 | Parliament Debates Gas Situation | The Oil Drum: Europe | Government doesn't accept imminent peak oil (Part 1) |  |
18 comments on A little more on gas, European and Asian
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Regionally rates of oil extraction have been falling for decades, of note the US in 1971 and more recently UK, Norway, Venezuela, Indonesia... these regional falls in oil extraction rates haven't caused problems (although the '73 and '79 oil crisis wouldn't have affected the US nearly as much if they had been able to increase domestic extraction) since oil was still abundant in other places in the world and very easy/cheap to transport (it only cost ~$2? to ship a barrel of oil from the Middle East to the US).
With gas however the regional extraction rate falls are far more important since gas is extremely hard to transport compared with oil, hence the common practice of flaring gas at oil wells since it just isn't (increasingly wasn't) economic to transport it to market. Europe is facing a gas crisis due to the regional North Sea extraction rate falls and the challenges of transportation even though Russia, Iran, Qatar have plenty.
I think about it like this. If we in the UK were short of oil we could import oil from the other side of the world - moving oil is cheap and easy. We could also afford to outbid many poorer countries. So assuming (perhaps unreasonably!) the whole global economy stays reasonably intact the UK will be okay for oil, demand destruction will come from elsewhere. Also, virtually all oil is used in transport in the UK, most in personal cars. It wouldn't be hard to cut our oil use in half and still maintain a resemblance of business as usual.
Gas on the other hand, we can't import it from the other side of the world since it is very expensive and hard to move, we operate in a much smaller regional gas market of Europe and Russia. Unlike with the global oil market we can't afford to outbid all the other countries in Europe. Gas is mainly used for heating and cooking domestically and generating electricity industrially. It would be very hard to cut out gas use by half, much harder than cutting our oil use.
So - it's easier for the UK so source more than it's fair share of oil than it is for gas and we're more reliant on gas than oil. That's why I think gas is the UK's problem not oil.
This ignores the larger global economic problems that global peak oil causes compared to regional peak gas - but these will be the same for many countries so aren't a UK specific issue.
- 70% of these reserves are in 3 countries - Russia, Qatar and Iran. This is potentialy devastating for the security of supplies and for our ability to bring them online quickly enough. A single blast in Moscow and the whole West Europe could be frozen.
- The cliff NG production falls after it reaches its peak production is making it much more harder for the local economies to accomodate. I hardly imagine what would happen if we went to NG on large scale lured by the Russian reserve figures and their fields start to decline.
- The increasing usage of NG as substitute for oil, where NG is abundant locally
- Our only significant source of conservation on world scale is from NG fired plants, and we don't really have anything to replace them with, except coal.
Overall the prognosys is for a calm weather on average. with occasional storms, hurricanes and tornados here and there.The whole of the European gas pipeline network must be evry vulnerable to determined efforts to damage it.
The physical security of pipes, storage depots (remember Buncefield) seems to rate very low on future plans... although they talk of little else with nuclear power.
JESS is just a bunch of civil servants coevering their backsides.