How Green Can One Get :The Virgin Airways Mitigation Prize
By Hendrik Tennekes
Flanked by Bill Clinton – yes, he of the Clinton Climate Initiative - Richard Branson, the president of Virgin Airways, last fall offered a $3 billion contribution to the mitigation of climate change, spread over ten years.
Flanked by Al Gore – yes, he of inconvenient truths – Richard Branson now offers a $25 million prize for innovative technology capable of removing one billion tons of CO2 annually.
I am an old-fashioned aeronautical engineer, so I did a few sums. First I had to find some data on the size of Virgin’s fleet. I looked that up with Google, and found these approximate numbers: 15 Boeings 747, 25 Airbus 340, 50 Boeings 737, 50 Boeings 737 New Generation.
A single 747 consumes 10 tons of fuel per hour (see Tennekes: The Simple Science of Flight, p. 106). The combustion process converts one ton of kerosene to 3 tons of CO2. A 747, therefore, produces 30 tons of CO2 per hour. These birds are worked hard: they fly 16 hours a day, more than 300 days per year, for a grand total of more than 5000 hours per year. Total annual CO2 emissions for a single 747 then compute as 150,000 tons.
The numbers for an Airbus 340 are a little better. A 340 consumes about 8 tons of kerosene an hour, for a grand total of 120,000 tons annually. The 25 of them in Branson’s fleet add 3,000,000 - yes, three million – tons to the atmosphere’s CO2 burden each year.
Now for the 100 Boeing 737s. A 737 burns 2 tons of fuel an hour (The Simple Science of Flight, p. 121), spewing 6 tons of CO2 in our threatened atmosphere. Those 737s are worked hard, too, but have to make more stops. They fly just 4000 hours a year, and so deposit 24,000 tons of CO2 in the air. One hundred of them? That sum is a cinch: no less than 2,400,000 tons a year.
How does all this sum up? In my estimate the Virgin Airways fleet pollutes our world with close to 8 million tons of CO2 each year. At current CO2 market prices, that would cost Branson $200 million annually. No wonder he turns green. Can he afford it? Let’s again do a few sums. A 747 produces about $30 million in revenues each year. Fifteen of them, plus 25 Airbuses, plus 100 baby Boeings: I have done the sums and arrive at a total of $1,6 billion in annual gross revenues. Almost half of that, 40%, goes to debt service and depreciation, 20% to fuel, and another 20% to crew salaries and maintenance. Branson’s profit then is $ 320 million a year. He would have to hide in Chapter 11 if he were charged for his emissions. He surely needs the technological fix he is angling for with his Virgin Airways Mitigation Prize.
As a final note, I admire Branson’s bravado. He gets 30 seconds of prime-time TV exposure worldwide, merely by offering $25 million bait. And his “green� image is enhanced, with Al Gore on his side, radiating planetary concerns. Having to buy an equivalent amount of commercial time would’ve cost him a lot more. He surely is an entrepreneur with imagination. World class, indeed!
Editorial comment, deleted
Comment by Henk Tennekes — February 12, 2007 @ 8:10 am
Editorial comment, deleted
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — February 12, 2007 @ 8:20 am
Just a moment ago, I have made a rough estimate of the total emissions of the worldwide airline industry. The number I obtained is a staggering 500 million tons of CO2 a year. Richard Branson is a far-sighted executive: if the prize he offers is won, the airline industry can grow to twice its present size and still claim it is running “emissions-neutral”, if I’m permitted the awful bureaucratic jargon. It’s a long shot, but Branson evidently thinks it is worth the gamble.
Comment by Henk Tennekes — February 12, 2007 @ 9:37 am
Professor Tennekes, thank you for the weblog.
Petroleum engineers are rooting Branson along. If Branson’s prize results in an economical method of stripping CO2 from the atmosphere, it would almost certainly result in a boom for the petroleum industry. CO2 is miscible with crude oil at certain pressures, and reduces its viscosity substantially. This results in a 10-30% recovery increase of oil that is left behind from primary recovery methods and waterflooding. The oil that the CO2 recovers also is richer in the heavy ends that are used to distill such products as kerosene. In many U.S. states with large reserves left unrecovered (Oklahoma, California, ect.), such technology would result in billions of barrels of incremental recoverable oil. What would injection of CO2 do to the recoverable oil reserves in the North Sea? Furthermore, injecting CO2 into an organic shale or coal increases its production of methane.
In the past, this weblog has suggested overly-hyped predictions of a global warming disaster may actually be a means (by some) of moving energy policy in a certain direction. Those who would mix climate change discussion with energy policy debate make interesting partners for Branson. If his prize results in new technology to inexpensively strip CO2 from the atmosphere, will they support the injection of this CO2 into petroleum reservoirs? Will they support the increased longevity of petroleum (and decreased costs) which might result from such technology?
I think Branson is smart like a fox. He needs inexpensive kerosene to make his aviation business profitable. Airplanes do not fly very well on solar. If his prize works, he gets cheaper petroleum, and he also looks green. Now that is what I call a world-class entrepreneur, indeed!
Comment by Bryan Sralla — February 12, 2007 @ 9:50 am
RE: #4 - That is 100% spot on. This is a case in point, let the capitalists deal with this, we don’t need no more stinkin’ regulations and we certainly do not need thought police and quasi-fascist fervor oppressing those of us who are not AGW hysterics.
Comment by Steve Sadlov — February 12, 2007 @ 11:48 am
Branson is trying to shield his corporation from the heat the alarmists are directing at the airline industry. It reminds me of BP and Shell trying to re-brand as green oil companies. Trying to differentiate themselves from big bad ExxonMobil. It didn’t work.
Expect more corporate public relation stunts like this in the near future.
Comment by Reid — February 12, 2007 @ 11:59 am
There is an excellent summary of the very important contributions of Henk Tennkes entitled “The limits of predictability” in the February 2 2007 edition of the National Post. Is is worth reading as it provides an overview of why Henk Tennekes is so well qualified to discuss the issue of climate and prediction.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — February 12, 2007 @ 1:24 pm
There is an interesting quote near the end of the piece at the National Post, “We only understand 10% of the climate issue…”. I am curious what percentage others would apply to the question of our understanding of climate science and the implications for predictability.
Comment by Phil Durkee — February 12, 2007 @ 1:51 pm
Thank you for your calculations Dr Tennekes but your 25$/ton CO2 is not fairly priced. You can find vendors proposing much lower prices for
hot airCO2 (I even suspect that pricings are for carbon, in which case a 12/44 factor should be applied to your numbers) here, here or here* and no doubt Mr Branson, with his charisma, with obtain discount prices.What makes R. Branson life even “easier” is the European carbon price has recently CRASHED (aeronautics vocabulary I presume) and is currently traded at around 5$ at Powernext, depending on the day and outside weather and other turbulent & chaotic factors.
Maybe he’ll just have to wait until the CO2 tons reach penny stocks status.
* carbon
scammersvendors (among many others):http://www.climatecare.org
http://www.greenseat.com
http://www.atmosfair.de
http://www.myclimate.org
http://www.co2solidaire.org
Comment by Demesure — February 12, 2007 @ 3:06 pm
The “technology” for “scrubbing” CO2 is everywhere in the form of vegetation. The question is how to manage vegetation to provide the best land use and reduce atmospheric CO2 which would reduce the fears of those who adhere to the belief in mono-causality global warming. More grasses? More trees? This would be a great project for agricultural and earth science experts to tackle.
Meanwhile, there are many mundane measures for reducing the per capita production of atmospheric CO2. For example, although I don’t have a good average figure of the number of tons of CO2 produced by an average automobile per year, I would have to guess that it is probably in the 5 ton range which means about 1 billion tons per year for the U.S. vehicle fleet. If that number could be reduced by 20-30%… let’s say 1 ton annually… then that is 200 million tons per year in the U.S. alone.
When one looks at driving patterns and conditions, it is reasonable to say that most of CO2 production occurs in urban settings. Typically, a vehicle will use 30-50%% more gasoline per mile in an urban situation than on a highway. The reason: acceleration and idling. The reason: traffic congestion. The reason: poorly timed traffic signals (USDOT verifies this). The increasing number and poor progression of signals causes a great amount of congestion causing inefficient driving patterns causing excessive burning of gasoline causing excessive production of CO2. Fix traffic signal progression and CO2 production will decrease dramatically. I’ve heard that other countries occasionally experience traffic congestion as well.
As I said, mundane… but something that could be done now… simply by each DOT doing the job they are already paid to do.
And then, of course, there is simple conservation practices. Turn down heating; reduce air conditioning; use fluorescent lights or LEDs.
But everyone wants the new magic bullet.
hallofrecord.blogspot.com
Comment by Bruce Hall — February 12, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
… “new forests in mid- to high-latitude locations could actually create a net warming.”
http://www.llnl.gov/pao/news/news_releases/2006/NR-06-12-02.html
Comment by pat neuman — February 12, 2007 @ 6:40 pm
Bruce, I’ll do another little sum. My car is a little Suzuki Swift, which runs about 17 kilometers on a liter, that is 750 grams (see The Simple Science of Flight, p. 37) of unleaded gasoline. My annual kilometrage is about 14,000. So I consume 14,000 divided by 17, that is slightly over 800 liters a year. In terms of weight, that is about 600 kilograms, or 0.6 of a ton of gasoline, which produces almost 2 tons of CO2.
The average fuel consumption of cars here in Holland is substantially higher, what with all those ridiculous SUV’s in these lowlands. I estimate average CO2 emissions of 3 tons annually. There are about 6 million cars running around in this crowded corner of the world. The sum total of their emissions then computes at 18 million tons a year. One would almost think Richard Branson is greener than expected. His Virgins emit only 8 million tons annually.
I am sure you are eager to make similar computations for road traffic in the USA. Cheers!
Comment by Henk Tennekes — February 12, 2007 @ 7:16 pm
#11 Pat,
Well, that’s interesting. Wouldn’t that argue that North America should have been warmed more prior to the 18th century when most of the virgin forests were intact? If CO2
#12 Henk,
Thanks for the additional thoughts. I was presuming the average of a mid-to-large American car because U.S. vehicle mix is so heavily influenced by SUVs and light trucks (light for trucks but heavy for cars). I had read some time back that a car traveling 12,000 miles per year produces something in the neighborhood of 4 tons annually and upped it a little for SUVs and light trucks.
Regardless, the point I was trying to make was that despite any mileage inefficiencies from any other factors, poor traffic management contributes substantially to CO2 production and that could be addressed immediately with computer models that are far less sophisticated than used by climatologists.
Comment by Bruce Hall — February 12, 2007 @ 8:54 pm
#11 Pat
Sorry my comment got posted too quickly.
… If CO2 is really driving climate change, then it must be doing it much more rapidly than one might expect since deforestation has been the norm worldwide over the past 100-200 years.
Or maybe the variability of temperature during the last 2 centuries really reflects something other than the recent increase in CO2… say solar forcing or cosmic rays.
Regardless, the natural “scrubbing” of CO2 by forests is apparently offset by the warming caused by the forests if you are correct. Too bad. I guess we’ll have to settle for a world full of really big lawns.
Comment by Bruce Hall — February 12, 2007 @ 9:00 pm
What really, really worries me, a non-scientist, but not stupid, is that some well meaning idiot actually comes up with some way to combine CO2 with something else, perhaps with some sort of catalytic conversion, so that it becomes inactive, insofar as vegetation is concerned, and that this technique spreads so that far more than the 1 billion tons gets converted. Anyone remember the law of unintended consequences?
Comment by Tony Edwards — February 13, 2007 @ 6:19 am
Well Demesure (#9), what about that? Let’s follow your line of thinking and see what happens. Eight million tons of CO2 correspond to 2 million tons of carbon. If it is carbon that counts, and if the carbon market has slipped to $5, we’re talking about a mere 10 million dollars. Branson wouldn’t blink an eye for that kind of pocket money. No sir, I used numbers that might make him worry just a little. Why? For him to know, for you to find out.
On another matter, is there anybody here who knows how to compute the CO2 emissions from our lungs? Ever since a 1982 incident with a high environmental bureaucrat here in Holland, I worry just a little bit about the possibility of a universal respiration tax.
Comment by Henk Tennekes — February 13, 2007 @ 7:40 am
Before we start sequestering CO2, shouldn’t we come to some kind of “consensus” on what constitutes the optimum amount of CO2 in atmosphere? For all we know we might still be below the magic number…
Comment by Ivan Kovacic — February 13, 2007 @ 8:09 am
#13 Bruce,
“poor traffic management contributes substantially to CO2 production and that could be addressed immediately”.
That’s a good idea for many reasons (air quality, fuel costs, car maintenance, convenience, etc). What percentage of the total U.S. emissions of GHG would that save?
peace,
jax
Comment by jax — February 13, 2007 @ 8:56 am
#16 Dr Tennekes,
).
In fact, we have a moving targets and calculations must be revised: the carbon market has plummeted to 1,15$/ton today ! You won’t be able to have R. Branson worry about carbon prices (financially I mean
As for a respiration tax, a good starting point is here :
an average individual respiration flux is 5 l/min containing ~3.7% CO2. But a poor worker with physically intensive tasks, for example a man tiling lands or a woman transporting water may emit up to 4 to 10 times this quantity (up to 50 l/min) containing that many times of CO2 and water vapor. A tax against the poor to prevent any excess GHG emission should be proposed. As about 1,5 billions of them live with under 1$/day, this would hugely reduce human (litteraly) emissions.
Comment by Demesure — February 13, 2007 @ 8:59 am
BTW, carbon trader quotes may be found here : http://www.ecxeurope.com/index_flash.php
Comment by Demesure — February 13, 2007 @ 9:00 am
According to http://www.mrp3.com, it’s about 300 grams per day while resting
Comment by Tony Edwards — February 13, 2007 @ 9:43 am
Dr Tennekes,
I believe Table 1 at the following link provides an appropriate “average” test subject and measurements of oxygen usage over a set period of time. This could be useful in your calculations (although I suspect no matter the data, the error will be large-ish):
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/johnson/portable.html
Comment by Rejean Gagnon — February 13, 2007 @ 10:10 am
RE: #15 - Indeed, the prospect of zealots monkeying around directly with the atmospheric composition frightens the heck out of me. This could actually be, currently, as intended within the grand design. This actually gets into McKibben (sp?). We are both making nature unnatural but at the same time are part of nature. Nature intended Homo Sapiens to arise and to conquer the globe. Nature intends us to do what we will do. Now we are at the verge of geoengineering. Are we intended to just do it, or, are we intended to stop it before something unintended happens? What a conundrum!
Comment by Steve Sadlov — February 13, 2007 @ 10:29 am
re: 14
I don’t support lawns. My yard is prairie, shrubs and trees - good wildlife habitat. I’m in the city but next to a ravine area that’s been left “wild”.
Comment by pat neuman — February 13, 2007 @ 12:42 pm
Thank you, Tony (#21). With 300 grams of daily CO2 emissions from our lungs and allowing some extras for periods of activity, I reckon a human emits about 100 kilograms of CO2 a year. Demesure (#19), you’re really spoiling the fun. In raw carbon, those 100 kilos slim down to just 27, and at the crash price of just $1.15 per ton, the net take is $0.03. Old Abe Lincoln would see three of his copper pennies go to the IRS. I give up.
Comment by Henk Tennekes — February 13, 2007 @ 2:04 pm
#18
1997 data had this breakout:
Energy End-Use Sector Sources of Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1990-1997
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/gg98rpt/carbon.html
Sector
Million Metric Tons Carbon PercentChange
1990 1997 1990-1997 1996-1997
Transportation 432.1 473.1 9.5% 0.5%
Industrial 454.1 482.9 6.3% 1.0%
Commercial 206.8 237.2 14.7% 4.9%
Residential 253.1 286.5 13.2% 0.3%
Note: Electric utility emissions are distributed across sectors.
So, 20-30% reduction of traffic based CO2 would be a fair chunk of change.
Comment by Bruce Hall — February 13, 2007 @ 4:17 pm
#26 Bruce,
60% of transportation emissions is from personal vehicles. The rest is from air, rail, long haul, etc.
60% * 473 / 1480 = 19% from personal vehicles.
A 25% reduction of all personal vehicle emissions from timing traffic lights seems quite high, but using that number yields a 4-5% reduction. What percentage emission reduction is stated to noticeably reduce global warming? 60? 80? Timing traffic lights, reducing hvac, and switching to fluorescent bulbs are all favorable things to save substantial money for an individual, but aren’t substantial to reducing global warming. Adding to the list the oft stated changes - banning SUV’s, driving a Pious, and becoming a vegetarian still won’t significantly reduce CO2.
peace,
jax
Comment by jax — February 13, 2007 @ 8:01 pm
Okay, Jax.
I’ll take your word for 4-5% reduction of CO2 production.
Now, how else can you achieve that reduction without significant manipulation/outright scams (i.e., carbon credits ala the Chinese), significant subsidies, significant taxes/penalties, or significant infrastructure changes (e.g., replacing coal fired power plants with nuclear)?
… good traffic management is something we’ve already paid for, but the government hasn’t yet delivered. Of course, we can hope that if we pay a lot more, the government might deliver some positive results in addressing apparent global warming… this time.
Or, better yet, we can listen to scientists like Dr. Pielke and better understand what is and is not contributing to climate change, what are the social and environmental implications of such change, and what really are our options… before we simply tax ourselves into an economic problem.
Comment by Bruce Hall — February 14, 2007 @ 10:22 am
#28 Bruce,
Please don’t take my word for anything in this discussion. The point of my initial post is to go beyond adjectives and analogies to see the impact of a proposal expressed as a number - the percentage of the total emissions.
peace,
jax
Comment by jax — February 14, 2007 @ 1:53 pm
Jax,
That’s okay. The point of my initial comment was that there are mundane efforts such as improving traffic management that will yield efficiencies and reduce CO2 (and other pollutants) production… not necessarily “solve” a problematic issue of climate change.
Too many questions remain for new “solutions” to be implemented.
Comment by Bruce Hall — February 14, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
What is Branson looking for, other than publicity and personal gain? There are plenty of ideas for CO2 removal out there. I believe there are some very simple thermally driven reactions that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere but it takes energy. But to do it on a scale that would make a difference is a huge engineering problem. First you would need a large nuclear reactor to provide enough energy, and then a place to put billions of tons of liquid CO2. Underground or at the bottom of the ocean. My guesstimate on the cost would be high hundreds of billions to a trillion dollars. Personally I think we can wait few decades before we do something so costly and potentially stupid.
Comment by Wang Dang — February 14, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
Hello!
Does anyone know where (to whom or addrese) shoul we send our ideas about R. Branson`s offered.
pleas, if you know, let me know on maja_truden@yahoo.com
Comment by maja — March 2, 2007 @ 5:38 pm
Aloha
In the best way that I know how to make a difference for the better. Is to start getting people to Waster-Size.
Which is Bending at the waist to pick up the waste and getting rid of both. Wishing we all had an interest in taking care of Mother Nature. Remember the “AINA” The life of the people is in the land.
Gerry T. Rasmua aka KOTO,Keeper of the ocean
Comment by Gerry T. Rasmus — September 2, 2007 @ 11:51 pm