In the following article about the coming shortage of energy supplies, Michael Meacher, the former UK Environment Minister (1997-2003), ends with the following words: ".... civilisation faces the sharpest and perhaps most violent dislocation in recent history." It should have read: ".... civilisation faces the sharpest and perhaps most violent dislocation in history."
There have been two violent changes in energy supplies in mankind's existence. The first was when every person could gain as much energy from food grown from, say, 1 acre as he did before from 10 square miles of hunter-gatherer territory. This occurred whenever groups turned to agriculture and, in modern terms, represents a 6,400-fold gain in GDP at least. (This is actually a great underestimate of the productivity gain because in most parts of the world that turned to intensive agriculture one acre can feed at least a whole family.)
When agricultural man turned to coal mining and then, entirely fortuitously, to oil and then natural gas, the productivity gain was at least 640-fold in available energy (once again a conservative estimate as between, say, 1500 and 2000 ). In the course of 10,000 years, therefore -- about 5-10% of our total time as a species -- the average amount of energy used by each person in the developed world compared with the hunter-gatherer has increased by at least 4,000,000 times.
What happens when oil and gas start to decline from about 2015 onwards? Can we drop back to agriculture, for example? Hardly. Most of the tradable food in the world has been produced by using nitrogenous fertilisers which need oil or gas as chemical feedstock on the basis of one tonne of fertiliser for one tonne of oil (or gas). Indeed, the amount of energy we gain from food is far less than the amount of energy we put into growing it using fertilisers.
The 4.000,000 dis-bonanza won't hit us suddenly in 2015. Our descendants will probably have a further half-century to adjust to it. And, in the meantime, other energy technologies will start to take up part of the slack. Renewable methods, such as wind and wave power, will probably contribute, say, 15% to the total requirements, as will nuclear power. Deep-mined coal and tar sands might contribute another 15%, with a similar amount from solar-powered cells. There will be another major contribution from growing energy-rich crops such as sugar cane from which petroleum substitutes could be extracted (which will reduce the amount of food-only agricultural land). A great unknown is the generation of hydrogen directly from sunlight-powered custom-made bacteria. However, it might take a century just to understand the genetic know-how of this technology.
Even if we scrape by during the next half-century (and having a much-reduced world population would help), energy will be very expensive, whether it's in the form of electricity or as hydrogen or petroleum substitutes. Who can say what the price will be? -- at least a 10-20-fold jump I would have thought, but it could be a great deal higher. And all other resources requiring energy for its transformation into products -- including food -- will increase at the same rate, of course. In short, the coming era of expensive, even if adequate, energy is highly likely to transform our built environment just as dramatically as the scenario changed as between the villages of Tudor England and our present wheel-and-spoke environments of suburbs and metropolises with astronomical amounts of energy being used for commuting and transportation.
From what I can see, the following FT article has been rendered down -- albeit excellently -- from a much longer paper, "The Bush/Cheney Energy Strategy" by Prof Michael T Klare, given at the second annual meeting of the Association for Study of Peak Oil held in Paris last year. And this paper, in turn, mines heavily the US National Energy Policy (the 'Cheney Report'), particularly where it turns to the real nitty-gritty, in Chapter 8, of US policy towards Middle East countries with oil resources. Incidentally, much of this policy is a straight-line continuation of what was hitherto known as the 'Carter Doctrine' -- that is, making sure that American combat troops are placed in or near every major oilfield in the world except Russia and Canada.
Keith Hudson <<<< PLAN NOW FOR A WORLD WITHOUT OIL
Michael Meacher
Four months ago, Britain's oil imports overtook its exports, underlining a decline in North Sea oil production that was already well under way. North Sea oil output peaked at about 2.9m barrels per day in 1999, and has been predicted to fall to only 1.6m bpd by 2007. Even the discovery of the new Buzzard field, the biggest British oil find in a decade, with a total of some 500m barrels recoverable, will not alter by much the overall picture of dwindling resources.
This prospect would not be so bleak were it not that similar trends are now becoming manifest around the globe. The three main oil-producing regions are Opec, the former Soviet Union, and the rest of the world. According to papers presented at the latest annual meetings of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, Opec's future production is expected to peak in 2020 at about 40-45m bpd. Under-production in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s has been followed by a new surge in east Siberia and Sakhalin. Together with new discoveries in the Caspian, this will yield a peak of about 10m bpd in 2010.
Combining the models for Opec, the former Soviet Union and the remaining 40 or more major oil-producing countries puts ultimate world oil recovery - past and future - at some 2,200bn barrels, with production peaking at about 80m bpd between 2010 and 2020. To this may be added non-conventional oil and other liquids brought into commercial production by the rising price as oil becomes more scarce. These include oil from coal and shale, bitumen and derived synthetics, heavy and extra-heavy oil, deep-water oil, polar oil and liquids from gas fields and gas plants. These sources, though at very much greater cost, could provide an ultimate recovery of about 800bn barrels and might peak in 2050 at around 20m bpd. But the combined model suggests a peak from all sources of about 90m bpd around 2015.
Today we enjoy a daily production of 75m bpd. But to meet projected demand in 2015, we would need to open new oilfields that can give an additional 60m bpd. This is frankly impossible. It would require the equivalent of more than 10 new regions, each the size of the North Sea. Maybe Iraq with enormous new investments will increase production by 6m bpd, and the rest of the Middle East might be able to do the same. But to suggest that the rest of the world could produce an extra 40m barrels daily is just moonshine.
These calculations place the coming oil crunch some time between 2010 and 2015, perhaps earlier. The reserves in the world's super-giant and giant oilfields are dwindling at an average rate of 4-6 per cent a year. No more big frontier regions remain to be explored except the north and south poles. The production of non-conventional crude oil has already been initiated at enormous cost in Venezuela's Orinoco belt and Canada's Athabasca tar sands and ultra-deep waters. Yet no major primary energy alternative can replace oil and gas in the short-to-medium term.
The implications of this are mind-blowing, since oil provides 40 per cent of all traded energy and no less than 90 per cent of transport fuel. But not only are the motor vehicle and farming industries dependent on oil, so is national defence. Oil powers the vast network of planes, tanks, helicopters and ships that provide the basis of each country's armaments. It is hard to envisage the effects of a radically reduced oil supply on a modern economy or society. Yet just such a radical reduction is staring us in the face.
The world faces a stark choice. It can continue down the existing path of rising oil consumption, trying to pre-empt available remaining oil supplies, if necessary by military force, but without avoiding a steady exhaustion of global capacity. Or it could switch to renewable sources of energy, much more stringent standards of energy efficiency, and a steady reduction in oil use. The latter course would involve huge new investment in energy generation and transportation technologies.
The US response to this dilemma is very striking. The National Energy Policy report prepared by Dick Cheney, US vice-president, in May 2001 proposed the exploitation of untapped reserves in protected wilderness areas within the US, notably the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in north-eastern Alaska. The rejection of this extremely contentious proposal forced President George W. Bush, unwilling to curb America's ever-growing thirst for oil, to go back on White House rhetoric and accept the need to increase oil imports from foreign suppliers.
It was a fateful decision. It means that, for the US alone, oil imports, or imports of other sources of oil, such as natural gas liquids, will have to rise from 11m bpd to 18.5m bpd by 2020. Securing that increment of imported oil -- the equivalent of total current oil consumption by China and India combined -- has driven an integrated US oil-military strategy ever since.
There is, however, a fundamental weakness in this policy. Most countries targeted as a source of increased oil supplies to the US are riven by deep internal conflicts, strong anti-Americanism, or both. Iraq is only the first example of the cost -- both in cash and in soldiers' lives -- of facing down resistance or fighting resource wars in key oil-producing regions, a cost that even the US may find unsustainable.
The conclusion is clear: if we do not immediately plan to make the switch to renewable energy -- faster, and backed by far greater investment than currently envisaged - then civilisation faces the sharpest and perhaps most violent dislocation in recent history.
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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