ENERGY REVOLUTION: An international panel of experts recommends carbon capture and storage from coal-fired power plants, in addition to more efficient coal burning, as key technology solutions to global warming.
CSIRO

Both Brazilian sugarcane farmers who turn excess to ethanol and Chinese city dwellers who enjoy hot tea thanks to solar water heaters don't realize it but they are at the forefront of what an international panel of scientists hopes the future will look like. The Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council—a group that represents 150 national scientific and engineering academies—released a report this week detailing how countries can shift from burning coal and other greenhouse-gas emitting fuels to cleaner energy while also introducing modern forms of energy to the billions worldwide who rely on charcoal, firewood or even dung as their fuel.

Some "1.6 billion people don't have access to electricity," notes physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and co-chair of the panel that wrote the report, commissioned by the governments of China and Brazil. "The energy problem means different things to different people."

In the developed world, "conservation and energy efficiency will remain for the next several decades the most important thing the world can do to get on a sustainable energy path," he adds. Developing countries, such as China and Brazil, need "to leapfrog well past what we did in the West, like in the U.S., where we have sprawling suburbia and long commutes."

The report—"Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future"—addresses the challenge of bringing modern energy to everyone, while reining in global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Currently, according to the International Energy Agency, the world is on a path to a 40 percent increase in oil-burning alone by 2030 that will lead to a concomitant rise in CO₂ emissions of 55 percent.

As it stands, fossil fuels, primarily coal and oil, supply around 80 percent of the world's energy needs, and known reserves of coal alone could power the world at current consumption levels for several centuries. But burning such fuels accounts for more than eight billion metric tons of CO₂ entering the atmosphere yearly.

The report calls for a massive investment—doubling the current worldwide energy research and development budget of roughly $9 billion—as well as implementation during the next decade of improved energy efficiency, carbon capture and storage technology, and deployment of renewable energy sources. "Energy conservation would be a first priority—through transportation, lifestyle and also building," says panel member Li Jinghai, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

But the "cornerstone" of any sustainable energy future, according to panel member Ged Davis, co-president of global energy assessment at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, will be carbon capture and storage. "We still are a long ways from any sense of commerciality," he says.

In order to get technologies, such as integrated gasification and combined cycle coal power plants with carbon capture and storage, into the economic mainstream, a carbon price is needed. The panel estimates the necessary price would be $100 to $150 per metric ton of carbon, or $27 to $41 per metric ton of CO₂. "We are now doing a little bit [of carbon capture and storage], but it's mostly at the level of enhanced oil recovery, several million tons per year," Chu says. "If this is going to be a significant part of controlling carbon emissions, it would have to be on the scale of one [billion] to 10 billion tons per year."