Ready or not, California’s fuel rules are changing
In keeping with a 2006 law called AB32, the world’s first carbon-fuel emission standards were set April 23 by the California Air Resources Board, or ARB, in Sacramento.
This comes a week after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed declaring greenhouse gasses a threat to public health – almost three years after California started acting on the issue. EPA officials in Washington D.C., had no public comment on California’s move.
Some South Coast business leaders have admitted they are concerned about how the state’s fuel standards may hurt commerce, but they are waiting for more explanation from Sacramento. The ARB is starting a marketing campaign to explain the new rules to small business.
In short, the California rules – which will be fully enforced by 2012 – require fuel providers, refiners, importers and blenders to make sure their products for the state’s market meet an average declining standard of “carbon intensity,” which is determined by the sum of greenhouse gas emissions associated with fuel production, transportation and consumption.
If that sounds complicated, it gets more involved when ARB officials describe how they plan to do this without further upsetting the state’s embattled economy.
However, when asked why this route is being taken in California’s quest to battle climate change, ARB officials are quick to respond that the new rules can do this by increasing the market for alternative-fuel vehicles and cutting 16 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 – which they claim will generate thousands of jobs along the way.
Why now, why this way?
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger raised some eyebrows across the country in 2006 when he signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act, known as AB32, into law. His aides told him if carbon emissions weren’t reduced, the effects of climate change, especially global warming, would damage the state and world’s habitat and economy, which three years ago was not in a meltdown it is today.
A 2007 governor’s executive order called for the ARB to develop the fuel emissions standards approved April 23, said board spokesman Stanley Young. He said the fuel standards follow the state’s campaign to cut vehicle emission 30 percent by 2016. It’s the Golden State’s version of a full-court press to battle climate change.
The Princeton ‘wedges’
California officials were convinced something could be done about harmful gas emissions partly because of the research by two Princeton University professors who said in 2004 that reduction of global carbon-dioxide emissions by 1 billion tons of carbon per year in 2057 could be achieved. They said this could be done by an “aggressive, globally coordinated scale-up of a mix of already commercialized or nearly commercialized technologies.”
Professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow measured the emission cuts in “wedges.”
The professors have delivered a number of lectures around the country – including one Aug. 12 at UCSB – where they said “implementing eight wedges should enable the world to achieve the interim goal of emitting no more CO2 (or carbon dioxide) globally in 2057 than today, and in the following 50 years driving CO2 emissions to net-zero emissions would place humanity, approximately, on a path to stabilizing the climate at a concentration less than double the pre-industrial concentration.”
The professors said if fuels such as ethanol are used with a combination of solar, wind nuclear and other power sources, the goal of slashing greenhouse gases can be met.
That’s the theoretical side of the carbon-fuel emission issue.
The ethanol conundrum
On the more practical side, ARB officials say if ethanol producers can clean up their act in producing their fuel, the alternative to blowing carbon into the air will be using what spouts out of the ground.
Several measures were taken to ensure ethanol can help transportation fuel suppliers reach a proposed low-carbon fuel standard that the ARB passed April 23.
The ARB “believes that corn ethanol will play an important role in helping California achieve the goals of the (low-carbon fuel standard),” the ARB’s chairwoman, Mary Nichols, said in a letter to retired Gen. Wesley Clark, co-chairman of a biofuels association called Growth Energy.
The letter said steps California is taking are aimed at ease concerns that the state’s rules are biased against corn-based ethanol. That includes “investigating the land-use impact of all transportation fuels, harmonizing land-use emissions values with future U.S. and European Union standards, and listing biofuel feed stocks that have no or negligible land-use effects on carbon intensity by December.
ARB officials admit some ethanol producers have good reasons to be concerned.
“That’s because their production process, which involves burning coal, is too carbon intensive,” said Dimitri Stanich, ARB public information officer. “We hope they streamline their process to cut their carbon emissions.”
‘A multiplicity of fuels’
Stanich said the push is to bring “a multiplicity of alternative fuels to market in California.”
“It won’t happen overnight,” he said. “We want the market to dictate the economic process in bringing the need to bring more fuels to California.”
Eventually, the ARB sees an $11 billion reduction in the price of fuel. “Whether (fuel producers) want to pass that along to the consumers is their choice, but we think it is a wise business strategy,” Stanich said.
At least 20 ethanol producers plan to open operations in California soon, which would create 3,000 jobs in rural areas, Stanich said. However, he admitted several ethanol producers already operating in the state are having what he called “a difficult time” because the rising cost of corn. At the moment, corn is the primary source of ethanol.
Growing non-food crops
Stanich said use of other non-food crops to produce ethanol is growing.
Switch grass, for example, is being used as an ethanol source. Companies such as Ceres in Thousand Oaks are developing types of switch grass that can be used for this purpose. “Switchgrass is an invasive weed that can be found all over California,” Stanich said. “It looks very promising.”
“While the low-carbon fuel standard is designed to favor low-carbon, non-food energy crops like switchgrass, high-biomass sorghum and miscanthus (i.e. our crops), we are concerned about the precedents it may set and the uncertainty it may create as the advanced biofuel industry seeks the capital it needs to grow,” said Gary Koppenjan, Ceres corporate communications manager. “Going forward, policy makers, investors and the industry need to pursue regulations based on demonstrable data and studies, and rely less on computer simulations based on well-intended, but speculative assumptions.”
Attorney Jocelyn Thompson has dealt with the ARB for four decades. Now an attorney for Alston & Bird in Los Angeles, Thompson said she’s “very skeptical” of the way the state agency deals with cost estimates on its policies. “They often underestimate what it takes to get the job done. “I’m very skeptical about their cost equation.”
“This is the first regulation could have a widespread and costly impact on how fuels are made,” she said. “This totally overhauls our fuels and how we use them … whether it’s taking goods to market, driving to work or riding in the bus.”
She said her oil company clients have realized this has been coming for the past two years and have been “trying to find ways to comply with the rules.” She said, “They are trying to figure out how to run their businesses with them.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, as California moves forward on its own and about a dozen other states watch closely, the EPA’s action earlier this month sets the stage for a massive debate on climate change in Congress this summer.
The EPA health-hazard announcement covers six greenhouse gasses: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride.
After a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling called for the Bush administration to allow the EPA to do its job, the agency said April 17 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses from power plants, cars, and other sources can harm human health directly.
The agency also said global warming will have broader health effects on the population.
Comment on this article
Cali needs more nuclear power : 4/25/2009
Nuclear power, low carbon and safe. On a unit output level, the waste produced is minimum compared to all other alternatives, and most out there won’t believe this, but it can be handled safely, whereas the waste produced from coal never will. Coal fired electricity is the only real alternative for base load generation that we require in our multi-TWatt society. Coal is a matrix of carbon compounds impregnated with heavy metals and acid rain producing sulfur and nitrogen containing compounds. When it is burned, the matrix disappears into carbon dioxide and sulfurous and nitric gases and the heavy metals are vaporized and released into the atmosphere, or concentrated and held in huge sludge ponds as toxic waste. Annually, a 1 GW coal plant releases 30,000 pounds of mercury a year into our air, soil and water. It takes eons for this stuff to leave the ecosystem. The waste burden here also includes arsenic, lead, chromium, uranium and thorium. There is more recoverable energy in the uranium that goes out the smoke stack then produced by combustion of the coal itself, by over 20 times. A similar nuclear plant by comparison produces a few tons of spent fuel assemblies a year. These remain intact, we know where they are and we can place them in overly engineered casks until they have decayed. The really dangerous stuff is decayed in a few hundred years. The rest emits as much radiation as high grade ore in around a thousand years. The longer the half life of the isotope, the less harmful it is. Chicken littles talking about millions of years are talking about isotopes that are not that harmful, we all consume natural U235 on a daily basis and always have. What we haven’t always done is consumed the levels of mercury that we now are, as we gestate our next generation. This was the choice that the anti-nuclear lobbies made, mercury, acid rain and CO2 everywhere, vs. spent fuel rods inside multi-million dollar dry casks, inside multi-million dollar concrete storage units and ultimately in a very deep hole, all to protect us from something that when it could possibly leak into the environment, and migrate into and be almost infinitely diluted into an aquifer tens of thousands of years from now, will have lost most of its potency. There were natural uranium reactors in the ground in Africa several millions of years ago, we have analyzed where the products went, the answer, they are all still where they were produced. There are also emerging nuclear technologies based on Thorium which produce vastly less waste to begin with and are proliferation resistant. What is needed is not more switch grass, or windmills, or solar panels destroying the desert. What is needed are about 6 AP1000s in three new power plants, one in the lower central valley, one in the upper central valley and one near the bay area. That would cover 80% of the base load. An increase in geothermal should make the base load carbon free. http://www.thoriumpower.com/files/Ten_Essential_Facts_About_thorium.pdf Fear over logic, which one is this species famous for? Easy answer.
Ken
Ethanol gas : 4/25/2009
”Unlike MTBE, little is known about the impacts of ethanol releases into groundwater or the environment. However, because ethanol is the primary ingredient of beverage alcohol, which is classified by the California Proposition 65 Committee and other cancer experts as a human carcinogen, many are concerned about the possibility that ethanol may pose a cancer risk. Additionally, independent researchers have determined that ethanol in groundwater can extend plumes of other more potent gasoline carcinogens (benzene, toluene, etc.) up to 25%. In addition, ethanol is less effective than MTBE at fighting air pollution, and due to transportation and supply problems, will likely increase gasoline prices.” Stella Sez, Hemmings Motor News, July 2000, clubs.hemmings.com/clu... Should California consider a fee on corn fuel ethanol use? * * * Lower price for food, gas, water, beer, cleaner air and funds for the budget from oil profit
nuke power : 4/26/2009
Do you know how much it costs to"safely" store spent nuke fuel for the next 100 years? The price is nearing $1 billion at a place called Yucca Mountain in Nevada....check it out. It's not cost effective.
E
Yucca : 4/26/2009
was always a bad idea. However, the nuclear power industry deposits 0.1 cents for every KW into a fund for handling this which now contains over $30 billion dollars that has already been paid into it. If your figure is correc (which it is not, it is extremely low) what are they going to do with the rest of that money. 0.1 cent per KW sounds cheap to me. Unlike the coal industry, the nuclear industry is not able to externalize its cost to the environment. Which is more expensive? What are they going to do with the other 29 + billion dollars? Your sense of accounting and scale is off, which is probably why you don't support nuclear energy in the first place. We are currently in the final stages of commercializing the first technology to efficiently burn plutonium in light water reactors using Thorium. There are several efforts to develop the liquid fluoride thorium reactor which can eat any transuranic isotope you throw into it due to its extremely long burn up and neutron spectrum. So, you will advocate damming rivers, putting up windmills that fail at the task of producing base load power but succeed in wasting money, paper the fragile desert ecosystem with industrial scale solar production all so that you don't have to deal with something you fear from a lack of understanding. Fission products have a half life of up to 30 years, mainly Sr90, which means that in 300 years they are decayed to background, this does not mean they are dangerous in year 299. They are half the original amount in year 30, a quater the original amount in year 60, and eighth the amount in year 90 and so on. Fission products constitute the largest threat poised by nuclear fuels and most of them have a much shorter half life than this. We can handle this, and in the future, we will probably simply retrieve all this "waste" and use it. We currently burn 3 billion tons of coal a year, and that is just the US. You snipe about the cost of nuclear waste, this is amazingly short sighted. 40% of mercury pollution currently in the environment is from coal fired electric generation plants and it is rising. It does not clear from the environment in an appreciable manner. With their supercritical boilers, and their century of constant improvement, they are very efficient at turning heat into electricity. 3 billion tons ground to flour like consistency and blasted into furnaces to create steam to be captured by turbines that this steam is focused on. How many wind mills and solar panels is that? All alternative forms of power currently represent only a couple percent of our current energy production. I was enthusiastic about wind power, until I started learning about it. It will never work, when the science is against it, don't do it. All the warm feelings in the world won't make it so. Solar is even worse. Talk about waste, what is the cost to us, tangible and intangible, of mountain top removal? Big coal plants eat a coal train a day. The coal companies and their utility customers pay none of these costs, the nuclear plants do, and you are against this.
Ken
Hey Ken : 5/7/2009
An Obama administration proposal would provide $197 million to find an alternative to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project in Nevada, another setback to the nuclear power industry from the administration — but a welcome gesture to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has long sought to block the project 90 miles from Las Vegas.
E
neuclear fuel rods are reusable : 12/6/2009
I just want to inform people that the spent fuel rods are not waste to France because they reprocess them but because
of evironmental pressure and public misinformation we don't allow it in the united States. For example a family of 4 would
have a shoebox size of nuclear waste after 20 years of using nuclear power but after the waste was reprocessed
there would be a pill bottle of waste left. Yucca mountain was caused by an ignorant American Public.
truth822 David
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