Figuring land area use into the energy equation

Nature Conservancy's hot air report may bring up a good point.

The Nature Conservancy published a paper earlier this week that explored the topic of additional land use in the pusuit of energy to meet society's growing needs in the future. The paper explored fossil fuel and renewable technologies alike and looked at their respective impacts on the environment in terms of area of land affected. The study looked at plausible scenarios out to the year 2030.

The paper brought forth the term 'energy sprawl' to identify the habitat destruction that goes along with each technology. Obviously, efficiency gains resulted in net decreases in acreage of habitat affected, but suprisingly coal and natural gas production came in as less environmentally needy than solar.

Of course, Green Inc. and others focused on biofuels' impact and clean energy negatives in general. From Green Inc., "by 2030, energy production in the United States will occupy a land area larger than Minnesota, in large part owing to the pursuit of domestic clean energy. The authors call it 'energy sprawl', a term meant to draw attention to habitat destruction, and to warn that biofuels in particular will take up substantial amounts of land." While taking the opportunity to push the nagatives of biofuels, they did highlight the main point of the Nature Conservancy report, that is, land use area and natural habitat effects should be considered alongside economic aspects of national policy.

The report from Nature Conservancy stated some other facts that coincided with several graphs. Below is the 'meat and potatos' graph:

The report made some kep statements in the discussion section. Highlights include:

Implementing a cap-and-trade system may increase the total new area impacted by energy development and change its distribution among habitat types.
Energy production will shift from fossil fuels to energy production techniques that draw more diffuse energy from a broader spatial area.
Energy conservation can help reduce the new energy needed by the U.S., reducing the area impacted by new energy development.
Energy sprawl is less severe when the cap-and-trade bill is more flexible, allowing for CCS, new nuclear plants, and international offsets.
With respect to biofuels: Much energy crop production will occur on grassland or forest sites already in use for agricultural production, although increased aggregate demand for agricultural commodities may still spur agricultural expansion domestically or internationally. (These indirect land use changes may account for biofuels' overblown figures)
An increase in wind production may be compatible with biodiversity if properly sited, but certainly will pose a challenge for conservationists, because of the large area impacted and the threat of bird and bat mortality.
For new petroleum and natural gas production, we estimated the amount of new pipeline needed, based on current ratios of kilometers of pipeline to wells, assuming that these ratios held constant into the future.
We have not attempted to estimate the new area impacted by new long-distance transmission lines needed to carry new capacity, as the length and location of new lines is very uncertain and depends on future energy production mixes as well as federal and state policy.
All scenarios of the effect of a cap-and-trade bill are tentative due to uncertainty about the pace of technological change, among other things.

You can read the full report here. Or read Mother Nature Network's sitdown with one of the scientists in the study here.

The central message of the report, "Energy sprawl deserves to be one of the metrics by which energy production is assessed", is a solid point to be made, but the assessment methods used by the Nature Conservancy do not seem to be thorough in some cases.

For example, nowhere in the report are coal and oil's true effects on the different ecosystems considered as their emissions diffuse into the environment. The report looks at the effect of wind turbines on bats and birds, but it does not consider the effect of coal's mercury emissions on fish. One has to wonder if the report considered how much land use change was considered in the case of mountaintop mining where whole valleys are filled with debris and streams are impeded. In terms of hydroelectric plants, the report considers stream impairment as a negative effect, but since coal companies currently are exempt from the Clean Water Act with respect to mountaintop mining debris (they are allowed to call debris 'fill'), perhaps blocking streams throughout the Appalachian region were not considered in coal's land-use impacts. With respect to oil, dependence upon foriegn countries' oil, incentivizes American farmers to use more land to grow food to meet demands in the Middle East and Africa where nations choose to spend financial resources on the more lucrative oil trade; the report considers indirect land use changes for biofuels, but gives oil a free pass on this topic. Overall, the report seemed limited in its conclusions based upon certain assumptions that researchers plugged into their computer models. Just as with climate models being used to predit future effects, the models used for this report were not able to assess the plethora of variables that will make up the energy matrix over the course of the next 20 years.

However, it is nice to see other aspects of the human impact on the planet being considered rather than just the climate. BBC this week asked if the entire environmental movement had been hijacked by climate change. "Species are going extinct at perhaps 1,000 times the normal rate, as key habitats such as forests, wetlands, and coral reefs are plundered for human infrastructure. Aquifers are being drained, and fisheries exploited at unsustainable speed. Soils are becoming saline, air quality is a huge cause of illness and premature death; the human population is bigger than our one Earth can currently sustain. So why, you might ask, are the world's political leaders not lamenting this big picture as loudly and as often as the climate component of it?"

In a previous post, I used a start-up biofuel technology to try to draw some comparison figures using the Alberta oil sands development of 140,000 sq. km. to equate with not-so-distant biofuel production figures. Granted, using non-commercialized technologies is a stretch, but the point of land-use impact comparison becomes more valid for biofuels as the technology improves. Even the Nature Conservancy's report acknowledges that "All scenarios of the effect of a cap-and-trade bill are tentative due to uncertainty about the pace of technological change, among other things".

This other post on current solar technology that compares solar land use acreage and energy development to that of coal, contradicts the findings of Nature Conservancy entirely. "If you covered the 1.5 Million Acre area of Kentucky that has been affected by Strip Mining and Mountaintop Removal with Solar Panels like those commonly manufactured today, then you would produce 2.9 times the energy every year from that Installation than you would from mining the coal. In addition, unlike in coal mining, where once you've mined out an area, you have to move on to another, in the case of Solar, the Installation would produce Energy Year after Year from the same pieces of land." There seems to be something 'fishy' in the Nature Convservancy's report. Here are some other figures for solar regarding MW per acre.

The part of the report that seemed off-kilter the most was the fact that habitat which was already developed was excused; so, in essence, fossil fuels received a free pass on their activities up until now. The other part of the report that was left out was that once clean energy systems are put in place, their impact on the habitat lowers in some cases to zero. Perhaps taking their findings out to 2050 would show a considerable differentiation between fossil fuels and clean energy.

As stated with the AmericanSolarEconomy post, oil, coal, and natural gas have to move on, constantly impacting more habitat and ecosystems in order to fuel their growth. Nowhere in the report did emissions figure into land use effects. Additionally, oil and gas pipeline effects upon habitats were only extended several dozen yards from the pipeline; what about migration corridors being affected and the indirect land use changes from changes in grazing habitats of wild herds.

Obviously, many ecosytems and species are entering a period of decline based upon pollution from fossil fuels. The scientists from the Nature Conservancy seemed limited in this respect in their considerations.

To say that solar energy in all its forms is more impactive upon the environment than oil, does not take into account the number of roads built to facilitate the automobile economy. Where is this in the Nature Conservancy report? Seed Magazine reports that, "The amount of area required at 10 percent efficient solar cells in order to power the United States would be comparable to the nations numbered highways, so this is not by that measure an extraordinary amount of land. We have covered more area already with parking lots and roads by far than we would need to cover with solar converters to power civilization for centuries."

While factorially ommissive in its considerations, the Nature Conservancy report's ulitmate finding, "Energy sprawl deserves to be one of the metrics by which energy production is assessed", is a good one that should enter into the debate on energy. "We either have the lights go out, or we find a way to site energy generation facilities of one type or another in a responsible way."