Interview David MacKay
In Britain the nuclear industry has been ‘wonderfully safe’, according to MacKay
which allows the system to bury CO2 cap- tured from the atmosphere by the trees. And
Professor MacKay’s hedging strategy only manages to cut emissions by 92% by devoting a land area twice the size of Wales to biofuels and biomass forestry, as well as importing large amounts of bioenergy. Remove those assumptions and the strategy fails. Again, is this approach remotely credible? Food prices have soared in recent years, push- ing millions more into hunger according to the World Bank, partly because of the effects of the relatively modest growth in biofuel production so far. And yet these plans would involve another big increase, particularly if repeated in other countries, with potentially wider impacts both at home and abroad. On the home front, Britain’s food secu- rity could suffer. The UK already produces just 60% of its food, and devoting 10% of our land to biofuels could only increase our import dependency. But shifting from food production to biofuels at home could also lead to impacts around the world, through what’s known as indirect land use change (ILUC) – when biofuel production in one country pushes farmers in another to clear forest to make good the lost food produc- tion. A recent report from the Institute for European Environmental Policy found that the ILUC impact of achieving the EU’s target of 10% renewable transport fuels by 2020 would require replacement food production on a land area somewhere between the size of Belgium and Ireland, equivalent to putting up to 26M additional cars on Europe’s roads.
22 | Sustainable Business | June 2011
So the emissions reductions achieved by CCS biomass co-firing could well prove illusory. MacKay defends the model’s assumptions, stressing they were based on data from the International Energy Agency about how much low grade agricultural land exists that is not being used for food production and could be converted to energy crops, and indeed the IEA recently published a report that concluded biofuels could deliver 27% of all transport fuels in 2050. However, that would mean increasing the land devoted to energy crops from 30M to 100M hectares – an area the size of Egypt. The report acknowledged the “great uncertainty” about land-use change
“We reckon there are land areas that aren’t being used inten- sively for food, which would be candidates for energy crops”
impacts, and stressed the need for a strong policy framework to protect food security and biodiversity. Given the experience so far, it is hard not to be sceptical about the power of governments to regulate those impacts. “There’s a definite tension there,” MacKay concedes. “But we reckon there are land areas that aren’t being used for food, or at least aren’t being used intensively for food which would be candidate areas for energy crops.” Without large areas of land devoted to biofuels, the only remaining way to make the model achieve the emissions target is to ramp up a deus ex machina solution called
geo-sequestration. Unlike CCS for coal- and gas-fired power stations, geo-sequestration
would suck CO2 directly out of the atmos- phere, for burial or use in construction materi- als. However, the technology is in its infancy, and if it is ever commercialised would require tens of thousands of freestanding units – each about the size of an upturned shipping con- tainer – along with vast amounts of power. These units alone would consume the output of ten Sizewell B nuclear stations, according to DECC, which would not come cheap. MacKay says that on a 40-year view, geo- sequestration could be part of the arsenal, along with other budding technologies such as CCS and offshore floating wind turbines. But its inclusion in the model could also be seen as clutching at straws. So how confident is he that the world can actually deliver the neces- sary emissions cuts?
“If we keep nuclear on the table and if CCS is successful, and if we have strong action on renewables and on the demand side I think we can find cost-effective solutions”, he con- cludes. “The more of those options are taken off the table, ruled out or proved not to be deliverable, the harder it gets.”
David Strahan is an investigative journalist and documentary film-maker and the author of ‘The Last Oil Shock: a survival guide to the imminent extinction of petroleum man’, published by John Murray. He is a trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre and fellow of the RSA
www.sustainablebusinessonline.com
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