Sep 20 2009
Solve the energy crisis, don’t fight over the oil
The west has intervened militarily too much in the Middle East. Governments always claim a high minded and good reason, but you cannot help thinking the presence of so much oil there lies behind some of the preoccupation. I am sure there have been nasty Middle Eastern regimes which we would prefer were replaced by democracies. So there are in places like Zimbabwe and North Korea, but it has not led us to military intervention.
It is true that we are not directly fighting over oil in Afghanistan. It is also true that there was a regime change war aim in Iraq, which just happened to have big oil reserves. The Allied war machine did want to secure the oilfields and get them back into full production, as part of the task set. The US preoccupation with the Middle East owes a lot to the dominant role the regional has in world oil produciton, and a lot of the politics is based around moderating and regulating the flow.
There is no doubt about it. The oil wealth gives Middle Eastern countries direct power, because they can sell their oil for larger sums which allow them to buy substantial weaponry. It buys them indirect power, as sensible western countries wish to avoid a break down in relations so the oil will keep flowing in their direction when needed.
None of this is very healthy, either for the exporting countries or for the importing countries. Visionary Gulf states are rightly trying to create flourishing diversified economies on the back of the oil wealth, aware that it will not last for ever. So why aren’t visionary western economies seeking to reduce their dependence on imported oil?
In place of strife, in stead of endless wars in oil rich countries and their neighbours, why don’t we redirect our efforts to replacing imported oil by other means of generating power? The UK has failed to plan and replace generations of nuclear and coal fired power stations. We should have been doing it earlier and faster, and considering adding more electricity to our energy mix at the same time. More space residential and commercial heating and factories could be powered by nuclear, clean coal and renewable electricity.
For those uses that will still require hydrocarbons, there is domestic oil, and the later opportunity to covert coal to a fluid, as they did during the second world war.
20 Responses to “Solve the energy crisis, don’t fight over the oil”
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
Dear John. A very well reasoned argument – as usual. I especially agree with the point that developing our own power resources would be ultimately more beneficial than neo-colonialism. Is it not the fact that we would be less dependent on imported oil if Brown had not capriciously imposed a windfall tax on oil companies operating in the North Sea, causing them to cease development until a more responsible government took office?
On the power mix, why the emphasis on wind generation when wind farms are of doubtful “green” value, are anti-social, and stop working in extremes of heat and cold because such conditions occur in high pressure systems – when there is no wind? Nuclear power is, despite safety concerns, essential, and if it were not for the myth of Man-Made global warming, modern coal-fired power plants would have the advantages of using a natural resource found in the UK plus providing real jobs to extract the coal.
We live in a part of the world with some of the strongest tidal movements known. The unnavigable shoals of the East and South coasts and the Bristol Channel provide a source of almost limitless renewable energy, but there is little attention being given to wave generation, even though there have been a series of inventions to make tidal generation a realistic option. surely tidal generation should be a significant part of the mix?
A point, that seems to escape most commentators, is the enormous amount of power actually used to move electricity from the point of generation to the place of use. Buying electricity from France is a very expensive business due to power losses en route. Wider appreciation of the costs involved could change public perception as to the need for national power generation. Finally it has been shown that fibre-optic cable can be used for electricity distribution at greatly reduced power transfer losses. If this technology was developed and used for the national grid, while the capital costs would be enormous, running costs would be minuscule by comparison.
Stuart Fairney Reply:
September 20th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Au contraire, quite a bit of work was done on the Severn barrage project, guess who opposed it on environmental grounds?
Do I even need to say it? Yup, the greens as it would damage fish or something (I confess I did not study the argument in depth).
Number 6 Reply:
September 20th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Ah, the greens. Sadly they have way too much influence with all the main parties. Sadly, Dave seems as much in their thrall as the rest.
Stuart Fairney Reply:
September 20th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Yep, for a group that have been shown to be dead wrong on a number of claims over the years (Brent Spar, next ice age a la 1970’s, we’re all going to burn a la 1990’s, the oil is running out, the sea levels are going to rise 30 feet etc etc) it is amazing anyone takes these anti-humanity buffoons seriously, let alone gives their ideas unchallenged respect.
The Half-Blood Welshman Reply:
September 20th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Actually I think Mr. Fairney means that it would damage (i.e. destroy) the rare bird habitats at Slimbridge – which was quite correct. There was also disquiet that no account had been taken of the amount of debris the Severn carries in suspension and no scheme for getting rid of it when it got trapped behind the barrier, and the damage that might be done to seaborne trade in Bristol because of congestion in the locks (which did not seem to be adequate in size or number).
As it happens, I am all in favour of harnessing the power of the Severn to generate electricity. I have two beefs with the current plan: 1) it is the most disruptive, expensive and stupid way to do it, particularly as the “tidal lagoons” option is also on the table and b) why is it only the Severn we’re talking about, not the Clyde, Dee, Humber etc?
We could do with some real vision here – especially given that a series of lagoons/barrages around the coast could provide us with an inexhaustible supply of power unless someone blows up the moon.
Stuart Fairney Reply:
September 20th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Yes, that was it…
I should probably clarify, I don’t care if rare birds get somewhat more rare, much more rare, unique or visible only in textbooks. However, I really, seriously care if the electricty goes off and I don’t want to spend years arguing over birds so to hell with ‘em. (I appreciate these are probably protected under some piddling euro directive or other).
The seaborne trade argument is surely one that can be clarified by simple mathematics isn’t it? I confess I may revisit the issue when there is the remote prospect of it being funded, which I don’t think will be soon, but I would certainly suggest you have read a lot more than me on this one.
The last time I looked, coal-to-oil was a horribly messy, polluting, environmentally unfriendly process. The most recent example I can think of would be the SASOL plant in South Africa developed during the Apartheid era of oil sanctions. Certainly at today’s oil prices this would be economic, but I doubt that we would be willing any more to pay the environmental price. Remember the old town gas plants? Well they were disgusting smelly places, but they were positively clean compared with a coal-to-oil plant. Furthermore, where is the coal going to come from? I assume that you are thinking of reopening the deep mines that became uneconomic during the 1980’s? But do we really want to have to depend for our energy on another generation of miners who could hold us to ransom like Arthur Scargill and his minions tried to do? On top of which, would we really want to consign a generation of young men to work in one of the most unpleasant and dangerous jobs in the world? Yes, we could import coal from friendly nations like Australia and South Africa, but personally I don’t think coal-to-oil is the way forward.
As for “clean coal”, well I’m no expert but Christopher Booker seems to think it’s still an unproven dream. BTW, I take it you saw his article in The Telegraph today stating that the government is planning on replacing the nuclear power stations and old coal-fired plants that must soon be shut down with 25 GW of gas-fired power plants? Interesting.
More North Sea oil and gas could be recovered if the government reduced its tax take and provided the right financial incentives. The decline in production is well-established and may be slowed down, but it can never be reversed now.
Education? Why not aim at a nice safe desk job when you have drifted into uni? Work? That’s for losers.
Religion? Disproved now. Read Richard Dawkins. What we need is to save the planet from Global Warming. This is our Faith.
Nuclear power? No thanks/Nie Danke. That’s for unacceptable places like Iran and North Korea.
Coal? Don’t be disgusting.
Gas? We already have a steady supply from our very good friends in Russia.
Wind farms? Excellent. They will turn this country into Saudi in the next few years.
Tidal power? Well, actually, we haven’t thought of that because the latest wheeze is osmosis……
That is what we are asked to believe.
It is the faith of the government too.
It is taught in most schools as the Truth.
And it is we, the voters, who three times deliberately voted the people, who believe this tosh, into power by a huge majority.
I have to agree, but you need to take an even longer view and think about other technolgy. No matter what we do, coal, gas and oil will eventually run out, or become so expense as to be uneconomic for cars, vans etc. We also need them as feedstocks for the plastic and chemical industries. They are much to important to just burn.
The use of hydrogen as a fuel for personal and commercial transport is already a viable proposition. Despite what our fearless eco-warriors would have you believe it can be rolled out over the next few years – it’s even made it on to Top Gear for goodness sake in a recent road trial in the U.S.!!
So the long term plan should be;
- Ignore the EU and keep the current nukes and coal fired stations open for a few years longer than planned (with adequate safety planning etc) so the lights dont actually go out in the next decade.
- Speak nicely to the French and get their construction companies to start building 40-50 new nukes for us. Keep them standard, no R&D delays, buy in bulk. To start with put one next to each of the current nuclear power stations to avoid the usual NIMBY planning delays. This makes use of existing local skills and takes advantage of the architecture of the National Grid which already has a major node at each generating location. That covers us for the old nukes being turned off.
- Then do the same again adding a third new plant to each location to start to allow the old coal stations to be replaced.
- In parallel find some new locations and start another round of nuke building there. This will take a while but we need more sites. The Grid will also need modifiying to allow these new locations to be connected. This gets us well into phasing out most of the fossil fuelled stations; oil, gas and coal.
This plan gives us lots of cheap, low carbon (if you think that matters) generating capacity independent of control by rogue states. Industry and commerce will need to move to electrical power wherever possible (the rising cost of oil and gas will help do this). Domestic consumers will need to go the same way over time, possbily with grants/tax breaks on getting rid of old cookers, boilers etc.
The only area left is transport. For personal transport on local journies or for short range city use electrical vehicles will be OK. These can be recharged cheaply at night when demand for electrical power is low.
Unless someone comes up with a major improvement in battery technology longer trips are just not practical with electric cars. Electric powered haulage is also a non-starter. This is where the use of hydrogen comes in as it has an energy density similar to petrol/diesel ie way more than a battery.
So we produce hydrogen using our abundant, cheap electric power and use this for commercial and long distance transport. The current petrol distribution and retail network can be rengineered to distribute this new fuel.
And it’s all done with proven technology. What’s not to like?
One minor fly in the ointment, our esteemed government is this week selling off the last remaining bit of the UK’s nuclear consulting and clean up capability (ie UKAEA’s Harwell Labs) for peanuts to Babcocks. So we will have no national civil nuclear capability left at all despite our supposed committment to nuclear power. Smart move there chaps.
John Law Reply:
September 21st, 2009 at 6:52 am
John (RS)
The drift of what you suggest is not to far off.
A couple of points though. The most stupid Brown move (in the energy field) was to sell off the AP 1000 reactor design (BNFL/ Westinghouse) to Toshiba, for peanuts. This design is already the most popular in the USA and China and will probably be the most widely built design in the years to come.
We should put major effort into sensible energy conservation (cheapest option), the current light bulbs being pushed are an environmental joke, but there are electronic technologies coming along which will solve that problem.
Re hydrogen, this would best be produced using fourth generation (high temperature / helium coolant) reactors by catalyst assisted high temperature dissociation of water. We will need some technical development to move the hydrogen around as it does not have the energy density of natural gas, but it could be converted to other more compressible or transportable fuels.
Natural gas should only be used as a feedstock and in the shorter term as transport fuel by conversion to methanol or other liquid.
We should be putting effort into getting much more out of the North Sea, and then not wasting it generating electricity. We should also, slightly longer term, look at developing coal bed methane and possibly in-situ gasification or other chemical / bacterial mining of the gigantic deep vergin coal reserves in the East Pennine and North Sea coal beds and similar huge reserves in the North West and North Wales.
Governments have to stop seeing energy as a tax wheeze ( it will be expensive enough) and develop long term plans for energy security and good environmental practice (not climate change rubbish).
Problem is to get politicians to think beyond the next election (Mr Redwood excluded of course). We have absolutely no chance with the current brain dead, technologically illiterate incumbents.
As with so much else, the government’s approach to all this has been to dither.
Dithering over nuclear power, to the point where it is doubtful whether we have time to build new stations (at least with current planning laws) before the old ones are decommissioned.
Dithering over tidal power, with endless studies and consultation over the Severn Barrage but no commitment to the project.
I guess they just love putting off difficult decisions until after the election, panic-stricken lest they offend someone.
I would add to your reasons for replacing oil use, John, the fact that we have a massive trade deficit and oil is a significant and growing component of that.
Ironically one of our biggest exports to the Middle East is weaponry.
As technology comes on line, digging oil out of the ground in mad theocratic countries will decline in importance, I hope to live long enough to see the Iraqis and the Saudis et al doing whatever they please at home and we really won’t care about them anymore, I reckon about 40 years at most.
As a former Saudi oil minister put it, the petrochemical age will come to an end when the world has a better technology, not when we “run out” of oil. He went on to note that the stone age did not end because of a rock shortage, but because we learned out to extract and fashion metals.
So it will be with oil.
Before the Iraq war Jerry Pournelle pointed out that for the amount the war would cost America could build about 300 nuclear reactors & achieve energy independence (he was assuming economies of scale in producing them). Of course back then occupying Iraq was costed at $300 bn rather than $3 trillion. Meanwhile Britain faces blackouts, possibly as soon as during the Olympics.
A book called ‘Sustainable Energy — without the hot air’ by a Cambridge physicist may be of interest.
It has excellent reviews on amazon
(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sustainable-Energy-Without-Hot-Air/dp/0954452933)
and is available free in ebook form
(http://www.withouthotair.com/).
I havent looked at it closely, my only interest in it is as a tool to debunk the green fearmongering, but it could be useful for policy makers.
Labour never never ever invests in key projects designed to protect us from the vagaries of an uncertain world. Never. Road and rail infrastrucure, power generation, military hardware, etc etc. Their entire emphasis is on short term eyecatching initiatives and incompetent and lazy ministers are more concerned with politics than with getting their heads down and WORKING at the job we pay them to do. The situation with power generation is a scandal of delay, dither, incompetence and indecision and we see daily their footprint regarding our armed forces. It is very sad indeed.
I blogged lightly about this very subject early in September–( Nabucco project–oil pipeline in Afghanistan)
http://dopoliticiansknowanything.blogspot.com/2009/09/is-this-what-our-presence-in.html
Are you arguing for a less costly dependence or to replace oil. If the latter then you must also find alternatives to the majority products from oil – plastics, chemicals etc and not just fuel. If you go wholely nuclear then you will likely be dependent on a different region for the nuclear material. You will also be dependent on changing individual behaviours as there is neither enough funds nor resources to replace all cars with battery powered alternatives
Perhaps part of the answer is to look at a mix of national grid and local/domestic solutions together with modifying the demand. I imagine similar approaches would be needed when attention inevitably turns to the same dependency/shortages issues around food and water.
In the meantime, are there mandatory performance criteria placed on the now privatized, foreign owned utilities requiring them to meet levels of availability and reliability. If so, what penalties would they face for non-compliance, eg Brown-outs and black-outs. What incentives are there to motivate the power companies to invest such large capital outlays in strategic facilities such as Nuclear Power rather than tactical, relatively quicker return solutions such as Gas.
[You may have addressed this in the ECPG paper, I haven't got to that section yet as it's a bit big]
David Price Reply:
September 21st, 2009 at 7:40 am
Just read section 7 of the ECPG paper and looks like it does address most of my questions. It also suggests we may need to avoid dependency on “continental operators” as well, not just the Middle East.
Strange how oil never seems to run out……
Oil, the renewable resource
“A team consisting of Russian scientists and Dr J. F. Kenney, of Gas Resources Corporation, Houston, USA, have actually built a reactor vessel and proven that oil is produced from calcium carbonate and iron oxide, as detailed on the Gas Resources website http://www.gasresources.net/AlkaneGenesis.htm
Further, they wrote a paper which was published in 2002 in the prestigious Proceedings of the United States National Academy of Science (PNAS), where they proved that for the alkanes comprising petroleum, except for methane, to be formed from biological matter would be in contravention of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Also see Generation of methane in the Earth’s mantle: In situ high pressure–temperature measurements of carbonate reduction).
Russian and Ukrainian scientists found that a continuous reaction occurs naturally at a depth of approximately 100 km at a pressure of approximately 50,000 atmospheres (5 GPa) and a temperature of approximately 1500°C, and will continue more or less until the ‘death’ of planet earth in millions of years’ time. The high pressure causes oil to continuously seep up along fissures in the earth’s crust into subterranean caverns, which we call oil fields.
Oil is still being produced in great abundance by this natural process. Oil is thus a sustainable resource — by the same definition that makes geothermal energy a sustainable resource. With this knowledge, Russian and Ukrainian scientists developed geotechnical science to better predict where to drill for oil. This explains why Russia is today one of the world’s major oil and gas producers and exporters.”
Makes you wonder….
[...] The sad thing is that John’d be pretty good at working out what action to take to help British businesses make money by getting the world a new zero carbon energy system. He says sound things on related subjects, such as the need for flood prevention (the photo at top of this blog post is John discussing flooding with his constituents) and on making Government buildings energy efficient. Heck, he has recently posted on energy security. [...]