In recent years, natural gas consumption in the United Kingdom has grown rapidly. At the same time, there has been an abrupt change in UK natural gas supplies, brought about by depletion and decline. In the first part of this two part series, I look at historical developments in EU and UK natural gas consumption, production and imports and the challenges posed by declining production.

In the second part of the series, I use a simulation approach to test the likely adequacy of natural gas supplies during the upcoming heating season. In these simulations, I use data from the UK Department of Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform (BERR), UK National Grid, as well as information about recent UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) and Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS) develpments. Based on what I refer to as the reference scenario, it seems likely that the UK will increasingly have to rely on Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) imports to secure adequate supplies.

Once, black caviar from the Caspian Sea was ubiquitous in Russia in its typical blue cans. Now, it has disappeared. "Peak Caviar" has taken place around 1980 in Russia

This is a post by Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of The Post Carbon Institute and author of Peak Everything, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, and The Oil Depletion Protocol. A special thanks to Global Public Media for facilitating publication of Heinberg's work; GPM is a wonderful resource and plays an important role in peak oil activism. This article is a draft chapter from a forthcoming book, currently titled Coal’s Future/Earth’s Fate.

With oil and natural gas prices rising and coal prices still relatively low, the return of the US to a greater reliance on coal might seem inevitable. However, several recent reports suggest that coal reserves, which have shrunk dramatically during the past century, may still be overstated. Coal prices are likely to rise precipitously during the next two decades due to transport bottlenecks and higher transport costs, falling production trends in many current producing regions, and the lack of suitable new coalfields. This information should give pause to any agency planning new coal power plants today.

Peak oil has made us aware that many of the resources on which civilization depends are limited.

M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist for Shell Oil, found that oil production over time followed a curve that was roughly bell-shaped. He correctly predicted that oil production in the lower 48 states would peak in 1970. Other analysts following Hubbert's methods are predicting a peak in oil production early this century.

The depletion analysis pioneered by Hubbert can be applied to other non-renewable resources. Analysts have looked at peak production for resouces such as natural gas, coal and uranium.

In this paper, Patrick Déry applies Hubbert's methods to a very special non-renewable resource - phosphorus - a nutrient essential for agriculture.