Western cities, does not explicitly appear in the Roadmap.

So the IEA has proposed a range of technologies, such as carbon capture and a shift to electric vehicles, which tend to focus on supporting a business-as-usual lifestyle for citizens of OECD member countries. They also provide a lifeline for industries whose products are perhaps not essential if we can provide the necessary energy-related services – reasonable amounts of well-heated or cooled residential spaces, serviced by reasonable transportation options – in other ways.

Overall, the IEA report is a well researched document providing a reasonable roadmap to net zero by 2050. But it is not surprising that the IEA, as an arm of the OECD, has not put a lot of stock in societal changes that might prove a difficult political sell. This is critical: as the best vaccine is the one in your arm, the best climate change policy is the one that gets implemented, even if it is not technically the best or fastest one, because it is better than no policy. A recent publication (Mark Jaccard, The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming myths that hinder progress. Cambridge University press, 2020, digital version available free by clicking here) describes this well, and is very highly recommended, whether the reader tackles the full IEA Roadmap or not.

Reference: International Energy Agency (2021), Net Zero by 2050, IEA, Paris: Net Zero by 2050 Scenario - Data product - IEA. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

2050: What the experts are saying about climate change... and some technologies that might help improve matters.

Note: This was also posted on my new Substack page (click here). Please bookmark that page as I may eventually stop posting here. 

In my last post I set the stage for a conversation about what the world might look like in 2050. Population and climate were two big drivers. Today I’d like to look at what the experts are saying about climate, and the technologies that might serve to alleviate the problem.

In May 2021 the International Energy Agency (IEA) released “Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector” (click here). As the IEA focusses on energy, and as the energy sector is responsible for three-quarters of the global carbon emission problem, it makes sense they would be the experts here. And as policy wonks hired by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), which is an organisation whose members are First World countries, one would not expect any bombshells. Their customers are, after all, First World politicians worried about re-election.

One would be wrong. A key conclusion is we need to “leave it in the ground” – there is more than enough coal, oil and gas already discovered to exceed our maximum budgeted emissions if we want to remain below 1.5 °C. No new drilling is needed. This is exactly the point the environmentalists have been trying to make for a very long time now.  

In June 2021 I wrote up a review of this 224-page wonk-fest. At 13 pages, my review is still long for a blog post, but the keeners can find it by clicking here. For the rest of you, a summary in several parts follows. I look forward to your comments and discussion.

The IEA assumes the world economy is 40% larger in 2050 than in 2020, while using 7% less energy. Energy production and use are critical components of climate change as they led to emissions of 33.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (Gt CO₂) in 2020, about 75% of the global total. Getting this to zero, while maintaining energy supplies at just 7% below today’s level, is critical. Here are some energy technologies that the IEA thinks will help get us to net zero by 2050.

Solar photo-voltaic and wind power are commercial today and provide close to half the necessary savings; and the good news is that growth in these technologies since 2021 has been faster than expected as costs drop.

Maintaining existing hydroelectric capacity remains a part of the puzzle. But building new hydro plants takes a very long time. Furthermore, drought can affect the capacity of new and existing generating stations. So hydro may be part of the solution but it is itself at risk from climate change.

Several other technologies identified by the IEA present significant challenges, in my view.

Replacing coal with so-called residual biomass, such as bark or sawdust from sawmills, or crop residues from farms, allows coal-fired assets to switch to a “renewable” fuel, meaning we can grow some more; this technology is largely proven. Biomass can also displace petroleum-based liquid transportation fuels and natural gas in pipelines, although these technologies are still not completely ready for prime time. But carbon neutrality of biomass combustion is under threat, first because it does in fact emit CO₂, which we are trying to avoid, even if it is “renewable”; secondly, any benefit may be more than offset by unknown levels of new climate-driven emissions from forest fires, insect infestations, floods and desertification. Forests may not be the huge carbon sink we are all counting on. Biomass for energy use is particularly problematic where whole trees are chipped and pelletised as a coal substitute, or where so-called energy crops start to displace food crops.

Carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) is essential for lime kilns used in the production of cement and other products, because CO₂ emissions come from the chemistry of the lime reaction and not combustion. CCUS is also essential for any combustion process, such as thermally-generated power, remaining post-2050. But CCUS requires energy to run the plant and the necessary compressors to store the captured CO₂. More rapid decommissioning of coal-fired plants would reduce the need for CCUS, which will be expensive, energy-intensive and time consuming to implement. Direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is a variation in CCUS, and when located next to CO₂ storage sites, would not need pipelines, but the energy cost of removing CO₂ from air is much higher than from lime kiln or boiler exhaust stacks due to much lower CO₂ concentrations; these much larger plants will take that much longer to build and start up. And the cost per tonne of CO₂ removed will be much larger than with other options.

So the question is do we have the time to build and implement carbon capture technologies, which are still at an early stage? And should we be allocating precious energy resources to cleaning up emissions rather than preventing them in the first place?

There is a lot of talk about hydrogen these days, and not just from the IEA. On the face of it, “burning” hydrogen in an oxygen environment generates good old H₂O, a.k.a. water. But there are two issues: where do we get the hydrogen from in the first place, and how do we distribute it.

The classic hydrogen source is from hydrocarbons such as natural gas or oil. Processes to extract H₂ from hydrocarbons generate CO₂ as a byproduct; this will have to be captured (see CCUS above), otherwise we have simply shifted the emissions somewhere else. If burning hydrogen generates energy and water, we can also reverse that process by using energy, hopefully from a green source, to dissociate the H₂ from the O₂, but we return to the issue of needing more (hopefully green) energy to allow us to continue using energy, even though energy use is what got is into this pickle in the fist place.

Finally hydrogen is a very dilute gas, and needs to be compressed to very high pressures in order to get a reasonable amount of energy into a reasonably small package, such as a vehicle fuel tank. The first time a hydrogen-fueled vehicle explodes following an accident will be the day this approach loses public support, as the explosion is likely to generate a lot of hot, high velocity shrapnel, killing people over a wide radius. Hollywood movies notwithstanding, a gasoline tank explosion is far more contained than one involving a compressed gas.

To be fair, there is a niche market for hydrogen: industrial sites involving a combustion process, such as a lime kiln, with green power to generate hydrogen from water available onsite via solar or wind generation, and where the hydrogen is used onsite in a situation where industrial-level occupational health and safety rules can be implemented. Having an onsite process use for the oxygen would be a bonus. It is not a solution for the transportation sector (which I will address in a subsequent post).

Nuclear power, which the IEA expects to double by 2050, is needed to offload other technologies and to stabilise the grid. But the time to get new conventional reactors permitted, engineered and online is very long. So-called Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are a great idea on paper but none have been permitted or built yet, and the cost per installed MW may be very high. And the waste problem still needs to be sorted out.

Again: Assuming we are all OK with the disadvantages of nuclear power, do we have the time?

So several options for getting the world off combustion-based energy production and use are going to be expensive and energy intensive, and won’t get built fast enough to make much of a difference. But it’s not all doom and gloom; I’ll talk about some short-term opportunities in an upcoming post.

Reference: International Energy Agency (2021), Net Zero by 2050, IEA, Paris: Net Zero by 2050 Scenario - Data product - IEA. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.