The importance of advancing technology to America’s energy goals
Introduction
Simultaneously achieving national goals for greenhouse gas mitigation and energy security poses a transformational challenge for the U.S. energy system (Barrett, 2009). Doing it at a price society is willing to pay will likely require major advances in energy technology and in many cases advances in the underlying fundamental science (Richels and Blanford, 2007, p. 22; Clarke et al., 2006; Edmonds et al., 2007; International Energy Agency (IEA), 2008; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007). Both technological breakthroughs and market acceptance are inherently uncertain (National Research Council (NRC), 2005).1 Most energy models are designed to analyze trade-offs between costs and societal objectives conditional on assumptions about technological progress. Uncertainty about technological progress is addressed by means of scenario analysis (e.g., Nakićenović et al., 2000; IEA, 2008; U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration (U.S. DOE/EIA), 2008).
The method used in this report assumes that technologies will either succeed or not, enumerates all possible sets of successful technologies, uses the Kaya (1990) equation to identify those sets that enable national energy goals to be met and applies probability theory to derive insights. It does not consider economic trade-offs or behavioral change. As Richels and Blanford (2007) observed, “insights can be obtained from analyses that analyze the implications of uncertain technological success, conditional on cost-effectiveness, as well as from analyses of cost-effectiveness conditional on technological success.”
The method is used to evaluate the prospects for achieving the following energy goals:2
- (1)
reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy use by 50–80% by 2050 compared to 2005,
- (2)
reduce the costs of U.S. oil dependence to less than 1% of GDP with 95% probability by 2030 (Greene, in press),
- (3)
at costs society is willing to pay (in the vicinity of $50–$100/tCO2 and an oil premium of approximately $25–$50/barrel).
The authors identified eleven broad areas of energy technology with the potential to contribute to national energy goals. Based on existing studies, the ability of each technology to reduce CO2 emissions by 2050 and oil use by 2030 relative to the Energy Information Administration’s Frozen 2008 Technology projections were estimated (U.S. DOE/EIA, 2008). Initially, technologies were assumed to either “succeed” or “fail” (have no additional impact beyond the reference projection). All possible combinations were generated and their impacts on CO2 emissions and oil use estimated.
Given the “successful” technology sets, inferences can be made about the number of technological advances likely to be needed to achieve both goals, the required likelihood of success in advancing technology, and the impact of each technology’s success on achieving national energy goals. The assumption that technologies will either succeed or fail with a fixed impact is then relaxed, and Monte Carlo analysis is used to test the robustness of the inferences.
Section snippets
The energy goals
It is assumed that the United States establishes a national objective of reducing CO2 emissions from energy use by 50–80% by 2050 (IPCC, 2007). The costs of different levels of greenhouse gas emission mitigation, conditional on the success of energy technologies have been estimated elsewhere, demonstrating the value of technological progress to solving the climate problem (Edmonds et al., 2007).
Concepts of energy security can be diverse, ranging from petroleum dependence to protection of
The technologies
For this analysis, technology categories must be broad enough to have a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions or oil use. Keeping the number of categories small helps keep the computations tractable. With this in mind, the authors identified eleven important areas of energy technology. Each includes several technologies with different hurdles to overcome. Quantitative estimates of impacts on CO2 emissions and the U.S. petroleum balance relative to the Frozen 2008 Technology Case are shown in
Method
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Frozen 2008 Technology Case (our reference case) reflects no breakthroughs in energy technology but a continuation of other trends. Assuming full deployment of the best current technology and assuming continued shifts toward less carbon-intensive activities, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are projected to exceed 9 billion metric tons by 2050. The scenario is similar to others’ (Richels and Blanford, 2007; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Results: “Essential” energy technologies
With a CO2 goal of 60% and oil independence goal of 25 EJ/yr, 40 (2%) of the 2048 possible sets met both goals. The CO2 goal was met by 128 sets, while 208 sets met the oil independence goal. No set with fewer than seven successful technologies achieved both energy objectives (Fig. 1). If a 95% probability of meeting both goals is required and equal likelihood is assumed for all technologies, the common probability of success must be at least 73%. A much better than 50/50 chance of success for
Conclusions
Each of the 11 technologies is important to achieve CO2 mitigation and oil independence. Four technologies – CCS, BIO, EVH2 and AFL – appear to be nearly essential to meeting both goals simultaneously and two others – buildings and transportation energy efficiency – are almost as critical. The four technologies for electricity generation and distribution appear to be less critical but if any two are taken away, the chances of reaching America’s energy goals fall from 95% to about 50%. To be
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Douglas Arent, John Ahearne, and Howard Herzog for their comments on the supporting documentation to this paper and to Zhenhong Lin for carefully checking our spreadsheet model.
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