The Denver Nuggets are in the finals and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is focusing on creating bioenergy for our jets. Sometimes things happen quickly – but usually the seeds were planted long before.
by Allen Best
We sometimes have pivots, long in the making but defined by moments. They occurred both in basketball and in Colorado energy on May 22.
In basketball, Nicola Jokic and the Nuggets dethroned the King, as LeBron James has long been known, and his Los Angeles Lakers. The Nuggets defied Vegas oddsmakers but their ascendancy was in plain view for four years. This will be team’s first finals appearance since entering the NBA in 1976.
In 1977, Colorado gained a national research laboratory, then called the Solar Energy Research Institute. Later renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL has expanded its missions to gain energy self-sufficiency. President Donald Trump in 2017 wanted to slash its budget. Congress refused.
Now, Congress has given NREL another $150 million in a special allocation. One result among several will be a new research facility focused on creating bioenergy capable of fueling airplanes. Commercial airplanes and large business jets account for 3% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. In Aspen and Vail, I suspect it’s far higher. If batteries can power cars, buses, and even small aircraft, they’re heavy for long-distance air travel. Other solutions must be pursued.
Solar similarly once seemed like a long reach. Panels have become ubiquitous, and we’re just getting started in Colorado, owing in part to the seeds planted at NREL more than 40 years ago. By decade’s end, Colorado will almost certainly be at 80% renewable energy for our electrical generation and likely higher in some places.
That leaves us at the intersection of uncertainty and exciting opportunities. We still don’t know how exactly we will reach 100% emissions-free electricity nor how we can end emissions from long-haul transportation, concrete production and some other sectors.
U.S. Sen.John Hickenlooper said the future is now. Top, the new research laboratory at NREL. Photos/Allen Best
At the NREL campus on Monday, U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper captured the essence. “The future is now,” he said. “In 50 years, we’re going to look back on what’s happening in the next few years as part of this great transition where the world we knew gets left behind.”
That change, he acknowledged, will involve loss, a reference to the fossil fuel sectors being displaced. “We have to process that. But we don’t have too much time to spend mourning. We gotta move forward, because the future is now.”
Soon after, tours were conducted of the Research and Integration Laboratory, called RAIL. It will pursue answers to the riddle of plastic recycling to help curtail consumption of fossil fuels. The lab was designed to be flexible, though, to help solve other questions as they arise.
An hour before the tours and four miles away at the Colorado School of Mines, Gov. Jared Polis had signed several bills. The new laws contemplate possible solutions as Colorado stretches to achieve its emissions-reduction goals from 2030 to 2050.
Two of the laws anticipate using the subterranean in ways to quell emissions or even stow carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere. A central player in this governance will be the Energy and Carbon Management Commission, which is a new name for an old agency.
This agency will have a broader mission than the oil and gas drilling that previously was its exclusive domain. One is potential tapping of underground heat to generate electricity. Another is governance of underground storage of hydrogen as Xcel Energy contemplates with a potential project involving the Pawnee power plant near Brush.
Carbon capture and sequestration is a third possibility, but one hotly disputed by some environmental watchdogs, among them Leslie Glustrom, a biochemist. They are skeptical of the agency’s ability to regulate oil and gas, let alone other activities. Pipelines, both for oil and for carbon dioxide, have a history of ruptures. In 2022, residents of a rural area of Mississippi were left unconscious after a pipeline rupture left the odorless carbon dioxide spewing for four hours.
Dozens of bills addressing the energy transition were passed this year by Colorado legislators, a recognition of the need for swift actions proportionate to the risk of still-rising emissions. Even more striking was a report from northwest Colorado that Rangely, one of our most prominent oil and gas boom towns, plans to be engaged in the clean energy transition.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Photo/Allen Best
Speaking at NREL on Monday, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm noted that urgency. “We have to do everything everywhere all at once to get to that 100% goal,” she said.
The work has begun on the changes that will be manifested beyond 2030. The path leading to the current basketball championship began in 2014 when the Nuggets drafted Jokic with their third draft choice that year. The Nuggets did not have high expectations. Some things take time – and then, all of a sudden they’re here.
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As always, enjoyed reading this Allen! Clean, simple exposition of the actions happening now that have long antecedents.
As a PIO for Mines in early 80’s, I saw many of those early steps that are suddenly “here.” Carbon capture and sequestration terrifies lawyers and geologists, because it is so easy to imagine stored carbon leaks that fill basements with fatal results. Also, a full-blown CCS program would require a pipeline complex equal to the past century for oil and natural gas.
Several years ago you did a piece, with pictures emphasizing the point, on just how fast this country went from horse-drawn power to horsepower. Then, private industry took the lead. Now, we are undergoing another abrupt change from fossil fuels to renewable, but what’s different is industry is not taking a lead, but is rather being dragged kicking and screaming into this new world. Did New Deal government regulation ramp down private industry leadership for government leadership?
While development and use of “bioenergy” may reduce the need for using fossil fuels in aircraft, won’t biofuels still add CO2 to the atmosphere when they are used for propulsion by jet and other internal combustion engines?