Study says low-carbon research offers big payoff
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It would cost up to $1.8 trillion to dramatically reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, but spending $35 billion on research into cutting edge technology for nuclear and low-emission coal plants could cut the price tag in half, researchers said on Monday.
U.S. electric utilities that currently rely on coal-burning, greenhouse-gas emitting plants for about half their generation capacity face the rising likelihood they will have to spend billions of dollars to comply with a government-imposed cap on heat-trapping emissions.
The Electric Power Research Institute, nonprofit electric sector researchers based in Palo Alto, California, said U.S. industry must start investing in cutting-edge research now to avoid a much bigger compliance bill in future decades.
"There's a tremendous benefit to developing a technology-based solution to reducing CO2 emissions," said Revis James, director of EPRI's Energy Technology Assessment Center.
"It's worth it to start on that now even if we want to continue to debate the exact nature of the priorities on research and development."
Without key technology advances, it would cost $1.8 trillion to reduce U.S. CO2 emissions by 2 percent a year starting in 2010, or about 50 percent below 2010 levels by 2050, the study found.
That number drops to $900 billion if U.S. industry spends about $1.4 billion annually in research and development through 2030 - about $35 billion total.
That money would go into emission-reducing technologies like carbon capture, new nuclear power plants, electric "plug-in" hybrid cars and coal-burning plants that sequester their carbon dioxide emissions in underground reservoirs.
"You get a pretty big payoff for a small investment," James said.
Coal-burning power plants emit the most U.S. carbon dioxide, about 40 percent of the total, and cars emit about a third of the total.
Nearly half of the R&D price tag -- $690 million a year through 2030 -- would go toward research into advanced coal technology and capturing and storing carbon dioxide, as specified by EPRI.
EPRI called for all new coal plants built after 2020 to be capable of capturing 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions, which would yield the single biggest reduction in sector emissions.
The group also called for marked efficiency improvements and cost reductions in two prominent "clean coal" technologies -- pulverized coal and integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) -- and making carbon capture commercially viable by 2020.
The study also counts on a massive U.S. nuclear plant build-out, about five times the amount predicted by Energy Department forecasters, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The group said U.S. nuclear capacity could grow to 64 gigawatts by 2030 - five times the government's estimate, which would account for 26 percent of U.S. electric generation.
On the transportation side, EPRI called for wider use of plug-in hybrid vehicles, which run mostly from batteries that can be charged overnight while sitting in the home garage.
EPRI's goal would be for such vehicles to account for 10 percent of new U.S. sales of light vehicle sales by 2017, rising to 30 percent by 2030.
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