中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

Authors: Benjamin DESSUS

Date: 2007

Social economy confronted with the energy challenge

For several years, climate experts have been warning us about the imminence of a climate and energetic catastrophe. Can it be avoided? What solutions do we have? Fossil-carbon sequestration technologies, renewable energies and nuclear energy are the most generally favoured tracks. But to rely solely on those technologies would be complete utopia. It is absolutely necessary to change energetic paradigm.

Why is it connected to social economy?

Constatation

In terms of climate

Experts are positive: to avoid uncontrollable and permanent drift of the climate, the world must divide its current human-activity-related CO2 emissions by two (figures close to 12 Gtons of CO2 should be achieved by 2050). If the current tendency is allowed to continue, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts the world consumption of primary energy to reach approximately 23 Gtoe by 2050 (of which 80% fossil), for a final energy consumption (that which reaches our homes, our companies, our cars) of of about 15 Gtoe, as opposed to 7.6 today. Under those circumstances, CO2 emissions, instead of being divided by two as the IPCC recommends, are to be at least multiplied by two by 2050! All the required conditions to trigger the expected climate catastrophe are therefore met… This is all the more true since the two least CO2-emitting fossil-energies, natural gas and oil, are also those whose supplies are lowest. In all likelihood, in 2050, the share of charcoal will be dominant compared with the other two energies, and the CO2 emissions will be reinforced out of it.

Recommandations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

IPCC’s recommandations directly translate into an upper acceptable limit for the various fossil sources: 3.9 Gtoe (3.9 billion tons in oil equivalent) for oil used alone, 5 Gtoe for natural gas used alone, and 2.9 Gtoe for charcoal used alone. As for a mix of those sources, the value should be comprised between both extremes (2.9 and 5 Gtoe). As a matter of fact, in the present account of world primary energy consumption (11.2 Gtoe), the consumption of fossil energy reaches approximately 9 Gtoe, which is already twice two much.

In terms of development

Continuation of current policies, depite the strong forecasted increase in energy consumption by developing countries that it implies by 2030, fails to get the poorest population of Subsaharian Africa and Asia out of the situation of near-total lack of energy they are facing today: 1.4 billion people (18% of world population), as opposed to 1.6 today, would still be deprived of access to electricity. 2.6 billion people (31% of world population), 240 millions more than now, would only have access to the traditional biomass (mostly firewood) to ensure their essential energetic services.

In a more general manner, the rapid increase of oil and natural gas use, not only in developing countries and transition countries but also in OECD countries, will in all likelihood lead to an increasing tension on the price of those energies, even though the deadline of these energies’ production peaks is still matter to controversy. This tension on the price of oil and natural gas, and maybe charcoal, will have some far worse consequences in developing countries than in rich ones. Finally, even if those tensions can be contained within acceptable limits, the energetic investments necessary to start exploitation of the resources, to transport them and to transform them into the various final energetic products will weigh extremely heavy in budgets (16 000 billions in investment should be mobilised by 2030).

In terms of safety

The very probable tension on fossil resources, generated by rapidly increasing draining of oil and natural gas, amplifies the insecurity of supplying. In this context, conflicts, natural catastrophes, technical incidents and accidents can have major consequences on the security of energy supplying or dispatch of network energies. Reciprocally, the tension on those resources, by raising fears over the supplying safety, increases the risk of conflicts between consumer countries, concerned about securing their supplying at all cost, and producer countries. There again, the least developed countries have no means, neither economic nor political or military, to weigh in those conflicts.

So are we condemned to this apocalyptic vision?

“No”, our engineers and economists say, echoed by our governments: “we have two complementary levers at disposal to address this major challenge.

First, we can use technologies to substitute fossil energies with energies that produce little or no greenhouse-effect gases, such as nuclear energies (fission or fusion) or renewable energies (solar, eolian, hydraulic, biomass, geothermal, etc.)

We can also develop “atmosphere repairing” technologies, the first of which is capture and storage, for sufficiently long, of the carbonic gas produced by the combustion of fossil energies.

By combining those two types of solutions, with vigorous research programmes and ambitious industrial policies, the hell if we can’t get out of this dead-end without compromising our - necessary - economic and social development!”

But are the application potentials at global level of these technologies, as well as their maturation and implantation dynamics, up to the task?

The answer is obviously negative. Let us examine the example of a nuclear scenario like SUNBURN (The SUNBURN scenario, B.Dessus and Ph.Gerard, Global Chance n.21 booklets), a very ambitious international programme that plans to replace gas and charcoal power plants with new nuclear capacities for the basic power needs.

Given the rate of new needs, qudrupling of the nuclear production capacity should be planned as early as 2030. Then, in spite of its ambitiousness, this programme will save only 10% of the emissions at that date, while they will have increased by 60% by then according to the previsions of the IEA. Besides, such a scenario leads to uranium reserves being used out around 2100 if the nuclear pool is not massively converted to plutonium combustion, through installation of so-called “fourth generation” reactors, currently still in research phase, and which might bear new proliferation risks.

Concerning renewable energies, the situation is a little more complex. The IEA scenario for 2030 proposes an ambitious policy of 80% increase in hydrolic use, 50% in biomass use, and a five-time multiplication of eolian and photovoltaic use. It is definitely possible to do more, concerning in particular second-generation biofuels, thus saving an additional 1.5 gigatons of CO2 in 2030 compared to the previsions of the IEA, that is 5% of the emissions in 2030.

There is still the capture and storage of CO2 in terrestrial underground, a track that raises many hopes. The technologies to separate and capture CO2 in plants’ fumes already exist, even though some further improvements are expected. But the development of this way is confronted with the difficulty of finding storage sites near the production areas. In the current state of our knowledge, only partially or entirely used out oil wells offer safe storage capabilities; but the map of those wells covers only very partially that of the production means. Given the life span of the already installed pool, and the range contingencies between capture and storage sites, one cannot reasonably expect to exceed 1 Gton of avoided CO2 in 2030, that is another 3% of the emissions in that year.

The combination of those three options – making the optimistic assumption that they be undertaken simultaneously without meeting any technical, economical nor social-political obstacle – is not that more reassuring: we would hardly achieve stabilisation of our CO2 emissions in 2030, at a way-too-high value (33 Gtons), without ever achieving the goals of 2050.

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• L’économie sociale face au défi de l’énergie