Far North Science

Fort Wainwright Central Heating and Power Plant
Source: USACE

Consider the truism: Think Globally, Act Locally.

With the weekend release of the synthesis report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — warning of a planetary catastrophe that will hit the Arctic hard — snow-drenched Alaskans ought to mull over carbon emissions produced by the state’s 241 power plants and consider whether any of them can be reduced or even eliminated.

For instance: Two military powerplants in Fairbanks rank among the “dirtiest” facilities in the United States — in terms of the total carbon emissions spewed per megawatt of electricity produced, according to a new report posted online by the group Carbon Monitoring for Action.

The report — with an easily searchable database — also lists a number of relatively tiny power plants in Alaska villages that share the same top-of-the-scale “intensity” for emissions-per-megawatt. Even though their total emissions remain miniscule on the world stage.

Not so for the military facilities. Both the Eielson Air Force Base plant and the Fort Wainwright Central Heating and Power Plant produce about 6,000 pounds of CO2 per megawatt of electricity. That’s more than five times the emission intensity of the state’s largest electrical producer, the gas turbine plant operated by Chugach Electric Association at Beluga.

For a quick analysis, check out the database of Alaska powerplants, and sort them by intensity, megawatts or total CO2 emissions.

How did the military plants get their 6,000 intensity ratings — on par with the worst emitters on the globe? Notice that Fort Wainwright — Alaska’s fifth biggest emitter overall — spews out 429,975 tons of CO2 to produce only 143,325 megawatts of electricity. Eielson, the state’s 10th biggest emitter, spews out 200,242 tons of CO2 to produce 66,747 megawatts.

(Are these figures still accurate? That’s worth asking, because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent millions to upgrade the Fort Wainwright plant, a 50-year-old coal-fired dinosaur that was fined in 1999 by the EPA for particulate pollution. By 2005, EPA was reporting that the upgrades had reduced particulate emissions by 800 tons per year. Doyon recently signed a contract to take over Wainwright, along with other military plants.)

Still, if we add the statistics posted online by CARMA, we find this result: The two military powerplants put 630,217 tons of CO2 into the air in order to generate 210,072 megawatts of power.

Contrast this with the Beluga plant, the state’s biggest producer of CO2. Beluga spews out more than 1 million tons of CO2. That’s a lot, but the plant’s natural gas turbines in turn produce 1.8 million megawatts of power for railbelt users. That gives Beluga an intensity of 1,186 pounds of CO2 per megawatt.

Watt for watt, the two military plants produce more than five times the CO2. In order to produce a tenth of Beluga’s electricity, they spew out about one-third of its greenhouse gas tonnage.

Here’s another plant to ponder. The Nikiski fertilizer plant, set to be shut down, produced an amazing 783,675 tons of CO2, the second largest emitter in the state.

The CARMA database contains detailed information on 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies in nearly 200,000 geographic regions across the globe. It arranges the emissions data by Year 2000, the present and future. By tweaking the search engine, one can zero in on a specific region or zip code, call up the details of a single power company or region.

For instance, you can rank Alaska’s 241 power plants by their carbon intensity or by total emissions. Some 111 of the facilities hit CARMA’s red alert category.

Of course, Alaska’s total carbon production of 5,951,978 tons makes the state a tiny contributor to rising concentration in world greenhouse gases. If you divide the state’s tonnage by the 7.8 million megawatts of power produced, and Alaska’s overall intensity is ranked fairly low — about 1,525 pounds of CO2 per megawatt.

In that context, the Eielson and Wainwright plants don’t actually produce much CO2. Nothing in Alaska does. Georgia Power’s Scherer plant in Juliette blasts out 25 million tons of CO2 — five times the entire production of Alaska. Or the Taichung in Tawain: 41 million tons of CO2.

All this data comes from CARMA, home to a massive interactive computer archive that went live on Nov. 14. In its first two days of operation, some 150,000 people from 187 countries tapped into the data, according to the CARMA blog.

CARMA was created by the Confronting Climate Change Initiative at the Center for Global Development, a think tank located in Washington, DC. Organizers say they hope to inspire people to fight for emission reductions by providing up-to-date information on emission sources.

“CARMA provides the world’s most detailed and comprehensive information on carbon emissions resulting from the production of electricity,” organizers wrote in the Welcome to CARMA blog.

We believe that the time is ripe for rapid reduction of carbon emissions, and CARMA is intended to be our contribution to this effort. We’re particularly concerned at the Center for Global Development, because global warming threatens to undermine the poverty-reduction efforts of many developing countries.