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by Jesse Jenkins | The Energy Collective

Jesse Jenkins: Even before world leaders descended on Lima, Peru this week for United Nations-sponsored climate negotiations, climate diplomacy made global headlines with the joint announcement of a partnership between the world's two largest carbon emitters: the United States and China.

The joint pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions and collaborate on clean energy technology development has been hailed as a potential sea change in the tone and substance of international climate mitigation efforts.

To dig in to the details of this U.S.-China climate partnership, I caught up this week with Valerie Karplus, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management and Director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy Program.

An expert on both American and Chinese energy and climate policy, Prof. Karplus and I explored what the climate deal means for domestic energy policy in each nation, chatted about the major drivers of emissions growth in China, and considered implications of the new emissions pledges for international climate negotiations.

Read the full interview at the Energy Collective

by David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

New research shows that relatively small volcanic eruptions can increase aerosol particles in the atmosphere, temporarily mitigating the global warming caused by greenhouse gases. The impact of such smaller eruptions has been underestimated in climate models, the researchers say, and helps to account for a discrepancy between those models and the actual temperatures observed over the last 15 years.

The findings are reported in a paper in the journal Geophysical Review Letters, co-authored by MIT Professor Susan Solomon, postdoc David Ridley, and 15 others. They help to explain the apparent slowdown in the pace of global warming recorded over the last 10 to 15 years — possibly explaining as much as half of that slowdown, the researchers say.

“We’ve learned a lot of new things about how the Earth’s climate changes, not just from year to year but from decade to decade, as a result of recent research,” says Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT. “Several independent sets of observations show that relatively modest volcanic eruptions are important.”

For the last several years, “It’s been quite clear that the observed trends are not following what the models say,” Ridley adds: While the overall warming trend continues, its rate is slower than projected. Previous research has suggested that some of that discrepancy can be accounted for by an increase in the amount of warm water being carried down to the deep ocean, but other processes can also contribute.

The cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions, such as that of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, was already widely recognized; the new work shows that smaller eruptions can have a significant cooling effect as well, and provides a better estimate of how much of the recent reduction in warming could be explained by such eruptions: about 30 to 50 percent of the discrepancy, the team found.

The team found that small eruptions produce a significant amount of aerosol particles, which reflect sunlight, in a region of the upper atmosphere that is relatively poorly monitored: Satellites can provide good data about the atmosphere down to around 15 kilometers above ground level, below which clouds interfere. The team filled in the missing region using multiple balloon, laser radar (lidar), and ground-based measurements.

Aerosols in that intermediate zone, from about a dozen modest eruptions around the world during the last 15 years, may double previous estimates of the cooling effect of eruptions, Ridley says.

“It’s always exciting in science when you can find multiple measurements that lead to a common conclusion,” Solomon adds. “Several independent sets of observations now show that relatively modest volcanic eruptions are more important for global climate than previously thought.”

Overall, these smaller eruptions have lowered the increase of global temperature since 2000 by 0.05 to 0.12 degrees Celsius, counteracting some of the warming that would otherwise have occurred. Now, using this new information, groups that carry out climate modeling can update their models to more accurately project global climate change over the coming decades, Ridley says.

Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers University, says, “This work helps to better quantify the impacts of the most important natural cause of climate change, volcanic eruptions. We have an imperfect observational system for volcanic aerosols, and this work exploits some previously unused sources of information to better quantify the effects of small eruptions for the past decade.”

Robock, who was not involved in this research, adds that in light of these findings, “We need a more robust observing system for volcanic aerosols, to do a better job of measuring future small eruptions.”

Ridley and Solomon were the lead authors of this paper, joining authors from Wyoming, Russia, Germany, Japan, California, New York, Virginia, Colorado, and the U.K. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of the Russian Federation, and the Russian Science Foundation.

Until recently, most natural gas trade has been limited to the regional scale due to the challenges of transporting gas over long distances. Over the last decade, Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)—an option that reduces the volume of gas about 600 times allowing for transportation by ship—has created an opportunity for expansion of the international market for natural gas.

In this report, Joint Program researchers examine the prospects for LNG trade over the coming decades. Part of a collaborative project between MIT and Cyprus, the report estimates that LNG trade volumes will increase from about 240 Mt LNG in 2014 to about 340–360 Mt LNG in 2021.

Sergey Paltsev, coauthor of the report and a principle research scientist and assistant director for economic research at the Joint Program, discusses some of the report’s findings.  

Q. The increase in trade volumes is largely the result of new LNG infrastructure projects. What’s causing the upswing in construction?

A. The main force driving many of these new LNG projects is the high price of LNG in Asian markets. The cost of natural gas in the US right now is about $4/mmbtu. If you add in liquefaction and transportation costs it’s about $10-11, whereas Asian prices up until recently were $14-$16. So, with this price differential an LNG exporting operation can be quite profitable. Actually, the trend that we’re seeing with new LNG projects is the opposite of what we saw less than ten years ago. In 2005 and 2006, US companies were building regasification capacity, or in other words, terminals to get gas into the country. Now, a lot of infrastructure is sitting idle because US prices are so low. Many of the current U.S. projects are actually taking the existing import terminals and converting them into liquefaction facilities, or export terminals.

This underscores why long-term market analysis is so important. Since the development and construction periods of these projects are so long, 4-5 years on average, any projects started now are not going to ship gas until 2020; and those facilities are going to be operational for at least 20–30 years. So that means you need to understand the market dynamics not just today, and probably not just in 2020 when you start operation, but also in 2030, 2040, and 2050.  

Q. Is the US going to become a major player in the LNG market?

A. There are a lot of projects that are in the permitting process right now. To export LNG from the US, you need approval from the DOE and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).  If you add up all of the applications which are currently in the pipeline and those projects labeled by FERC as potential, the total is more than half of the US current natural gas production. Obviously many of these are not going to happen, but everyone is trying to capitalize now. There are currently only two US projects that are likely to be completed before 2020—the Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi projects run by Cheniere Energy, Inc. In comparison to the current very limited exports from the US, these two projects will substantially increase exports from the US. So the US will have some share of the LNG market, but I don’t see it becoming the dominant player.

Most of the exports from the US will likely go to Asia, and one thing to note is that the price of LNG in Asia will start to come down as shipments of LNG increase. Over the next ten years, the global price of LNG will equalize—in other words, the price will be the same in all regions, with the main difference being the cost of transportation. So, the price differential between the US and Asia is going to narrow.

Q. What’s the long-term prognosis? Have we entered a golden age of LNG trading?

A. LNG is poised for substantial increases. Looking at the supply side, the LNG market is going to expand. Suppliers who have traditionally been in the pipeline business, like Russia, are now actively pursuing LNG projects. Again, this growth is being driven by the high price of LNG in Asia, which isn’t going to last forever. So some of the hype is going to diminish, but even with a lower Asian price this mode of natural gas trade is still going to expand.

Future demand is harder to estimate because there’s more uncertainty there, especially when much of the future demand will be determined by carbon policies, especially in China and India. Developing countries are expected to dominate new demand, and this trend is likely to continue. In addition, the LNG technology keeps evolving. In our report we discuss the potential effects of floating LNG (FLNG)—ships that liquefy gas onboard. FLNG could have a substantial impact on the industry if proven viable, since it removes the need to build permanent infrastructure.

Read the full report here.

By Mike Orcutt | MIT Technology Review

China may put a stop to growing carbon dioxide emissions earlier than expected, but how quickly they start coming down is also important.

In an agreement announced last week, China and the United States, which together account for some 45 percent of the globe’s total carbon dioxide emissions, pledged to make significant efforts in the next 10 to 15 years to limit their CO₂ emissions.

It’s the first time China has publicly committed to halting the decades-long rise of its CO₂ emissions. However, due to economic factors and policy shifts, China may be poised to achieve this goal even earlier than promised.

The U.S. pledged that by 2025 the amount of CO₂ it emits annually would drop to 26 to 28 percent below its emission levels from 2005. China meanwhile promised that its annual CO₂ emissions, which have increased by 257 percent since 1990, would stop rising by 2030 or earlier. China also pledged that 20 percent of its energy would come from sources other than fossil-fuels by 2030. That’s up from around 8 percent in 2010.

As recently as 2010, when China’s economy was still growing at more than 10 percent a year, it was unclear when its emissions might peak, says Valerie Karplus, a professor of global economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy and Climate Project.

But economic growth has slowed (it was 7.7 percent in 2012), and in turn so has growth in demand for energy.

Also, this year China’s government has already announced a plan to reduce air pollution by taxing and limiting coal use. Beyond that, carbon trading systems are now being tested in five cities and two provinces, and a national system is expected to come online in 2016.

In a recent modeling study that accounted for these new policies and assumed that China would accomplish ambitious near-term goals for expanding nuclear power and renewables, Karplus and collaborators at Tsinghua University in Beijing found that demand for coal could peak sometime between 2020 and 2025, and carbon emissions could level off sometime between 2025 and 2030.

But, says Karplus, there is still uncertainty over when China will begin actually reduce its emissions, and by how much. “It makes a big difference whether it peaks at 10 billion, 11 billion, or 15 billion metric tons of CO₂,” and whether or not the trajectory decreases rapidly after that peak, says Karplus.

Read the full article at MIT Technology Review

By Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office

With cap-and-trade legislation on greenhouse-gas emissions having stalled in Congress in 2010, the Obama administration has taken a different approach to climate policy: It has used the mandate of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to propose a policy limiting power-plant emissions, since electricity consumption produces about 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases. (The administration also announced a bilateral agreement with China this week, which sets overall emissions-reductions targets.)

The EPA’s initial proposal is now under public review, before the agency issues a final rule in 2015. Christopher Knittel, the William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is one of 13 economists who co-authored an article about the policy in the journal Science this week. While the plan offers potential benefits, the economists assert, some of its details might limit the policy’s effectiveness. MIT News talked with Knittel about the issue.

Q. How is the EPA’s policy for power plants intended to work?

A. The Clean Power Plan calls for different emissions reductions depending on the state. This state-specific formula has four “buckets:” efficiency increases at the power plant; shifting from coal to natural gas; increases in generation from low-carbon renewables such as wind; and increases in energy efficiency within the state. So they applied these four things and asked what changes were “adequately demonstrated” to generate state-specific required reductions.

Q. The Science piece emphasizes that the EPA’s plan uses a ratio-based means of limiting emissions: the amount of greenhouse gases divided by the amount of electricity consumed. So a state could add renewable energy, lower its ratio, but not reduce total emissions. What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this?

A. The targets are an emissions rate: tons of CO₂ [emitted] per megawatt-hour of electricity generation. Then it’s really up to the states to determine how they’re going to achieve the reductions in this rate. So one strategy is to increase total electricity generated. This compliance strategy, unfortunately, is what makes rate-based regulation economically inefficient.

The states also have the option to convert that rate-based ratio target into what the EPA is calling a mass-based target, total tons of greenhouse-gas emissions. This would effectively imply the state is going to adopt a cap-and-trade program to reach its requirements.

In current work, we — scholars Jim Bushnell, Stephen Holland, Jonathan Hughes, and I — are investigating the incentives states have to adopt to convert their rate-based mandate into a mass-based mandate. Unfortunately, we are finding that states rarely want to [use a mass-based target], which is a pity, because the mass-based regulation is the most efficient regulation, from an economist’s perspective. Holland, Hughes, and I have done work in the transportation sector that shows that when you do things on a rate base, as opposed to a mass base, it is at least three times more expensive, and more costly to society — often more than five times more costly.

Q. Why did the EPA approach it this way?

A. I can only speculate as to why the EPA chose to define the regulation as a rate instead of total greenhouse gas emissions. Regulating a rate is often cheaper from the firm’s perspective, even though it is economically inefficient. Why the EPA chose to define things at the state level is more clear: The Clean Air Act … is written in such a way to leave it up to the states.

But if everyone’s doing their own rate- or mass-based standard, then you don’t take advantage of potentially a large efficiency benefit from trading compliance across states. That is, it might be cheaper for one state to increase its reductions, allowing another state to abate less.

The most ideal regulatory model is that everyone’s under one giant mass-based standard, one big cap-and-trade market. Even if every state’s doing its own cap-and-trade market, that’s unlikely to lead to the efficient outcome. It might be cheaper for California or Montana or Oregon to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions, but as soon as they meet their standard, they’re going to stop.

Q. The Science article says that certifying efficiency-based gains is a crucial factor. Could you explain this?

A. Given how the regulation treats efficiency, it really puts in the forefront the importance of understanding the real-world reduction in energy consumption coming from efficiency investments. Let’s say I reduce electricity consumption by 100 megawatt-hours through increasing efficiency in buildings. Within the [EPA’s] policy, that reduction is treated as if I’m generating 100 megawatt-hours from a zero-carbon technology. So that increases the denominator in the ratio [of greenhouse gases produced to electricity consumed]. One concern, though, is that often the actual returns from energy-efficiency investments aren’t as large as the predicted returns. And that can be because of rebound [the phenomenon by which better energy efficiency allows people to consume more of it], which is a hot topic now, or other behavioral changes.

Behavioral changes can make those efficiency gains larger or smaller, so getting the right number is very important. I’ve heard stories of people who get all-new windows, and the old windows used to let in air, but now they think the house is stuffy, so they keep their windows cracked. We should be doing more field experiments, more randomized controlled trials, to measure the actual returns to energy efficiency.

Another related concern is that it might be left up to the states to tell the EPA what the reduction was from these energy-efficiency investments. And the state might not have any incentive at all to measure them correctly. So there has to be an increase in oversight, and it likely has to be federal oversight.

Q. While you clearly have concerns about the efficacy of the policy, isn’t this one measure among others, intended to lessen the magnitude of the climate crisis?

A. For many of us, the potential real benefit from the clean power rule is that it will change the dynamic in Paris in the [forthcoming international climate] negotiations. For a long time the U.S. could say it was doing some improvements in transportation, but they really weren’t doing anything in electricity, for climate change. My view is there are a lot of countries out there that aren’t going to do anything unless the U.S. does. This might bring some of those countries on board.

In this column for the Washington Post Wonk Blog, Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foriegn Relations, describes the significance of U.S.-China climate agreement, and research that may have influenced the agreement. 

Read the article here. 

by Zach Wener-Fligner, MIT News correspondent

All around the planet, high-frequency climate observatories are collecting atmospheric data around the clock as part of the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), a 35-year-old project to study emissions and climate change.

But there’s one problem: Despite a network of observatories that covers much of the globe, AGAGE lacks data on Africa — the world’s second-largest continent.

That’s something that Jimmy Gasore, along with other scientists, is trying to change. Gasore, a fourth-year graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences under Ronald G. Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science, is working with research scientist Katherine Potter to build the first high-frequency climate observatory in all of Africa.

Once finished, the observatory will sit atop Mount Karisimbi, on the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, at an elevation of nearly 15,000 feet. (Climate observatories are often built at high elevations so that researchers can cast a wider net, collecting data from a much larger surrounding region.) For now, it’s located at about half that elevation, on Mount Mugogo in Rwanda — making for more efficient work, since the hike up Karisimbi takes two days.

It’s a project that will fill a large hole in our current understanding of emissions of greenhouse gases — especially those coming from agricultural activities, wildfires, and deforestation. This will lead not only to better climate predictions, but also support regional and global climate-change mitigation strategies.

It’s also a highly personal project for Gasore, a citizen of Rwanda.

“We don’t know about African emissions, and we don’t have enough studies in Africa,” Gasore says. “It’s worth doing this study that has the potential to actually change people’s lives. It’s very gratifying to do research that actually affects people.”

Doing what felt right

Growing up in a village in southwestern Rwanda, Gasore used to watch the shadow cast by his house to predict when his mother would come home each day from her job as a schoolteacher — the first time he ever felt like he was really using science.

Gasore was also innately fascinated with how things worked: He was transfixed when he saw mechanics poking around car engines, and would stare as they struggled with the machinery.

“Even today I can watch road work, and tractors, for hours,” he says.

His father was trained as a nurse, but ran an electronics repair shop, fixing radios and televisions. Just from hanging around his father’s shop, a young Gasore learned about electronics by tinkering.

School wasn’t mandatory in Rwanda when Gasore was growing up, but his parents put a heavy emphasis on education for him and his five siblings. He learned to read French when he was 5, but didn’t attend school until he was 7. His father soon started to bring him books on computers and physics.

It just so happened that he had a knack for school — and for math, in particular. At the end of his primary schooling, Gasore was the best student in his district, and then placed third in a nationwide examination. He was awarded a scholarship to the National University of Rwanda, where he studied theoretical physics, graduating first in his class in 2007.

After finishing college, Gasore reached a crossroads. He stayed at the university and worked as a teaching assistant, but could feel himself growing disenchanted with the ethereal world of theoretical physics.

“When I finished I found that I wasn’t well connected with the real world,” he says. “I knew things, but couldn’t actually talk to people and tell them what I knew.”

Gasore was interested in climate science because it offered a mix of the theoretical and the practical. “I love using my theoretical knowledge on real-life problems,” he says.

Before long, an opportunity came knocking. Gasore was familiar with MIT, and the National University of Rwanda had partnerships with the Institute through OpenCourseWare and iLab. When Potter — now his colleague — came to visit Rwanda as part of her research, Gasore asked to meet her.

Potter was impressed with Gasore’s interests and intelligence, and advised him to apply to MIT. He did, and was accepted. The following fall, he moved to Boston.

Carving a path at MIT

Initially, Gasore was surprised by the freedom he found at MIT: “My previous school was sitting in a class and having someone teach you what to do. So I liked getting to choose what I got to study — to have 20 options for classes and to get to choose four.”

He quickly immersed himself in student opportunities surrounding his studies, joining the Weather Forecasting Team, the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and the Center for Global Change Science. Recently, he was also awarded a Martin Family Fellowship for Sustainability, which supports MIT graduate students in environmental studies.

Gasore realizes the importance of being able to talk to policymakers.

“Policy meetings are about climate-change mitigation and emissions abatement. So you have to talk in those terms,” he says. “I think the Center for Global Change Science is very strong in emphasizing strong mathematical skills, but also keeping in mind that we are doing this for policy.”

Above all, Gasore is passionate about his work: “I enjoy doing it. That’s the motivation. That’s why I can spend the night here in the lab troubleshooting,” he says. “There’s a reward when you spend five hours on something and then at the end you see it working and you say, ‘Wow.’ That’s what keeps me going.”