Dr. Karl Hausker: Getting to net-zero - Climate challenges and solutions

>> SARAH MILLS: Good morning, this one is not live, so I will use my booming voice. 
Good morning, and welcome to the Ford School, I am Sarah Mills, I am a research here at 
the Ford School in our Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy, our acronym is CLOSUP 
low sub does apply policy research on a range of state and local issues, but one of our 
specific initiatives looks at renewable energy, the work that we do in close up on 
Renewable Energy is largely funded by the Ford School Renewable Energy Support Fund, and 
it really takes a view that there are a range of state, local and federal policies that 
either facilitate or hinder, renewable energy deployment from the media, or even some 
policy makers often focus on some of the big name climate policies, so there's a lot of 
attention on carbon tax or renewable portfolio standards, or cap and trade or the Green 
New Deal and those are all important, but in order to have an energy transition we're 
going to need to deploy a whole bunch of clean energy infrastructure. And so, it's 
equally important to look at policies like siting because that controls the rules of 
where you're allowed to build infrastructure, it's important to look at tax policy, both 
to make sure that clean energy developers have a financial incentive, they can actually 
afford to deploy this technology, but also to make sure that there's something, some 
economic interest in it, for the communities that would host that infrastructure. The 
work that we do at considers workforce development policy and making sure that there are 
people that are trained to be able to have that clean energy transition come to fruition. 
And I could go on and on.

But importantly, a lot of these policies that we talk about here are on renewable energy 
and we know that a transition and achieving carbon neutrality is going to take more than 
just building more renewable energy.

That's why I'm really thrilled that we were able to partner with us Global CO2 Initiative 
to bring Karl Hausker Graham pus to better understand what getting to net-zero will entail.

I want to acknowledge the other co-sponsors of today's event, the School for Environment
and Sustainability, the Graham Sustainability Institute, and the Center for Sustainable 
Systems. And I also wanna say thanks Susan fancy from The Global CO2 Initiative and Bonnie 
Roberts, who's probably still running around in the back from the Ford School for making 
this event happen today and now I wanna turn it over to Professor Volker the Director of 
The Global CO2 Initiative to introduce our speaker. But thank you again for being here.

[ APPLAUSE  ] 

>> PROFESSOR VOLKER: Sarah, thank you for being the local host and good morning everyone, 
I'm thrilled for any opportunity that I personally... And I think I lost negative can have
to engage with all the codes and colleges on central campus in the periphery of CID or 
North Campus. But of course, today, we're looking at a climate challenges, and solutions, 
which is perfectly lined with what we do at the globe to initiative, and we will hear 
today from Chaucer who is our guest today, coming to us from the World Resources Institute.

Well, he leads the Climate Program and I putting things in a broader perspective to see 
where the challenges are and how we arrive at sensible solutions.

God first lands. Things might make sense and upon close of an inspection, they don't... 
We will certainly hear from a leading expert in this field, one might say, actually the 
expert in this field, he has been engaged in climate-related programs for more than three 
decades, now.

It probably... I lead analysis and modeling of climate mitigation electricity market 
design and social cost of care.

He has done so many things that I could easily use up his speaking time here to...

I don't on, I mean, having spoken with you yesterday, I know that I need to spare any 
second I can.

So acknowledging your work for the Clinton Administration in the EPA and towards in the 
agency climate policy development and COO also saying that you support it as Chief 
Economist, the US senate committee on Energy and Natural Resources you certainly have 
put you degrees from Berkeley and Cornell. To phenomenal use and I'm so pleased that you 
here today, call that it... The floor is yours.

>> DR. KARL HAUSKER: Thank our thanks everyone, thanks to all the sponsors of this really 
appreciate the chance to speak here at the University of Michigan. I think it's important 
that we set the stage, first by going back 66 million years to a lecture hall very much 
like this with a climate change expert speaking to the dinosaurs assembled the picture is 
pretty bleak gentleman. The world's climate are changing the mammals are taking over and 
we all have a brain, about the size of a walnut, the dinosaur is an extinct. They didn't 
mitigate the asteroid that at the earth, they didn't adapt very well. Fortunately, we 
have brains larger than a walnut and we are going to solve this problem, we are going to 
mitigate global warming, we are going to adapt to the warming that is in the pipeline 
that Job has begun and it's gonna be carried on for decades to come. By the students in 
this room. Let's roll up or sleeves and figure out how to do it.

There's no line of what I'm gonna cover today.

The Net Zero challenge, how to take emissions down to net-zero by 2050 consistent with 
the IPCC 15 degree report that came out over a year ago. I'm gonna focus on three 
takeaways from that report. The needed transformation of the entire economy particular 
attention to Pathways to de-Carbonite the electricity sector, and finally the an emphasis 
on the need by mid-century, for carbon dioxide removal. From the atmosphere, I... One 
focus on a special time, on the renewables revolution.

We all know that the cost, the solar and wind has come down, "how far can wind and solar 
take us on this journey?

And I'm also gonna sound a theme of the need to spread our chips beyond solar and wind 
and talk about the rules for nuclear and carbon capture utilization and storage, or CCS 
CC us and finally winding up with what I really consider the carbon capture imperative.

I'm gonna go pretty fast, but you are gonna have access to my PowerPoint. There's lots of 
links at the bottom each slide if you wanna dive into some of the sources I quote, and 
we'll have some Q and A at the end.

So many of you are probably familiar with the 15 degrees report. It not only talked about 
the impacts of various levels of warming. 15 degrees, two degrees. It urged us to start 
focusing on trying to limit warming to 15 degrees rather than the kind... Big widely 
accepted, get two degrees that it helps way for many years. It also laid out the kind of 
pathways, we need to get on to limit warming to either 15 or two degrees, this is the 
rather daunting rather scary chart. Again, many of you are probably familiar with it. 
That tells us where we are now as a globe emitting roughly 40 giga tons of CO2 per year, 
and how we need to get on a very steep slope of decreases so we're admitting roughly 
net-zero missions. Maybe some positive emissions may be taking some out of the atmosphere 
by mid-century, beyond that we're gonna have to even do more.

The IPCC looked at dozens and dozens of computer simulations of how the world economies 
could get there. And I wanna emphasize three major takeaways from all that analysis of 
mitigation pathways. First of all, yes, we need transformations across all sectors.

The power sector are buildings, our transportation systems in our industry.

I'm focusing on CO2 here from the energy sector as I'm sure many of you know, there are 
five other greenhouse gases there is also black carbon there are many different case 
contributors, but the battle is gonna be won or lost on what we do on CO2. It's about 
80% of the problem, but we also need to work on the other five greenhouse gases to 
renewable electricity meaning large as solar, solar and wind in the IPCC modeling, they 
believe that with the cost decreases, we have seen over the last 10 years, we could have 
globally a system that's 60 to 80% powered by wind and solar by 2050, that's great, news 
and comes into the cost far less than we thought 10 years ago, but we're gonna explore 
why that's not 100% renewables in the electricity sector.

Finally, the big take away as you can see past 2050 Global CO2 Miss. So actually, turn 
negative. We need to find ways to actually take CO2 out of the atmosphere because we are 
likely to overshoot the levels, that would hold warming to 15 degrees or to two degrees.

That is also a daunting challenge but I do doable and everything I say today about the 
pathways we can get on can be done with technology that's currently commercial currently, 
commercial or is near commercial, we are testing it in laboratories or we're doing 
demonstrations and will also have more technology innovation on the next 30 years that we 
can barely imagine, now, and the technology innovation almost always brings pleasant 
surprises. So this is doable.

Let's talk about the transformations.

There are four basic strategies that appear in all of the deep carbonation literature on 
how we get there, and I wanna focus first on energy of energy efficiency just across all 
end uses, in the economy, we need to be as efficient as possible.

We have been trying since a re-loves writing in the 1970s to make our economy more 
efficient, we know we can squeeze more use out of every Batu or every kilowatt hour we 
use... We make gradual progress toward that goal.

There's still a long way to go. We know that was currently on technology. In your 
commercial we can take the dollars and the BTs per dollar of GDP from about 3 million B 
per 100 GDP and cut it by two-thirds over the next 30 years.

If we're smart, if we apply the technologies we know work once we make every and 
efficient as possible, the next step is to electrify as many and uses as possible to 
substitute electric, the direct use of electricity. For the combustion of fossil fuels 
and we... We're already starting to do that with electric hybrids plug-in hybrids all 
lector cars in the transportation sector, we know we could switch from gas water heating 
to heat pumps, guess hot water to electric or water heating.

And so this... And across industry, there is a number of applications we could use more 
direct electricity or use electricity to create a zero carbon fuel like hydrogen or 
synthetic methane.

And so in this particular study done by Jim Williams and the consulting group e-ER, that 
came out last year, they charted pathways for the US where we go from about 20% direct 
use of electricity across our end uses to triple that to 60% of all and use energy. We 
know how to do that.

Finally now actually number three, not finally, one if we're gonna Leif the economy, 
we're gonna demand a lot more electricity, we have to de-Carbonite that electricity and 
we can do that through a variety of technologies solar PV, solar-thermal either she a 
thermal hydro New Clear and carbon capture used with fossil fuels, or biomass all of 
those are either zero electric zero carbon generation or very low carbon generation?

I got our in electricity sector, from over 300 down to below 50 or even lower depending 
on the generation mix.

Those three things combined can take us way down this pathway. The four strategy as I 
mentioned, the beginning is carbon capture, we can apply it in power generation, we can 
apply it in industry and ultimately, we can apply it to actually removing carbon dioxide 
from the atmosphere. These are the four big strategies that can get us down that road to 
net zero.

What does this cost?

The good news is the cost of going on these pathways has come way down. Also from the Jim 
Williams study, this is a really fascinating chart of how the... How, what percentage of 
GDP, have we spent on supplying energy to the the OPEC oil embargo of the 70s and then 
decreasing. This is driven a lot by oil costs and then a fluctuating kinda in the 6 to 8 
to 9% range over the last 20 years.

So the baseline projection of what we will spend on energy, if we don't solve the climate 
problem is kind of a steady decrease from six declining more as the economy grows, but 
energy remains relatively abundant and cheap. If we get on any one of the studies, seven 
pathways consistent with ultimately getting to 350 PPM the end of the century, so Sunday 
to the US, to net-zero by 2050 we are spending 2 to 3% additional Ong of our GDP on clean 
energy instead of the baseline case, what that means is just staying in the same kind of 
range that historically we've been at, and this is true globally as well as for the US. 
So, "Soltan climate does not mean the end of Western civilization, it does not mean that 
we tank the economy, we can afford this, it's far more costly not to do this.

This is a complex chart that gives you a feel for those transformations across buildings, 
transportation industry and what happens to various energy sources.

The top, you have demand for liquids meeting a petroleum natural gas and electricity and 
then on the bottom of supply, let's see what happens, how would we transform our use of 
petroleum liquids where we are here with 30 quads mostly of oil fueling our transportation 
sector, we can take that way down and instead we can substitute electricity in our 
vehicles, natural gas a bunch of it is used in our commercial residential buildings, we 
can squeeze that down with the technologies I described and electrify it, on the supply 
side, our liquids or fossil fuels decreased dramatically, we supplement them with some 
renewable fuels.

We probably don't wanna keep making Ethan ABA, we can make biofuels biodiesel, things 
like that and a lower content with carbon capture on the supply side natural gas remains 
an element of the economy in this kind of pathway, it decreases overall use, but as as we 
wrap up the electricity supply and again, like I said, when you electrify everything, you 
gotta produce a lot more power. Natural guests still plays a role.

We get to about 67%Renewables, a largely windows, solar with with our sort of our 
existing Hydro to... In this scenario, we keep... Nuclear flat for about 20 years, but 
then with a new generation of reactors that the nuclear component could increase.

The wonderful thing about this study that again was actually done for the our children's 
trust lawsuit, back in release in 2019, is that the models have sort of a base case with 
nuclear and CCS in along with renewables, along with land use changes that remove co-from 
the atmosphere and they kind of play. What's that game jungle where you pull the blocks 
out okay? They show us sinners. If we don't expand, nuclear what happens... What do we 
have to do if we don't have good land use, what do we do if you don't succeed in look 
electrifying the economy as much.

If you read that study, you'll see how this kind of a push me, pull me thing, when you 
pull options out. One thing that they did not pull out because they couldn't was some 
development of carbon capture technology, they could not get to net-zero without some 
applications of carbon capture.

So we saw in the IPCC studies that we got to 680% solar and wind by 2050, we saw that 
same result in the US modeling that I just showed which is also consistent across say 
the Obama long-term strategy report that came out in 2016 and other modeling that I would 
call sort of mainstream modeling of how do we de-Carbonite the power sector.

Just wanna give you two other examples here is the European Union's clean planet for all 
report from 2018, where they showed how they can grow their renewables to 808-185% by 
2050, in their Dearborn pathways a 65 to 72% of that is wind and solar, the rest is some 
hydro and biomass as they phase out fossil fuels in the power sector, the black diamonds 
and keep... Nuclear relatively constant, although it shrinks as a percentage of total 
generation. Again, this is kind of mainstream modeling of how to get there.

And the final example I'll give you is from Irena the International Renewable Energy 
Authority, which is a collaboration of about 20 governments worldwide designed to promote 
renewable energy across the globe. They put out a roadmap last year on how to get near to 
net-zero by 2050 and they too, it come up with a very similar model for the power sector, 
where globally we could get 80-6% of our power from renewables. A chunk of that is hydro. 
A chunk of that is bio-energy about 62%Is your solar and wind chunk mostly solar PV and 
wind, small chunk of concentrated solar thermal power.

So this is all kind of a very consistent picture, but how do we reconcile that with the 
headlines that often scream out of the trade press or the newspapers? renewables are 
winning the battle against coal and gas on economic terms, solar costs and when costs 
are so low, they're cheaper than existing coal and nuclear according to lead the natural 
guest just about everywhere by 2023.Why would we not just build electricity sector, 
entirely on a on-Sheep solar and went?

One key to this is that this cost comparison, this assertion that solar wind, are cheaper 
than anything else, realize on a metric called the leveled cost of energy meaning 
electrical energy and to understand that puzzle we need to do a little dive on that.

As I said at the outset, there has been a revolution in renewables the levied cost of 
energy from a winder solar plant as declined dramatically over the last 10 years, 
economies of scale, plus plus innovation, the cost of wind in the US has decreased about 
70% On an L-C-O-E-basis cost of PV solar has declined about 90% over the last 10 years on 
an LC-E-basis, so wind 28 to 54, a megawatt depending location utility scale solar big 
plants, not rooftop solar 36-44, a megawatt hour. But what does this mean? What is the 
LCA that means just looking at that plant by itself in isolation, cranking out power 
according to whatever pattern it is capable of You can do this for a call plan or gas 
plant nuclear plant wind solar it looks at it in isolation, so a nuclear plant might run 
247 most of the year except for refueling, a wind plant is gonna have sort of a 
stochastic pattern across seasons across days was just look at the average cost of what 
that plant puts out.

That's important thing to keep in mind, metric of cow and stack it up against other types 
of generation. We find that that pump out these LC numbers are places like lizard 
consulting Bloomberg New Energy Finance, so I... So, they rack up similar numbers that we 
just saw to say, "Here's onshore wind cheaper than 60... A megawatt hour tracking solar 
voltaic non-tracking solar biotech not sure why they have large hydro in here because 
we're not really building any more large hydro in the US, we've taken up all the sites 
and here's combined-cycle natural gas turbine and look at these numbers, it looks like 
the solar wind have now so below the total cost of building a new gas plant.

And I also note that if you run numbers for nuclear CO-CO, with carbon capture gas 
peaking plants, guess with CCS they would all be tire here, then these numbers in the 
kind of 20-304 megawatt hour. But as you can probably guess, we need to keep in mind at 
power systems are not built of one plant. Let's just... Let's just find the cheapest 
plant, build lots of that. A plant power systems are built of different kinds of plants 
playing different roles based on their capabilities and relative costs. So, I like to 
describe this as the riddle of cheap renewables and high system costs. This is just a 
thought experiment from some authors at Google from a couple of years ago, the ask 
themselves, "What if I had a power system of just kind of dispatch nice gas plants that 
cost me for Sena, kill what hour? And what if I started to try to de-Carbonite that with 
just one type of Power Plant and nothing but solar to that power system, the system cost 
stay steady for a while but eventually they start escalating, why because if you just 
keep throwing solar on nothing but solar then you're throwing in a production pattern 
that just peaks in the middle of the day, drops to nothing for 12 hours, the 12 hours of 
night time.

What if we did that, was just wind just tried to de-Carbonite going from 0% zero carbon 
facies up to 100% zero carbon generation, just keep throwing wind on over and over the 
system cost stay stable for a while, but then eventually get that Nine linear effect.

And finally, even if you tried to back out all of your natural guests with nothing but 
nuclear system cost a stable for a while, but eventually turn up, why is that, why does 
this phenomenon happen in all the studies, I've looked at that asked that question, this 
is another illustrate from the "istra ion from that same Google study where they asked 
the same question, but this time, let's do sort of the mixture of solar and wind, let's 
throw in some batteries let's start with zero renewables and zero batteries and see what 
happens as we build out and add more and more solar and wind and batteries, and start 
backing out the gas.

You get a steady system cost for a while, but then you have this non-linear phenomenon, 
what happens why does that happen in these projections of very high renewable systems, 
it's related to something called integration costs, and we have an electrical engineers 
in the room.

No, okay, I ate in a... Because of the intermittent nature the variable nature of solar 
and wind, we have to take certain steps to keep the lights on to keep it reliable when it 
fluctuates as opposed to power plants that are very highly reliable. They still break down 
sometimes, but you control them when they operate and sometimes you can ramp them up, you 
can ramp them down to follow load, but it's different in a high solar. And wind 
situation, the first thing we try to do to address that variability is build transmission 
lines to aggregate solar and wind over a bigger geographic area, the bigger geographic 
area, you can aggregate over you have or the law of large numbers and the output smooths 
out to some extent transmission is not free, that's an integration cost.

Second thing we can do and we're starting to do is load shifting demand response. Try to 
move your demand for power to when the sun is shining to when the wind is blowing.

We can do this somewhat with the pricing mechanism charging different prices, different 
times of day, we can do with programs that use all sorts of cool software to cycle your 
air conditioner or turn on your electric closed drive here and there.

We can ask industry to shut down certain hours and give them some economic benefit for 
that.

We can shift percentages of demand here and there. Some people think we could shift 20% 
or more move load around but it's not cost less, there are prices to pay for shifting 
load around that's an integration cost. The third one that we've heard a lot about... And 
then again, there's lots of good news. Is storage as you've probably heard the cost of 
lithium battery storage has dropped dramatically. Also recently a we are now often we're 
doing utilities are often installing four to six hours of storage on their system. 
Sometimes plants are co-located with storage, that's letting us push abundant solar in the 
day time into four to six hours into the evening and avoiding those dramatic ramp-ups of 
other power sources when the sun sets, batteries are still not free, we're doing some 
steps to deal with sort of the daily fluctuation of win and solar but there are also 
seasonal. Differences in wind and solar production in the winter.Solar production is 
lowest for obvious reasons, distance from the sun angle of the sun.

Wind patterns vary by season and again, depending on weather, and climatic patterns of 
varies by country to country, we tend to have a lower wind production.

I think in the summer is actually lower than a spring or fall.

I'll have to double check, I'll have to double check that. But again, depends on the 
country.

There's also just whether fluctuation sometimes, you have weather patterns that just shut 
down solar and wind for days.

What do you do in those situations? What's your integration cost to deal with that, what 
a number of modelers. Do when they project heavy renewable systems is actually 
deliberately create over generation, in some months.

In other words, I E-If... So I production bottom out in the fall and December, just 
build the system really large to produce as much power as you need.

That system is then overbuilt in spring and summer and you have lots of surplus power if 
you do nothing with it that drives your system costs up.

We need to start thinking about if we have overbuilt systems, we wanna use that spare 
electricity say to create hydrogen if we're not using it in our buildings, our industry 
or our transportation is... So the laymen of explanation for why does this happen at some 
point is that those integration costs are real and they get spread over narrower, more 
infrequent periods large capital cost, I think of batteries that might be amortized over 
only a couple of days per year. That's what drives us the exact shape of that curve 
depends on the system, how much transmission have you built, how much load shifting, are 
capable of doing. So it's not necessarily always 80 or always 60, maybe it can be 90 and 
so, but it's kind of like a law of diminishing returns for the economists in the room. 
You can't just keep throwing the same input into a production process over and over, 
without getting diminishing returns.

I love the German language.

I ate. They have a word, a long word for everything.

Just as an illustration. "duala the dark old rooms.

This is not a computer simulation, this is a real record of what happens at least once a 
year in the winter in Germany, the dark doldrums where for 10 days give or take a couple 
of days, the weather patterns, it's really cloudy and the wind drives up and they have a 
dramatic drop in wind and solar production.

What do they do now?

They turn on their coal and gas plants, they're sort of legacy fossil fuel system and 
their missions, shoot up for those days. But this is the kind of thing that power system 
planners need to compensate for and it's what all of us thinking about what kind of 
electricity system, we're gonna build, how do we deal with this? There's also simulated 
Duca flats that happen in polar vortex period during the US.

So I wanna go back and illustrate those integration costs in a little more concrete way 
here we've already seen this slide. Looks like solar and wind are looking pretty good, 
as stand-alone plants.

But I wanna show you the full graph from B-N-E-F-where you just saw this part, right?

Here's the rest of what they show where they start illustrating the costs of integration. 
So you look at what happens when we start throwing just four hours of storage onto a wind 
plant.

Well, we may get up close to 100 over 100 a megawatt hour.

What happens when we throw 4 of batteries on a solar PV plant? Well, we're up to 176 a 
megawatt hour.

What is the cost of demand response?

I haven't dug into the origin of these numbers, so I can't tell you what's behind them, 
but it's their representation of a range of what that load shifting, and demand response 
would cost on a dollars per megawatt hour?

This is a peer plant which we just run this few hours as we can open cycle, generate and 
gas turbine just appear four hours of utility scale batteries is way up 170s... 180s and 
new pump hydro... Systems, that's a form of storage, it's the largest form of storage, we 
have right now. They've often decades and decades old. If we try to build more pump 
storage systems, it's pretty expensive.

So these are the integration costs that drive up the average system cost that we have to 
be concerned about.

Counterpoint.

And by the way, I'm not here to bash renewables I'm not anti-renewables, I want renewables 
to carry as much of the load as possible.

There are experts largely a couple of academic groups in Australia Finland and this is 
Mark Jacobs and out of Stanford, that do run models that say I can get you 100% renewables 
not only just for the electricity sector, I can supply energy across all economy.

They are not in the mainstream of models. This is a group. I personally, I believe that 
they make rather heroic assumptions to get their heroic on the amount of load shifting, 
that as possible on how far battery Costs will drop and when they model the entire world, 
the model integrated transmission systems across entire continents "tartaric entire 
content of Africa, the entire Middle East is one Kumaran mission system.

Why are you laughing, the... And so there are plenty of groups that there's NGOS, devoted 
to 100% renewables, there's mayors that wanna buy 100% clean, which really in this case, 
means a 100% renewables. We have corporations that have said, "We wanna buy 100% 
renewables, those organizations are increasing use of renewables, which is good, and the 
big integration costs are not gonna happen the next couple of years. They're gonna happen 
out in the 2030s... 2040s, if we stay on this trajectory.

So some people say don't... Don't worry about it now, but wise or even wants you to know 
that they're gonna brew... Their beer with 100% wind. And again, this might be a 
successful marketing campaign but I want to urge you all to think about solving the 
climate problem as a question of what solutions are you gonna bet on to solve this... 
Are you gonna put all your chips on a couple of technologies, or are you gonna spread 
your chips across multiple technologies?

The I rotate.

There are vehement arguments to leave it all on the ground "Stop fossil fuel use as 
quickly as possible, do not use fossil fuel and power plants or in industry, even with 
carbon capture that takes the emissions and stores them safely underground. There are 
people who say shut down the existing reactors, as quickly as possible or maybe run them, 
but don't build any new ones.

These are not value judgments or a of relative risks. And I respect the people their 
opinions to say the cost of the risk of nuclear unacceptable the risks of fossil fuel 
use, are just unacceptable, because there's environmental risks of production of them 
and transportation etcetera, but there are also risks with almost any form of energy. 
There are risks of all the aluminum mining and steel mini you need to do to build 
windmills A... And, and, uh, there's land use impacts, of any energy source.

So I encourage you to think about trading off risks against each other.

If you take nuclear off the table, what's left and how will you supply the world's energy 
needs, plcs off, what do you do if you pull both off, you're effectively putting all your 
chips on a... On a handful of technologies that may or may not solve this problem, right? 
I spread your chips.

My personal philosophy, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog NGO for the nuclear 
Cy for many years has looked at this risk is trade off and they've concluded we should 
keep our existing reactors operating if they have a good safety record, and the costs are 
reasonable... We also have some promising designs for small modular reactors that are at 
the pilot stage, that development is worth watching, we may wanna as a society and as a 
globe put a few chips on that one.

So, I carbon capture and storage. The oil and gas industry has been doing it successfully 
for years to enhance oil recovery on existing reservoirs.

We know we can keep it underground once we pump it up it down.

It was also great innovation going on in this sector, to... I encourage you to become 
familiar with a company called net power demonstrating a 50-megawatt gas plant in Texas 
right now, that achieves a 100% capture of CO2 emissions.

I know I'm getting short on time, but boy, there's one really important thing. Industry 
emissions. We're gonna need carbon capture.

I wanna spend just a couple of minutes on this big task, removing carbon dioxide from the 
atmosphere, how do we do that?

We can think of several ways on the right-hand side here, you see what's called the 
natural solutions.

And had no till farming and other agricultural processes and practices that store more 
soil excuse me, that store carbon in the soil, we can plant trees, we can restore degree 
degraded lands, and we can enhance, we can literally remove carbon dioxide from the 
atmosphere by growing more trees.

And then there's the technical means bio-energy with carbon capture and storage, growing 
dedicated energy plants to the burn and biomass plants capture the CO2 it has a net 
negative impact, and we're even pilot piloting something called direct air capture a very 
energy intensive process that literally removes those 400 parts per million of CO2 out of 
the air concentrates that is ready to use, or store underground. So the those are some 
options. There's other things at the research stage. Enhanced weathering rocks and 
minerals. See, what are captured.

But let's go back to the IPCC? Pathways.

They showed us for a luster to Pathways among the many dozens of modeling exercises, 
they reviewed.

So you'll see the familiar toboggan slide that I showed you, alias in the four pathways, 
what they illustrated was depending on how fast we can get our missions down where 
they're gonna do a little bit of carbon acid removal or more or even more or even a lot.

And the color coding here shows the limits of what we can do with aloe agriculture, 
forestry, and land use practice. These are the natural means of Soils, and forests. It 
can be an important slab of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but there's a limit to how 
much we can do with that. And the IPC has scored those out the yellow part they coded in 
their original report as Becks as bio-energy with carbon capture.

But this, too, could it could involve some constraints start planning that many dedicated 
energy crops. What happens, you start competing with food production and affecting 
biodiversity, so many in the environmental community. Don't like the idea of direct air 
capture. Don't like the idea of bio-energy with CCS. They wanna use the natural means 
they wanna restrict us to "afflue at a court for try and so P-1 and P-2 look a lot more 
attractive, but if you dig deeper into the IPCC report, you look at what underlies 
P-1 P 2, P-3 P-4, what are the global energy demand projections?

And this takes a little bit of digging, and fixing the legend. So the origin report, but 
what this chart shows is exodus of primary energy consumption, globally and we in 
20-20-15, we are about at 600 Exodus assume a dramatic drop by 2030 of almost a third of 
global energy consumption.

It makes assumptions like dramatic movement to plant-based diets, slower population 
growth other lifestyle changes to less energy intensive lifestyle world world-wide, all 
of which, personally, I would welcome in many ways, but is it realistic to think that 
that's gonna happen? drops from 600 to 400 exo deals by 20-30. and then leveling off. 
Or even further decreases I think we have to be prepared instead for growth in energy 
consumption and the P3 P4 shows steady or increasing growth in energy demand if P3 and 
P4 is a more realistic view of the world or at least we need to be ready for that then we 
have to be ready to do this, we need some form of technological crosses. So this is what 
I call the Carbon-Capture imperative we need to start moving now to innovate on carbon 
capture, start to deploy and scale up and put all the regulatory systems in place for 
safety, and the public acceptance. Not 'cause we're gonna deploy it today, but we're 
gonna have to start deploying it. 2030-2040. and the lead times for that technology are 
not measured in months, they're measured in years, and years.

I think we're gonna definitely need it for "caradoc ad removal, we're definitely gonna 
need it for certain industrial sources. It is likely to play a role in electricity 
generation.

And I don't, personally, I don't put a lot of belief behind the idea, that developing 
carbon capture creates a moral hazard that well, we're not gonna worry so much about 
climate because we can capture carbon acid, but again that's something we... We may wanna 
deal with in-Q-and-A-So my key messages, how do we solve this? Be efficient electrify 
everything produced mountains of zero carbon electricity.

Use a broad portfolio of technologies make sure we innovate and bring lots of options to 
the table 'cause we're gonna need many beyond solar and wind spread our chips. And also 
in the discussion, I've a lot been talking about a US perspective, but we also need to 
think globally, the US is a technology leader if we don't innovate in some of these areas 
I'm not sure other countries are gonna bring these technologies to fit even if we don't 
think we're gonna need a technology we may wanna do the RD, and anyway because developing 
countries may need it Eastern Europe may need it countries that are not blessed with the 
kind of hydro and land and wind and son that we have.

So thanks very much, I look