Modeshift

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are climbing, in large measure because of China’s production and combustion of more than 3 billion metric tons of coal annually, or nearly four times as much coal as the United States produces and burns. One of the solutions — though it is attracting rigorous opposition in the U.S. — is replacing coal with cleaner-burning natural gas.

Even with protests over fracking, natural gas is replacing coal in the U.S., where technical advances in drilling and production technology are yielding a motherlode of oil and gas from the country’s deep shale reserves.

With technical assistance from the Obama administration, China is busy probing its deep shale natural gas reserves, too. Last year I investigated how well Chinese shale gas development was proceeding, spending more than a week in Sichuan Province, where much of the new development is occurring. My conclusion: China’s hope to replace some of its climate-changing coal production with natural gas is just that, a big hope. Impediments abound. My report is part of Circle of Blue’s path-breaking Choke Point: China project.

XINCHANGZHEN, China— Liu Zhongqi’s mud and brick home is set in a cluster of hillside houses in the village of Lao Chang, a serene half-circle of settlement on the west side of this misty Sichuan Province valley.

A few steps away is a flooded paddy, about half the size of an American front lawn, where Liu raises rice. Next to that is a slightly larger and deeper pond where he produces fish. And just beyond Liu’s fishpond is something very new here and potentially momentous: Wei-201H3, one of China’s first horizontally drilled and hydro-fracked deep shale natural gas well.

The completion of Wei-201H3 in January 2012 — and the earlier development of two other deep shale wells, drilled within a half-kilometer of Liu’s home — introduced more than the sounds of diesel engines and other industrial dissonance. The new wells, Lao Chang residents told Circle of Blue, have wrecked the pastoral iconography of this valley, a place where repetition and water wove together a centuries-old rural mosaic of green fields and dark ponds.

“They came here one day,” Liu said. “It’s been hard. Very hard.”

The same can be said for China’s nascent shale gas industry. In November 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao signed a bilateral agreement to deploy U.S. expertise to develop China’s deep shale gas reserves and Chinese capital to finance the much more mature American shale gas sector. The bilateral pact, formalized in a Beijing ceremony that attracted global media attention, also spurred Chinese and Western energy companies to develop partnerships and dispatch crews and rigs to drill experimental deep shale natural gas wells in bucolic and densely populated Sichuan valleys like this one.

The goal here — and in half a dozen other energy-rich provinces — is two fold:

1. Reach a national production target of 6.5 billion cubic meters (229 billion cubic feet) of shale gas by 2015.

2. Duplicate the American shale gas boom.

The hope is that by increasing shale gas production, China can begin to wean itself off of coal, as the United States has begun to do. Since 2005, tens of thousands of U.S. deep shale gas wells, drilled in a dozen states, have driven U.S. energy costs down, fueled manufacturing job growth, reduced reliance on coal as a fuel source for generating electricity, and helped U.S. climate-changing carbon emissions to drop to the lowest levels in a generation.

“We’re just starting to understand what we need to develop shale gas,” said Zhang Mi, chairman and president of the HongHua Group, a manufacturer of drilling rigs based in Chengdu, a city of 14 million residents about 140 kilometers (90 miles) north of Lao Chang . “Exploration is in the experimental stage. From my perspective, Sichuan is China’s Texas for shale gas development.”

But many of Sichuan’s field engineers, analysts, industry executive, and resource managers say there is convincing evidence that China’s shale gas industry is developing at a much slower rate than either Chinese or American leadership had anticipated — in other words, it is hard to see how China expects to even come close to meeting its 2015 production goal. China’s shale gas sector is buffeted by uncertainty about the quality of China’s shale reserves, concerns about scarce freshwater supplies, competition from other energy sources, the potential safety threats posed by a byproduct poison gas, and emerging civic distrust. As a result shale gas development has yet to move any faster than a very slow crawl.

See the entire article here at Circle of Blue.

– Keith Schneider

Over at Circle of Blue, we’ve spent much of the year reporting on the transition occurring in the Great Lakes as a result of changes in climate and energy markets. The newest article, on shifting water levels and the Great Lakes port and transport sectors, posted here today.

On average, two big ships call every day at the docks of this Lake Erie city. The route to one of the busiest ports in the Great Lakes follows a 34-kilometer (21-mile) ship channel, which starts well out in Lake Erie, runs past the Maumee River delta, and ends 11 kilometers (seven miles) upstream. To ensure the ships do not scrape the bottom of the shallow port at the mouth of the silty Maumee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers annually dredges 700,000 cubic meters (900,000 cubic yards) of mud and sand from the channel, or 1 million metric tons a year.

For decades, the mathematics of waterborne transport here were simple. For every 10 to 11 metric tons of cargo that moved into and out of the Toledo port, about one metric ton of sediment left the channel. (Last year, 10.4 million metric tons of cargo were handled at the port.)

This all equates to more frequent dredging to keep transportation flowing on the Great Lakes. Tens of millions of dollars in Great Lakes port planning and construction depend on a better understanding of weather and water conditions over the next several decades. Tens of billions of dollars in waterborne trade do, as well.

Port Planning in Era of Climate Change
“We’re not in the business of speculating about climate change or its causes,” said Glen Nekvasil, vice president of the Lake Carriers Association, the trade group of U.S. flagged vessels, which is based in Cleveland, Ohio. “We’re just seeing a lot of variability in water levels, and it affects our operations.”

On Tuesday morning next week, August 21, Circle of Blue hosts a conference call with the media and citizens to discuss the findings of the new Great Lakes report. Join us by signing up here:

Essentially, our reporting found that the Great Lakes and Great Lakes states are in the midst of a remarkable and confounding ecological and economic transition related to climate change and the fossil energy sector. Real and swift changes are occurring on waterways carrying less coal, pipelines transporting more corrosive fuels, refineries expanding and modernizing, coal plants shutting down, and natural gas wells supplying more gas-fired power plants. The shift in fuel sources has helped to reduce air emissions, but also increased water pollution events. It’s also helped Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan become top generators of new jobs over the past year.

Meanwhile, the effects of climate change and erratic weather appear to be eroding infrastructure at big ports, and influencing waterborne transport as Great Lakes water levels drop. Sediment levels are increasing. Ships carry lighter loads. Docks and other infrastructure are decaying. A wealth of new science also is revealing disturbing trends about the effects of warming air and water on the intensity of storms, ice cover, erosion, stormwater overflows, sea lamprey reproduction, and other events.

Join our interactive conference call with Circle of Blue’s director, J. Carl Ganter, myself, and three prominent Great Lakes authorities, to ask questions, learn more, and sort out seminal trends that are shaping the Great Lakes.

– Keith Schneider

My friend and colleague Bill McKibben this week joined 10 other prominent climate activists in calling for civil activism in front of the White House in August. I learned of the planned event, to protest the $7 billion Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast, from a young friend here in northern Michigan who is attending Middlebury College in Vermont, where Bill is a resident scholar. She’s also planning to join the protest.

Bill’s rules of engagement for the campaign are like a short list of his own personal strengths of character and courage. He suggests participants ought to dress appropriately, behave reasonably, and be prepared to engage in “civil disobedience that will likely get you arrested.” (That’s Bill at right in pix above with colleague Christopher Shaw during a Middlebury environmental journalism workshop for young writers in the spring of 2010).

It’s fascinating to watch a writer of Bill’s talent and influence steadily evolve as an activist on climate change who is 1) globally celebrated by public interest organizations and a number of developing-nation governments around the world, and 2) raising louder and louder alarm bells in the corporate offices of the fossil fuel industry and the high government councils they fund.

Bill co-founded and directs 350.org, which organizes online and has produced the largest global citizen actions ever about climate risks. In December 2009, during the international summit on climate change in Copenhagen, Bill was among the most sought after speakers and most recognizable NGO leaders. Last year, before the election, he led the widely publicized campaign to convince the White House to reinstall the solar panels that President Carter put on the roof of the White House in 1979 and President Reagan dismantled in the early 1980s. President Obama agreed to hook up a White House solar power system, but the equipment hasn’t yet reached the White House roof.

Make no mistake about the enormity of what Bill and his fellow activists confront in their challenge to the Keystone XL pipeline. Keystone is viewed by its proponents, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as vital to securing adequate supplies of energy in the U.S. A very solid background on Keystone, tar sands development, shale oil and shale gas is on Circle of Blue. I’m heading in late July to east Texas to report for OnEarth on civic unrest east of Dallas, where citizens are concerned that oil leaks from the Keystone project are a risk to their water supplies.

Over the weekend on Modeshift I described, with links, the huge fossil fuel infrastructure that is being built alongside the Keystone XL — the $22.6 billion that the energy industry is spending to expand and modernize refineries in the center of the country, and the $30 billion that is being spent to build a new pipeline network to transport tar sands oil, and deep shale oil and gas.

Completed and Proposed Oil and Natural Gas Pipelines in U.S.

Keystone and Keystone XL pipelines — $12 billion

Alberta Clipper — $3.3 billion

Southern Access Extension — $350 million

North Dakota System Expansion – $100 million

Enbridge Bakken Expansion – $560 million

Bakken Marketlink – $140 million

Bakken North -  $200 million

High Plains Expansion – $220 million

Northern Gateway Pipeline — $5.5 billion

Rocky Mountain Express gas pipeline — $4.5 billion

Proposed Cochin natural gas connector — $550 million

Quintana Capital Group oil pipeline: $250 million

Monarch pipeline —  $1 billion

Texas Longhorn — $275 million

US Refinery Expansions

Motiva (Shell) planned completion 2012 – $7.5 billion

BP Whiting Expansion, underway – $3.8 billion

Detroit Marathon expansion – $2.2 billion

Valero Port Arthur expansion – $1.4 billion

Total Port Arthur expansion – $2.2 billion

Wood River expansion – $1.8 billion

Marathon Garyville expansion – $3.7 billion

Bill McKibben is tackling the most significant and riskiest confrontation over resources and the economy in our lifetimes. He’s trying to head off a calamity. An article last week that completed Circle of Blue’s year-long Choke Point project on energy and water describes some of the dimensions. Energy developers are pursuing ever harder and more dangerous reserves of oil, gas, and coal, and driving up energy prices. They’re making a fortune while also producing  a new magnitude of environmental damage. Energy companies feel justified because they see themselves holding off energy shortages that would cripple the economies of the U.S. and China.

But it’s a gambit, that unless dramatically alterred, has an unmistakable climate and economic conclusion. Bill McKibben and most of the world’s scientists say our unreasoned search for fossil energy is wrecking the planet’s capacity to regulate global temperatures. And I quote David Fridley, an energy supply expert from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who says we’re spending at peak levels for energy in the U.S. now, and a deeper recession is fast approaching. Energy prices are heading steadily higher, not necessarily because of short supplies, but also because it is getting so much harder and more expensive to mine, drill, process, transport, and supply markets.

– Keith Schneider

Jay Letto, a friend who oversees the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists, wrote to me last week asking for my ideas and participation on a panel in October that looks at U.S. and China clean energy and environmental technology development.

Here’s my response:

The last year of reporting on energy and environment issues globally has been just about as interesting and engaging as any I’ve done — the China experience in particular. I took three long reporting trips there over six months from October to April, covering the Tianjin climate conference last year and doing the research for Circle of Blue’s Choke Point: China project, which we finish with our last piece on Tuesday. Tremendous story occurring there and it’s been a privilege to interview the people putting in place the tools and equipment that are building a nation at a scale and speed that is just off the hook. One of the early chapters in our report was about China’s non-fossil fuel sector, which is now well ahead of such development in the U.S.

I’m happy to help you frame the panel and would enjoy participating if 1) I’m here and 2) can find some dough to defray expenses. I may be in China at that time. I’ve been working with some DC-based people to line up a teaching/writing gig in Guandong in the fall. I’ll know more by summer’s end.

On the general idea,  a few thoughts:

1. China is investing almost $80 billion annually over the next decade to develop its wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, and biomass electrical generation sectors. By the end of the decade it will generate about  700 gigawatts of power from these technologies, up from about 266 gigs at the end of 2010. If that kind of development occurred in the U.S. it would amount to 60 to 70 percent of our electrical generating capacity by 2020. So China is outpacing the US in every non-fossil fuel sector except nuclear when it comes to electrical generating capacity.

2. China, though, is not nearly as much of a clean energy hero as some would want to believe. Reason. It’s growing so fast, and its top cultural and economic priority is to continue to grow at breakneck speed and gargantuan scale. Result: Coal production has tripled since 2000 to 3.15 billion metric tons in 2010 (more than three times US coal production and use) and is expected to increase by 1 billion more metric tons annually  by 2020. Coal supplies over 70 percent of national energy needs and will continue to linger at that level for at least the next decade, even with all the non-fossil development. Reason in part: Electrical generation in China, now about 960 gigs, is anticipated to at least double to 1,900 gigs by 2020. The U.S. also produces about 960 gigs annually. So China over the next ten years will add the equivalent of all the electrical generating capacity that it took the US 100 years to build. The environmental consequences of China’s coal-based electrical production sector is enormous for water, air, and land resources.

3. China plans to double its hydro-generating capacity to 400 gigs annually by 2020 from 213 gigs at the end of 2010. The environmental consequences to the river basins in southern China, where most of the dams are either under construction or planned, are high. The tradeoff — less coal and climate-changing emissions vs. damage to natural areas, fisheries, and human communities — is one that China has chosen to make but is producing civil unrest as well.

Last year Circle of Blue produced Choke Point: U.S. which looked closely at the contest over energy demand and water supply here. We concluded that the U.S., is devoting itself to perpetuating the fossil fuel economy in order to hold off the damage that rising energy prices is doing to our way of life. In order to produce the energy we need at current rates of demand, and to prepare for generating more as demand grows, the U.S. is quite literally going after energy resources that lie in much more difficult forms and places to tap.

The country, afraid of rising gasoline prices and unwilling to pursue cleaner alternatives at any kind of scale, appears  clearly ready to tear itself asunder and produce environmental damage that is an order of magnitude higher than we’ve sustained in previous decades. The Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West are targets of deep shale oil, gas, and tar sands development. Northern Alberta is  now the biggest mining district in the world. The Gulf Coast deepwater exploration — well we know that story now.

The point I’m making here is that the two largest economies aren’t in any competition over technology or practices to advance environmental safety. Nor are they in competition to foster fossil fuel development. In fact I found tremendous cooperation between U.S. and Chinese companies and the two governments to assist China and the U.S. in strengthening conventional energy security — Westinghouse is building China’s nuclear reactors, Peabody is financing advanced coal gasification technololgy in Tianjin (see pix above), the U.S. is assisting China’s shale gas development with technical support, and China has billions invested in North American tar sands, gas, oil, and pipeline developments.

What China and the U.S. are doing is perpetuating the fossil fuel economies of both nations, and the environmental costs of the expansion in gas, oil, coal, and tar sands developments is serious and growing. So maybe a panel that looks closely at these troubling trends in the world’s two largest economies could be something you’d also find interesting. I realize that this suggestion may take you off course and SEJ may have already done such a panel, but the big global environmental story is what’s happening with new fossil fuel development in both countries. Even with China’s new clean tech sector development, it’s a small piece of that nation’s overall energy plan for at least the next decade.

– Keith Schneider

There’s nothing like confronting the big fist of climate denial in Congress to decide new tactics are needed to cool the planet. In the past week, U.S. climate activists shook off the national election’s punch to the gut and began delivering a few jabs of their own.

This week in California, outgoing Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the formation of a clean energy financing program to commercialize technologies, reduce carbon emissions, and generate renewable energy. Schwarzenegger described the “R20″ global program during his third and last Governors’ Global Climate Summit, which attracted representatives from 80 countries. The public-private partnership of 20 “metropolitan, state, and subnational” governments will also enact comprehensive low-carbon policies within five years.

Other than planning to write a book Schwarzenegger hasn’t mentioned any other pursuit after leaving Sacramento in January. Don’t be surprised to see him in a prominent national and global climate action role. His interest in reducing carbon emissions and growing the clean energy industry is keen and authentic.

Next month, California’s proposal to become the first state in the country to cap and trade greenhouse gases within the state, starting in 2012, is scheduled to become law. This fall, Schwarzenegger joined greens and former Secretary of State George Schultz to convince voters to soundly reject the oil industry-financed Proposition 23, which would have suspended A.B. 32, California’s global warming law. “Prop 23 was the largest clean energy referendum in history,” Schwarzenegger said yesterday. “The oil companies flexed their muscles, trying to overturn our environmental law. We flexed back.”

Scientists also decided this week to join the fray. The American Geophysical Union, the country’s largest association of climate scientists, said on Monday that 700 researchers have agreed to push back against their critics. One of the leaders, John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, is developing a rapid response group that includes three dozen leading scientists to support the consensus on global climate change.  The group is almost certain to be busy, the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out this week, since climate-science denying conservatives are taking over the House and “the misinformation is now coming from the very people charged with solving the problem,”

Not to be outdone in the opening of what could be a new era of climate stridency, one of the country’s green titan organizations has decided it’s going to be a lot less polite in its climate advocacy. Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund,  said on the Huffington Post that his organization is re-evaluating its tactical approach to climate action. “It is time to sharpen the nation’s focus on the businesses that obstruct vital progress,” Krupp wrote. “For EDF, that means our historic interest in cooperation over confrontation will be recalibrated.”

– Keith Schneider

Maybe things aren’t as dismaying as we thought a week ago. Or just a little less in the dismay department.

In the last few days, two of the prominent names in American politics and business appeared to reach consistent conclusions about governing, technology, and the warming climate.

On Friday, Karl Rove told an audience of natural gas developers in Texas that “climate is gone” as a Congressional issue. And this week, in a Rolling Stone interview, Bill Gates said it will take a breath-taking leap in innovation to meet rising global energy demand and still cut climate-changing pollution. “To have the kind of reliable energy we expect and to have it be cheaper and zero carbon,” said the Microsoft chairman, “we need to pursue every available path to achieve a really big breakthrough.”

Rove and Gates view the crisis from alternate sides of the political spectrum, of course. But in succinctly describing the problem they also indirectly set out a path for climate activism that involves much greater grassroots agitation to win elections, and higher levels of publicly-funded support for clean energy research and development.

Tactics
Both facets of that tactical strategy are within reach. In Washington, the results of the election, while damaging, also left enough sympathetic lawmakers in place to make some progress on the clean energy investment front. Democratic lawmakers intent on making a difference on climate and energy retained their chairmanships in the Senate. And of the 56 members of the Congressional Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, just seven House and one Senate member lost their bids for reelection. “It should be clear,” said Sam Ricketts, the coalition’s executive director, “that a vote for cap and trade and ardent support for a cleaner environment were not the target of voter anger that many opposed to these policies might lead you to believe.”

In addition, the most important and telling vote for climate action in the country was the strong majority result to enforce the emissions reduction and energy efficiency goals of AB32, California’s climate law. In a game changing marriage of superior campaign financing, message development, and grassroots activism, climate advocates and clean energy venture capitalists outspent, out-organized, and soundly beat the oil industry in a crucial vote.

A New Opening
Climate activists in and outside Washington, who nearly a year ago anticipated a big diplomatic advance in Copenhagen, are justifiably worn by the reverse momentum in the 11 months since. But in the past week, my conversations around the U.S. indicate a resolve among activists to dig deeper and be prepared for a new opening.

That could come sooner than any of us think.

No matter how tightly the fossil fuel industry wraps itself around lawmakers in state capitols and on Capitol Hill, there is still the one motivating electoral factor it cannot control – the American response to rising gasoline prices. The global knife edge that describes the tightening supplies and increasing demand for oil will inevitably tip toward $4-a- gallon gas or higher, say energy industry analysts. When that happens, perhaps in the next year, climate activists need to be ready to identify the culprits who blocked the cheaper and cleaner alternatives and the jobs, prosperity, and safety they would have produced.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China — On Monday, two days after the UNFCCC climate conference ended after six days of grudging negotiation, the sky above this busy city turned blue, the sun appeared for the first time in a week, and Tianjin’s angled skyline, not visible previously in the thick smog, appeared like a gleaming glass and steel mountain range.

The beautiful warm day not only brought a fresh focus to just how earnest China is in building cities of the future, it also helped to clarify the outcomes of this nation’s first global climate gathering.

From the speeding bullet train that brought participants from Beijing to this city’s spotless train station, to the state-of-the art electric buses that transported them to and from the brilliant marble and glass conference center, to the advanced coal-fired power plant and lithium ion auto batteries being built within city boundaries, China is as serious as any nation in adding clean energy and energy efficient tools to its economic development strategy.

The second big lesson of these intercessional talks is that a good portion of China’s work in the clean energy economy is occurring in close cooperation with either the American government or American companies.

Beneath Bickering, Real Progress
So while China and the United States continued the diplomatic bickering over commitments each was making to limit climate-changing emissions, and how to measure progress, the story on the street is that both nations are kind of walking hand in hand toward the same goal.

But one partner seems more ready than the other to take the lead. The big difference, made plain last week here, is that China’s leadership has developed the world’s largest markets for wind and solar power and appears committed to the clean energy enterprise. Meanwhile the staying power of the United States has been weakened by the opposition party’s conviction that climate change is a myth, and its avowed goal to roll back federal investment in solar, wind, clean car, rail, and other clean energy initiatives advanced by the Obama administration.

Christiana Figueres, the UNFCCC executive secretary, considered all of these competing trends and accurately declared the Tianjin conference a step forward. Negotiators completed a draft text to submit to the annual global climate summit that begins late next month in Cancun that, she said, defines “what is doable in Cancun and what will be left after Cancun.”

In the artful language of global negotiations that means negotiators here managed to push ahead a bit to resolve issues related to forest conservation, technology transfer, and financing for developing countries that could eventually lead to a global climate agreement.

Work Party Is Global Success
In the other big global climate story, tens of thousands of citizens from over 180 countries gathered in a giant global work party on Sunday to mark the second annual international demonstration for climate action. Days before the work party, which was organized by an alliance of groups, the White House announced it was installing new solar panels on the roof, the result of a concerted campaign to do so by Bill McKibben, the writer and 350.org leader.

One of the largest demonstrations occurred in Beijing where 30,000 students from 200 Chinese universities used the Global Work Party for a national call for climate solutions, marking the biggest show of youth environmental action in China’s history, said Paul Horsman, a leader of Tcktcktck.

“How do you say ‘thank you’ 7,347 times?” asked McKibben in a message sent to supporters. “People got to work yesterday in at least that many places around the world — the planet has never seen anything quite that widespread. Or quite that beautiful.”

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – Whatever the differences that irked delegates from China and the United States during the six days of climate negotiations that ended here on Saturday, divisions principally defined by how each would control carbon emissions and measure progress, the unmistakable conclusion reached by most of the delegates and participants is how closely tied the two nations are to each the other.

Lying quietly below the nuanced diplomatic language of frustration and distrust expressed all week by Chinese and American negotiators is an expanse of cooperative projects in and outside government that are expressly designed to help China and the U.S. use energy more efficiently, develop new technology, and lower carbon emissions.

Participants this week toured an advanced coal-fired power plant that is being built by a consortium of Chinese companies and includes an American coal company. Chinese and American partnerships also are being forged in solar and wind manufacturing, and in carbon capture and sequestration emissions control technology. The two countries last year established a joint clean energy research center, with offices in China and the United States.

Coda Electric Car
Another good example is how Coda Automotive, a California-based electric vehicle manufacturer, and Lishen Battery Company, a Tianjin-based manufacturer, are collaborating to build batteries in their joint venture factory for Coda’s all-electric cars for sale in the U.S. starting early next year. The powerful, 800-pound lithium-ion battery pack that will provide the Coda with a 100-mile range between charges, is being built and assembled in Lishen’s joint venture plant on the city’s south side.

The Coda’s drive train and electric engine are American designs built in factories in the U.S. The car’s safety systems were engineered by American and European experts and will be built by American companies. And a Chinese auto manufacturer will receive all of the various parts and assemble them under contract into new cars for shipment to the U.S. The company is planning to build a battery assembly plant in Ohio, where Coda’s chief executive, Kevin Czinger, was raised.

In his blog posts and various interviews in recent months Czinger has expressed his own frustration with energy and climate policy in the U.S. But that is not affecting his company, which he says will sell 14,000 cars in California next year. “The good news is that we can take action,” Czinger writes in his latest blog post. “We don’t need to wait for our leaders.  We can do what we do best –  take new ideas and new technology and create.  The electric car can be the driver of a new economic and energy system.  It can be the driver of a new American mindset and a revived manufacturing foundation.  Within a globally interdependent world that will have increasingly higher shipping costs, we can rebuild our car industry based on a new technology.  And we can replace our foreign oil with clean, secure and affordable electricity generated in America.  We can create a new prosperity for this century.  We have the choice. Now.”

The Coda (see pix right) will be priced at around $45,000, and with federal and state electric vehicle and clean energy incentives, the off-the-lot cost will be closer to the low $30,000′s. Either way, neither the Coda, nor the other all-electric passenger cars making their way to the market – the Nissan Leaf and the Ford Focus – are priced low enough for sale in the world’s largest car market here in China.

Biggest Car Market and Big Oil Demand
Last year, China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s number one vehicle market, recording 13.5 million car and truck sales, according to the China Passenger Car Association. Manufacturers, by contrast, sold 10.43 million in the U.S., according to the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Michigan. This year vehicle sales in the U.S. could reach 11.6 million according to J.D. Power.

Sales in China in 2010 are expected to top 16 million units. Xu Changming, a research director at the State Information Center, told reporters in June that the number of vehicles in China could reach 78 million units, up from 63 million at the end of 2009, and surpassing Japan as the second largest nation for vehicle registrations. He also said the number of vehicles in China is expected to eventually rise to about 490 million units, though he did not offer a date for reaching that forecast.

A Coda executive on Saturday said that at the current sales pace China’s vehicle population could reach 200 million by the end of the decade, or roughly 60 million less than the number of vehicles in the U.S. this year.

Electric vehicles, of course, are a staple of transportation in China, though most of them are two- and three-wheel bikes, scooters, and carts fitted with small electric motors. The country manufactures state-of-the-art electric buses, a number of which were used to quietly transport climate negotiators and participants to and from the conference center and their hotels.

The country also is rapidly electrifying its high-speed rail network capable of transporting tens of thousands of passengers on trains, like the one that links Tianjin to Beijing (see pix below and right), capable of speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. According to Chinese NGO experts at the climate conference, China has built 4,000 miles of high speed rail and is in the process of constructing 6,000 more miles.

China, though, could use many more electric cars. Gas and diesel-fueled cars jam China’s highways and urban streets, and contribute to the smog in China’s major cities that is so thick (see pix above in Tianjin) it obscures the tops of buildings. The rapid rise in vehicle ownership also is challenging China’s economic security, just as it is in the United States. China’s oil consumption last year reached 8.625 million barrels a day, or 3.1 billion barrels annually, or nearly twice China’s consumption in 1999, according to the respected 2010 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. U.S. oil consumption is now just under 7 billion barrels annually, according to the Department of Energy.

China produces nearly 3.8 million barrels of oil daily from its own oil fields, which means that it imports 56 percent of its petroleum. That percentage will grow steadily higher. The demand for oil in China grew 539,000 barrels a day from 2008 to 2009, or nearly 7 percent. Meanwhile China’s oil production fell 111,000 barrels a day during the same period, or just under 3 percent.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – Though Chinese workers this week celebrated the 61^st anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, a holiday season as significant as July 4 in the United States, a swarm of construction laborers at China’s GreenGen coal-fired gasification power plant were busy welding pipes, fitting massive joints, and bending steel for forms to be filled with concrete.

Since construction on the $1 billion project began in June 2009, said Li Liangshi, the deputy chief engineer, the dusty construction site has been a nonstop 24/7 hive of activity for 2,100 workers. Next year, the consortium of companies financing the project, five of them Chinese plus Peabody Coal, an American producer, plan to start operations.

GreenGen’s principle purpose is demonstrating advanced Chinese technology to burn coal much more efficiently than conventional power plants, remove many troubling air pollutants, and prove that its climate-changing carbon emissions can be safely captured. Much of the sequestered carbon will be pumped into oil wells to increase production in one of the China’s mature oil fields.

“China has a lot of coal,” said Deborah Seligsohn, the principal advisor of the World Resource Institute’s China Climate and Energy Program, who joined a Clean Air Task Force–USCAN-sponsored tour of the plant on Thursday.  ”This project deals with efficiency and pollution abatement in a fairly clean way.”

Outside Stalled Negotiations, Promising Steps
This week the UN climate negotiations inside the expansive Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center here have been stymied, in large part by a dispute between China and the United States about how the two countries take action to combat climate change and measure progress toward those ends.

Outside the closed negotiating sessions, though, a series of side events convened by NGOs and governments have detailed the progress, some of it quite impressive, that both countries are making to advance clean technology and energy efficiency that are intended to simultaneously build economic vibrancy while lowering carbon emissions. In some cases, Chinese and American companies are cooperating on clean energy and efficiency projects.

The trip to GreenGen illustrated both the competition and cooperation between China and the U.S. to develop the tools and technology to burn coal more efficiently, and to safely dispose of its dangerous emissions. In terms of investment and the number of projects, the U.S. and China are both working to perfect the technology, design and deploy the equipment, and command the potential multi-billion dollar annual market for what both countries call “clean coal” power, but more accurately can be called “advanced coal.”

GreenGen will test gasification technology developed by China’s Thermal Power Research Institute (TPRI). TPRI has licensed the gasification technology deployed at GreenGen to Houston-based Future Fuels LLC. Future Fuels plans to use the technology at its Good Spring IGCC project in Pennsylvania, which it expects will deliver 270-megawatts of electricity while capturing over 50 percent of the CO2 output initially and nearly 100 percent by 2020.

Coal in the China, U.S. Path To Lower Carbon Future
Coal’s influence in both countries on climate change is significant. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported last year that coal combustion at American utilities accounts for 2.7 billion tons of the roughly 6 billion tons of annual U.S. carbon emissions. In rapidly developing China, coal accounts for 80 percent of the 6.3 billion tons of carbon emissions, or about a quarter of all the climate-changing emissions globally.

Both governments, along with utilities and manufacturers see the need to reduce coal’s influence on global warming, and an opportunity to build economic strength in reaching that goal. Last November, during a trip to China, President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao formally announced the establishment of a joint Clean Energy Research Center to collaborate on the science and development of low-carbon energy, and to cooperate specifically on generating energy from coal with much less pollution. In March, Steven Chu, the American secretary of energy, announced that over the next five years the Energy Department would invest $37.5 million in the joint center to support research conducted at a facility in the U.S. and another in China.

The United States, according to the Department of Energy, also is spending $3.4 billion to leverage $8 billion more in private investments to build a national array of plants that demonstrate CCS technology, and that showcase new combustion techniques.

Advanced Coal Projects
They include the $1 billion U.S. investment, just announced in September, for FutureGen, to build a high-tech oxygen equipped coal boiler unit to an existing 200-megawatt unit at an American Energy Resources plant in Meredosia, Illinois, and then deploy CCS technology to sequester the carbon emissions. The DOE also just approved a $308 million investment in a $2.8 billion Kern County, California plant to develop cleaner combustion technology and carbon sequestration techniques. Other investments include $350 million toward a $1.7 billion a state of the art integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant with carbon emissions directed to producing more oil in old wells in Texas, and $36 million for a $2.15 billion IGCC plant in Minnesota. Private IGCC plants are under development in Indiana and Pennsylvania as well, and the Duke Power plant in Indiana is testing CCS storage techniques.

According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution U.S. and Chinese companies are collaborating on a number of projects. In August 2009, Duke Energy signed a memorandum of understanding with Huaneng for developing renewable and clean energy technologies. In September 2009, Southern Company and KBR Inc. agreed to license their IGCC technology to the Beijing Guoneng Yinghua Clean Energy Engineering Company. Peabody Coal is an investor in the GreenGen project. Huaneng joined the FutureGen Industrial Alliance.

Here in Tianjin, the GreenGen project is at the head of a pack of Chinese power plants designed to burn coal more efficiently and to develop and prove CCS techniques. China has built over 20 supercritical and ultra-supercritical power plants that operate at extremely high water temperatures and pressures that produce much higher efficiencies, producing more power with less coal, and thus lower emissions per megawatt of power generated.

According to the World Resources Institute, China has developed and approved seven major energy projects to demonstrate CCS techniques, and to develop more efficient energy generating practices. They include the 845-megawatt Huaneng Gaobeidian Co-Generation plant in Beijing, the first in China to fully test CO2 capture, and features a full suite of environmental controls. During winter months, steam from the plant is used for district heating, and efficiency can be has high as 84 percent. Engineers estimate the plant uses about 400,000 tons less coal annually than a similarly-sized conventional plant.

GreenGen Could Be Big Step
GreenGen represents the next step in China’s drive for higher efficiency and lower pollution in generating power from coal. When the first of three phases opens next year, GreenGen will be the first utility-scale IGCC power plant in China, and one of the few operating in the world.

When fully operational in 2014, Chinese officials assert, Greengen will generate 650-megawatts at 60 percent to 80 percent efficiency – about twice the efficiency of conventional coal-fired power plants – and dispose of its climate-changing emissions through carbon capture and storage technology.

If the plant is a success, said Jiang Kejun, a director of research for the Energy Research Institute, a unit of the National Development and Reform Commission, China is prepared to build 20 more such gasification and CCS power plants. “We want to make sure it works,” he said.

– Keith Schneider

On opposite sides of the Pacific, leaders of the world’s two biggest economies and carbon polluters are plainly thinking about clean energy to power up their economies and cool the climate.

In Washington, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced their intention to extend vehicle efficiency standards that went into effect in April in order meet a national goal of 60 miles per gallon average fuel economy by 2025.

President Obama, in an interview in Rolling Stone magazine promised to keep pushing the clean energy and climate action envelope. And in his Saturday national radio address, the president attacked the Republican campaign plan to scrap clean energy incentives.  ”We can go back to the failed energy policies that profited the oil companies but weakened our country,” the president said. “We can go back to the days when promising industries got set up overseas.  Or we can go after new jobs in growing industries.”

China Making Clean Energy Progress But Coal Dominates
Meanwhile in Tianjin, where China is hosting its first U.N. climate conference this week, Chinese officials also are touting clean energy initiatives. They include mandatory building standards established five years ago that are lowering energy demand, new offshore windfarms that supply as much power as big coal-fired power plants, new cities built on principles of energy efficiency and conservation, and a national commitment to lower the levels of carbon pouring into the atmosphere.

What distinguishes China from the United States is that there’s no political opposition getting in the way. China’s national policy vector is very plainly pointing in the direction of incorporating more clean energy technology, and energy efficient practices into its economy. The U.S. gear at the national level, with Republicans campaigning on a message attacking climate science, the Senate unable to act on a comprehensive bill, and investors unsettled by the roiled politics, is in danger of slipping into reverse if it hasn’t already done so.

What makes the countries similar, though, is how far each needs to go and what both countries are willing to do to really make a dent in reducing global carbon emissions. That, of course, has been the central issue confronting negotiators at UN climate meetings for several years, and it’s the single biggest issue in Tianjin.

Very briefly, while both nations are investing considerable sums in clean energy development, China and the U.S. also are tightly hugging the existing fossil fuel economy as essential to national stability and well-being. The consequences of that are considerable for the environment and the rest of the world.

The U.S. produces and burns 1 billion tons of coal annually, uses almost 7 billion barrels of oil, and last year produced 5.8 billion tons of carbon emissions. China meanwhile, according to state economic agencies, will mine and combust around 3.15 billion tons of coal this year, consume more than 3 billion barrels of oil, and produce around 6.3 billion tons of carbon emissions.

Soaring Energy Demand In China, Off The Chart Emissions
While U.S. energy demand and carbon emissions are slipping as a result of the Great Recession, China’s energy demand is soaring. By 2020 according to government projections, China will use 4.2 billion tons of coal – which accounts for 80 percent of its emissions.  And even if China meets its 40 to 45 percent reduction in “carbon intensity” by 2020,  an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council projects that China’s carbon emissions will essentially double by the end of the decade.

Tianjin climate negotiators, aware of the stakes and stymied by the pace, press ahead here to draw a bit closer to global agreements on financing for developing nations to pursue clean energy, conserving forests, reducing the effects of climate change, verification and transparency, and other issues. The annual global climate summit in Cancun, Mexico approaches at the end of November. The new UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Christiana Figueres, said yesterday there is a dire need to show the world’s citizens that the negotiations are making “visible progress.”

Essentially what she meant is that negotiators need to change the vector of a grim situation. She commended NGO groups for generating grassroots support, including 350.org, which is holding its Global Work Party on Saturday at thousands of sites in nearly 200 countries.

Indeed, there’s time, bushels of good ideas, and a tide of public will to act. The NRDC and Environment America calculated that reaching the 60 mile per gallon mileage standard in the U.S. by 2025 would save consumers $101 billion in 2030, cut oil use by roughly 1 billion barrels, and reduce heat-trapping carbon pollution by 470 million tons, the equivalent of taking nearly 70 million vehicles off the road.

And here in China, before the Tianjin climate meeting opened, leaders in the Guangzhou, the nation’s third largest city, said that they were spending $37 billion on 34 projects to reduce fuel consumption, increase energy efficiency, and lower climate emissions. The projects include advances in public transit, replacing low efficiency lighting with LED technology, and generating a sizable share of the city’s power with green energy sources.

– Keith Schneider