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Jane Goodall: wild at heart

Stephen Moss — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:31:00 +0000

It has been 50 years since the scientist turned eco-evangelist began her seminal work with chimpanzees in Africa. But, writes Stephen Moss, her work is far from finished.

Jane Goodall, grey in complexion but resplendent in a red shawl, is sitting on the sofa in a dimly lit room in west London. The scientist-turned-environmentalist has just arrived from Bournemouth on England’s south coast, had a rotten journey, has a hacking cough, but accepts it all stoically, rejecting the suggestion that the heating be turned up.

She is here with her talisman, a stuffed monkey called Mr H, given to her by the blind magician Gary Haun (“the Amazing Haundini”), who thought it was a chimp. Goodall, who has a childlike quality, sees a metaphorical significance in a blind magician who is able to pull the wool over the eyes of the sighted. The letter H, standing for Hope, also attracts her.

The world seems to divide into people who are besotted with Goodall and people who have barely heard of her. She is more prominent in the United States, where the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is headquartered, than in the United Kingdom, despite being born here in 1934; after half a lifetime spent documenting the lives of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park overlooking Lake Tanganyika in the far west of Tanzania, she is now living with her sister Judy in their old family home in Bournemouth.

Our meeting takes place at a flat that belongs to Mary Lewis, a JGI employee with a cut-glass English accent who appears to run Goodall’s life as if it were a military operation. The trigger is a book Goodall has written with two fellow environmentalists: a collection of stories of survival called Hope for Animals and Their World, the written-by-committee feel of which must of course be forgiven because of its subject matter.

Even I, an intermittent eco-worrier, was moved by the battle to save the California condor, and I feel doubly guilty for criticising the book because at the end of the interview she insists on signing it for me: “For Stephen. Together we can make this a better world for all. Thank you for helping.” Can is underlined, all is both underlined and capitalised.

These days, in her mid-70s, Goodall is more shaman than scientist. She has set aside a planned companion volume to her seminal study The Chimpanzees of Gombe, and instead tours the world preaching the need for sustainability, harmony and respect for the natural world (this makes me worry about the size of her carbon footprint).

It was in 1986 that, at a conference on chimps, she realised the extent of the crisis affecting them across Africa and determined, overnight it seems, on a life as an environmental evangelist. One journalist who has followed her career likens her to a “peripatetic Mother Teresa”, and it’s a good description: she combines stateliness with a kind of holiness, her religion a predominantly green one.

The message of her new book, with its stories about black-footed ferrets, American crocodiles and whooping cranes, is surprisingly upbeat. “My job seems to have increasingly become giving people hope, so that instead of doing nothing and sinking into depression, they take action,” she tells me. “It’s very clear to me that unless we get a critical mass of people involved in trying to create a better world for our great-grandchildren, we’d better stop having children altogether.”

Goodall has chosen to focus on the heroes fighting – and occasionally winning – individual battles, in the hope of attracting others to participate in a war she does not yet accept is lost. “I’ve seen areas totally despoiled that have been brought back to life. Animals that were almost gone have, with captive breeding or protection in the wild, been given another chance. If we stop now, everything’s going to go. So we have to keep on doing our best for as long as we can, and if we’re going to die, let’s die fighting.” The apocalypse is conjured up in a croaky and curiously detached monotone.

Do governments understand the scale of the crisis? Goodall argues that many are still in hock to “dark forces” – vested interests such as the fossil-fuel industry and agribusiness. Politicians, she says, should stop parroting the myth of limitless expansion. “Unlimited economic growth on a planet of finite resources is not possible; it doesn’t make sense. I thought this financial crisis would help people realise that, but it seems very much like, ‘Oh, let's get back to business as usual.’ ”

Much of her evangelising is directed at the young. Her institute – set up to protect chimps and their habitats almost 10 years before that Damascene moment in 1986 – has a dynamic youth wing called Roots and Shoots, which started in 1991 when 16 young Tanzanians met on the porch of her home in Dar es Salaam to discuss environmental issues affecting their lives.

Twenty years later, there are groups in 114 countries, with hundreds of thousands of youngsters involved in community projects. After a slow start, it has taken off in the United Kingdom in the past couple of years, with 700 groups now participating.

But apart from the headquarters in the US city of Arlington, Virginia -- which has 20-plus staff -- most of the JGIs that coordinate these projects are shoestring operations, and the institute has been hit hard by the credit crunch. “We’re in a financial hole in the US because of the downturn,” Goodall admits. “Money that should have come in has been cut.”

The organisation had just held a meeting in Belgium to discuss how to dig itself out, and one priority is to recruit an executive director. Is that recognition of a time when someone will need to take over from her? “Of course,” Goodall says. “It will probably be a collection of four people taking over from me.” Despite the holiness, she is not guilty of false modesty.

The institute today is not just concerned with her beloved chimps. “To me, it was obvious to grow from wild chimps to saving their forest to seeing about their conditions in captivity to working with local people and kids,” she says. “You can kill yourself saving forests and chimps, but if new generations aren’t going to be better stewards there’s no point. That’s why I’m so passionate about Roots & Shoots.”

Until the 1986 conference on chimpanzees, she had assumed she would spend her life studying chimps. “It was wonderful out in the forest collecting data and analysing it, giving a few lectures, writing books.” In her 1999 book, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, she says that as a Bible-reading teenager, she “fantasised about becoming a martyr”. In a way, she has achieved that ambition, sacrificing the paradise of Gombe for a succession of airport lounges.

When I ask if she is still a Christian, she gives a somewhat ambiguous answer. “I suppose so; I was raised as a Christian.” She says she sees no contradiction between evolution and a belief in God. Nor does she blame the Bible and the idea in Genesis that man has dominion over plants and animals for our exploitation of the natural world (she says “dominion” is a mistranslation; what is meant is “stewardship”). These might seem academic points, but perhaps they are a key to understanding her transition from scientist to eco-evangelist – and the resonance of her message in the more spiritually aware US.

“I realised that my experience in the forest, my understanding of the chimpanzees, had given me a new perspective,” she writes in Reason for Hope. “I was utterly convinced there was a great spiritual power that we call God, Allah or Brahma, although I knew, equally certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature.”

This year is significant for Goodall and her institute, marking 50 years since she began studying chimps at Gombe. As well as the new book, there will be a BBC documentary in the spring and a German-made film, Jane’s Journey, to be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, in which Angelina Jolie has a walk-on part. It is indeed a remarkable journey, from a middle-class home in Bournemouth to secretarial work in London and then, thanks to the patronage of paleontologist Louis Leakey, to Gombe and beyond.

“I loved animals as a child, read the Tarzan books, and decided at the age of 11 that I would go to Africa, live with animals and write books about them,” she says. “Everybody laughed at me except my amazing mother, who said, ‘If you work hard and really want something and never give up, you will find a way.’ ”

In 1957, after earning the money for the boat fare by working as a waitress and a secretary, Goodall went on an extended visit to a school friend in Kenya. Someone suggested she get in touch with Leakey, a formidable figure who was then curator of the Coryndon museum of natural history in Nairobi. He barked at her down the telephone when she called, but she kept her nerve, got an appointment to see him, was given an administrative job and, in 1960, was given the chance to move to Gombe to start collecting data on chimps.

Leakey also dispatched Dian Fossey to Rwanda to study gorillas and Birute Galdikas to Borneo to observe orangutans; the three women were patronisingly known as Leakey’s angels or Leakey’s trimates, but each made significant contributions to primatology.

What did Leakey see in Goodall that made him choose her for Gombe? “I think he was amazed that a young girl straight out from England with no university degree knew so much,” she says. “I'd spent hours in the Natural History Museum in London, and could answer most of his questions.”

Goodall had planned to spend only a year in Africa but was there more than 30. She still has a home in Dar es Salaam, and makes the long trek to Gombe when she can. She learned her science in the field, but Leakey was keen for her to get academic training and, in the mid-60s, she did a PhD at Cambridge in ethology, the study of animal behavior. She needed the qualification to counter critics who attacked her approach as unscientific and anthropomorphic – she gave the chimps she studied names, and prided herself on getting to know them as individuals.

“I was told at Cambridge I shouldn’t have named the chimps and that they should have had numbers,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about them having personalities, and certainly not about them thinking or having emotions. But then I thought back to my childhood teacher who taught me that this wasn’t true – my dog.”

The scale of Goodall’s observational data eventually silenced her critics. She was the first scientist to observe an animal, her favourite chimp David Greybeard, not just using a tool (a stem of grass poked into a termites’ nest to dig out the insects) but fashioning it for that purpose. When she telegraphed a report of what she had seen to Leakey, he replied: “Ah! Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

We haven’t quite accepted chimps as human, but the work showed that the distance from one to the other was far less than previously thought. In his introduction to a revised edition of Goodall’s most famous book, In the Shadow of Man, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould called her work “one of the western world’s great scientific achievements”.

In 1964, she married the Dutch-born wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick, and their son (also called Hugo, but known as Grub) was born three years later. In her books there are several sweet pictures of Grub growing up at Gombe, but the relationship of mother and son has not always been smooth. At one point he was engaged in commercial fishing, of which she as a committed vegetarian disapproved, but is now developing an eco-tourist project in Tanzania and they are getting on much better. Goodall and van Lawick divorced in 1974 and she married Derek Bryceson, director of national parks in Tanzania, who died of cancer in 1980.

Is she one of those naturalists, as Fossey supposedly was in her dark final years, who prefers animals to people? “I’m not one of those people who says let me go and live with chimps forever or dogs forever,” she says. “I certainly prefer a lot of animals to a lot of people, but then I prefer some people to some animals too.”

And does she miss the chimps? “All the chimps I knew so well have gone now,” she says sadly. “Fifi, the last of the real old-timers, died four years ago. It’s not the same as it was.” But she still enjoys returning to Gombe. “When I get up on to my peak where I sat for so long, I can get back into the skin I had and remember just what it felt like – the excitement of never quite knowing what you’d see and what you'd find.”

Hope for Animals and Their World is published by Icon Books.

www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Homepage image from Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees

Modern and mobile (2)

Ced Hesse — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:48:00 +0000

African pastoralism has been dismissed as outdated and inefficient. But awareness of its social and environmental benefits is growing, says Ced Hesse.

In many parts of dryland Africa, national governments are beginning to value pastoralism and the importance of mobility for productivity. Innovative policies now recognise and reflect pastoralism’s crucial role within local, national and regional economies, and new activities put these policies into practice.

Recognising that pastoralism frequently needs to cross international borders, and that regional trade needs support, several international institutions are formalising cross-border pastoral mobility. This provides nation states with a benchmark to design their own policy and legislation. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has led the way, providing an institutional framework to facilitate cross-border livestock mobility. Cross-border movement is authorised by granting a certificate that controls the departure of pastoralists from their home countries and assures the health of local herds.

Over the past 15 years, the pace of policy reform in west Africa has been considerable. The governments of Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania and Niger have all passed specific pastoral laws to protect pastoral land and to facilitate livestock mobility both within countries and across international borders. In eastern Africa, too, there is some progress. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania all recognise pastoralism as a livelihood system deserving of support. East Africa has also established influential pastoral parliamentary groups that offer oversight of government policy. Pastoralists’ Day in Ethiopia and Pastoralists’ Week in Kenya are now regular features on these countries’ political calendars.

Decentralisation throughout the Sahel has introduced a radical new agenda involving civil society in areas traditionally controlled by government. The devolution of authority for the management of local affairs including land and the provision of key services such as water, health and education through local government reforms, decentralisation and regionalisation in Mali, Niger, Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Burkina Faso offer hope for the more active involvement of pastoral communities in the implementation of policies that affect their lives in many countries. These reforms vindicate pastoral indigenous knowledge and practice, as well as the scientific research that confirms the critical role of livestock mobility in maximising productivity and preserving the environment from degradation.

In west Africa the Wodaabe (Fulani) of Niger are increasingly internet-aware. These groups develop their own websites in French and English and, more recently, Spanish to reach out to a wider public, to defend their way of life and to explain the key role of mobility. The Wodaabe have adapted their traditional gathering of clans and created an internationally-renowned General Assembly. Donors, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and tourists are all invited to attend what has become a cultural festival, further raising the political visibility of these emerging new forms of social organisation.

These innovations are assisted by new thinking among development agencies, who, after decades of development failure, now facilitate more holistic interventions in pastoral areas. Projects that focussed solely on water development, animal health or range management have been replaced with concern about social, institutional and governance issues. Peace building is on the increase, as are experiments with ways to protect key pastoral assets in the event of drought or disease. And the importance of markets has finally been recognised with innovations ranging from pastoral credit provision to drought insurance.

Much attention is paid to addressing land tenure and establishing appropriate institutional mechanisms at the outset to reconcile the competing interests over resources often found in Africa’s rangelands. These rangelands are part of what is broadly called the “commons” – natural resources that are owned, managed and used collectively by different users, either simultaneously or sequentially often under different tenure arrangements. Through experience, projects now acknowledge that rules for the management of these areas must recognise and secure these multiple interests.

Millions and millions of US dollars have been spent in pastoral-drought relief in dryland Africa since the 1970s. Nearly all of this money has gone on buying food aid, which while saving pastoral lives has failed to save their livelihoods. For many pastoral communities, the return of the rains after the drought has not allowed them to return to mobile-livestock keeping. Having lost their animals during the drought, they either remain in or around the towns from which they received the food aid that saved their lives, sometimes succeeding in a new livelihood, or they try their hand at agriculture, charcoal making or, in extreme cases, adopting a violent lifestyle.

Groundbreaking work by a consortium of agencies including Save the Children in eastern Africa has been experimenting with market-based approaches to protect the key livelihood assets of pastoral communities. By providing cash for work, as opposed to food for work, or by facilitating controlled de-stocking of pastoral livestock through the market with private traders, pastoralists in Ethiopia and Kenya managed to save their core breeding herd though the drought of 2006. These initiatives take a livelihoods approach to emergency response, which not only helps to harmonise relief and development interventions, so often contradictory, but also strengthens pastoralists’ resilience to drought.

Global challenges

Unlike other land uses, pastoralism is uniquely capable of adapting to climate change. Although climatic variability is the norm in Africa’s drylands, human-induced climate change is beginning to pose a serious challenge. Climate is becoming more variable and less predictable. Successive poor rains, shifts in the beginning and end of the rainy seasons, increased rainfall intensity – which often runs off in floods and damages crops and infrastructure – increases and decreases in rainfall in varying parts of the continent and increases in drought-related shocks, are all current trends observed across the continent. These trends are likely to continue over the short to medium term.

Pastoralists that are mobile are in a better position to quickly and successfully adapt to a changing climate than those tied to sedentary land uses. For 7,000 years pastoralists have used mobility to respond quickly to variations in the drylands’ climate, and used specialist risk-spreading strategies as an insurance against the potential loss of their stock. Whether pastoralists will successfully adapt to the current climate change will depend on how the environmental and developmental challenges are tackled and whether mobility is secured. To continue to adapt, pastoralist communities need to be informed of changes to come and be involved in planning for the future.

The livestock sector, and by implication pastoralism, has been accused of contributing to global warming through methane emissions. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations’s high-profile report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, found livestock to be responsible for 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, a higher share than transport. When the data is unravelled, however, it becomes clear that livestock have been globally aggregated, with European intensive-milk production, south-east Asian high-intensity pig farming, US beef burger feedlots and ranching and African pastoralism all lumped together. Until we have a better understanding of the environmental impacts of the different livestock sectors, it is a mistake to conclude that mobile-livestock keeping in Africa’s drylands does more harm through its contribution to global warming than good through its contribution to national food security, economic growth and carbon sequestration.

There is now increasing interest in exploring the value of pastoralism in mitigating the impact of climate change, with the carbon sequestration capability of Africa’s pastures emerging as a real opportunity for the drylands. Thirteen million square kilometres of grasslands are found in Africa. Grasslands store approximately 34% of the global stock of carbon dioxide – a service worth US$7 (47.8 yuan) for every 10,000 square metres, according to research by Robert Constanza, director of the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics, and others. What is important to note is that grasslands’ capacity to store carbon is significantly reduced in heavily degraded areas, or where rangelands are converted to croplands.

Rangelands, and pastoralism in general, are increasingly seen as having positive environmental impacts. The grazing action of livestock is recognised as having helped maintain healthy populations of wildlife – the cornerstone of much of Africa’s tourism industry. East African savannah landscapes have been largely shaped over the course of the past 3,000 to 4,000 years by pastoralist land-management practices. Well-managed grazing opens up pastures, stimulates vegetation growth, contributes to seed dispersal and pasture diversity and enhances nutrient cycling through the ecosystem. Where mobility is reduced and pastoralists are confined to limited spaces, evidence of overgrazing becomes apparent.

Where mobility is secured, pastoralism has massive environmental benefits, can adapt to climate change, and presents African governments with the very real possibility of grasslands generating revenues as carbon sinks. When their livelihoods are secure, pastoralists freely patrol inhospitable and remote border regions and can help reduce conflict. And when their herding strategies and practices are secured, pastoralism allows the economic independence of millions of people in the drylands, who would otherwise have little alternative but to fuel urban poverty and undesired social dynamics.

Future policy decisions need to take into account the many valuable benefits and services provided by pastoralism. If the pastoral system is allowed to flip into irreversible destitution, there is a real danger that all these benefits and services will be lost. Losing pastoralism is not in the public interest.

Ced Hesse is principal researcher in the climate-change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Co-authors of this piece were Saverio Kratli, Izzy Birch and Magda Nassef.

An earlier version of this article was published in book form by the IIED as “Modern and mobile: The future of livestock production in Africa’s drylands”. It is summarised and used here with permission.

Homepage image by Andy Catley

Modern and mobile (1)

Ced Hesse — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Nomadic pastoralism boosts African economies and protects livestock from drought. So why is it under threat? Ced Hesse explains.

Mobile-livestock keeping, or pastoralism, plays a critical role in the economic prosperity of Africa’s drylands. Across east and west Africa, an estimated 50 million livestock producers support their families, their communities, and a massive meat, skins and hides industry based on animals that are fed solely on natural dryland pastures. Where other land-use systems are failing in the face of global climate change, mobile-livestock keeping is generating huge national and regional economic benefits.

Today’s pastoralists download the latest market prices for cattle on their mobile phones, use cheap Chinese motorbikes to reach distant herds or lost camels and trek their livestock thousands of kilometres by foot, truck or ship to trade them nationally and internationally. Prevalent perceptions of pastoralists are that they are a minority, out of touch with the rest of the world and practicing an archaic and outmoded lifestyle. The reality is that pastoralists are fully integrated with wider global processes.

But moving is now becoming a serious problem. Grazing lands are being taken over for other uses and access to water and markets is increasingly difficult. With reduced mobility the economic profitability of livestock keeping is being critically undermined. Animals are producing less meat, less milk and are more susceptible to drought and disease. This is contributing to poverty, resource degradation and conflict.

New thinking, new policies and innovative practices for pastoralist mobility are beginning to take root in many parts of dryland Africa. The African Union and other regional institutions are recognising the huge benefits to be reaped from supporting livestock mobility. This is encouraging several governments to develop informed, progressive policies that reflect the needs of modern pastoralism.

Why move?

Essentially, pastoralists move to take their animals to places where they can find the best quality grazing. It is the scattering of different pastures over different places at different times that makes mobile-livestock keeping so productive in what is otherwise a difficult environment. To sedentary-livestock keepers, who rely on uniformity and economies of scale, randomly variable concentrations of nutrients on the range would be a serious constraint to productivity. But to pastoralists, who are mobile and maintain populations of selectively feeding animals, it represents a resource.

Modern ranching is often believed to be an improvement over traditional livestock management. But research in Ethiopia, Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe comparing the productivity of ranching against pastoralism all came to the same conclusion: pastoralism consistently outperforms ranching and to a quite significant degree. Whether measured in terms of meat production, generating energy (calories) or providing cash, pastoralism gives a higher return per hectare of land than ranching.

In east Africa, the intra-regional livestock trade is a major and growing industry, with an annual value in excess of US$65 million (444 million yuan). The profitability of this trade is dependent on livestock being mobile, particularly across borders. In many countries of the Sahel, livestock’s contribution to total agricultural GDP is above 40%. These figures are sizable, and yet they still fail to capture the full contribution of pastoral production systems to national economies. National accounts are based only on the value of final products such as meat and hides and leave out the many social, security and ecological benefits mobile-livestock production adds.

During periods of drought or disaster, mobility becomes absolutely essential for pastoralists, when they are forced to move in order to survive. Drought is a normal occurrence in drylands, and is a key reason why mobile-livestock keeping, rather than crops, is the production strategy of choice.

Obstacles

Pastoralists are increasingly constrained. Farms frequently block access to their grazing areas; national border controls hinder their trade patterns; and the areas they traditionally preserve for times of drought are now national parks or agricultural schemes. In other areas national government policies actively encourage pastoralists to settle and be “modern”. These policies are often driven by unfounded perceptions that pastoralism is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Alternative land uses, including large-scale agriculture and national parks, are believed to bring in more national revenues and to have less environmental impact. But this is not evidence based.

Farming is one of the biggest challenges to pastoral mobility. The slow but inexorable advance of family farms, combined in places with the establishment of large-scale commercial farming, is swallowing up vast areas of grazing lands. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has called for a moratorium on the expansion of large mechanised farms in Sudan's central semi-arid regions, sounding a warning that it was a “future flashpoint” for conflict between farmers and pastoralists. Northern Sudan’s huge commercial farms have been blamed for fuelling conflict and for environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

Particularly in east Africa, the loss of land to national parks, game reserves, hunting blocks and conservation severely restricts pastoral mobility as much of this land either consists of critical dry- or wet-season grazing or cuts across seasonal migration routes. The creation of Uganda’s Kidepo Valley National Park in the 1960s, on the border with Sudan and Kenya, severely restricts the movement of the Toposa from southern Sudan to dry-season grazing in Kaabong district, northern Uganda. Within Kaabong District, Dodoth pastoralists have also lost critical wet-season grazing in the north-eastern Timu forest when it was declared a forest reserve in 2000, according to research by Michael Godwin Wantsusi of the Karamoja Agro-Pastoral Development Programme. Yet a lot of evidence suggests that pastoralism is far more compatible with wildlife than other forms of land use, particularly crop farming.

Both non-pastoralists and pastoralists are enclosing the rangelands. From the Borana in southern Ethiopia, to the Fulani in Niger and Burkina Faso and Somali groups in Somaliland, a territory in the Horn of Africa, pastoral families are fencing grazing land. Poverty, due to shrinking herd sizes, is driving thousands of pastoral families throughout east and west Africa to fence off the rangelands to practice rain-fed agriculture and, where water is available, dry-season gardening. Others are enclosing land from a fear of losing out as more and more land is taken or are seeking to protect the rangeland from farming or the cutting of trees for charcoal.

It is not known how much former pastoralist-grazing land has been lost overall but much of it is in the form of wheat farms, sugar farms, irrigated tobacco, cotton and sorghum schemes, flower and vegetable farms, game and cattle ranches, national parks and forest reserves. And it is not just the sheer extent of the lost land that is so important; it is the nature of that lost land that is critical. Much of the alienation concerns strategic areas such as wetlands or riverine forests. Here, because of higher and more stable moisture, pastures of higher nutritional content can be found, particularly in the dry season when the surrounding range is dry and poor.

These areas represent “islands” of high-quality pasture where livestock feed until the arrival of new, fresh grass with the next rainy season. The loss of these areas undermines the profitability and resilience of the whole pastoral system. Little research has been carried out to calculate the economic and environmental impacts the loss of these areas has had on national economies, and whether the expected benefits from the new land-use systems are greater than the benefits lost as a result of displacing pastoralism.

Conflicts are also a major block to mobility, altering grazing patterns, reducing productivity and increasing environmental degradation. The enduring conflicts in Chad and Sudan mean pastoralists move together in larger groups for security but have subsequently found it more difficult to access high quality pasture and water. Sudan’s conflict with Egypt also reduced access to key grazing areas for Beja pastoralists in Red Sea state, north-west Sudan. Where grazing areas cannot be accessed, the under-utilisation of pasture leads to bush encroachment. Where pastoralists become squeezed into smaller grazing areas, competition for a dwindling resource increases and conflict becomes inevitable and self-perpetuating.

Across the drylands inappropriate policies are blocking livestock mobility. Enduring perceptions of pastoralism as an outdated, economically inefficient and environmentally destructive land-use system continue to drive rangeland and livestock policy in much of Africa. Yet, none of these perceptions are evidence-based, informed by past failure or reflect current scientific knowledge of the dynamics in dryland environments and livelihood systems. Nor are they designed with the participation of pastoral communities. These persistent beliefs must be left behind in the twentieth century.

Ced Hesse is principal researcher in the climate-change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Co-authors of this piece were Saverio Kratli, Izzy Birch and Magda Nassef.

An earlier version of this article was published in book form by the IIED as “Modern and mobile: The future of livestock production in Africa’s drylands”. It is summarised and used here with permission.

NEXT: recognising global advantages

Homepage image from World Bank

High-rise drama in Nanchang

Li Taige — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:09:00 +0000

The unnecessary demolition of a 10-year-old hotel in south-east China exposes a shallow commitment to low-carbon development, argues Li Taige.

It only takes eight seconds to demolish a four-star hotel.

Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province in south-eastern China, which claims it is en route to becoming a “low carbon city”, has done something almost unbelievable. On February 6, the landmark 22-storey, 86-metre high Wuhu Hotel, which only opened in 1997, was dynamited. The hotel was owned by Hong Kong’s Kaimei Group, which bought it in July, 2007 with a view to adding a further three floors – raising the building to a height of 90 metres – and refurbishing the interior to five-star standards.

The changes were approved by the local planning authorities, but the company then changed its mind. According to a city planner quoted in the city’s Information Daily on November 19 last year, Kaimei became nervous about possible subsidence and abandoned its plans. A new proposal was submitted: to demolish the original building and replace it with a new 25-storey hotel and six-storey auxiliary building. The Nanchang government signed off the plan in early November, approving both demolition and reconstruction.

The news of the demolition was met with scepticism from the public, with some commenting that the Wuhu was “the best hotel in the city” and demolition would be an “enormous waste” and others calling for an investigation. But the hotel was nonetheless demolished, to the bewilderment of the local community.

The quality of the original building can not have been the issue – otherwise, how could Kaimei have planned to extend it to 25 storeys? Furthermore, professor Xue Fengsong of the People’s Liberation Army University of Science and Technology, an explosions expert who was responsible for the demolition, told the media that the building was “solidly constructed”. The official line from Kaimei’s spokesperson, Qi Xiaoxing, was that there were failings in the structure and design of the hotel and that reinforcement would have been insufficient to enable the planned increase in height. Perhaps they are right that the Wuhu Hotel could not have been transformed into a 25-storey, five-star hotel. But it was designed as a 22-storey, four-star hotel. Why force these changes upon it?

Kaimei’s behaviour is strange enough. But the really odd thing is that Nanchang’s planning authorities played along. Surely, they realised the demolition would waste a huge amount of social resources, not to mention produce large quantities of dust pollution and building waste. Governmental neglect of duty led directly to the destruction of the hotel. Since Jiangxi is one of eastern China’s less economically developed provinces, the demolition of a perfectly good hotel in the provincial capital is particularly surprising. Its reconstruction also entails the pointless consumption of large amounts of energy, which will doubtless increase the city’s carbon footprint.

The ironic thing is that Nanchang talks endlessly about developing a low-carbon economy and creating a low-carbon city. In November last year, the city held the “First World Low-Carbon and Eco-Economy Conference and Technology Exhibition”. Low carbon banners and slogans were plastered everywhere and the conference even earnestly announced a “Nanchang Declaration” on the development of an eco-friendly global economy – through the promotion of low energy consumption, low carbon emissions and low pollution.

Prior to the conference, the UK’s Strategic Programme Fund had launched a low-carbon cities project, with Nanchang the first signed up. The Nanchang Daily reported that Nanchang, along with the provinces of Guangdong and Hebei, and the cities of Chongqing and Baoding, had been named as “National Low-Carbon Economy Pilots” at a climate-change conference in Beijing. The city is clearly very concerned about its environmental labels. Clean energy has an important place on Nanchang’s low-carbon roadmap, with plans for a world-class photovoltaic park. And several months ago, solar energy firm Saiwei’s thin film solar-cell plant went into operation in the Nanchang High-Tech Development Zone.

Many other Chinese cities have the same ambitions and plans for low-carbon economies and new energy. Indeed, a wave of “low-carbon cities” is sweeping across the land. The development of new energy sources is, of course, to be encouraged. But it would be short-sighted to think it is all that is required for a low-carbon economy. Other methods such as waste reduction through urban planning and advocating the use of public transport are equally important.

Demolishing a hotel that has been in use for little more than a decade is not common. But unnecessary demolitions do often happen in China. In one district of Fuzhou, the capital of the south-eastern province of Fujian, the local government recently released a startling piece of news: it plans to demolish a 15 million yuan (US$2.2 million) primary school, which only opened last year, along with a number of residential buildings that are less than ten years old in order to allow construction of a “Central Business District”.

Last summer I visited a project in Wuhan, central China’s most populous city, linking two urban lakes with a 1.7-kilometre long canal. The work involved the relocation of 8,932 households – but the majority of those homes were not actually in the area needed by the project. In early 2007, a Zhejiang University building on the bank of Hangzhou’s West Lake, east China, was also dynamited. The 20-storey, 60-metre high building was designed to last a century but ended up being used for just 13 years. The university had sold its lakeside campus to Hong Kong’s Kerry Properties, which plans to build a new complex.

The legal system should be the strongest guarantee of development of a low-carbon economy. But many take advantage of loopholes or a lack of legislation or simply forget about the law altogether. The unavoidable truth is that many of China’s local government officials have not appreciated the true meaning of a low-carbon economy. They like the low-carbon city label, but not what it really entails.

Li Taige is a Beijing-based journalist. He obtained a master’s degree in engineering from Sichuan University in 1997, and studied as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003-2004.

Homapage image from Lotus prince.

A home away from home

Suzanne Goldenberg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:29:00 +0000

Can some of the most vulnerable species be saved from extinction due to climate change? One biologist has a radical idea: pick them up and move them, writes Suzanne Goldenberg.

Picture an elephant in the wild, making its stately progress across the savannah, tall grass bending beneath its feet. Now transplant that image to the American prairie. In one of the most startling new ideas to emerge about climate change, a leading conservation biologist is calling for plants and wildlife facing extinction to be saved simply by picking them up and moving them.

Camille Parmesan, a butterfly biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, has been monitoring the effects of rapid climate change on species – particularly those threatened because they cannot adapt to or escape from rising temperatures – for more than a decade now. But her idea for a modern-day Noah’s ark remains hugely controversial.

“The idea is that, for certain species at very high risk of extinction due to climate change, we should actively pick them up and move them to suitable locations that are outside their historic range,” she tells me in her office at the university campus, near the biology laboratory in which she and her husband keep myriad caterpillar samples in the cold store.

Her proposals, once confined to a handful of scientists, are now getting a broader airing as governments begin to grapple with the enormous problem of how to insulate animal and plant life from a warming climate. Shortly after appearing inThe Atlantic magazine’s list of “brave thinkers”, Parmesan lobbied negotiators, environmental activists and scientists at last December’s climate-change summit in Copenhagen to start drawing up plans to move animals that are most at risk.

She is, not surprisingly, frustrated and angry with the failure of governments to cut the emissions that cause climate change. After the subsequent discovery of a false claim about melting Himalayan glaciers by the UN’s climate body the IPCC, Parmesan also stresses that conservationists should not fall into a pattern of reflexively blaming climate change for each and every decline in wildlife. However, she remains convinced of the dangers to the world’s animals from a rapidly warming atmosphere.

Scientists have long believed that 20% to 30% of all known species of land animal, bird and fish could become extinct because of climate change. But recent studies, based on more elevated temperature projections, have suggested an even greater rate of die-off – 40% to 70% – as heatwaves, drought and the increasing acidification of the oceans drive animals from their native habitats and destroy their food supply.

The sheer scale of threatened extinctions has forced conservationists to rethink what was once dismissed as an outlandish notion. And it’s got Parmesan thinking about elephants …

To date, there is little evidence about how climate change – rather than traditional threats such as poaching or growing urbanisation – is affecting the grasslands where these majestic creatures live in the wild. “But at some point, I think we might want to think about moving them around,” Parmesan says.

She has already been pushing for efforts to regenerate America’s prairie grasslands in parts of Texas and the US Midwest, by bringing in big grazing animals. There are fossils to suggest there were elephants in North America tens of thousands of years ago. So why not transplant African elephants to North America?

“With climate change, I am starting to think that, if we do get a massive reduction of Africa’s grassland, then as I am advocating restoration of the US prairie anyway, we can use the large herbivores from Africa to help that process because they are already co-adapted [or mutually accommodating]. I wouldn’t be opposed to that.”

Parmesan can see her way to moving other big herbivores too, such as giraffes. She can even justify finding new homes for pandas. However, she concedes that most of the planet’s iconic large animals would still have to find their own way out from climate change – it would be impractical to move carnivores, for example.

“What we are advocating is not moving tigers to Africa, nor moving polar bears to Antarctica – nothing as dramatic as that – but [on the whole] to take species that are fairly innocuous, including a lot of plants and insects,” she says. “We know enough about their competitive abilities and their behaviour, and we have no expectation that they are going to be able to take over an ecosystem.”

Climate studies since 2000 reveal a growing threat to animal life far beyond the polar regions that have been feeling its early impacts. A review of recent scientific literature showed 52% of species striking out for more temperate areas as their traditional habitats became unsuitable, migrating from 50 kilometres to as far as 1,600 kilometres away when geography and human settlements allowed.

Climate change is also altering their way of life: some 62% of species, for example, are mating earlier in the spring. The studies noted huge varieties in response to climate change except for one fatal trait: no species was exhibiting the kind of large-scale evolutionary changes needed to adapt to warming temperatures in its existing habitat. “Evolution is not going to save the polar bear,” says Parmesan simply.

If it were up to her, the evacuation would start now – perhaps with a variety of the ephemeral Checkerspot butterfly that started her on this unlikely career path. Now 48, she did not set out to become a campaigner – or even a lepidopterist, for that matter. The youngest (and smallest) of six daughters, she grew up in a solidly Republican family with deep roots in the Texas oil industry. Her mother, a geologist, worked for an oil company, as does one of her sisters.

Initially, Parmesan wanted to study primates, but she did not have the stomach to work with caged animals. She claims she is uncomfortable even describing herself as an environmentalist – although she does drive a blue Prius, and watches her carbon footprint.

It was fieldwork that set Parmesan on her more public trajectory, after she published her first paper on the plight of Edith’s Checkerspot. In the early 1990s, she spent more than four years rattling across the Pacific Northwest in an old Toyota pickup truck, tracking these butterflies from Mexico to Alberta.

Earlier researchers – including her husband, Michael Singer – had established that the Checkerspot was sensitive to temperature. The trek convinced Parmesan that it was dying out because of climate change: rising temperatures in California were drying up the plant that was its main food source, although the butterfly continued to do fine in northern latitudes. And yet Parmesan admits she was, at first, sceptical about projections of the broader impacts of climate change on the animal world.

“I have to admit that 10 years ago, I thought they were a bit too extreme,” she says. But now she fears the scientific community is under-estimating the risk of extinction, and is frustrated with conservation organisations for failing to grasp the urgency of this situation.

When Parmesan first began talking about moving species, or “assisted colonisation”, at academic conferences, her fellow biologists erupted. They accused her of playing God; of tampering with nature in ways that carry enormous risk. They warned that her approach would set off a whole new chain of problems. How did Parmesan know the transplants would take to their new surroundings? How did she know they would not stage a hostile takeover, chasing out the native species?

“I was surprised at how angry people got – how emotional,” she says. “They were just horrified that I advocated playing God. They thought I was advocating an engineering approach to conservation.”

Which, Parmesan concedes, she is. But she argues that her approach may be the only way left to save some species whose escape routes are blocked by urban sprawl or punishing desert, or which cannot adapt in time.

Unlike traditional threats to wildlife, Parmesan says there is no prospect of recovery from climate change. Loss of habitat and poaching can be reversed, given enough money. Threatened animals can be coaxed back to healthy numbers – as in the case of the wolf in the Rocky Mountain West region of the United States. Degraded landscapes can be restored. But climate change is irreversible, at least on a human timescale. And besides, it’s not as if there hasn’t been transportation of animal or plant life in the past.

“It doesn't make any sense to say it’s OK for the shipping industry and the transport industry to accidentally move stuff around, for the aquarium trade to move stuff around, for the garden trade to move stuff all over the place, but that it’s not OK for a conservation biologist who is desperately trying to save a species from extinction to move it 100 miles [about 160 kilometres]. Come on, we have mucked around with Earth to such a degree that I think it’s a ridiculous argument.”

In recent years, Parmesan and a handful of other scientists have begun work on a blueprint for moving plants and wildlife on the verge of extinction. She argues it would be far more effective to transplant entire communities of plants and animals, rather than a few token species.

“If we move individual species, it will just be: ‘Let’s save a few cool things for our grandkids.’ But if we can get people to think about it on a grander scale, it could save some significant percentage of species.”

Their idea is to start small – with plants, butterflies, birds, small rodents, and mammals – and to restrict the relocation plan to isolated spots that are immediately threatened by climate change. That is, high-altitude species that are being forced to migrate higher and higher up mountains to find cooler temperatures. Parmesan would shift those populations to another, higher mountain within close range.

It is too soon to say if she is winning the argument. Her ideas are still considered outside the mainstream of conservationists, and undertaking any kind of mass animal rescue will require rewriting existing international laws on transporting animals, as well as huge infusions of cash. But some of the bigger wildlife NGOs are beginning to listen more seriously to what was seen only a decade ago as an outlandish idea.

“We need to have as many potential tools as possible in our tool boxes,” agrees Thomas Brooks of Conservation International. “It is not very easy and it is not very cheap, but I do see this as an option that needs to be explored when cheaper and easier options aren’t working. But this is a more difficult and expensive approach, and needs to be evaluated carefully in that light.”

Even with temperature rises of 0.7° Celsius [1.26° Fahrenheit], some animals have already been lost – such as the golden toad that lives in the cool mountains of Costa Rica. (Biologists there have warned that more than a dozen amphibian species have disappeared from the jungles because of climate change). And last year, researchers in Australia reported what would be the world’s first mammalian extinction of modern times: the lemuroid ringtail possum. These animals drop out of trees and die if the temperature rises above 30° Celsius [86° Fahrenheit] –although subsequent reports suggest a number have since been sighted.

Many other species are under a death sentence. In the American west, researchers have charted a sharp decline in the pika, a small, furry brown animal that lives in the Rocky Mountains. As for the polar bear, its natural hunting grounds are fast disappearing with the melting sea ice. Some studies suggest the Arctic’s summer sea ice could disappear entirely by 2020, and with it the seals that are the bears’ main food supply. Recently, Canadian biologists reported several cases of male polar bears eating their young because they were going hungry.

But while it’s too late for the polar bear, Parmesan believes there is a chance of saving other animals – provided governments and conservation organisations overcome their reservations and act now. “Otherwise, we are going to see a whole slew of species go extinct that we could have saved, if only we’d been willing to think a little bit more outside the box.”

www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Homepage image by lensbug.chandru

Wringing China dry

Feng Yongfeng — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Reservoirs and hydropower stations are sprouting up all over China, damaging ecosystems and causing conflict. It’s time to leave the rivers alone, says Feng Yongfeng.

Last December, 160,000 residents living along the Qingzhang River in Hebei, north-east China petitioned local government over the construction of a new hydropower station in neighbouring province Shanxi, complaining that it was cover for a new reservoir. They wanted the authorities to call an immediate halt to the project, saying that the Qingzhang River – the lifeblood of the county and its 400,000 inhabitants – would, otherwise, be cut off.

The Qingzhang is part of the Hai River system. It rises in Shanxi, then flows through Hebei and Henan and its waters are shared between the upper and lower reaches. Since the 1950s, various water-storage projects have been constructed in Shanxi. In the two decades leading up to 1965, the river’s annual average flow was 1.96 billion cubic metres. But, from 1980 to 2000, it was only 356 million cubic metres – huge quantities of water were being retained upstream.

Meanwhile, Hebei has been busy building its own reservoirs. Since 1949, more than 1,000 reservoirs of different sizes have been constructed “for flood protection”. This took reservoir capacity across the province to 10 billion cubic metres of water, 6 billion of which could be supplied to cities. But a mixture of economic growth, a rising population and years of drought left parts of Hebei suffering from water shortages. And so reservoirs originally intended to prevent flooding were gradually used to supply water to the cities.

Hebei has another grievance. Even during times of extreme water shortage, it is obliged to provide a constant flow to Beijing to ensure the capital’s water security. The Hebei to Beijing section of the South-North Water Transfer Project has already been completed. Should Beijing suffer a water crisis, Hebei’s four major reservoirs – Wangkuai, Xidayang, Gangnan and Huangbizhuang – will be expected, come what may, to turn on the taps. When water levels at Beijing’s Miyun reservoir fall below one billion cubic metres, the Hebao and Yunzhou reservoirs, over the border in Hebei, are also forced to provide water – even if they themselves are nearly dry.

But even Hebei and Shanxi are not enough to satisfy the capital. In the 1950s, Beijing built the four billion cubic metre Guanting reservoir on the Yongding River, a tributary of the Hai River in north-east China. But, by 2009, water levels were hovering around the 100 million cubic-metre mark. Water expert and leader of Beijing-based NGO, Green SOS, Wang Jian, blames the 270 reservoirs built upstream for the low levels.

Currently, local governments are fighting to hold onto any water that passes through their borders. Hebei is also vexed about a project planned in Shaanxi, central China, that will divert water from the stretch of the Han River in the south of the province, through the Qinling mountains and into the Wei River, where it will raise water levels and reduce pollution. With such large quantities of water being taken at the upper reaches – and another 10 billion cubic metres from the middle reaches earmarked for Beijing – nobody can predict what kind of conflict will arise.

Per capita water resources in the north of China are inadequate, giving rise to protectionism and hoarding. But south of the Huai River, where flows are plentiful, a different kind of water war is under way. Hydroelectric firms want to turn water into electricity. For them, it is “liquid oil”, but all the hydropower stations and water distribution hubs they are putting in place will end up destroying the rivers’ ecosystems.

China’s major waterways flow down from the Tibetan Plateau, with differences in altitude providing the potential for energy generation. So power firms are particularly smitten with the hydropower possibilities in the south-west of the country. After the year 2000, investment in hydropower was liberalised, leaving both major power firms and smaller private companies free to build hydropower stations.

Within a few years, tributaries of the Jinsha, Yalong, Dadu, Lancang and Nu rivers had been developed; as soon as water left one power station, it flowed right into the next. The actual rivers themselves are also unlikely to escape their fate; there are plans for numerous dams on almost all of them. And while the public is paying attention to the hydropower fever that has taken hold in the south-west, similar developments are taking place on some rivers in the east. The counties of Jinzhai, Yuexi and Huoshan in the Dabie mountains of Anhui province, eastern China, all have plans to “enrich the people” and “boost the economy” through small-scale hydropower projects.

The first hydropower station on the Jinhua, or Wu River, system, the largest southern tributary of the Yangtze, was built in 1950, at Huhai on the Qiantang tributary. By 2005, 183 stations had been built, generating more than 61,000 kilowatts of electricity. Fujian’s Min River, in the south-eastern corner of China, was not far behind. Figures from 2004 indicate the river had 29 large or medium-sized hydropower stations and a large number of smaller stations. The city of Nanping, in central Fujian, was alone home to 183 stations that were completed, under construction or in the pipeline. Environmental assessments or approvals had not been obtained for the majority of these.

The density of hydroelectric development is shocking: the water outlet from one station feeds directly into the dam of the next. On the Min River, the outlet for the Shuikou station flows into the dam for the Shaxi station, while the outlet for Shaxi flows into the dam for the Xiayang station. And so it goes on. As a result, these stretches of river are left without flowing water – they and their tributaries become a series of lakes.

On December 12 last year, the State Council issued an environmental and economic plan for the Poyang lake region, indicating the area had become a part of national-level strategy. This plan includes the construction of a water-distribution hub, roughly where Poyang Lake and the Yangtze River meet, to control the level of the lake. When the lake is full, water will be returned to the river and, when levels are low, water from the Yangtze will be fed in. The level of the lake will not, therefore, fluctuate so much across the seasons.

Almost the entire global population of 3,000 white cranes spends the winter at Poyang Lake. “For a long time, the white cranes have found the habitat and food that they need at Poyang,” says wetlands expert Lei Guangchun. “If the water level during the winter suddenly increases, they and other wintering birds won’t be able to forage and populations will plummet.”

The idea of a lock controlling the water level also worries dolphin experts. Wang Ding, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan-based Institute of Hydrobiology, says that, like the already extinct baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin, the originally populous finless porpoise could also be lost. There may already be fewer than 2,000 finless porpoises in the wild, divided into two main populations – one in the Yangtze River and one in Poyang Lake. Bridges over the entrance to the lake and frequent shipping have already virtually cut these two groups off from each other and there is an emerging consensus that this is resulting in genetic degradation. This “ecological lock” will completely remove any chance of genetic mingling and means that, in the not too distant future, the finless porpoise could follow the baiji into oblivion.

Ma Jun, a well-known environmentalist, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and chinadialogue author says: “Full-on building of reservoirs and hydroelectric stations are not only the spark for frequent water conflict but also cause loss of ecological function by breaking the rivers down into sections. We need to let the rivers flow and keep their ecosystems healthy. We need to let people live in harmony. The best way to do that is to reduce the exploitation of rivers and let them recover.”

Feng Yongfeng is a technology journalist at Guangming Daily.

Homepage image from Wetland China shows white cranes at Poyang Lake, south-east China.

Chinese coal remedies (1)

Natural Resources Defense Council — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:01:00 +0000

In spite of an urgent need to cut emissions, fossil-fuel consumption in China is soaring. CCS offers a solution, says the Natural Resources Defense Council.

To avoid the worst consequences of global warming, the world must limit average temperature increases to two degrees Celsius or less above pre-industrial levels by reducing carbon dioxide emissions by at least 50% below 1990 levels by the year 2050. Several recent studies have found that the warming we are already committed to will exceed that limit even if emissions growth were to stop completely.

Achieving the urgently needed emissions reductions will require efforts beyond first-resort measures such as increasing energy efficiency, scaling up renewable-energy use, and enhancing natural carbon sinks. Given the world’s current heavy reliance on fossil fuels, some countries, such as China and the United States, need to pursue a wide range of carbon-mitigation strategies that should include carbon capture and storage (CCS).

All three components of CCS technology – capture, transport, and sequestration – are commercially mature but have mainly been used for other purposes rather than CCS. Very few integrated large-scale projects are in operation today due to the lack of explicit national climate policies to limit carbon-dioxide emissions. For the technology to contribute to meaningful emissions reductions, integrated commercial projects are urgently needed to gain operational experience and drive down costs. Sequestering high-purity carbon-dioxide waste streams from certain industrial facilities reduces the cost of a CCS demonstration project and thus presents a “low-hanging fruit” opportunity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that CCS is capable of contributing 15% to 55% of worldwide cumulative carbon-emission reductions until the year 2100.

CCS is of particular importance for China. Although the country has made significant strides in expanding capacities in hydro, wind, solar and nuclear power, it still meets 70% of its energy needs through coal. By 2020, China is projected to have four times the hydropower capacity and double the wind and solar-power capacity of the United States but these renewable sources will remain small in comparison to coal consumption.

Chinese researcher Kejun Jiang and colleagues project that, even assuming concerted action to restrict the development of energy-intensive industries, taxation policies to encourage energy efficiency and conservation, strong government support for renewable and nuclear-energy development and high efficiency standards in industrial production, coal will continue to meet more than half of China’s energy demand until 2030. Under this aggressive policy scenario, China’s coal consumption could peak around 2020 and then slightly decrease through 2050. Even if coal consumption decreases, China’s carbon-dioxide emissions from all fossil fuels would not decrease without CCS, but would only level off.

China has promising geological-storage potential. Chinese and US researchers have identified over 1,600 large carbon dioxide point sources, 91% of which are located 160 kilometres or less from potential geological sinks and more than half of which are located directly above a candidate formation.

There are at least 130 megatonnes of high-purity carbon dioxide emitted each year from 185 large-scale ammonia, hydrogen, and ethylene-oxide production facilities, according to Xiaochun Li and Ning Wei of the Chinese Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics (ISRM). Three-quarters of those high purity carbon-dioxide streams are situated within 80 kilometres of a candidate sink. Such streams could total as much as 208 megatonnes per year in China once all planned ammonia, methanol, and liquid-hydrocarbon production facilities come online, according to research by Zhong Zheng, Eric Larson and others, who have told the NRDC about their work. Because the state where carbon dioxide is separated from a gas mixture is skipped, the costs of CCS for several of these sources can range from US$10 (68 yuan) to US$20 (137 yuan) per metric tonne of carbon dioxide avoided, lower than typical estimates for power plants, these researchers say.

Initial basin-scale assessments, performed and published jointly by Li and Wei of ISRM with the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), suggest that China’s theoretical sequestration capacity in deep saline formations amounts to 3,066 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide – more than 450 times China’s total carbon dioxide emissions in 2005. The practical capacity and matched capacity, however, are expected to be much smaller than the theoretical potential when more factors are taken into account, such as injectivity – the rate and pressure the carbon dioxide can be pumped into the target without fracturing the formation – the effectiveness of carbon dioxide trapping mechanisms, cap-rock tightness, reservoir size, risk from faults, regulations, infrastructure constraints and economics.

Even though China’s sedimentary basins are large in number, they are also among the most complicated in the world and are characterised by numerous small-scale faults and strong faulting activity. These features have led to the formation of complex geological traps, which indicate that detailed, localised studies and site characterisation will be crucial to ensuring the successful application of CCS.

China’s capacity for carbon dioxide-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and enhanced gas recovery (EGR) is estimated to be up to 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. While the assessments of oil and gas fields were also conducted at the basin level, the researchers used available field-location information to get greater storage-zone resolution. Unlike deep saline aquifers, oil and gas fields generally have more accurate and detailed geological information. According to ISRM-PNNL joint studies, two-fifths of the large carbon dioxide point sources in China are located within 80 kilometres of an oil or gas field and the estimated incremental oil production by EOR in China’s 16 major onshore and three offshore oil basins could technically reach up to seven billion barrels – two and half times China’s current annual oil consumption.

There are a number of near-term opportunities for CCS demonstration in China, including various oil and gas basins that show promising EOR and EGR opportunities from using high-purity carbon dioxide sources or combined waste gas streams. A number of integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) projects that are either under construction or in the planning stage have also expressed an intention to conduct a pilot CCS project, as has the Shenhua direct coal-liquefaction plant in Inner Mongolia, northern China.

A number of ammonia plants that are located 50 kilometres to150 kilometres from the oilfields of the Jianghan Basin, in south-central China, collectively emit over four million tonnes of high-purity carbon dioxide per year from manufacturing fertilisers. The combined benefits of short distances between sources and sinks and high potential EOR revenues make the Jianghan area a promising near-term CCS candidate.

The crude natural gas produced at the Jiangyou gas field in western China, contains acid gas – carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide – which needs to be removed from the gas product anyway. And the city of Jiangyou, located less than 25 kilometres away, has several large industrial point sources of low-concentration carbon dioxide. Therefore, one opportunity for low-cost CCS demonstration would be using the acid gas mixed with the industrial low-concentration carbon dioxide, without capture, for EGR.

China’s largest coal producer, the Shenhua Group, has a joint US-China project that aims to collect high-purity carbon dioxide from a direct coal-liquefaction facility in the Ordos Basin of Inner Mongolia and is slated to reach operational status in 2010 or 2011, with an aim to eventually sequester 2.9 megatonnes of pure carbon dioxide per year, most likely in a nearby saline aquifer.

The GreenGen project, mentioned in Li Jia and Xi Liang’s chinadialogue article on the economics of CCS, is led by China’s largest power producer, the Huaneng Group and will be China’s first commercial-scale IGCC facility, with plans to capture 25,000 to 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year starting in 2012-2013, with a higher target set for 2017. This 250-megawatt IGCC plant is currently under construction in the Bohai Basin in Tianjin, north-eastern China.

The China Power Investment Corporation has proposed an IGCC facility in Langfang, near Beijing, that would capture 8% of the carbon dioxide from the syngas – a gas mixture containing varying amounts of carbon monoxide and hydrogen – produced by two 488-megawatt IGCC units. An oilfield is only one kilometre away from the facility site, making sequestration through EOR a prime possibility for this project. The project is awaiting the government’s final approval.

In addition, two other large IGCC projects have been proposed and are seeking government approval, one in Dongguan in Guangdong Province, south-eastern China and the other in Lianyungang in Jiangsu Province, eastern China. The Dongguan project would build four 200-megawatt IGCC units and would be situated 100 kilometres from two depleted oilfields, while the Lianyungan project would eventually build 1200 megawatts of IGCC capacity and 1300 megawatts of ultra-supercritical capacity and would be situated in a coastal city 200 kilometres north of the Subei oilfield. Both projects have expressed an interest in combined CCS and EOR.

An earlier version of this article was published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, as “Identifying near-term opportunities for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in China”. It is a summary of a full report, co-authored by Jingjing Qian, George Peridas, Jason Chen and Yueming Qiu, Julio Friedmann, Xiaochun Li, Ning Wei, S Ming Sung, Mike Fowler, Deborah Seligsohn, Yue Liu, Sarah Forbes, Dongjie Zhang and Lifeng Zhao.

NEXT: The value of international cooperation

Homepage image from Huaneng shows its planned IGGC plant in Tianjin, north China.

Chinese coal remedies (2)

Natural Resources Defense Council — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:18:00 +0000

The global community can – and must – help China overcome the obstacles to a carbon capture revolution, argues the Natural Resources Defense Council.

While it is evident that China needs and has the necessary technical capability – and sufficient storage capacity – to carry out carbon capture and storage, significant barriers exist for its wide and timely deployment. The most important of these are the high capital costs and the considerable amount of energy currently required for carbon capture. These two barriers are interrelated; cutting the energy penalty will reduce the total cost of CCS.

Currently, the energy penalty for a new post-combustion coal power plant can be as high as 31% and, for a new integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant, 16%, as explained by Edward Rubin of Carnegie Mellon University. In China, the addition of CCS will require the burning of roughly 25% more coal in order to generate the same quantity of electricity. This is a steep initial price for the first CCS plants, which is nonetheless widely expected to come down subsequently. In addition, it is important to remember that in meeting carbon-reduction targets will rely first and foremost on improving energy efficiency and utilising renewable energy and other lower-cost opportunities, only using CCS deployment to supplement these efforts.

Technological progress has the potential to slash the energy penalty, and many research-and-development efforts are underway inside and outside China aimed at fashioning more efficient and cheaper capture processes. Based on the historical cost trends of other emerging energy technologies such as wind and solar power, there is reason to be optimistic. Solar photovoltaics, windmills and gas turbines have undergone constant cost reductions as installed capacities have increased. For this reason, research-and-development and large-scale demonstration projects will all help lower CCS costs.

International expertise is stronger than that of China in three technical areas: subsurface geological engineering; long-term monitoring and verification; and long-distance carbon dioxide transportation infrastructure. Given the United States’ extensive carbon dioxide-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) experience – the world’s first such project was launched in the southern state of Texas nearly four decades ago – the United States is well-positioned to play an important role in developing CCS in China.

International collaboration may also take place in joint technology research and development, such as the US-China Clean Energy Research Center that was announced during US president Barack Obama’s visit to China late last year. China has already begun its own CCS research, with notable work conducted by Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, several institutes in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and research institutes of China National Petroleum Corporation and the Huaneng Group. Chinese companies, such as the Huaneng Group and the ENN Group, have developed proprietary coal gasification technologies and are already collaborating with Australia and the United States.

The international community could also provide recommendations to China on developing a regulatory system to ensure the safety and effectiveness of CCS projects. It is crucial that the initial demonstration projects are conducted properly in terms of site characterisation, risk assessment, environmental-impact assessment and ongoing operations, because sub-standard work at the beginning could call the technology as a whole into question and slow down its deployment.

Since China does not yet have a comprehensive regulatory system in this area, early demonstration projects will, in particular, need to learn from the experience and best practice that industrialised countries are developing. The European Union and the United States have already launched efforts to share their regulatory experiences with China. This is also an area where international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can make a substantial contribution, exemplified by the collaboration between the World Resources Institute and Tsinghua University.

But knowledge-sharing alone is not enough. Increased funding is also needed to jump-start a CCS industry in China. The first few large-scale demonstration projects will be intrinsically expensive and “risky” for any single developer and there is still widespread public concern in China about the technology. Therefore, international funding will be critical in helping to initiate a number of demonstration projects that experiment with different capture technologies and geological formations and benefit all parties involved technically, politically and economically in a carbon-constrained world.

More substantial funding from both the Chinese government and international sources is essential to the deployment and improvement of CCS technologies, and thus reduction of the costs involved. Three main areas are in need of major financial support. The first is large, integrated projects to test commercial-scale technologies, gain experience, identify regulatory issues, and train human resources. The second is research into offshore basins for carbon sequestration to meet the storage needs of China’s heavily industrialised eastern and southern coastal regions, which lack sufficient onshore storage capacity. And the third is detailed, subsurface geological assessments of China’s major onshore sedimentary basins to refine current methodologies and produce more accurate estimates. To develop a CCS industry in China that is also capable of exporting technology and expertise, further policy and economic drivers are needed, such as direct regulation, carbon taxes and emissions-control subsidies.

China will need a wide portfolio of mitigation measures, including CCS, to reduce its carbon footprint. There are many “low-hanging fruit” opportunities that exist for CCS in China, but whether these opportunities are grasped will depend on the extent to which governments, international institutions and corporations engage in meaningful and prompt financing, capacity building and technology and knowledge transfer. This collaboration will not only benefit China but will also be of value to cooperating countries and, ultimately, the wider world.

An earlier version of this article was published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, as “Identifying near-term opportunities for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in China”. It is a summary of a full report, co-authored by Jingjing Qian, George Peridas, Jason Chen and Yueming Qiu, Julio Friedmann, Xiaochun Li, Ning Wei, S Ming Sung, Mike Fowler, Deborah Seligsohn, Yue Liu, Sarah Forbes, Dongjie Zhang and Lifeng Zhao.

Homepage image from US Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy

Capitalising on capture

Liang Xi, Li Jia — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:25:00 +0000

CCS is rapidly gaining ground as an accepted green technology. But, say Li Jia and Liang Xi, financial barriers still stand in the way.

Over the last two decades, awareness has grown that carbon capture and storage (CCS) could be an important technology in the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; more than 20 large-scale demonstration projects are now in the pipeline. According a 2009 report from the International Energy Agency, CCS in the power and industrial sectors is likely to represent 10% of total emissions reductions by 2030.

As most major economies have already made a commitment to controlling greenhouse gas emissions, ideally no new fossil-fuel power plants, oil-refinery and steel plants or cement kilns would be permitted unless they were built with full-scale CCS facilities. Widespread deployment of large-scale CCS is, however, facing two major challenges: a lack of experience in building and operating commercial-scale integrated CCS projects and insufficient financial incentives to provide a fair return for investors. Before these challenges can be addressed, new fossil-fuel combustion plants in the next decade should be designed and built using the carbon capture ready (CCR) approach in order to ease retrofitting of CCS in the future.

Some stakeholders are concerned that CCS technologies are not yet proven because of a lack of industrial projects. This view is not entirely correct. More than 100 industrial CCS projects are being developed and about 20 are currently in operation, including the Statoil-Sleipner one million-tonne per year storage project in Norway, the 30 megawatt Vatternfall-Schwarze Pumpe pilot plant in Germany and the Huaneng-Gaobeidian 3000-tonne per year post-combustion capture pilot in China. A few projects have been running for more than 10 years.

The real issue is a lack of large-scale schemes. According to the United Kingdom’s Stern Review, capturing carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel power stations is essential to delivering steep cuts in emissions. But no existing CCS project is yet capturing carbon dioxide from power stations at a rate of more than one million tonnes per year.

The European Union hopes to have at least 10 demonstration projects up and running by 2015 and is preparing a knowledge-sharing framework for CCS, though the timetable appears to be slipping. The US energy secretary Steven Chu has announced a similarly ambitious target: the United States could have 10 to 12 commercial demonstration projects operational by 2016 and ready for a wider commercial deployment by 2019. The Australian government, meanwhile, is providing 100 million Australian dollars (US$90 million) per year for a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI) to support demonstration projects worldwide. And, while the Chinese government has not yet aggressively supported CCS demonstration projects, large state-owned energy companies such as Huaneng Group, GreenGen and Shenhua have proposed a number of large-scale schemes. Several bilateral and multilateral initiatives have also been established in order to accelerate the sharing of risk, funding and knowledge, including the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, the FutureGen Alliance, and the UK-EU-China Near Zero Emissions Coal (NZEC) initiative plus the GCCSI.

Examples of three types of capture technology – post-combustion, pre-combustion, and separation from industrial process – are in commercial use for non-CCS applications. A fourth, oxy-fuel, is still in the pilot demonstration phase. However, more research and demonstration are needed to make “capture” economically feasible and technically proven at the scale, and under the conditions, required for CCS-relevant applications.

Once the carbon dioxide is captured, it has to be transported to a suitable and secure storage site – a pipeline is the most economic way to do this – and can then be injected into deep geological formations for storage. The oil and gas industry has experience injecting large quantities of carbon dioxide into saline formations and oil and gas fields and the technology is reasonably mature. Thus most CCS technologies are ready to deploy and have established suppliers. The priorities in their development are achieving cost reductions and demonstrating full-system integration.

So what are the costs? According to a study by energy consultancy Pöyry for the UK government, the abatement cost for carbon capture in 2015 is likely to be US$41 (280 yuan) to US$57 (389 yuan) per tonne of carbon dioxide for capturing from coal or natural-gas power stations, and the cost for storing and monitoring carbon dioxide in saline aquifer US$1.60 (10.9 yuan) to US$3.20 (21.8 yuan) per tonne of carbon dioxide. A special report on CCS from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests the cost of transportation is US$1 (6.8 yuan) to US$6 (41 yuan) per tonne for a 250 kilometre pipeline carrying five-million tonnes per year but the actual number is sensitive to location and land cost.

According to a study by consultant McKinsey & Company published in 2008, the total cost of initial CCS demonstration projects between 2012 and 2015 is likely be around US$84 (574 yuan) to US$127 (867 yuan) per tonne of carbon dioxide and reduce to US$49 (335 yuan) to US$70 (478 yuan) per tonne abated shortly after 2020. However, if a discount rate is applied to reflect the uncertainties in CCS investment, the cost goes up by US$13 (89 yuan) to US$15 (102 yuan) per tonne.

CCS in developing countries may have a cost advantage. The NZEC project and China-EU collaboration, COACH, suggest the full CCS costs could be US$35 (239 yuan) to US$42 (287 yuan) per tonne of carbon dioxide abated in large scale projects. However, this advantage may be much reduced in 2020 as labour costs, capital costs and currency value tend to rise faster in developing countries. An established CCS methodology in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) could potentially provide a substantial amount of financial support to kick-start early CCS demonstration projects in the developing world. However, support solely from CDM is not enough. Since carbon abatement costs in demonstration projects are much higher than the current market price of certified emissions reductions (CER), additional financial incentives from the public sector are likely to be the main driver for CCS demonstration projects around the world in the next decade.

The vast majority of global stakeholders share a consensus that CCS is an important technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, among the lay public, renewable and efficient appliances are perceived to be slightly more positive than CCS. The lack of awareness and information among policymakers and the general population has become a barrier in deploying CCS at scale.

The energy penalty is one limitation of CCS. Capturing and compressing carbon dioxide may increase the fuel needs of coal-fired power plants by more than 25%. Interestingly, most stakeholder consultations carried out in major developed economies have concluded that development of CCS will enhance energy security because a number of people in developed countries believe coal plants will not be permitted in the absence of CCS in the near future. However, Chinese stakeholders tend to frame CCS technologies as a threat to national energy security because they believe they could result in a higher import rate for coal. Some are also concerned about operational safety issues and coal-mining accidents.

Before CCS becomes economically feasible, power stations will continue to be built and emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. According to an IEA estimate, coal-fired generation is likely to grow by 2.5 times in China and 3.5 times in India during between 2007 and 2030. Modifications to make new plants carbon-capture ready are important for easing the retrofit of CCS. Developers of capture-ready plants should take responsibility for ensuring that all known factors in their control that would prevent installation and operation of carbon-dioxide capture have been identified and eliminated.

For pulverised-coal power plants, the carbon-capture ready investment is modest; less than 1% of the original fixed-capital expense, according to IEA estimates. However, it could reduce the possibility of early closure by 7% to 10% and increase the possibility of retrofitting by 5% to 7%, according to a 2009 study by the UK-China Chinese Advanced Power Plants Carbon Capture Option (CAPPCCO). A survey of 103 power plants in China by CAPPCO indicated nearly half of Chinese coal-fired power plants, none of which were built to be capture ready, would be unviable for retrofit.

The success of CCS will depend on a series of factors being realised. First, sufficient financial and political supports, plus explicit early-mover benefits, are needed to create an acceptable investment environment for demonstration projects. Second, such projects must prove the reliability and safety of CCS technologies and find efficient financial and operational models. Third, substantial cost reductions need to be achieved through technological innovation and the carbon price must become stable and high enough to justify CCS investment. And fourth, a more effective communication framework is necessary to improve the understanding of CCS among policymakers, energy entrepreneurs and the lay public.

Finally, once CCS becomes economically feasible, it should be possible to implement the technologies in every new fossil fuel plant and to retrofit some existing plants – with priority for those that were built to be carbon capture ready.

Li Jia is chief executive of LinksChina Investment Advisory Limited, founder of CaptureReady.com and a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at Imperial College, London. Xi Liang is a research associate in the Electricity Policy Research Group at the University of Cambridge.

Hompage image from Vattenfall shows its Schwarze Pumpe oxyfuel pilot plant in Spremberg, Germany.

The science of storage

Logan West — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:51:00 +0000

Putting greenhouses gases underground is the riskiest part of carbon capture and storage, yet it is often overlooked. Logan West sets out the facts.

Editors' message

Until recently, carbon capture and storage (CCS) was a phrase largely reserved for detailed discussions in university laboratories or the research divisions of energy giants. That is not the case today. The technology, which captures carbon dioxide produced by fossil-fuel combustion and stores it in deep geological formations, such as oil fields, now occupies a prominent position in climate-change policymaking and the public debate around cutting carbon.

Held up by its advocates as a way of reducing carbon emissions while maintaining a secure energy supply, CCS has gained significant traction with the world’s governments. The United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia are among the countries to have pledged large sums of public money to high-profile demonstration projects in the last two years. CCS is considered to be particularly important development for China, where around 70% of energy needs are still met by coal. A commercial-scale "clean coal" project is already under way in the city of Tianjin, in north China, but researchers, such as Stanford University’s He Gang, argue more is needed to promote widespread adoption.

The technology’s enormous expense – the cost of one CCS plant is currently estimated at around US$1.5 billion (10.7 billion yuan) – still stands in the way of rapid deployment. And it has been criticised by some for being a “plaster” for global ills rather than an attempt to deal with the root cause. But more and more policymakers, non-governmental organisations and academics are backing it as one of the many solutions required to cut carbon dioxide output, saying it is an advanced technology with a ready skills base – injecting carbon dioxide underground is an established practice in the oil and gas industry.

CCS is attracting huge global attention. And this week, chinadialogue will look at some of the key issues surrounding its development. Logan West kicks off the series with an explanation of the process’s storage aspects, while Li Jia and Liang Xi analyse the financial stumbling blocks and possible solutions. Later in the week, the Natural Resources Defense Council presents a detailed account of CCS development in China and the global cooperation needed to promote it. As always, we are keen to hear your views, so do please leave a comment – and get involved in the conversation.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a classic relocation-style response, like landfill or water diversion, that is steadily picking up steam. In fact, the International Energy Agency forecasts that CCS will contribute over 10 gigatonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions reductions in 2050, compared to 11 gigatonnes for renewables.

Why the optimism? The concept is simple, the technology exists, industry is proven to have the capacity and CCS is an adaptation, rather than overthrow, of the existing system. That said, CCS lacks neither flaws – energy inefficiency, high costs – nor detractors. While the topic heats up, details of the process itself often get lost in the debate. But an understanding of carbon-dioxide storage is essential to continuing the discussion.

For the non-geologist majority, storage can be difficult to conceptualise. Where does the carbon dioxide actually go? How does it stay there? What happens if it escapes? The storage process presents the riskiest and most uncertain part of any CCS project. Not only can carbon-dioxide release be hazardous, but its escape also undermines the whole process and wastes a lot of time and money doing so.

So how does storage work? It is important to understand that the carbon dioxide being stored is not like the carbon dioxide people exhale every day. The hot, high-pressure conditions of the kilometre-deep storage zones force carbon dioxide into a supercritical state with a liquid-like density, leading it to “flow”, which restricts its buoyancy.

This carbon dioxide is pumped into what geologists call a reservoir. Beneath our feet are layers of rocks, typically stacked one on top of the other. Reservoirs are layers in which fluids like water – called aquifers – and oil or gases accumulate. The key characteristic of reservoirs is that the rocks contain a lot of interconnected, open pore space, which fluids can move through and fill. The injected carbon dioxide “plume” does exactly this.

There are four main mechanisms for keeping the carbon dioxide plume where it is. The single most important factor is the cap-rock, an impermeable layer above the reservoir that holds in the plume the same way that a bottle cap shuts in the carbonation in a bottle of soda. It is essential that cap-rocks, among other traits, are spread over the whole area of the plume – up to 100 square kilometres – and are free of escape pathways such as leaky faults. The cap-rock and other unique geological structures are the frontline for containing carbon dioxide.

As the plume permeates through the pore spaces, the carbon dioxide becomes trapped as some channels are too tight for it to squeeze through. Then, as the gas interacts with the water in the reservoir, some of it dissolves. Once dissolved, the carbon dioxide loses all buoyancy and cannot move on its own. Eventually, a share of the dissolved substance reacts with the rocks to form minerals, solidifying the carbon dioxide in the subsurface, where it will stay for millions of years.

There is plenty of evidence indicating that these trapping mechanisms have been, are and ought to be successful. Naturally occurring carbon dioxide accumulations have been trapped in the subsurface worldwide for millions of years. Meanwhile, ongoing international demonstration projects are successfully conducting CCS. This has led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to state that, when done right, 99% of the carbon dioxide stored is likely to be retained 1,000 years after injection – time enough to find emission-free energy.

Still, there are a great number of unknowns. In geology, no two locations will ever be exactly the same. Thus, unlike capture technology, there is no “one size fits all” blueprint for carbon dioxide storage. And, while tools help us image the subsurface, they can only provide a sketch of the reality. Regardless of how thoroughly a site is examined, predicting the movement and reaction of carbon dioxide in the subsurface still involves a lot of guesswork. Experience and data do, however, lower the uncertainty and that is why oil fields make likely first-generation storage targets. Their geology is well understood and the carbon dioxide can sometimes be used to push out previously unrecoverable reserves.

The uncertainty can be managed if regulators and project operators work together to ensure that storage is carried out with the highest precautions and attention to efficacy. The key to successful storage is picking the safest site, analysing potential locations to identify one that will not only trap the carbon dioxide but also has the space to hold it all and allows the gas to be pumped in as fast as it arrives from the source.

To back up such research, collected data should be used to develop models of the reservoir that can simulate what the carbon dioxide is likely to do. Monitoring tools should then be put in place to track what it actually does and to test for leakage. Models and monitoring will function in tandem, with an ongoing assessment of the possible risks and plans for fixing leakage should it occur. Regulators should carefully review all preparation work and data before awarding permits for storage sites. They should also consult with local communities. This makes data transparency essential.

Even with all the precautions, carbon dioxide can still leak and the side effects can be serious. While normally non-toxic, heavy concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air can be deadly to humans and plant life. Such serious side effects are only caused by the rapid release of large volumes of carbon dioxide, which is unlikely to happen. However, more plausible, slow seepage of the gas from storage reservoirs can still be hazardous. Carbon dioxide that escapes into shallow aquifers nearer to the surface will react with the water to form a weak acid that can render groundwater non-potable or unusable for agriculture and industry. This acid could even leach toxic metals from the rocks or soils, which would worsen the health and environmental effects. Even carbon dioxide escaping harmlessly back into the atmosphere still contributes to greenhouse-gas emissions.

This raises the following question: is storage feasible? Technically, yes. Economically, yes; storage costs vary depending on the site but typically account for only 5% of the total project. But what about those estimates suggesting China can hold as much as 2,300 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide – or 100 years’ worth of emissions at the country’s current rate? Don’t let these estimates instill false optimism. They are theoretical figures. So much is still unknown that the true capacity is hard to predict. Geological data in China is still limited and little is actually known about the saline aquifers that show the greatest potential.

Where there is data, it is proprietary knowledge of oil companies, which are reluctant to share it freely. Similarly, some spots good for carbon dioxide storage may lead to conflicts of interest if they possess other important resources. Furthermore, China’s reservoirs tend to be very complex, with abundant faulting that potentially compromises safe containment. Even at top-priority oil reservoirs, issues exist due to the number of old exploration wells that need to be located and plugged to prevent carbon dioxide from escaping.

Finally, just because a site makes geological sense, does not necessarily mean it is practically viable. It does not make economic sense to pump carbon dioxide from Shanghai in the east of China to Xinjiang province in the west, just because there is a good reservoir there. Nor does it yet make sense to pump carbon dioxide directly under Beijing or other heavily populated regions. The uncertainties are still too high to justify taking the risk that the gas might leak and, at the very least, damage water resources.

Still, China may well possess many gigatonnes of realistic storage space – enough to play a significant role – and this is where discussion can move back to the big picture of costs, policy and beyond.

Logan West is a researcher at the Tsinghua-BP Clean Energy Research and Education Centre in Beijing.

Homepage image by Øyvind Hagen for Norway's Statoil shows the Sleipner CCS facility in the North Sea.