BIKE: Energy update

[rcbaker]

"Either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which
case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and
civilisation collapses."

             ******************************************


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1097622,00.html


http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1097622,00.html

Bottom of the barrel

The world is running out of oil - so why do politicians refuse to talk
about it?


Tuesday December 2, 2003
The Guardian

The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the
development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at
least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find, which
dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You begin to
recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you
discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for five
and a quarter days.

Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon
which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it
because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.

Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever
more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in
the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the
big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the
new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s.
Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and
the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field
is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long.

The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections are the
ones produced by the US department of energy, which claims that this
will not take place until 2037. But the US energy information agency
has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged: it has
based its projections for oil supply on the projections for oil demand,
perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial markets.

Other analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin
Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak before 2010. In
August, the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he
was "99% confident" that the date of maximum global production will be
2004. Even if the optimists are correct, we will be scraping the oil barrel
within the lifetimes of most of those who are middle-aged today.

The supply of oil will decline, but global demand will not. Today we will
burn 76m barrels; by 2020 we will be using 112m barrels a day, after
which projected demand accelerates. If supply declines and demand
grows, we soon encounter something with which the people of the
advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar: shortage. The price of oil
will go through the roof.

As the price rises, the sectors which are now almost wholly dependent
on crude oil - principally transport and farming - will be forced to
contract. Given that climate change caused by burning oil is cooking
the planet, this might appear to be a good thing. The problem is that our
lives have become hard-wired to the oil economy. Our sprawling
suburbs are impossible to service without cars. High oil prices mean
high food prices: much of the world's growing population will go hungry.
These problems will be exacerbated by the direct connection between
the price of oil and the rate of unemployment. The last five recessions
in the US were all preceded by a rise in the oil price.

Oil, of course, is not the only fuel on which vehicles can run. There are
plenty of possible substitutes, but none of them is likely to be anywhere
near as cheap as crude is today. Petroleum can be extracted from tar
sands and oil shale, but in most cases the process uses almost as
much energy as it liberates, while creating great mountains and lakes of
toxic waste. Natural gas is a better option, but switching from oil to gas
propulsion would require a vast and staggeringly expensive new fuel
infrastructure. Gas, of course, is subject to the same constraints as oil:
at current rates of use, the world has about 50 years' supply, but if gas
were to take the place of oil its life would be much shorter.

Vehicles could be run from fuel cells powered by hydrogen, which is
produced by the electrolysis of water. But the electricity which produces
the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. To fill all the cars in the US
would require four times the current capacity of the national grid. Coal
burning is filthy, nuclear energy is expensive and lethal. Running the
world's cars from wind or solar power would require a greater
investment than any civilisation has ever made before. New studies
suggest that leaking hydrogen could damage the ozone layer and
exacerbate global warming.

Turning crops into diesel or methanol is just about viable in terms of
recoverable energy, but it means using the land on which food is now
grown for fuel. My rough calculations suggest that running the United
Kingdom's cars on rapeseed oil would require an area of arable fields
the size of England.

There is one possible solution which no one writing about the
impending oil crisis seems to have noticed: a technique with which the
British and Australian governments are currently experimenting, called
underground coal gasification. This is a fancy term for setting light to
coal seams which are too deep or too expensive to mine, and catching
the gas which emerges. It's a hideous prospect, as it means that
several trillion tonnes of carbon which was otherwise impossible to
exploit becomes available, with the likely result that global warming will
eliminate life on Earth.

We seem, in other words, to be in trouble. Either we lay hands on every
available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and
civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses.

The only rational response to both the impending end of the oil age and
the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and
our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure,
and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People tend to
take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given
a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of
humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware.

In view of all this, the notion that the war with Iraq had nothing to do
with oil is simply preposterous. The US attacked Iraq (which appears to
have had no weapons of mass destruction and was not threatening
other nations), rather than North Korea (which is actively developing a
nuclear weapons programme and boasting of its intentions to blow
everyone else to kingdom come) because Iraq had something it
wanted. In one respect alone, Bush and Blair have been making plans
for the day when oil production peaks, by seeking to secure the
reserves of other nations.

I refuse to believe that there is not a better means of averting disaster
than this. I refuse to believe that human beings are collectively
incapable of making rational decisions. But I am beginning to wonder
what the basis of my belief might be.

· The sources for this and all George Monbiot's recent articles can be
found at www.monbiot.com.

Special reports
Oil and petrol

Useful links
Opec
International Energy Agency
Institute of Petroleum
American Petroleum Institute