The Oil Drum

It isn't just Italy that can expect gas (and hence electricity) supply problems soon.

There are 27 states in the European Union, the UK (to name but one other state) also produces around 40% of it's electricity from gas - caused by the UK Government's attempt to meet the Kyoto emmissions targets.

http://www.iop.org/activity/policy/Publications/file_21079.pdf

Gail - the UK is currently preparing to expand the fleet of CCGT's (combined cycle gas turbines) by 12. All we hear in the news is consumers and government wailing about ever higher gas prices. They don't seem to understand that increasing demand against near static supply will inevitably lead to higher prices.

Europe will start to import more coal and I fully expect the UK to re-start mining deep coal - Dave Rutledge watch out!

And in the UK we have had a U turn on nuclear policy - but rather late. Italy has a non- nuclear policy but I believe they import nuclear electricity from France. France will become the nuclear King of Europe, exporting electricity and reactors.

Russia and central Asia are wild cards in all this. It is possible that the Russian scenario is worse than depicted here if their production actually starts to fall. But this could be compensated for by increased production in central Asia - Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

What Europe really needs is a crash program for expanding all kinds of sensible renewable energy combined with a crash program of energy efficiency measures

Greetings to all,
As a speaker at the congress of Aspo Italy 2, I submitted a plan based on renewables and energy efficiency to reduce dependence on gas and oil. Considering all contributions obtainable those strategies we could stabilize gas consumption, reduce strongly the use of oil and hit the Kyoto target by the 2012. If every country in Europe could do this the gas crunch would be delayed in time, giving us more time to develope new solutions based on troposferical eolic or photovoltaic or even on new generation nuclear power. The fast approach of gas crunch is mostly a matter of increasing natgas consumption all over the continent. A strategic agreement with Russia is strongly needed, not only to realize new gas infrastructures, but even to increase energy efficency in gas use. Repowering of old soviet gas fired power stations with combined cycle and better insulation in central district heating stations could stop the increase of internal gas consumption making available stable gas amounts (and incomes) for export, while big european consumers, Germany, Italy, France and so on try to reduce consumption by efficency and renewables. Europe needs more time to develope solutions; Euan showed us that time could be too short to buld new nuclear plants before gas crunch happens. Efficency and renewables are quicker ways that can perform better.

Eugenio

Gail,

There are several alternatives to electricity generation by gas;

Geothermal is baseload generation, Solar and Wind are intermittent and need hydro/CAES/etc storage as well as an effective demand management approach for high levels of penetration.

Geothermal Power

Wind Power (Purple and Red are best sites)