Serious greenery is about efficiency--not only in the use of energy but also labor and capital.

(Excerpt) The winds of economic destruction are flattening not just retirement accounts but also naive visions for a green economy. Public support for costly new green mandates is weakening, and government budgets to fund them are bleeding red ink. Plummeting prices of oil and other fossil fuels have made it harder for green to compete in the marketplace. IPOs of firms working on "clean tech" green energy that have fueled fantasies of the coming energy revolution have crashed to a halt. In all the bad economic news, a new face of green is coming into focus. Whereas the old view of green tech was based on many small, decentralized sources of power and a green economy that harnessed the power of the marketplace, the new version will rely more heavily on regulation and subsidies. It will also embrace the wisdom, true in most of the energy business, that bigger is better for weathering economic storms.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies form a key piece of virtually all roadmaps for global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions reductions-many studies predict that CCS will contribute 20-50% of the necessary CO₂ emissions reductions by 2100. To assess actual progress of CCS projects towards fulfilling these expectations, the PESD Carbon Storage Project Database tracks all publicly announced CCS projects worldwide.

Through careful examination of numerous information sources, we grouped all CCS projects into three categories according to the probability of their completion: currently operating (100% likelihood), possible (estimated 50-90% likelihood), and speculative (estimated 0-50% likelihood).

We find that even under the aggressive scenario that all "possible" projects are indeed realized, this will result in about 80 Mt CO₂/yr of reductions worldwide by 2025, far short of the 350 Mt CO₂/yr of reductions that are projected as technologically feasible using CCS by 2030 in the US alone.

Looking worldwide, then, total carbon storage activity might need to be on the order of 1 billion tonnes CO₂/yr just for carbon storage to play a big role as one of a portfolio of technologies deployed so that the overall energy system cuts emissions on a path consistent with 500-550ppm. Our study shows that the actual deployment plans are on track to deliver less than 1% of what's needed.

We've then gone a step further and looked at the design of each carbon storage project in our database. We find that the vast majority of the most likely projects are associated with Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), sweetening of natural gas, and the production of synthetic natural gas (SNG). That is, the most interesting niche financially is associated with making more fossil fuels. While that investment pattern is understandable, it has huge implications for carbon storage in the power sector (which is where everyone thinks carbon capture and storage, or "CCS", is very attractive for cutting emissions) for the simple reason that only a tiny fraction of carbon storage investment plans envisions the use of CCS at scale. Our guess is that carbon storage will be developed through niche markets in EOR and SNG and then spread, perhaps, to CCS. But that pathway will be slow to unfold and suggests that visions of large scale near-term CCS will be hard to materialize without much greater investment in developing the technologies.

The second version of the PESD Carbon Storage Project Database, developed by PESD researchers Varun Rai, Ngai-Chi Chung, Mark C. Thurber, and David G. Victor, was released on 12 November 2008. The previous version was released on 30 June 2008.

New evidence that the climate system may be especially sensitive to the build-up of greenhouse gases and that humans are doing a poor job of controlling their effluent has animated discussions around the possibility of offsetting the human impact on climate through ‘geoengineering'. Nearly all assessments of geoengineering have concluded that the option, while ridden with flaws and unknown side effects, is intriguing because of its low cost and the ability for one or a few nations to geoengineer the planet without cooperation from others. I argue that norms to govern deployment of geoengineering systems will be needed soon. The standard instruments for establishing such norms, such as treaties, are unlikely to be effective in constraining geoengineers because the interests of key players diverge and it is relatively easy for countries to avoid inconvenient international commitments and act unilaterally. Instead, efforts to craft new norms ‘bottom up' will be more effective. Such an approach, which would change the underlying interests of key countries and thus make them more willing to adopt binding norms in the future, will require active, open research programmes and assessments of geoengineering. Meaningful research may also require actual trial deployment of geoengineering systems so that norms are informed by relevant experience and command respect through use. Standard methods for international assessment organized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are unlikely to yield useful evaluations of geoengineering options because the most important areas for assessment lie in the improbable, harmful, and unexpected side effects of geoengineering, not the ‘consensus science' that IPCC does well. I also suggest that real-world geoengineering will be a lot more complex and expensive than currently thought because simple interventions-such as putting reflective particles in the stratosphere-will be combined with many other costlier interventions to offset nasty side effects.

PESD Director David G. Victor will be teaching "The Political Economy of Energy Policy" in the upcoming winter quarter. The class will introduce students to the major theoretical frameworks used by political scientists, sociologists, economists, and other intellectual disciplines to understand how societies design and implement public policies related to energy, and how the energy industry responds. Topics covered will include theories of the state, monopoly and regulation, public choice, organizational behavior, international agreements, and innovation.  The class will apply these theories to major current and historical issues in energy policy, such as ethanol, climate change, energy security, the role of national oil companies in the world oil market, the functioning of OPEC, and the California electricity crisis.