Ecology & Carbon Management

Ecology & Carbon Management

Submitted By: Academic Group 14

1) Amit Kumar (PGP-10-003)

2) Nandita Arora (PGP-10-037)

3) Pallav Kumar (PGP-10-044)

4) Priyanka Taneja (PGP-10-052)

5) Shaik Kazeem (PGP-10-065)

6) Sonali Vemula (PGP-10-074)

Rise of Carbon

Pacing global economy and industrialization pressurized world to increase its fossil fuel consumption from 4.9 TW in 1965 to 13.62 TW in 2006. The immense increased in HC based Fuels has resulted in large amount of Carbon Dioxide emission. This Green House gas (GHG) attributed to the environmental warming and resulted in an increase of 0.74 degree for past 100 years. Rising global temperatures will cause sea level to rise and alter local climate conditions, affecting forests, crop yields, and water supplies. It may also affect human health, animals, and many types of ecosystems. Deserts may expand and some of our countryside may be permanently altered.

This concern has drawn World attention towards Carbon Management. The last 20 years have witnessed increasing momentum for international environmental policy efforts in order to avoid 'dangerous' anthropogenic climate change. Major achievements in the process so far have been the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol (KP) in 1997, which entered into force in 2005.

Carbon Management

Carbon management is the control of carbon emissions within the economic, social, and technical and policy constraints through the reductions of carbon sources and the enhancements of carbon sinks. When implemented effectively, CPM techniques can reduce operating costs, realizing gains in brand equity, competitive advantage and stakeholder value.

It basically focuses on developing break-through technologies for the large scale reduction (e.g. alternative, low carbon, energy sources), removal (e.g. gas separation from flue emissions) and sequestration (e.g. long term storage in geological, terrestrial, and ocean systems) of CO2.

By its nature, climate change is global. The interrelation between energy and other markets requires that an effective response to climate change also, ultimately, be global. Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, combined with those from changing land use, augment the large natural flux of carbon between the atmosphere, the land, and the oceans. Rapid mixing in the atmosphere ensures that CO2 emitted anywhere in the world is quickly distributed about the globe, and since the start of the industrial era, the mass of CO2 in the world's atmosphere has risen by a third. Without international cooperation in the coming decades, achieving significant reductions in CO2 emissions would be elusive, and disparity in national responses would create challenges to the international trade regime as different nations sought to address and prioritize what they saw to be their own particular concerns.

Approaches to reducing CO2 emissions could include the following elements:

 Energy efficiency and demand reduction

* Better and more efficient use of energy in all sectors, including transportation, buildings, industrial energy use, and power generation

* Improved efficiency will need to be translated into reduced energy demand rather than solely into increased performance

 Use of lower-carbon fuels

* Shift from coal to natural gas

 Use of non-carbon based power ("decarbonization")

* Nuclear power

* Wind power

* Solar power

* Ocean and geothermal power

 Use of "carbon neutral" energy sources

* Biomass to augment power generation

* Biofuels to augment hydrocarbons used for transportation

 Carbon capture and sequestration

* Preventing the release to the atmosphere of CO2 generated by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Innovation and deployment of new energy technologies in global energy systems could improve the

Potential for significant reductions in CO2 emissions while maintaining the desired level of economic activity. This would require substantial private- and public-sector investments in research, development, demonstration, and deployment. The most cost effective CO2 policies would involve broad, technology

Neutral, market-based mechanisms to create incentives for the private sector to undertake these technology changes.

Energy Efficiency and Demand Reduction

Improving the efficiency of energy use within the industrial, commercial, domestic, and transportation sectors has the potential to reduce energy use without reducing economic activity, and to reduce the associated CO2 emissions. However, to achieve this, incentives would be needed to encourage investments in higher-efficiency capital and to encourage using newly gained efficiency to actually reduce demand. Key to stimulating long-term investment by the private sector in more energy-efficient capital would be a steady, predictable, long-term increase in the cost of CO2 emissions. This would be enhanced by government incentives to economically retire older, high-CO2 emitting plants as well as to invest in newer, low-emissions capital. Incentives in the building sector, both commercial and domestic, would be needed to encourage the use of higher-efficiency construction techniques and efficient cooling and heating systems, which often come at a higher initial cost with a long "pay-back" period.

Carbon Capture and Sequestration

In a carbon-constrained world, CCS would allow us to sustain many of the benefits of using hydrocarbons. Even where the CO2 generated by burning hydrocarbons cannot be captured easily, as with using oil for transportation,