How to solve the climate change crisis?

                 Image by Avi Decorative Painting

While energy is the livelihood of our civilization, one of our society’s eminent challenges is climate change and greenhouse gas emissions reduction. How are we going to solve the climate change problem?

Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) has been conducting several studies addressing technological barriers and potential solutions concerning greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from energy production and utilization.

GCEP recognizes that there are a number of solutions to this challenge in the 10-50 year timeframe and attempts to work on a broad portfolio of approaches on a global scale, where fundamental research of innovative, cost effective and more efficient energy options are studied. In the past year, the project has broadened and accelerated access to its technology-patent rights and has undertaken additional research activities.

GCEP director, Professor Sally M. Benson, spoke at the State of Clean Energy conference on January 12 in Sunnyvale, CA.

To read more about What should be our main focus in addressing climate change? click here.

Prof. Benson illustrated the connection between societal responsibility, economic viability, security and environmental aspects.

Energy supplies should be accessible to all societies and all people. Along with the anticipated population growth and the growing energy demand, access to energy systems in some countries is limited. Economically, we want energy to be affordable, useful, predictable, resilient, competitive, come from diverse sources, and to be profitable. In terms of national security, the energy systems need to be secure, robust, and compatible with national interests. Environmentally, we want to improve air quality, affect climate change, improve water quality and utilization, protect and maintain natural resources and ecosystems.

Today’s energy use on a global scale is at 15 Terawatts (TW). The terawatt is equal to one trillion watts. Projection models estimate usage in 2050 at 30 TW.

Investigating the inevitable transition to diverse and robust energy supply systems with much lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the researchers looked at several factors: energy conservation and optimized utilization, applying energy efficiency technologies, smart grids, and production/supply/storage of low carbon energy mix.

To reduce the estimated energy usage of 30 TW, the study found that behavior based energy conservation approaches can achieve 20% decrease in energy consumption by 2050 (reducing global use from 30 to 24 TW).

Applying and implementing energy efficiency technologies, we can achieve additional 20% reduction in energy demand (reducing consumption further to 20 TW) in relation to 2050 projections.

Next, the researchers looked at the low carbon energy mix (which also reduces greenhouse gas emissions):
• Petroleum fuels usage - 4 TW
• Natural gas - 4 TW
• Solar/wind/hydro/geothermal - 5 TW
• Biofuels -1 TW
• Advanced coal generation (CCS)* - 3 TW
• Nuclear -1 TW
(*) CCS - carbon dioxide capture and sequestrations technology.

Findings recommend that on a global scale, transformational goals should be accommodating to industrialized nations as well as third world countries:

• Reduce petroleum use by 20% (0.5% a year) that can be achieved by:
1. Electrification of the transportation sector.
2. Synthetic fuels (biofuels and direct solar)

• Increase natural gas use by 20% (.5% a year)

• Increase renewable (solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower) by 10%

• Maintain current use of biofuels but switch to more efficient and clean utilization

• Decrease coal by 17% that can be attained by adding CCS to reduce emissions at remaining plants (increase at 11% a year).

• An increase in global use of nuclear power at a rate of 5% a year.

To transform our global energy systems, the studies recommend to focus on several next generation technologies and tools: strive to double the efficiency of fossil fuels usage, expand natural gas use for electricity production, apply CCS, grow biofuels with net emissions, improve energy storage, and develop a robust smart grid, electricity transmission and distribution. We also need to create a safe nuclear fuel cycle. The researchers noted that scaling up of manufacturing and deployment and tracking sustained progress on measurable and tangible steps against the transformational goals.

We still have a major challenge to create a greater collaboration between academic research and the industry, fostering innovation and leadership, in order to achieve a significant impact.
The transformation will have many economic benefits: job creation, enhanced productivity, growth, and in addition, environmental and health benefits. All of these outweigh the investment costs.

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