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UK: From Farm to Factory: The Energy Challenge We All Face
Mark Griffiths, Dreweatt Neate
Few can have failed to notice the price increases in vehicle fuel, electricity, and gas over the last year or two. For farmers this has also been felt in heavy nitrogen fertiliser bills, where gas is used as the basic resource. This is unlikely to be a temporary phenomenon and serious energy challenges lie immediately ahead.
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Few can have failed to notice the price increases in vehicle fuel, electricity, and gas over the last year or two. For farmers this has also been felt in heavy nitrogen fertiliser bills, where gas is used as the basic resource. This is unlikely to be a temporary phenomenon and serious energy challenges lie immediately ahead.
North Sea oil and gas production is already in steep decline. Department of Trade and Industry forecasts indicate that most of the production will be gone by 2020 or earlier. The UK became a net importer of gas in 2004, and of oil in 2005, both ahead of forecast.
Globally, oil discoveries have been in decline since the 1960s, with over 60% of oil-producing countries now at or past the peak of their production. Yet demand continues to rise at around 2% per annum as countries like China and India continue to industrialise.
(2 Jun 2006)
Dreweatt Neate is a real estate and finance company. This article appears to be a straight ahead assessment of the Peak Oil situation, which looks towards the town of Woking, England's leader in solar PV uptake and energy conservation, as a an a place the real-estate industry needs to watch. -AF
A Powerpoint presentation on Peak Oil (3.5 MB PowerPoint)
Madpaddy, Global Vision (Ireland)
From a thread on peakoil-dot-com:
I was asked to give a talk on energy to a group of army engineers next week. This is the talk I am going to give
www.globalvision.ie/oil.ppt
I would appreciate any comments people have on this.
Warning: the file is 3.5 megabytes, so may take time to load up.
Thanks,
Madpaddy
(3 June 2006)
Professional-looking presentation. Go to the peakoil-dot-com thread if you want to make suggestions.
The day after peak oil
Will we die in our cars or retool our communities?
JOHN F. SUGG, Creative Loafing
You haven't heard a lot in the mainstream press about something called "peak oil." The Atlanta Daily Newspaper of Declining Circulation -- whose marketing and news orthodoxy is that sprawl is splendid -- has mentioned the term only four times. Ever. Those items include one letter and, oh, one column from the pro-sprawl, pro-more-roads Georgia Public Policy Foundation. That column labels peak oil as a "belief" that's foisted on the public by "snake oil" salesmen.
"That's really stupid," says Richard Heinberg, author of two books on peak oil, and a guy who practices what he preaches. He's converted his California suburban home into a mini-farm where he raises food on once-manicured lawns. Through solar panels, he has cut his energy bill by 80 percent.
"The public policies that encourage sprawl are insane," Heinberg says. "Peak oil isn't a hypothesis. It's an observation. We're writing history, not predictions. And policies that don't recognize that are creating a tragedy that our children and grandchildren will pay for."
(31 May 2006)
Are we building highways to oblivion?
Joe Baker, The Rock River Times
Most Americans remain in denial or only somewhat aware of the reality of peak oil, climate change and the fiction of unlimited growth. Government is doing little to dispel those notions.
While the fact of finite resources is immutable, the politicians plan to build more and bigger roads, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to expanding the interstate highway network.
These massive road plans assume unlimited cheap oil, a condition that is already past. That is a trillion-dollar error that can co-opt the future of our post-carbon society.
The public is focused on and concerned about $3-a-gallon gasoline, but that fixation has not resulted in any significant change in public policy. There is no political pressure to tax windfall profits, create inter-city rail networks, install solar panels on homes or to take other steps to alleviate the constriction of supplies of fossil fuels.
Instead, we are promoting more suburban sprawl, more roads and more overdevelopment all dependent on cheap gasoline. An effective response to dwindling supplies of oil will take cooperative efforts from the local level all the way to the global level.
(31 May 2006)
Revisiting the Crisis Timeline
Steven Lagavulin, Deconsumption
It has been just over two years now since I penciled-out an outline as to how I thought the future might unfold for Americans, and which I dubbed the "Timeline for Unfolding Crises". I wrote it not to test my skills at prediction but simply because I didn't see how it was possible to properly prepare for a highly volitile future without attempting to be as clear as possible about what it is I thought I needed to prepare for. And since the Timeline is a working model, and since anniversaries are as good a time as any to assess where we've been and where we're going, I thought I'd sit down and read it over again and see what comes up.
(3 Jun 2006)
I hadn't seen Steven's original timeline before, but it is well worth a look. -AF
Can non-conventional sources make up the shortfall? Clearly not.
Dr. Rob Millar, University of British Columbia, UBC Reports via PowerSwitch
Dr. Rob Millar, Associate Professor at The Department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia writes:
Based on Hubbert’s model, current total oil supply of about 85 million barrels per day is projected to remain more-or-less flat out to about 2012, and then decline at a rate of about 2% per year thereafter. Meanwhile, globally demand for oil is growing annually at a rate of about 2%. And there’s the rub. While conventional oil supply growth appears flat and may soon begin to decline, demand for liquid fuels continues to grow. This means that by 2015, we could be facing a global shortfall of some 22 million barrels per day, representing the gap between global demand and conventional oil supply. To put this in perspective, a deficit of 22 million barrels per day would be greater than the current US consumption of oil. The question is: can production from non-conventional sources such as the Alberta tar sands or synthetic fuels using coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology be ramped up to anything even approaching a supply deficit of 22 million barrels per day by 2015?
The answer appears to be a clear no.
Not by a long shot.
(1 Jun 2006)
Dr. Rob Millar is Associate Professor with the Department of Civil Engineering at UBC.
