Cost of energy imports to UK trade balance
Posted by Euan Mearns on October 21, 2010 - 10:40am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Over the years I have drawn attention to concerns about the impact that peak oil (1999) and gas (2000) in the UK North Sea would have on UK trade balance. In the space of a decade, the UK has gone from oil and gas exporter to importer. In articles such as UK Energy Security (July 2007) and A State of Emergency (June 2008) I speculated about the financial cost and in today's article I put real numbers on the cost of UK energy imports.
Figure 1 Data compiled from tables published by the UK Office for National Statistics.
The cause of the UK's energy woes is summed up in Figure 2 that shows the history of UK primary energy production (excluding whales) since 1830. In 1981 the UK became a net primary energy exporter and more or less remained so until 2004. During that period (of low energy prices), the UK exported oil and gas (not every year) to the benefit of the trade balance and the financial well being of the nation. Since 2004 the bounty from North Sea oil and gas exports has been replaced by the burden of imports and the main purpose of this article is to draw attention to the magnitude of this burden and to consider the most appropriate policy responses.
Figure 2 UK primary energy production from 1830. Coal data from Dave Rutledge (and references therein), rest from the 2010 BP statistical review of world energy.
In Figure 1 the trends are dominated by oil & gas, food and coal. I have included food (fish and fertlizer) since they are fuel, primary energy products, and it is most relevant to consider the trend in food given the UK and EUs commitment to promoting and subsidising the production of bio fuel. Fish, fertilizer, electricity and uranium are all small bit players in the big picture, but all are worthy of inclusion nonetheless.
The monetary trends are controlled by volume and price. Price is very important, and, for example, 1998 just preceded the peaks in UK oil (1999) and gas (2000) production, but exports yielded low value owing to extreme weak oil prices that were temporarily below $10 that year (Figure 1). The swing from exports to imports from 2004 to 2005 is clearly seen in financial terms. And for every year that passes this problem is set to get progressively worse as UK oil and gas production continues to fall (Figure 2) although future price is difficult to predict.
Figure 3 The swing from UK energy surplus (negative numbers) to energy deficit (positive numbers).
The scale of the problem is best seen in Figure 3 showing that in the year 2000 energy products contributed net 6% to trade surplus but by 2008 (the year of the spike) that had swollen to a 19% deficit, a swing of 25% in 8 years. Peering into the future is far from straight forward. It is relatively straight forward to envisage the plunge in North Sea oil and gas production continuing for the foreseeable future, but much more difficult to understand how demand and price will evolve. The main conclusion I can draw here is that the UK cannot afford to pay for rising energy imports and higher prices simultaneously and so something will have to give, either locally or globally. Given that a large number of energy importing OECD nations face similar problems, it seems likely that the solution will be a global one and that energy prices must fall to make them more affordable and the mechanism most likely to bring this about is a global reduction in demand for energy.
The average oil price during 2008 was $97 compared with $62 in 2009. The average price so far this year is well above $62. The oil & gas deficit for Q1+Q2 of 2009 was £1.79 billion and this has grown to £2.55 billion for the first two quarters of 2010, a deterioration of 42%. With food and coal prices both rising the trade deficit for 2010 is set to become a whole lot worse, despite lingering recession.
Policy response
Figures 1 and 2 provides some insight to what government should be doing to resolve these structural problems in the UK economy. I do not intend to get overly involved in a policy debate in this short article, but it is worth making a few observations comparing what I believe should be government priority compared with what government is actually doing.
Oil and gas
It should be pretty obvious that the nation's best interests are served by maximising output and recovery from North Sea oil and gas fields. One remaining technology that could be deployed, if financially viable, is CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Government policy is to promote carbon capture and storage (CCS, see end note) but fails to support CCS EOR that is largely carbon neutral but potentially of enormous benefit to UK energy security and trade balance.
Coal
One way of reducing coal consumption is to improve the energy efficiency of power stations. UK power stations currently have thermal efficiency of the order 36%. Modern supercritical coal plant has efficiency of the order 45% and offers a significant energy saving. China is in process of upgrading the energy efficiency of coal generation. The UK plan is to hobble the energy efficiency of coal with CCS, approximately 20% energy penalty. It is difficult to comprehend that the government is willing to subsidise CCS to the tune of £1 billion (see end note) and this will lead to higher coal imports and further deterioration of trade balance and the value of Sterling!
Food
As a UK citizen, It is quite worrying to see the growing deficit in food. You would think that a sensible policy might be to ensure that the UK was self sufficient in food production - what better energy security! Instead we have government subsidised policy to grow energy crops which in the UK is primarily rape seed used to make bio-diesel. UK diesel now contains up to 10% bio fuel and we are therefore obliged to adopt one of the least energy efficient means of propulsion ever invented.
Uranium
The UK has not imported any U since 2005 and prior to that imports were always <£100 million per year. It is difficult to tell to what extent nuclear fuel has been made from stock piles. But for over a decade the external budget cost of nuclear to UK trade balance barely registers. In 2009 nuclear power provided 8% of total primary energy consumption in the UK. The UK government has for decades neglected the nations nuclear capacity which is set to decline throughout the coming decade as old stations are decommissioned (Figure 4). In an announcement made on 18th October, the UK Government nominated 8 sites in England that may be used for new nuclear power stations. The process of rescuing our energy infrastructure continues at snail's pace.
Figure 4 UK nuclear decommissioning schedule. The chart is about 1 year out of date but the general picture has not changed much. It is fully expected that many of the more modern power stations will get license extensions to bridge gap to new nuclear stations that are still on the drawing board. Source: British Energy & Nuclear Decommissioning Agency
So what is the remedy? The UK government must surely do all it can to promote sensible primary energy production whilst at the same time reducing energy consumption. Energy efficiency should be a guiding light and I'm afraid that means abandoning CCS and bio fuels in favor of energy efficient coal plant, combined heat and power (about 70% efficient) and food production. The strategic benefit of low import costs of nuclear fuel need to be factored into the nuclear debate.
To be fair, the UK government does have a range of sensible energy policies that includes progressive "taxation" of automobiles according to size and power and a program to upgrade insulation in older houses. But this good work is undone by pursuing simultaneously energy inefficient CCS and bio fuels. We need a big dose of common sense and some urgency to rescue a situation that is spiraling downwards out of control.
As part of the major public spending review announced on 20th October the government committed itself once again to spending £1 billion on a large scale demonstration CCS project. Energy Minister Chris Hune saying:
we remain on course to deliver on our promise to be the greenest government ever
Hune seems to be oblivious to the fact he is going to use government spending to create more foreign debt, and to spread energy poverty through the population. On the same day energy company E.ON announced it was withdrawing from the government's CCS competition.
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Thank you for an interesting article.
I recently took a trip to the U.K. which wasn't my first but what I noticed this time around, now that I am peak oil aware and pay attention, is scale and the rail network. Everything is smaller than in the U.S. - buildings, roads, distances, cars, even people! (though they are on average probably a little taller). And the rail network was great, it impressed me to no end that there was functioning, regular rail service from London to the smaller peripheral towns.
So even though I was pessimistic before, I now see hope for the U.K., but only if they have the right policies. It seems like they could get far with nuclear, wind, and a transportation policy which might include electric cars, they seem dense enough to make it work.
They are also going to have to slowly shift away from the "special relationship" and improve their relationship with continental Europe and Russia. Is the recent cut in military spending a step in that direction?
It snot often you here someone compliment the UK rail network, which has improved a lot in recent years. Continental Europe is even better.
We import coal and oil from Russia. Cuts in defense spending are of economic necessity. There's very few folks this side of the pond view Russia as threat any more.
In Sweden "ryss-skräcken", the fear of the russians, still lives on. I don't think we will ever trust them. If you have been at war with someone for 800 years you just don't wake up one day and say "hey, let's trust these guys".
I think it's a tad bit sorry we can't just leave the past behind.
You can add natural gas to that list of imports. (maybe not now but it's only a matter of time) *grin*
In the military minded chat rooms the defense cuts are in part viewed as an inevitable consequence of EU integrated defense policy and was a done deal since signing up on a EU military deal in 1996.
there is also the perception that they were also spurred on by a desire to free the UK (even in tory circles) from the special relationship
this opinion was not offered up from the socialist end of the political spectrum as it where
I'll just point out that the graph says that The Great War coincides almost exactly with peak UK coal... The primary energy form at the time.
So... US, China, Saudi, Australia etc.
That's because oil was better for naval warfare.
CO2 injection for EOR is not as easy as some suggest. CO2 used in EOR has to be clean and dry, with 2.5% hydrogen sulfide gas, no more, no less. Flue gas (10% CO2 80% nitrogen gas) could be forced into a reservoir to add pressure, but it won't scrub oil as efficiently as miscable supercritical CO2. The chemistry is well understood.
The technologies and practices associated with geological CO2 sequestration are all in current commercial operation, and have been so for several decades. Such commercial operations include: enhanced oil recovery, CO2 injection, natural gas storage and CO2 pipeline transportation. [Heinrich J. et al, MIT, 2004]
The US oil and gas industry has over 35 years of continuously developing experience in transporting and injecting CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). While constantly evolving, the technology operating experience and regulatory requirements that have been developed for EOR are extensive. In the United States alone, the oil and gas industry operates over 13,000 CO2 EOR wells, over 3,500 miles of high pressure CO2 pipelines, has injected over 600 million tons of CO2 (11 trillion standard cubic feet) and produces about 245,000 barrels of oil per day from CO2 EOR projects. [American Petroleum Institute, 2007]
In general it is acknowledged that using CO2 for tertiary EOR may add an additional 5 - 12% of OOIP to the anticipated total production. An essential feature of using CO2 for EOR is that the CO2 will mix and remerge with the produced oil and gas. [Kinder Morgan]
Higher oil prices, by themselves, will not unlock more of the technically recoverable oil resource available from state-of-the-art CO2-EOR [Kuuskraa et al, DOE, 2008]
CO2 injection and geologic sequestration is driven by politics more than science. DOE's fantasy scenario of someday recovering 100 billion barrels from the "transition zone" where oil is hopelessly mixed with formation water and mineral contaminants is a bad joke. Absent government subsidies and tax holidays, no one can afford the front-end cost of CO2 infrastructure plus added cost of separating, treating and disposing of a 95% water cut.
Given the significant front-end investment in wells, recycle equipment and purchase of CO2 equivalent to $20 to $25 per barrel and the time delay in reaching peak oil production, pre-tax economic margins on the order of the front-end investment will be required to achieve economically favorable rates of return. Oil reservoirs with higher capital cost requirements and less favorable CO2 to oil ratios would not achieve an economically justifiable return on investment. [Kuuskraa et al, 2008]
Nonsense.
The US gets 0.1 Gb/yr of CO2 EOR today without subsidies and with $80 oil. With CO2 being taxed (or traded) and higher oil prices post-Peak more CO2 EOR oil will obviously be produced.
I don't see CO2 sequestration being popular with environmentalists, the power utilities or Big Oil(Kuustraa is a Big Oil exec) so the idea that it is politically driven is baloney.
Interesting. They are losing political power as the right rises in the U.S.
One way that could change is with a methanol economy where CO2 is produced from a variety of pollution sources, including taking it directly from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel out of it (methanol fuelled the Indy race cars for decades until 2006).
Where is the energy going to come from? It's not as if methanol is just going to precipitate out of the atmosphere, and we can collect it in buckets as it pours off the roof.
If you're going to convert energy into methanol, why not just convert it into electricity instead? Electric conversions are way more efficient, and the distribution network is already in place.
Methanol is already produced by the billions of barrels.
It was used to fuel Indy 500 race cars for decades because it is powerful.
There are many ways to produce it, as pointed out in the book "The Methanol Economy".
It can be used in flex-fuel cars (M15, M85) or diesel engines. It is safer than gasoline because it is water soluable.
etc.
Methanol is typically produced from syngas made by partial oxidation of natural gas.
As there is considerably less NG energy available in the United States than crude oil, this is not unlike attempting to replace canola crops with Philippo Berrio Extra Virgin Olive Oil.
E-P, does the following look ok? Some of it I got from you, previously...
Hydrogen from electricity: Wholesale wind power at 6 cents per kWh; 75% efficient electrolysis of hydrogen from water would require 50 kWhs to produce a kilo of hydrogen. That is $3 for hydrogen with 37.5kWh, or an energy equivalent to 1.05 gallons of gasoline.
We could react CO or CO2 with hydrogen to make methanol (the Lurgi process, in which one CO2 and three dihydrogens exothermically become one methanol and one water) at 80% efficiency (Methanol synthesis from syngas is actually highly efficient, in the order of 80-90%. Catalysis of CO2 into CO + 1/2 O2 is probably about as efficient as H20 into H2 + 1/2 O2 since that's the same entropy balance).
If the overall conversion is 60% efficient, you'd have $5 for the methanol equivalent of a gallon of gasoline. Now, that’s just input costs. If the capital cost of the H2O electrolysers is $1 per gallon, you're at $6 per gallon. That doesn't seem bad.
EVs are, of course, much more efficient: electricity to hydrogen(25%loss), hydrogen to methanol(say 25%loss), methanol ICE 75%-80% loss; only about 12% of energy recovered. Compare this with an EV 80-90% of electric energy into useful motion.
Today's electric drive trains cost about $.10/mile, including the amortization of the battery and electricity costs, for the first 30-40 miles per day. On the other hand, these costs rise quickly for the miles beyond that range, due to the battery overhead. If synthesized methanol costs $.20/mile in a PHEV ($6/gallon divided by 40mpg (what is methanol's octane?)), that's pretty cost-effective for the less often used extra range. The more interesting cases are water shipping, long haul trucking and aviation. If $6/gallon is really feasible, those things would go up in cost, but still be feasible (especially water shipping).
I don't see anything obviously out of whack, but people already squeezed by $3/gallon fuel aren't going to like stuff that costs $6/gge before road and sales taxes. I'd also wonder just how much the capital cost of electrolyzers adds if they are used intermittently as dump loads instead of continuous duty.
I wonder if we can cleverly evade that. There were some news items a while back about archaea converting CO2 to CH4 at 80% efficiency when driven with nothing but electricity. There was another concept to convert CH4 to MeOH using an SO3/SO2 cycle, so if these are sufficiently cheap and simple to run they may get the capital cost issue off the table.
I'd also wonder just how much the capital cost of electrolyzers adds if they are used intermittently as dump loads instead of continuous duty.
I was assuming normally continuous operation. If this kind of operation used dump loads 33% of the time from overbuilt wind farms (raising capital cost by $2), then I would think that the electricity would be at least 40% lower in price (reducing power costs by $2), compensating for the capital cost underutilization.
Now, if there are cheaper alternatives, that would be great. I wonder how much work was done identifying obstacles to scaling up such processes...
I don't think it's sensible to assume continuous operation of anything which is supposed to be powered entirely or even primarily by wind. Having cheap equipment which can turn excess power and low-cost materials into high-value products is key.
I suspect that any great improvements are going to come from some combination of odd developments out of left field that turn out to be cheap and easy to work with. Take the archaea turning electricity and CO2 to methane trick. Bugs certainly work cheap, and many varieties of archaea are extremophiles. If some thermophilic strain from a boiling spring in Yellowstone works in this application, you can literally turn electricity and CO2 into methane and very hot water. The hot water could be used to heat bio-digesters, accelerating production of CO2 (and more methane) at the same time excess wind is available. Then you've got to have some simple and cheap way to turn methane into methanol (this came up last year, but I'm not sure how simple or cheap it might be; the catalyst incorporates platinum).
Primarily "huff and puff" onshore in Permian Basin. Nothing like North Sea.
I am unsure about the economics of CO2 EOR linked to CCS from power stations. I believe all US projects employ natural CO2 from reservoirs. The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) told me once that it would never be economic. But I have friends working in the industry who say it could be made to work - but with subsidy. And of course all this depends on price.
I'm pretty well convinced that the way to tackle resource scarcity is to use less resource and that means energy efficiency. Energy efficiency will however lead ultimately to higher prices and that means higher URR for resource. This is good strategy for tackling resource scarcity but very bad strategy for reducing CO2.
Unemployed people dont use as much energy. Demand destruction will likely play a bigger role in mitigating resource scarcity than energy efficiency.
Dead people use even less energy. There is some minor contribution to CO2 and CH4, but it is short duration. Just to point out the even less politically correct contribution to mitigating resource scarcity.
CH4 could be minimised with a proper oxygen fed composting program :)
Your going too far! Go and take your happy pills both of you.
Why bother with U-based nuclear? Is there 50 years of it left to spare? So a nuclear plant built today will be obsolete before its useful lifetime has expired. Thus the capital investment is wasted, making other types of generation more reasonable.
Why not aggressively build out offshore wind resources and promote efficiency rather than add nuclear, which may not be as good of an investment?
I imagine bicycling and electric rail are really the best options for transport when fuel supplies tighten up.
Good point that Biofuels are problematic, and it is troubling that Britain does not produce enough food, since it should have enough land to do so.
Need a bit of uranium? Just send a purchase order to Canada.
Yes. Please use all the Canadian U first. We have more of it here in Aus, but personally I'd like to see it sold at much higher prices.
Easily. Anyplace there is an issue with radon in soil or groundwater, you've got uranium in quantities which may be commercial.
Only two things wrong with that appraisal.
The main problem we have is that policy-makers have deliberately chosen not to develop these things.
They're good, but they're not stand-alone solutions; something has to supply the base load.
U getting a bit carried away here EP. Most "environmental" U occurs in minerals apatite (soluble in strong acid) , zircon (slowly soluble in very hot HF under pressure) and monazite - almost indestructible. Radiation damage to the mineral structure allows the radon to escape. The thing that makes a U ore an ore is the U bearing minerals - mainly uraninite - are easily soluble in dilute acid making recovery simple.
I speak strictly as an amatuer in this respect, but to me the evidence seems convincing that there is plenty of uranium if one assumes that the price of it goes high enough to mine the plentiful but somewhat lower grade ores found in many places.
It looks as if mining it with electricically powered equipment will be economically feasible-especially in a world very short of oil , and getting short of cheap coal and natural gas.
The real qauestion then becomes one of whether the eroi on mining and processing this uranuim is high enough.This has been thrashed out here before, and in my opinion the n uclear power advocates have had the better arguments as to the future uranuium supply situation.
And while i am no cornucopian or techno worshipper, the fact of the matter is that breeder reactors are a proven to work technology, even though they don't as yet work very well.Given the future value of electricity it seems likely that the technical problems will attract enough investment to find solutions;failing that, we will simply ust put up with balky breeder reactors and be damned glad that when they are running, they are running.
For the time being, when juice is still cheap, the public will probably continue to go along with the anti nuclear lobby, but later on, once the power starts going off occasionally, the issues of melt downs, decomissioning, and spent fuel disposal will get about as much attention as the issues of paying for social security and medicare have gotten in the past-that is to say, hardly any at all.The short term problem will rule in the public forum.
Mac, this is a very perceptive comment. Scotland used to be a leader in breeder reactor technology. I have spoken recently with a couple of engineers who worked at our experimental breeders at a site called Dounreay and they said that the reactors worked safely, producing 250 MW for years. But then I spoke with another expert who told me these reactors were never really that safe, the fact they worked for years didn't mean they were safe - and I think that is also true.
But conventional U - MOX reactors work safely all over the world. I think you are right about abundance of U fuel - we ain't imported any for years. I suspect that 21 st century will become the nuclear and not the solar century. Though I hasten to add I really do support sensible renewables.
I see what you are saying but I read that peak Uranium was likely.
You say there is 100 years of U left.
I like the breeder reactors, but dont like the idea of the conventional U reactors that make more of the waste that no one wants in their backyard.
I appreciate that wind needs backup baseload.
Still Geothermal is thermal nuclear without the mess to cleanup later.
Should be in the mix as well.
Surprised that Germany is so big on solar but England is not yet moving that way. Solar cells and wind never contaminated the local environment like coal, nuclear and oil have. But maybe we will hear of a solar 3-mile island event ;-)
Hi Oct, I do get your points, and they are good ones.And I for one live a very simple life and could learn to live without reliable electricity, day in day out, year in year out.
But expecting the spoiled silly entiltlement minded perpetual growth minded population of the currently prosperous parts of the world to accept rolling blackouts, austerity life styles, and so forth in order to protect the environment, and itself, from the dangers of global warming or anything else at the expense of its comfort and liesure is niave at best.
The hazards associated with nuclear power are trivial in my opinion in comparision to the hazards associated with the failure of the grid to keep the lights, water , and sewer systems working without fail.
We are in my opinion and that of others not afraid to look historical reality in the eye headed into a period of hot resource wars anyway.
Let me pose a question-suppose you live in Merry Old England , and due to a hot little war, or just a hot diplomatic flap, the gas deliveries are interrupted during a seriously tough winter;heat pumps and essential services powered by a nuke will stay up-with a little bad luck, wind power might decide to take a long weekend off and call in sick Monday morning.
How much more likely are riots and a military adventure in the one case as opposed to the other?
My actual personal position is that we should be building out nukes, wind, geothermal , and everything else at the maximum possible rates in order to get off of coal and oil asap;pushing all alternatives will almost certainly result in the greatest total amount of new renewable capacity-and while nukes are not quite renewable in the ordinary sense of the word, they fit in nicely with the true renewables and imo will become renewable within a decade or two when i expect breeders to come into thier own.Balky or not.
OFM, I had an epiphany last night: I realized Why the Integral Fast Reactor had to die.
It's a very quick read. Your thoughts?
Interesting take, and it might even be true.
But just because the US carbon fossil fuel industry can stop it here, that doesn't mean it won't happen elsewhere.
I expect that Japan and S. Korea would be very motivated to pursue this path, precisely because it eliminates their dependence on imported carbon fuels. And those two countries have the ability to pul it off, with or without US help.
Assuming your scenario is true, it is just another example of the problem of corporate interests dominating government. Government is no longer governing for the long term future of the people.
Government is no longer governing for the long term future of the people.
I'd love to see a good historical series that measures the level of democracy for various countries. For better or worse, I doubt that it was much higher in the past.
Japan was a partner in the IFR project, but they had the rug pulled out from under them when Hazel O'Leary hoodwinked the Clinton administration into cancelling it. Apparently they do not have the political capital to carry out the R&D on their own.
If we had a true justice system, O'Leary would be one of many government officials who would have been prosecuted for gross malfeasance or treason and would have died in prison. We let our elites get away with way, way too much.
wikipedia says: Generation III reactor
Nuclear gives the best bang for the buck Nothing else gives an operational life of 120 years
This is not quite true. Hydro electric systems can have operating lives of centuries, if not longer. The moving parts, turbines and generators, have similar life to those in nuke plants, but the rest of the hydro system, properly maintained will outlast a nuke plant.
In the old days there was a lot of small scale water power (water wheels and the like) plus a decent canal system. How is the outlook for small-scale hydro?
An article in the Guardian today on the future of UK's waterways...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/19/making-the-cut-british-wat...
The UK canal system still exists but is currently mostly leisure boating rather than commercial traffic. However as it connects into the heart of many major cities it could have a future commercial transport role. BWB, soon to be a charity looking after the waterways, is seeking to install hydro where feasible, and where old mills still have a water race, there are increasing examples of new turbines being installed to take advantage of FITS.
Now that that the grandiose Severn barrage plan has been stopped, I'd expect the alternatives, mainly tidal lagoons and much smaller barrages to be resurrected. Wave power remains in its infancy, despite the potential, while offshore wind is expected to form a major part of the energy matrix, as is nuclear.
Of much lower visibility to most observers is the increasing use of insulation, with 1 year paybacks for loft insulation due to government support. The message on energy saving is at every large DIY store and my electricity supplier, Eon, has even sent me free energy monitors and plugs for reducing standby use. The stick is the forecast of higher energy prices.
Living in a rural location with oil CH, due to insulation and new woodburner we've cut oil use by 2/3rd and space heating by 1/3rd. A 75% reduction has been achieved in electricity usage thru energy saving appliances and solar pv installation, the pv giving a yield of c9% pa.
Govt measures extend across all sectors, commercial, public and individual, so I am not certain that the UK will be the energy basket case often forecast.
FWIW, I was talking to someone looking after a National trust property, an old water mill for milling grain, and they were in the process of installing a water turbine. He said that it was very expensive because of the conditions that some authority (I would guess NRA, but I can't remember) was imposing. I think that it was mainly due to requiring an extra filter to save the fish,
Peter.
Though it seems as the micro hydro accreditation process is currently flawed
http://microhydroassociation.co.uk/Documents/Hydro%20industry%20letter%2...
Euan
It looks like--on a per capita basis--you Brits are paying about 250 pounds per year for imported energy/food et al.
From an American perspective that sounds like a bargain. Since
our imports are running about $1000 US per person.
Less than one pound a day.... it's a bargain.
Granted, North Sea declines will bump the tab, but as long as you have Guinness, no problem.
Hello Mr Rudall,
On per capita basis, energy products are about £270 per year in foreign debt, but that just represents about 17% of total deficit. Full deficit works out at about £1600 per person per year, which basically means we've all run up debts collectively as a nation that individually we have no chance of repaying.
(£1600 seems a lot I'm away to check the data)
Net imports for UK in 2009 was £82 billion. Dividing by 55 million people gives £1490 per person per year - this is truly ridiculous and unsustainable.
My country pays about EUR 1,625 per capita per year just for imported energy. Does that fact that our largest bank is 250% the size of our GDP have anything to do with this dismal statistic?
With population of 61 million.
Is that the cumulative trade deficit per capita?
Peter.
Yep - it says per person. Does it make you feel poor and vulnerable? We can never pay this back, only way out of mess is to inflate it away. More QE in pipeline me thinks.
Sorry, just checking that it was trade deficit and not any of the other deficits currently in the news.
QE is what they want, but it's hard to do with inflation running at 3 - 4%. Old Merv's giving it a good go, though, saying that he views the risks of inflation and deflation as about equal. Which is strange, really, since I don't think that he's ever had to write a letter to the chancellor saying why inflation is under 1%, but he's had to write plenty saying why it's over 3%. Still, he can always fall back on the unfalsifiable "in two years time" tactic,
Peter.
I have a simple and cunning plan to halve the per-capita deficit: double the number of people in circulation! ;o)
Mervyns going to be a busy boy...
Nick.
It is always possible that there's a whole lot more than 61 million already here. Individual fruit farms in Perthshire employ 250 migrant workers in the Summer and many hang around to work in bars etc.
I thought that the main export of the UK was financial services and associated legal services, particularly as provided by firms in the City and Docklands. Over half the financial derivatives are originated there, and about 3/4 of the secondary market in fixed income securities is there. A great deal of intermediation with financial havens in British possessions such as the Cayman Islands and the Jersey Islands is done through London. The major US fims on Wall Street all have huge London operations that do much of the firms investment banking in London, rather than in New York, due to more favorable laws and regulations.
Compared with the US, the service sector is about 70% compared with our 75%, but the service sector is more concentrated in financial services.
The US and Australia are increasing gas fired electrical generation seemingly oblivious to the reversal in gas fortunes of the UK. Can't happen to us they seem to think. I note BG Group has been trying to acquire coal seam gas fields in Australia, I presume to send back as liquid to Old Blighty rather than sell locally via pipes.
The economics of CCS/EOR can't be that good due to the distance between sites and the need to separate CO2 a second time. Whether coal mining in the UK has been 'hobbled' by CCS depends on whether you think CO2 is a problem. I wouldn't worry about ex colonies Canada and Australia not selling uranium to the mother country though I agree it is surprising there is no explicit mention of 4th generation nuclear to get better fuel burn rates.
The first few Gen 4 nuclear plants are likely to be 20+ years away.
Oz coal seam methane is mostly blue sky ASX speculation. BG is a big player in Brazil too, but that doesn't mean they are hoping to ship oil & gas to the UK. Makes no sense economically. Norway is closer and cheaper supply.
The 'deficit' within the UK economy extends beyond energy, although energy is going to become the driving factor over the next decades.
Last November I gave a presentation to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas on this subject. You can find the presentation/associated documents at:
http://appgopo.org.uk//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=55
-- or on my site at --
http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/papers/index.shtml#appgopo
With the cuts in public spending there's a lot of talk about the "structural deficit". Unfortunately the discussion at present only relates to the Government's own structural deficit, not the UK as a whole. The importance of the decline of indigenous UK energy resources, which I explain at length in my presentation, is that the UK deficit ceases to be a purely fiscal problem based upon the excess of credit spending over wealth generation, but instead becomes a direct drain on capital as the pressure to import the energy required to make the economy function grows.
There is no simple solutions to this issue. Either Britain develops a significant export-based economy -- unlikely within the period over which these pressures will take effect -- or we significantly contract economic activity as a whole to reduce the need to import energy to within manageable boundaries -- not impossible, but politically unacceptable at present whilst we maintain the mythical mantra of growth at the core of public policy. However, as I enter my tenth year of working full time on this subject, even many of the more progressive/radical campaign and social groups in the UK are not ready to accept this reality. In practice I think that contraction will take place at the behest of events rather than any planned "power down".
I'm trying to get my next book published at the moment -- this will look at this whole issue in more detail.
Await book with interest.
Do you or Euan have any figures on loss of direct revenue to the UK treasury as North Sea declines? Pretty well a straight loss in welfare if revenue goes down, if yesterday's approach is anything to go by?
Afraid I don't, though I could probably find out. My understanding is that direct tax revenues on North Sea were never that large, but they will obviously be going down. Main benefit has always been the general tax revenues generated by the economic activity that surrounds the oil industry.
In the budget of 2008 Gordon Brown put the figure at 9 billion. How much has been lost since then is probably averaging 0.8 to 1 billion per year. You have to add to that the extra costs of building LNG/piped gas import facilities, and at some point the UK will have to make a significant spend on oil storage too (perhaps in 2016/7) in order to meet the IEA's storage guidelines.
In addition importing energy, and the extra infrastructure costs, will have an economic effect because it lowers the supply chain efficiencies that have given the UK the in-built economic advantage of being an energy producer -- not just oil and gas, but also coal.
Hasn't the economic strategy of the UK from Maggie onward been to abandon the manufacturing Midlands and to focus on earning foreign exchange by establishing London as the global center of buccaneer capitalism?
Hence the controversy with the rest of the EU over financial regulation?
What are you suggesting the UK might increase the export of?
I've read that manufacturing based economies tend to use more energy per unit of GDP (case in point: China) -so that seems to rule out a return to manufacturing apart from some small high value-add types like jet engines.
I see vast amounts of waste everywhere in current society. We have become bloated on cheap energy both physically and societally. Efficiency is going to have to take up a large slice of the widening gap -as prices spiral people will install new boilers, insulate more heavily, buy more efficient and smaller cars (that continue to achieve the same get from A-to-B function), employ renewable/green technologies, etc, etc.
The problems really begin when you have cut most of the fat from the body and the only thing left to cut is the meat so to speak. Then layered upon the underlying problem you have the reaction of the populous who will at some point realise this is not just another downturn and fiscal belt-tightening excercise but a continued downslope of ever-reducing expectations. This is going to be a horrible wake-up, just look at how the French have reacted to raising the retirment limit to 62 from 60, what will they do when they realise there are not going to be ANY state pensions as their government is broke?
Nick.
The outcome of taking social dynamics for granted.
A large part of non- energy current account deficit is indirectly energy related as it is support for energy- consuming enablers such as property development or transfer payments to individuals who use the payments to consume energy.
The level of conservation required to maintain some level of energy reserve is beyond the limits of this or other Peak Oil discussions. For example, in the US consumption must be reduced not only below the level of domestic production but low enough to produce hard currency returns as well as allow for production over an extended period.
Somewhat like Schrödinger's cat, our debts are both real and abstract at the same time.
The extended period will be much greater than ten or twenty years or even a hundred years. As the US currently produces 5+ million barrels per day, the cutbacks would likely be TO the range of 2mbpd or less. This small production would be allocated toward managing an agricultural transition and to install truly sustainable energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal (not the heat pumps), hydro (which is largely built out in the US) and non- uranium nuclear - 'waste burners'.
The long term energy goal must be culture within the energy budget provided by solar insolation and nothing more.
Whether we burn through our resource bank accounts in ten years or a hundred matters not one bit if in the end we burn through it all without crafting tools that can produce replacement energy sources. It also won't matter if we create the sources without removing the cancerous 'economic growth/waste' culture that supports and is supported by the current energy regime.
The challenge is to keep the resource bank account intact with a view of increasing it over time. This is our real - human race - job. We are managers of this 'Earth' enterprise - or science experiment, if you like. Failure means extinction.
Obviously, 'consumption' as an economic driver must be jettisoned and replaced with husbandry. Otherwise, we are all Britons and the clock is ticking ...
Fast breeders can turn any isotope of uranium into energy (as well as burning all the transuranics), so you might want to look at this 2008 paper:
About 10% of that is suitable for enrichment to LWR fuel, but fast breeders or converters can use 100% of it. At 0.8 tons of metal/GW-yr, that is 590,000 GW-yr of generation or 590 years at 1 TWe without mining another gram of uranium. The USA is currently using about 450 GW average.
> What are you suggesting the UK might increase the export of?
Exactly! That's why I think it's a tall order to undertake any conventional kind of market reform of the UK economy in order to meet the challenges posed by rising energy imports within a service economy that runs a large external deficit. We just don't have the time to re-skill and re-tool for any other activity, hence why I believe that contraction is the most likely outcome. With their ideological fixation on growth and the market, an unplanned/uncoordinated created by circumstance -- much like the present spending cuts -- is going to be the realistic outcome of current government policy because it can't internalise the dynamics of resource limits.
We need a change of mind, not just a change of policy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/09/why-uk-exports-not-recove...
Well, sort of reminds me of this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqhlQfXUk7w&feature=related
Incredibly significant!
I hope the U.S. Senate reads your statement.
They are fond of saying "these things take an incredibly long time".
They said it in 1973 after the oil embargoes and long lines at the pumps.
More significantly I suppose, they said it last month when the cap and trade bill died.
UK oil production peaked in 1999. Only two years later, in 2001, they had shipped more than half of their post-peak CNE (Cumulative Net Exports, of oil).
Here is what BP shows for the combined production (P), consumption (C) and net exports (NE) for the three principal oil producers in the North Sea (UK + Norway + Denmark)--from their combined production peak in 2000 to 2009:
2000:
P: 6.38 mbpd
C: 2.11
NE: 4.27
2009:
P: 4.06 mbpd (-5.0%/year)
C: 2.00 (-0.6%/year)
NE: 2.06 (-8.1%/year)
Although their combined consumption fell slightly from 2000 to 2009, it wasn't nearly enough to keep the NE decline rate around the production decline rate. The C/P ratio has risen from 32% in 2000 to 49% in 2009.
In simple percentage terms, a 36% decline in production has resulted in a 52% decline in net oil exports.
I think the author I quoted said more with fewer words.
This is the second blog article that pushes an elimination of global warming mitigation in favor of coal fired power plants. The proclaimed neutral stance on AGW of TOD is showing a tilt to the denier side. Either TOD needs to take a stance on one side or the other, or hold to true neutrality. Otherwise, it will start gaining the reputation of biased news/analysis outlets like FauxNews.
There are many other energy sources, from geothermal to solar from Med countries, to wind, large and small scale hydro, and wave power. Having a Smart grid with HVDC connectivity within and without will take the UK into the 21st century, instead of relying on imported (Russia!?), dirty coal.
Uk Geothermal Resources
Small Scale Hydro Resources, England and Wales
There are other maps as well, though a number of technologies can be summed up by the following 2050 energy transition;
One might ask, "Where would all of these renewable energy generation facilities be located?"
Nothing on this thread is remotely denying AGW. It is looking at energy security in the geopolitical reality that is the UK today. To say that new coal powered stations are more efficient (and therefore produce less CO2 per KWh) than the existing ones, is just to state the obvious. In a country facing real electricity shortages and extreme levels of economic debt, CSS is unlikely to be implemented on cost and energy efficiency grounds alone. New electricity power sources are needed in the UK because so many of the existing nuclear and coal stations are at end of life.
This thread does not talk explicitly about climate change and CO2 emissions, but that does not make it in any way biased.
In response to ;
I repeat;
"This is the second blog article that pushes an elimination of global warming mitigation in favor of coal fired power plants. "
This article recommends a very high reliance on fossil fuels, when there are far better solutions that do not rely as heavily on imported fossil fuels. I detailed them above, but you seemed to have missed it somehow.
[edit] lost some of this comment at the front.
Geothermal is not strictly a renewable energy source. Once the heat is mined from the subsurface rocks, it is not replaced from surrounding rocks on a human timescale. Only one pilot plant in the UK, not a success.
Wind resource aplenty, and offshore expanding rapidly, but onshore limited by nimbyism. But it is still a tiny fraction of UK energy and we lack the infrastructure to increase the rate of build) to significantly affect the coming shortages.
The Severn tidal barrage has been shelved, on cost/environmental grounds. The money can be better spent on other renwables. Other tidal barrages have limited potential in the UK.
Underwater tidal turbines and wave energy have significant potential, but are in the research stages. Not ready for commercial development.
PV in the UK has marginal economics, and will remain a small player. Not enough sunlight.
Biofuels have marginal EROEI, and tie up and potentially degrade agricultural land we need for food production. It has limited potential for expansion.
All the renewables share the problem of high capital costs up front. That makes it very expensive to expand them rapidly. We do not have the money.
Of course the most efficient energy of all is the energy never consumed. That can be either through efficiency, insulation, social adaption, or economic contraction. Given that the UK is facing a low energy future, and our levels personal, government and national debt, economic contraction is winning hands down just now.
Importing PV electricity from Africa is a nice idea, but it is still importing energy, and I don't see it being built in the next 10 years.
Geothermal is not strictly a renewable energy source.
From MIT, The Future of Geothermal Power;
Wind resource aplenty, and offshore expanding rapidly
Exactly.
All the renewables share the problem of high capital costs up front.
And all the fossil fuels share the critical problem of costly imports, depletion and national security dependencies. Russia is weaving a natural gas dependency web; should the UK walk blindly into it? Should hard answers be ignored and the current leadership push the problem down the road for future generations to suffer the consequences of near-sighted leadership?
Is not the earth's life span as a bio habit dependent on that energy store?
I am so not keen on notions of large scale exploitation of this resource?
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/does-geothermal-power-caus...
I like the idea of geothermal, we just gotta figure out a way to tap it.
Duplicate.
I suspect the proposed severn barrage that the last gov encouraged was always intended to fail because it was a poor design. There have been many superior suggestions to use this resource over the last 100yrs or so. It is political will that stops it every time.
"Geothermal is not strictly a renewable energy source."
False. Name a geothermal plant that is declining in production.
Geothermal in the end is thermal nuclear power. Why extract the U when you can harvest the heat in situ from the earth?
"The International Geothermal Association (IGA) has reported that 10,715 megawatts (MW) of geothermal power in 24 countries is online, which is expected to generate 67,246 GWh of electricity in 2010. This represents a 20% increase in online capacity since 2005." Wikipedia.
"Geothermal power is considered to be sustainable because any projected heat extraction is small compared to the Earth's heat content. The Earth has an internal heat content of 10^31 joules (3·1015 TW·hr)" Wikipedia
Whereas nuclear power generation is in decline...
Surprising that Great Britain would go the way of the Dodo on Coal. Very surprising.
If I were an influential politician (which I'm not) and my country would still have abundant natural resources (i.e. gas or oil) then I would probably choose to pay a bit more to get the renewable/sustainable more expensive production capacity installed instead of going for cheap and maximum economic growth in the short run and get caught chasing my own tail paying for energy costs and having a permanent recession in the long run.
Perhaps the window of opportunity for the UK to transform to a sustainable energy supply without major social impacts has already been closed. Below you can post a "thank you!" for your country's electorate and past politicians for their job well done :-)
Growing an economy a bit slower for future benefit seems much more bearable then having to do a step back later. This might also be true for households (you can choose to have your house insulated and/or solar hot-water/PV installed first instead of going on an expensive holiday).
It wasn't my intention to come over as pro-coal. My position is in fact anti burning more coal to tackle problem. If we are to have new coal plant lets have 45% efficient plant or better still 70% efficient plant.
Your plan to replace FF in the UK by 2050 won't work without massive storage capacity which we don't have. Current hydro capacity is 1.5 GW which is a drop in the ocean, and even massive expansion of pump hydro won't make much inroad. I'm still very much in favor of sensible renewable energy, but would note that the Severn tidal barrage has just been "cancelled". I guess having power 4 times a day for £30 billion had its draw backs.
I'm not sure that Desertec will get built any time soon either, so I think you need to bump up your 38 GW nuclear. I don't like your map with bio fuels written all over it - I'd prefer to see food.
I will take you at your word that you didn't intend to come over a pro-coal.
I agree that hydro in the UK won't likely exceed 5% of current demand, though reducing demand should be as important as identifying supply.
The results of the first pilot of a wave power generation source are certainly a learning experience, though it in no way disproves the potential for wave power, no more that a mistake in a math calculation disproves math itself.
The images I provided above represented but one alternative sourcing profile I found that provided an illustration of sourcing; I personally prefer 'all the above', with as many sources as possible, though I am not a fan of most biofuels (still waiting to see what algae might deliver), given the shifting agricultural situation in the UK.
Very pretty colourful maps, but I have an bit of a problem; where's the food coming from?
There is only one essential human energy source -- FOOD. All other forms of energy are negotiable but the timely, sufficient and qualitatively sufficient supply food is the only true energetic necessity for human society. We forget this fact at our peril. Unfortunately the metropolitan green lobbyists seem to have lost that reality in their efforts to promote consumerist solutions to "the problem of consumption" (which, of course, was to be the title of Fritz Schumacher's book 'Small is Beautiful' before his publisher got him to think of something more snappy).
You're treating this as a carbon issue -- it is not. Carbon isn't a "problem", it's a "symptom" of our reliance on fossil fuels. The economic drivers that make fossil fuels indispensable are not a function of the fuel itself, but of and economy that relies upon a high turnover of energy in order to maintain growth. We could use something else as an energy source if it had the same unit price and energy return on investment as fossil fuels have had over the last century, but no such source exists -- even fossil fuels are having a problem maintaining the economic value of energy return as the industry is forced to adopt unconventional technologies (from deep water to hydro-frakking) to maintain production.
David MacKay's policies ideas -- the source of your argument -- are themselves flawed not because of the technological case, but because even he gives into the economic growth mantra in many aspects of his scenario design. Read Chapter 27 of his much-hyped book:
"In these plans, I assume that the current demand for electricity for gadgets, light and so forth is maintained... Yes, lighting efficiency is improved by a switch to light-emitting-diodes for most lighting, and many other gadgets will get more efficient; but thanks to the blessings of economic growth, we'll have increased the number of gadgets in our lives."
Sorry, but we're also running out of the raw materials that create all the gadgets and gizmos that are driving the demand for more energy. For example, the memory chips for mobile phones or laptops consume more energy in production than the device itself will consume during it's ordinary service life. Whether we're seeing an emerging copper peak is an interesting debate right now, and certainly there's a case for arguing that a gold peak is happening right now. Then there's the whole rare earths issue, without which many of the system required to deploy the vision you advance cannot work efficiently.
As has been demonstrated by the recent global financial crisis, the direct relationship between economic efficiency and low energy prices means that the global peak of oil, followed in short order by natural gas an coal, will stall the economy and take care of the carbon issue more effectively than eco-efficiency options. It's just a basic fact that, with the other resource restrictions that will play out as we approach the "Limits to Growth", reducing consumption and modifying patterns of economic activity to cope is far cheaper than trying to create some idyllic green Jerusalem where we can still have iPods and HDTV.
....in case you're all interested, the title of the new book is "Less is a Four Letter Word"; I think you get the idea ;-)
The coal power stations look less frightening than this!
It is possible to both acknowledge increasing concentrations of CO2 will cause Climate Change and simultaneously argue that policies in the developed world will have no impact on it if India and China are not willing to make draconian cuts. Since they will not do so one could conclude that policy should focus on energy efficiency not GW. IMO the argument for renewable energy is not to avoid climate change but simply because fossil fuels are running out.
McKibben who formed 350.org to promote policies to hold CO2 to 350 parts/mm in his most recent book has concluded that is now a pipe dream. According to him if all the promises made by countries were kept we would still end up with over 700pMM by the end of the century. In other words as he puts it the old Earth is gone welcome to Eaarth.
This slide from Dave Rutledge is quite instructive regarding future CO2 trajectories. Your right about India, China, especially China now burning 50% of the coal on planet Earth, any half hearted attempt by OECD to capture C is a total waste of time.
Is Chindia burning coal more of less efficiently than us?
This from World Energy Council report:
2007 Survey of Energy Resources
World Energy Council 2007
so an international deal on CO2 based on min efficiency standards as opposed to carbon credits/sequestration has headroom for a 10-20% reduction in CO2.
window dressing or worth having?
Worth having IMO, but you have to understand that energy efficiency makes energy more affordable and that ultimately means higher prices that in turn means more resource getting converted to reserve.
Energy efficiency is the best friend of energy decline and the worst enemy of CO2 emissions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
yes jevons of course
That assumes that energy policy is developed in a vacuum. The policies of India and China are driven in no small part by world trade policy, and if the OECD withdrew from the WTO and entered its own trade association with strong environmental standards, Chindia would find its own options much more constrained. If growth depends on exports and exports are blocked if CO2 is not addressed, it's going to have an effect.
" ....if the OECD withdrew from the WTO and entered its own trade association with strong environmental standards, Chindia would find its own options much more constrained. "
The OECD is not really a trade bloc in the same way that EU and NAFTA are. Ohter regional groupings are far more important. Australia would drop the OECD in a heartbeat if membership threatened our trading position with China and I suspect many other countries would do the same. Environmental standards are only something we want for our own backyard and we really don't care if China chokes in a ocean of filth as long as our cheap goodies keep turning up in the shops.
That's exactly the point: emissions which circle the globe wind up in everyone's back yard.
One small glimmer of hope emerged in George Osborne's Spending Review yesterday and that was the confirmation, after months of doubt, that the renewable heat incentive (RHI) will go ahead from June 2011. This should kick start the renewable heat market in the UK and lead to the installation of efficient heating technologies like heat pumps.
From a Scottish perspective, the Scottish Government strategy is to go all electric (including heating and transport) by 2050. The target for renewable electricity generation in Scotland for 2020 has just been raised from 50% to 80%. Alex Salmond, the First Minister, says 100% electricity from renewables is possible. Ian Marchant CEO of Scottish and Southern Energy reckons Uncle Alex is way too pessimistic. He reckons 200% is easily achievable.
What do you understand "renewable heat" to mean? Heat pumps running on wind electricity?
And is your comment about Ian Marchant serious? Do you have a link?
I might add that I think the 80% renewables target by 2020 is totally mad, and am more than a little concerned to note that each of Scotland's 5 large power stations are ear marked for closure by 2025. Longannet, the last man standing in the CCS competition will of course be providing electricity to compressors instead of houses in Glasgow.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/28/salmond-green-ele...
Thanks for adding the link RollOutTheBarrel - you got there ahead of me.
Renewable heat in the context of the renewable heat incentive has been defined by the UK government (see this link or this one). Renewable heat has also been defined by the EU. Heat pumps come into this category if they have high enough CoPs (i.e. if they are good enough), but other technologies are included in the broader definition (solar thermal, biogas or biomass for heat etc).
The general case for using heat pumps in the UK has been made by David Mackay for example, in his book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air.
Whether the targets for renewable electricity generation in Scotland are mad or not, there's certainly a lot of engineering planning and effort being focused in that direction. And there will be a mix of technologies involved in achieving that target, not just wind power. And not all on the generation side, but also in smart demand management.
High targets are much easier if you have a cooperative neighbour, and if you mean 'on average' !!
You can find small areas now, that can claim > 100% renewable power, so it's just a matter of degree.
Heat Pumps running in conjunction with Photovoltaic Thermal panels..... net carbon neutral, though not time of demand carbon-neutral.
www.newformenergy.com has designed a heat pump that uses the PV-T array as the heat source - rather than using ground- or air-source. Because of the pre-heating effect of the thermal component of the PV-T, the input temperature into the the heat pump is average 19 centigrade rather than 9-15 centigrade from ground-source. This allows for an operational COP (note "operational" rather than "claimed") in the region of 4.5 - market-leading in terms of winter heating requirements.
The PV-T panels are already MCS-accredited for FIT and RHI, the heat pump is going through the process.
Disclosure: I work for Newform, hence my NFE moniker.
So what does a system cost?
I heat my house with a nat gas boiler, guess 80% efficient. To replace with new 90% efficient will cost £5K - lot of plumbing involved to shift to outer wall. My gas bill is about £1k per annum, so I'd save about £100 per annum on my £5K investment.
Hi Euan,
System costs depend on number of panels etc, but figure somewhere between £20,000 and £25,000 fully installed. Installation costs vary on location and on amount of internal plumbing work to fit in the necessary thermal store and connect the panels to it.
FIT and RHI income would amount to £3,000 to £3,500 annually (index-linked and tax free) depending on location and your gas bill should be eradicated (if you have a well-insulated house), so total benefits in the region of £4,000 to £4,500 per annum.
I'm not going to go into the rights and wrongs of the FIT and the RHI - but the opportunity to benefit from them is there for (almost) everyone. Above numbers are based on RHI info BEFORE the CSR - should know more about exact tariffs and go-live date for RHI by December. Also based on south-facing roof, unshaded, etc, etc.
FIT= feed in tariff
RHI = ?
Its a lot of money to gamble on the continuation of what one day may become viewed as a flawed and unaffordable subsidy system.
RHI - Renewable Heat Incentive
Cuts to the FIT & RHI are more likely to be applied to future installations rather than applied retroactively to existing installations. To do otherwise would be politically unacceptable, in my opinion. It's much easier for government to resolve the lack of affordability by effectively shutting the subsidies to new entrants.
How about adding some insulation? I'm not terribly intimate with UK housing standards, but from my visits across the channel I remember not being very impressed. So, generally speaking, your house likely has quite a lot to gain as well.
External wall cavity insulation, underfloor insulation, double glazed high efficiency windows, root/attic insulation, etc, etc. The big steps are often economically very attractive (and good for comfort too), i.e. <5 years payback time and also boost property value.
House is built from granite in 1929. We did big modernisation when we moved in 1993, new high quality wood frame double glazed windows, and insulation up top, but not possible / wise to insulate walls without ripping them all down first. Its warm and comfortable, going to install a wood burner before winter which started yesterday.
Interesting, is it a single external wall (no cavity wall)? And how thick is the granite? I'm sure an R-value can be found for granite so it would be fairly easy to calculate how much heat you're loosing on a typical chilly English winter day.
No cavity wall. Granite is about 12 to 15 inches thick, then a gap of about 4 inches to internal lath and plaster. Problem I'm told is maintaining circulation and avoiding damp / condensation when the temperature periodically drops to -10˚C here in Scotland.
Insulation is the first step - I often am asked here about geothermal heating installations and my answer is always - insulate first; but for a given geothermal system properly sized and installed you can expect a better than 50% cut in heating costs.
My house has R-38 basement foundation walls (7" of roxul insulation inside and extruded poly styrene on the backfill side), it has 3 1/2 inches of Roxul in the above grade walls and 3 1/2" of extruded poly styrene (R-3o+) and R-40 in the attic. All the windows are triple glazed argon filled casements. I have an HRV for fresh air exchange. this was a retrofit.
No geothermal yet but in a year or so.
My annual heat (100% electric) is about 700 dollars (CAD) a year with an outside design temperature of -40C here in Northern Canada (55th parallel). I have a high efficiency wood burner but don't use it very much. When company is over and a fire is going we usually end up opening the windows and door even in Winter.
I lived in a granite house in Aberdeen for a year. Chilly. It was actually in Kintore north of Aberdeen.
You might (UK Folk) want to look up a fella named John Hockman - he goes to the UK once in a while to offer building envelope training. He is a colleague.
I enjoyed the post - but AGW is a real issue and it also needs to be addressed.
Euan, I recall an episode of "This Old House" where a slow-expanding foam was used to fill walls in existing construction. Holes were drilled bottom and top, foam shot into the bottom and when it came out the top, the job was done.
I'm not sure if this stuff is available in Scotland (or anywhere any more), but if you can get it it might be just the thing: insulation and vapor barrier all in one.
And there are techniques to spray foam insulation on the outside, which looks just like stucco. Having the thermal mass on the interior greatly dampens shifts in the interior temperature (a favorite trick of passive solar architects);
http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/code-green/mass-walls-inc...
Doing that to a 100+ year old granite home would be a tragedy.
But I guess only an aesthetic one..... ;-)
Euan
My walls are thicker than yours :)
Ours are nearly 50cms (18.5 to 20 inches), airtight stone, lots of heat capacity including massive internal walls. 150 year old one-floor.
I am going to try to internally line main room that currently has unlined external walls, stripping existing internal gypsum plaster skim and replacing with 4 inches of a hemp/lime mix finished with a lime plaster skim. We should get a 'warm wall' that is also hygroscopic. These walls have been shown to reduce condensation. Someone in our neighbourhood has already done this (we watch with interest). I hope to put in some instrumentation in our 'experimental' wall. Rural area, 'sunny' east side of the country on Scottish/English border, no natural gas but scope for passive heating and lower oil bill.
Need to do a lot of other stuff as well. Alternative is BAU and double our oil bill in not so distant future? - ouch! not an ideal future care-home.
ps. just potentially reduced our electricity demand by about 1000kWh per year by replacing a not so very old -18degC freezer with latest A++. Payback in money in about 3.5 years.
Thanks Euan. So lets see what insulation could do for you...
Granite: lambda = 3,50 W/m.K (add 25% if damp), 38 cm thick. Rgranite = 0.38/3.5 = 0.11 m2.K/W
Air cavity: lambda = 0.2 W/m.K, 10 cm thick. Rcavity = 0.1/0.2 = 0.5 m2.K/W
Plaster: lambda = 0.5 W/m.K, 2 cm thick. Rplaster = 0.02/0.5 = 0.04 m2.K/W
The entire wall gives a combined heatloss at deltaT of 30 degrees: 30 * (1/(0.11 + 0.5 + 0.04)) = 46 W/m2 .... 46 Watt for each square meter, big oeps!! A wall 8 meters long and 2.5 meters high would loose 1 kilowatt constantly at such temperature differences.
But this can be hugely reduced by adding 10cm mineral wool to the air cavity. Rwool = 0.1/0.034 = 2.94 m2.K/W which leads to a combined heat loss of 30 * (1/(0.11 + 0.5 + 0.04 + 2.94)) = 8 W/m2. The same wall now looses only 160 Watt under those circumstances.
Insulation of the cavity would reduce the heat loss to almost 1/6th of your current situation. And the good thing is: it wouldn't reduce your usable indoor space. The UK certainly would have a lot to gain with a rush to better insulated homes, given that heating accounts for about 2/3 of a households energy use.
Note1: it is really important to use a perforated (breathing) foil on the cold side (granite) of the insulation and an air-tight foil taped at the seams on the warm side (room) of the insulation. This stops moisture entering the insulation and condense there, which would otherwise cancel the insulating properties of the mineral wool.
Note2: the combined insulated Rwall of 3.59 is only just above the current insulation requirements in the Netherlands.
Thanks Styno, but it sounds like I'd have to rip down walls first since cavity is not easily / impossible to access. Not sure I'm ready to that just yet.
Sure, np, you already said that. But I was just interested in this case and wanted to show how a simple and cheap action can contribute a great deal to energy conservation. And I hope it will keep nagging in the back of your head and you will have it done anyway in a few years time. ;-)
Maybe UK government can implement a new law that forces new homeowners to upgrade the insulation to current standards? It would cost more initially but pays out in the longer term and banks might be more willing to provide (higher) mortgages because the monthly fixed costs of living are lower. But the moment you buy a house is a good time to do such work and it would be good for job creation too.
If you don't want to break down the plaster wall you might want to consider filling the cavity with PUR foam, although it might prove to exert too much force when it expands. But you can always ask a professional about that. Using PUR foam is a bit more expensive then mineral wool but only needs a few small holes in the plaster wall which can be repaired afterwards...
The big problem with that is how to administer the law. Some time ago the UK government mandated minimum standards for the thermal performance of new doors and windows. So far so good but the way they chose to implement this rule was to give you a choice of either getting an approved contractor to fit the new ones and self certify that they meet the standard or pay a building inspector to inspect it. Since DIYers cannot self certify this frequently makes the cost of doing the job out of reach of those who cannot afford a contractor. What is worse is that many of the contractors do work well below code but provide the certificates anyway.
A secondary problem is the tendency in the UK for homes to be refurbished for sale - you would have to somehow make sure that the law was framed in such a way that the work had to be done whatever. The last attempt to do something about this was an abject failure - even trying to get a meaningful inspection of houses for sale mandated proved impossible due to vested interests objecting.
Ofcourse, it's not claimed to be as simple as the single sentence I wrote.
But it can be done nonetheless. E.g. in the Netherlands cars are being inspected once every year which can be done by certified shops. To maintain a high inspection quality an independent inspector is randomly assigned to double check the inspection and shops that are lazy will get penalized in some way. This might work for the UK: Suppose local council knows which houses are sold and requires the homeowner to invite an commercial inspector within e.g. 2 years. The market will keep inspection cost low and the quality of the inspection is randomly double checked by council inspectors. Anyone who is able to buy a house should be able to shell out e.g. 100 to 200 Pounds extra for an inspection. The extra costs will be paid back quickly with savings on fuel costs. A win-win-win-win-lose situation if you ask me (homeowners - local businessmen - UK trade balance - environment - energy corporations).
Imho, refurbishing the house before sale does not really make a difference. If you want to refurbish, fine but do the insulation as well. If you don't want to refurbish then you can leave the insulation work to the buyer.
Perhaps additionally (or alternatively) the UK can introduce an energy label for buildings. That allows new homeowners to quickly see to what extent a home is insulated (and therefore the monthly energy costs).
We already do. It's called an Energy Performance Certificate. In Scotland at least, probably the rest of the UK too, an EPC must be supplied whenever a property is sold or rented.
http://epc.direct.gov.uk/index.html
Yes that one or something very similar is in England too, it was one of the few bits of the pre-sale inspection proposal that survived although the level of information it gives is pretty limited. There is no compulsion to actually do anything about improving it though. I think there is a rule that if you replace substantial parts of a building you have to upgrade while you do it but this doesn't seem to be enforced very well. In opposition the Torys were proposing a semi-enforced insulation inspection and upgrade but this seems to have disappeared now they are in government.
House inspections say every decade would seem perfectly reasonable though enforcing the work would be more difficult than cars where they just refuse to licence it without an MOT inspection certificate. I can just imagine the howls from incompetent DIYers who don't want their work looked at though. The main problem with the present approach is that the main purpose seems to be to generate registration fees for the self certification bodies who seem to be dumbing down as low as they dare.
Agreed.
We also have some schemes designed to help those most in need-
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/scotland/Scotland-Welcome-page/At-Ho...
...but with the approaching austerity measures, what priority will schemes like this be given?
Euan
Glad you keep a sense of reality alive in UK, given political discourse.
I did a check on diesel biofuel a couple of years back, and highlighted Scotland as an example because there were reasonable data and a number of specialised refineries were proposed across central Scotland. (UK-wide figures were not very different.)
A home grown source, Oil Seed Rape (OSR, canola), which grows particularly well in Scotland, would be available. Scottish Agricultural Colleges (SAC) did in-depth studies. In particular see pages 94-95, tables 10.10 and 10.11 for potential UK and Scottish contributions to biodiesel supply using existing acreage of OSR
EDIT: see http://www.angus.gov.uk/ac/documents/sacreport.pdf
To summarise: if an expanded maximum OSR Scottish crop were achieved, and all of it reached the bio-refineries, this could account for less than 6% of Scotland's demand for diesel. (Scotland uses roughly 50:50 diesel and petrol (gas)). At the time, though, I discovered elsewhere that the proposed bio-refineries were to have a capacity for processing perhaps 6 times the total Scottish crop. Presumably a bio-refinery must have a minimum input to be economic.
On all counts, serious UK-wide biofuel can only mean imports, and these imports have very dubious net-carbon emission equations with potential for very large net emissions.
NB Scottish OSR-derived diesel has been judged to have EROEI of about 2.4:1 but sensitive to nitrogen fertilizer use.
Biomass for power stations except for a little co-fired straw / coal, for the UK also means imports. We are currently seeing planning applications for new power stations across the UK designed to burn imported vegetable oil, in particular Palm Oil. :(
best
phil
Importing biomass is simply nuts:-)
ERoEI of 2.4 translates to an efficiency of 58% * 20% ICE efficiency (?) = 12% for propulsion system. Electric cars have got to be the way to go, but I suspect will be still born once again. I'm guessing that Europe will produce small diesels that do 100 mpgs within a few years, at half the price and 4 times the range of an EV, who would buy the latter?
I can't see anything replacing the ICE - right down to '4 bicycle wheels and a tarp roof, 25cc, 10mph, 300mpg etc..'
Yair...exactly. Have you you experienced how much "usefull work" can be accomplished on a cupfull of petrol by a Honda mini fourstroke.
We have a little Honda four stroke on tiller-it saves a hard day with a hoe on a pint of gasoline;and we have a Honda 300 four trax off road vehicle of the type usually referred to as a "utility four wheeler".
This machine saves us quite a bit of gasoline as it can haul most of the hand tools we use on the rack whereever we need them, , and a load of up to five hundred pounds on the little trailer I built for it.It will accomplish as much hauling and riding on the farm on a gallon of gas as our cheapest running truck will get done on more than five times as much gasoline.
It is quite safe if you stay off rough ground and don't drive it at high speeds-if it were legal to do so I would use it for local deliveries and save even more gasoline.
Seems to me that the UK should try harder to exploit its strength's to solve its energy problems. Strengths like the ability to organize and deploy investment capital offshore. Build high-efficiency coal generation projects at the minesites and import the electricity rather than importing the coal. (coal-by-wire). Build solar generation in the Sahara Desert rather than subsidize pointless PV in cloudy Britain.
British industry should wind up owning the infrastructure on which everyone else depends for electricity, and in the process resolve their own energy and export deficit problems.
PV in southern Britain actually achieves similar outputs to that experienced in Spain or Portugal where high panel surface temperatures massively reduce net efficiency during the summer months. A litle-known fact is that PV efficiency decreases by 0.5% for every 1 degree centigrade increase in panel surface temperature.
That's not to say UK is optimum solar territory, but then again neither necessarily are hot sunny climes, at least not with current PV technology.
I'm quite convinced that solar thermal is the technology of today. PV needs at least a few more breakthrough developments to become viable, especially for large-scale central installations. Between solar troughs, power towers and dish stirling, and insulated sand-gravel tanks for thermal storage for off-sun periods, solar thermal is already entirely ready for prime-time in hot cloud-free areas, fresh-water, sea-water or no water available. With scale-up in the manufacturing they would all compete today with clean coal for the cheapest electricity available.
Our 2KWp array has generated over 500KWHr since August, average of 5KWhr generated per day and yes the cooler autumn months mean higher efficiency which compensates for the sun being lower in the sky/shorter daylight hours.
Shifting high demand usage (dishwasher, laundry) to the middle of the day helps make use of the free electricity.
It's a shame stoves are not part of the RHI as ours supplies most of the heat to the house during winter - but as the cost of installation is low and the fuel is essentially free should not complain
UKTony,
That's pretty decent output: 10.42% net efficiency - will be interesting to see what you get over the course of a full year.
Shame you didn't know about PV-T, could have generated more like 615 KWh since August and provided a lot of your domestic hot water too.
Agree entirely about woodburners - I guess the issue there is about ensuring that the feed-stock is sourced from sustainable woodland and not from trees hacked down willy-nilly.
NFE,
Our roof was almost the best you can get, I think the quoted loss was under 1% from ideal plus as a new system the panels (actually 12 x 185W = 2,220Wp) have only just started there depletion profile.
Overcast days there is still enough light to cover the general daytime load (now I've unplugged most of the parasites), overall with some other measures our average electricity import has dropped from an average of 19KWhr/day to 10KWhr/day. Finally getting around to fitting a proper gas boiler central heating manager has meant practically zero gas usage apart from hot water so far this year.
Plenty of dead fall in the woods across the road :-) and Sussex wood supplies are nearly all from sustainable forest and woodland management.
The owner of our local was asking me about PV (he rather glazed over as it got technical) and PV-T does sound like it's a better system especially for place like pubs which actually can use the water during the day rather than having to store it for later use.
Nice work Euan.
An interesting addition to your analysis might be to look at banking/finance as a % of UK GDP and overlay that on top of your energy graphs...
I think over the cycle, banking and finance contribution to GDP is zero, maybe less. Watch out for the bears.
really?
I see investment banking and pensions industries as vast parasite sucking life out of economy. Pensions worked when we had growth in market and they could skim 2 to 4% off top and still leave some capital growth for "investor". But since markets began their move sideways and down (1999), the 2 to 4% commission is merely wasting capital. Situation made worse by electronic trading and money whirring round with commission flying off in all directions, eroding capital. Hope you don't work in the City:-)
well as an archaeologist I have worked in the City from time to time. But I have to admit to a similar bias on matters relating to the financial sector
I can not get to grip with the City's contribution to the balance of payments as outlined here
http://www.thecityuk.com/
it strikes me there is a lot of gobbledygook
after reading the following I was non the wiser especially concerning the true nature of FDI effect on the net balance figs?
I wonder if some of the developments just appearing can be brought to bear on these issues.
For instance, Britain has massive amounts of coal in seams too deep to be mined. This coal may well be accessible via underground coal gasification (UCG); Linc Energy recently tested a coil-tube drilling rig to increase output at a test site. The product gas can be cleaned up to mainly CO, H2 and CH4 (Chinchilla's production is 32% H2, 17% CO and 18% CH4 on a nitrogen-free basis).
Another development is the solid-acid fuel cell. A recent test showed tolerance of up to 10% CO without significant effect on output (unlike alkaline FCs, which form carbonates from CO2), and the temperature of operation is right in the range of steam reformers (which convert CO + H2O to CO2 + H2). The potential is for a power station to take a stream of syngas and convert it to CO2 and water, perhaps with hydrogen recovered for other uses.
Even if SAFCs do not become economical, CCGTs burning hydrogen from reformed syngas are not out of the question. The interesting point is that almost the entire amount of carbon is converted to CO2 without being mixed with nitrogen. This makes it very easy to separate and recover (in both energy and equipment).
The upshot is that neither the extraction nor use of that coal has to involve emission of CO2 to the atmosphere. Piping it to oil fields for EOR is a no-brainer.
I agree. UK in-situ coal gasification makes sense onshore and offshore.
How much energy does the UK actually need? Past and current production is one thing but if it comes down to essentials - how much do we need to keep 'the lights on', the food produced and transported, the useful goods manufactured etc. How much is currently wasted on non-essentials? Is a population of 63million sustainable - at any civilised level - in a post PO world?
I reckon I could get by on 50% of the energy I use, in time, without any loss to living standard.
Great if we could all do that - but I suppose the bigger issue is then that you can't run a capitalist economy on that basis. So what sort of economy, based on what sort of economics would we operate. Not like Kunstler's, World Made by Hand I hope.
if it was rationed we would all do it in no time at all.
Interesting, but there is no mention of how the population growth or decline(?) will impact the figures.
I am wondering at what point in the energy decline and economy decline the general population of England will turn on the immigrant minority population and demand their expulsion? Certainly the expulsion of minority immigrants would reduce the energy consumption and food consumption?
I am not saying I think this is good, I am just looking at thousands of years of human history and it seems a pretty good fit?
I think things would have to get pretty damn serious for that to happen - at least on an organised, official level. We've had occasional surges of Fascism in England but nothing substantial and when the chips are down the Brits kick the Fascists out. I like to believe Britain's extraordinary history of good governance and all the rest of the apparatus of state it's built up - will act as a buffer when the shtf. On the other hand the population has doubled since the 60s and today's overfed consumers are hardly comparable to the archetypes of the stiff upper lip and fair play Brit of the past. Unfortunately.
France recently deporting some Roma and Merkel's comment that multiculturalism has failed in Germany are interesting developments. As the stress builds, tolerance will wane.
Multiculturalism is dead. 9/11 destroyed the silly notion that all cultures are equal.
There is nothing wrong with having a preference for one owns culture and not wanting a foreign influence contaminating it.
Do you think Saudi Arabia would want 1 million Americans moving in and creating an "America town" where people: eat pork sandwiches, drink alcohol in public, and women were allowed to drive cars? *rhetorical question*
Why is it that the western world must "be tolerant" and bend over backwards to accommodate 101 other cultures while the rest of the non-western world sure as hell doesn't think they have to reciprocate.
do I smell a double standard?
Maybe because we owe the rest of the world. After all, they've had to tolerate several hundred years of exploititive capitalism with little reward. Still today, we are busy screwing up many countries - taking their oil and natural resources.
Really?
If it weren't for western science and technology (like sanitation, germ theory, electricity to name a few) the rest of the world would still be stuck in the dark ages where the average person has a 50% chance of dying before seeing their 18th birthday.
If I had to live a 2nd life, but as a black man....I would rather take my chances being born in a white society.
//
An unapologetic bleeding heart Liberal African American journalist once toured Africa to open his eyes a little. When he came back to the USA he admitted, "In a guilty way I feel glad that my ancestors were taken as slaves by the white man. If not then I would have been born in Africa."
This. In spades.
Dinesh D'Souza has similar thoughts in "Two cheers for colonialism".
The American college education system is primarily a place for students to get indoctrinated into the holy trinity of: multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance. Notice how *stew.art* responded with almost a knee jerk reaction proclaiming that the white man is the source of all misery on this planet. He has been "educated" quite well.
Notice how *stew.art* bends over backwards to (touch his ears to his ankles) as he atones for the sins of his forefathers and proclaims that the only reason why the western world got rich is because they stole it. I bet he must of been an A+ student.
As for "Two cheers for colonialism", IMHO European colonialism wasn't that bad. Look at The USA, we were a colony once and I think we turned out okay.
*knee slapper*
Gosh. Clearly I've stuck my head in an ideological hotpot here. I could take offence but you are obviously intent on performing an American stereotype. Fyi - I am of near pensionable age, Irish and definitely not "educated" in the manner you suggest. I have spent my life refusing to tow any party line but some things are so obvious in this world you'd be thick-as-a-brick not to 'get' them. I did not say that, "white man is the source of all misery on this planet". I simply dared to suggest that, in spite of all the wonderful opportunities provided for us by civilisation, we have developed this by hugely exploiting the rest of the world. I think I've heard it suggested that the US, for example, though only a tiny proportion of the world's population, consumes a quarter of its oil. Why should we take it for granted that this is as it should be? What gives the US the right to maintain its bau at the expense of so many others?
Whether we like it or not, our future is one of a lot less than we presently assume to be our birthright. "multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance" may not be to your liking but Americans are soon going to need all the friends they can get if they are to survive the PO catastrophe.
That's pretty disgusting. You have two choices only for the future.. multiculturalism or competitive extermination. You can either a) exterminate, b) be exterminated, or c) learn to get along.
USA is on the path to b) (just keep poking China another few decades...) Canada is the great experiment in c).
Fine. But you conveniently ignore or edit history to suit your ideological position. As for being born in "white society" - makes my point don't you think?
I'm not the only one here with an ideology.
Perhaps not but it doesn't sound like you have any desire to examine if your POV could possibly be wrong or if there might be other explanations for how history has transpired over the last 10,000 or so years. It seems wholly possible that a lot of it might have been just plain luck of the draw.
Th UK coal production peak around 1920 makes me very curious. As best I can tell, it was not caused by a lack of resource, but rather by a move to oil. One could begin to analyze this if one had data on historical prices.
I saw one discussion about historic coal prices, as follows:
"the cost of a ton of coal in 1900 Britain was 6 shillings which is roughly $30 a ton in today's prices.
6 shillings/20 s per pound x $100 in todays USD ~$30.
Today UK deep mined coal is less than $50 per ton--a very slight increase given the catastrophic exhaustion that Jevons feared.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/files/file14151.pdf
Since 1950 US coal prices on average have fell except for a spike in the 1970 and 1980s when electricity production rose and there was a switch from petroleum based generation to coal and nuclear.
Overall coal prices have trended down since 1950s.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ftproot/other/perspectives05.pdf
http://www.tsl.uu.se/uhdsg/Publications/USA_Coal.pdf
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6545/647817
--
The 6s for 1900 was from a site I googled and lost it.
Originally I
had this for price of UK coal but I couldn't find a convert for UK coinage to 2006 US dollars below 1900.
So I offer this paper of leveled to 1860s prices of 5.6s(in 1860 prices) for pithead average(Table 4). If you have a converter of 1860 s to 2006 USD, I think this will show current prices of deep UK mined coal is not vastly greater that it was in the distant past.
http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Coal2006.pdf
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Does anyone have historical data for UK coal prices?? Or, does anyone happen to have the time and knowledge to convert the prices in the paper just above?
> Th UK coal production peak around 1920 makes me very curious.
>As best I can tell, it was not caused by a lack of resource,
>but rather by a move to oil.
That's a very simplistic interpretation of the data -- domestic coal consumption in fact increased from the 1920s until the 1950s.
Here's the most significant graph from my presentation to Parliament last November:
A third of the coal dug in the mid-1920s, when the peak occurred, was exported. What the coal peak created was a progressive drop, from the 1920s until the 1950s, in exported coal -- it had no direct effect on consumption. We didn't become a net importer of coal until the 1960s, in part due to the fall in production, but also due to the rise in demand as Britain switched from coal-derived town gas to electricity, utilising the new large power stations (those which are about to be retired in the next decade!), in the 1960s/70s.
In contrast oil supply in the UK didn't start to trend upwards until the 1950s, reflecting the growth in car ownership -- and rising very quickly following the early 60s when Marple's new transport plan put emphasis on developing car ownership rather than public transport as the principal means of mobility. The change in policy to favour oil was probably marked by the UK's co-sponsorship, with the US, of the democratically elected and secular government of Iran in 1953 (when they wanted greater control over Anglo-Persia Oil; the company we now know as BP!).
If you look at my presentation to Parliament you'll see that the significant energy crunch in the UK economy didn't take place until the late 60s -- driven by oil yes, but it was the simultaneous need to import coal that made the 1970s change in the dynamics of the energy economy significant.
That's a great chart - is it yours? Nuclear should not be accounted as an import since the cost of fuel (that is imported) accounts for only 2 to 4% of total. Hence, nuclear normally accrues to indigenous primary energy production. And I'd prefer to see total demand - but I'm guessing supply and demand are in balance? What is the source of the pre-1965 oil import data (assuming that post 1965 is based on BP)?
> That's a great chart - is it yours?
Yes; it was part of my presentation to Parliament last November --
http://appgopo.org.uk//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=55
http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/papers/index.shtml#appgopo
It's available to use under the Creative Commons non-commercial attribution share-alike license, so feel free to use accordingly.
One of the points I'm seeking to make is that Britain has always been self-sufficient in energy, until the 1960s, and latterly around 2004. From now on it's all downhill! :-(
Very good presentation. I learnt a lot.
Get a suit and lose the pony tail. ;-)
When you say parliament you mean the All Party Group on Peak Oil? I've been attending these regularly but increasingly wonder if they have any impact whatsoever on the actual MPs and the process of government? Do the deliberations of such groups not just get snowed under by more important stuff?
I echo Euan - great chart.
Interesting if you look at per capita energy use in UK over longer time span to early years of 20thC.
The energy use per capita was already high 100 years ago, and remained roughly at that level (see however 1930s Depression) until the early 1950s, when our modern rise per capita, began.
[Our population has not 'doubled' since the 1950s, as somebody stated above. 1951 UK was 50.5M and 2001 was 58.8M - estimated currently ~61M.]
What the coal peak created was a progressive drop, from the 1920s until the 1950s, in exported coal -- it had no direct effect on consumption.
It had an effect on consumption elsewhere. For instance, Italy was badly hurt by the drop in UK coal exports.
So, why did coal production fall, starting in the 1920's? Was it rising production costs? If so, we should see it in the price of coal.
Do you have any historical statistics for the price of coal before 1949?
duplicate
Just noticed my account has ticked over to 3 years and 1 hour.
Yay me! :)
But am I 3 years smarter? Hmmm, doubtful, though I guess I can follow articles like this one more easily.
Am I 3 years closer to being... "prepared" ...for want of a better word. Nah, definitely not.
Here's hoping I have another 3 years to get my act together.
Cheers, Matt B
PS.
I just need to clarify something...
I was well into a second bottle of red with a couple of tennis-mates the other night, when one asked, "Why are you such a bloody doomer?" (I think I'd mentioned something about oil and stock prices rising together).
So I started scribbling on the back of the score sheet my $100 @ 10% example, doubling every seven years, then equating it to China's thirst for oil. I said, "So it's 10m barrels a day now, at ten percent it'll be 20m in seven years, 40m in 14yrs, 80m in 21yrs. That's what the entire world uses today and we're already drilling in 5000ft of water. Do you think it's doable?"
Now admittedly, we were all a bit sloshed at this point and as Dave cracked the seal on the third bottle, asked, "Yeah, but you're talking about their 'economy' growing, right? A large part of that's stock prices, that kind of stuff".
Of course, my brain was a bit misty, but I think I said something like, "I'm pretty sure shares aren't included in a country's GDP. They measure growth on the profit made from selling goods and services to other countries".
At this point, I felt like I was fudging, and they're interest was waining anyway, so we got back to talking about motorbikes (or something).
I guess my question is... (In theory) If China's economy grows at an average of 10% for the next two decades, and we all continue along our merry way of doing things, (in theory) will they need eight times the amount of oil and other "stuff" they need today.
In the light of day (and with a sober head), such an observation seems quite ridiculous.
Cheers again.
Welcome to the oil importer club, UK.
At least you already have many rational policies for dealing with it. You have a high petrol tax the encourages efficient use of petrol. You have an extensive public transportation system that allows people to move around w/o oil. You have a government that is aware of peak oil and looking into. Your geography is much smaller, so you don't have the really long distances to travel. Your development has been much more dense so you don't have the suburban sprawl of the USA.
So be happy. Despite your issues, I think you are in a much better situation for you change to importer and the eventual effects of a real peak oil caused oil crunch.
I think many in the USA are going to be in for a rude awakening when a long expensive commute makes driving from their low-paying job to their high-mortgage home with high-priced gasoline a money-losing proposition.
How does creating a public transportation system paid for by petrol taxes make one independent of crude oil?
It doesn't.
In reality the more heavily taxed a commodity is (whatever it is) the more financially dependent a government is on it.
PO will hit Europe harder than the USA.
Does anyone on here think that Russia can be trusted as a business partner? I can't imagine what it's like to be an energy executive working in that country, I would have a lot of body guards. Putin still runs that country, and his foreign policy is based upon an obsession & insecurity with the idea that Western countries treat Russia with disrespect & as a juvenile. Well, that's what happens when you intimidate foreigners and dishonor contracts & treaties. That country is still backwards, they have just dressed things up and called themselves a democratic government, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's sad when a government preaches about free markets, yet it's biggest corporations are just shells of the Russian government, i.e. Gazprom. How reliable are the other BRIC countries?
“Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, KG, GCB, PC
I think that the Russians are just about average when it comes to this, but I agree with you about all the other problems.
Interestingly Russia has exported as much oil/gas as it can for the last decade, despite it patently not being in their best interests (overheating economy, inflation, depressed oil price 2009). Maybe the west is lucky that Russia has not got its act together yet.