PowerSwitch

Posted: **15 Mar 2007, 20:27**

Did anyone else see this headline letter in Tuesday's Times?

" Fiddling while Rome runs out of combustibles"

"Sir

The absurdity of the Tory proposal to 'ration' air travel is that any such restriction on aviation fuel consumption will soon be overtaken by the event of oil depletion. [....] This report aligns you with the often scorned 'peak oilers' club in heralding the rising costs of upstream oil production. Ominously, ExxonMobil, Shell and BP have opted to buy back their shares rather than increase development and exploration to augment their falling 'hooked' oil reserves. For non-Opec countries, the peak in oil production was passed in 2005.

Without the burden of taxation, jet fuel costs will rise considerably and will be of insufficient quantity to fuel the expansion in air travel envisaged by the Dept of Transport. The first to suffer will be the aircraft builders. As runways revert to parking lots for aircraft with empty tanks, orders for new planes will be cancelled.

Milliband and Cameron need to temper their enthusiasm for carbon reduction with the reality of resource depletion. The emptying of the world's fuel tank will bring the reduction in emissions they seek and climate change will stall. The change in lifestyle they want us to embrace will be forced on us rather than coerced by taxation"

John Busby, Bury St Edmunds

Good to see a letter like that prominently placed in the Times, though I doubt his assertion that climate change will stall any time soon.

cheers

Mustard

Posted: **15 Mar 2007, 21:20**

Presumably that's from the John Busby of The Busby Report.
Interesting bloke.

Posted: **15 Mar 2007, 21:31**

Top bloke, great letter and hits the nail on the head. I'd argue peak oil/gas also represents peak anthropogenic CO2 emissions - or at least only precedes the CO2 peak by a decade at most. For that reason he could be right with the "climate change will stall" comment - only if he means our increasing contribution to the problem will stall, clearly there is considerable warming built into the system yet to be experienced and even after peak CO2 we'll still be emitting lots of CO2. Also whatever feedbacks may already be in place may rear their ugly heads.

Posted: **15 Mar 2007, 22:28**

Thanks Civ101 - That's the kind of time lag / runaway feedback things I was thinking

but couldn't properly describe.

Must enrol for a degree

in environmental studies or somesuch.

Posted: **15 Mar 2007, 22:41**

and it's here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 505396.ece

A search on peak-oil returns 24 articles

Posted: **15 Mar 2007, 22:45**

I've just been to see Mark Lynas this evening, launching his new book Six Degrees. He very scarily described degree by degree the impacts warming will have, and at what point irreversable tipping points such as the drying out and ultimate combustion of the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS, and the release of methane hydrates from permafrost will occur. I think there is a terrifying 'timelag' of emissions in the system - to be honest it almost makes me wish PO would hit hard and now.... before we can do anymore damage. Although I think that the resulting dash for coal might well be the equivalent of planetary suicide

Posted: **15 Mar 2007, 23:21**

cat.wasilewski@gmail.com wrote:I've just been to see Mark Lynas this evening, launching his new book Six Degrees. He very scarily described degree by degree the impacts warming will have, and at what point irreversable tipping points such as the drying out and ultimate combustion of the DODGY TAX AVOIDERS, and the release of methane hydrates from permafrost will occur. I think there is a terrifying 'timelag' of emissions in the system - to be honest it almost makes me wish PO would hit hard and now.... before we can do anymore damage. Although I think that the resulting dash for coal might well be the equivalent of planetary suicide

I like Mark, his first book was excellent - however I dislike his stance on peak oil, he doesn't think it's much of an issue from my past discussions with him. I read his front page, feature article in the Sunday Times last weekend. Serious climate porn! He draws heavily on feedbacks for which the sensitivity and triggers are poorly understood at best and of course not really buying into peak oil accepts the IPCC?s impossibly high carbon scenarios and even mentions statistics like China using 100mbpd in 2030. Things like that discredit the really good work he's done on climate change.

Posted: **16 Mar 2007, 07:51**

cat.wasilewski@gmail.com wrote: Although I think that the resulting dash for coal might well be the equivalent of planetary suicide

Read the article and editorial about coal in this week's New Scientist.

It relates to this study from MIT:
The Future of Coal

Posted: **16 Mar 2007, 08:01**

Actually, The Future of Coal, really seems a rather important report. Here's a flavour (there's another 92 pages):

BOX 1 ILLUSTRATING THE CHALLENGE OF SCALE FOR
CARBON CAPTURE
Today fossil sources account for 80% of energy demand:
Coal (25%), natural gas (21%), petroleum (34%), nuclear
(6.5%), hydro (2.2%), and biomass and waste (11%). Only
0.4% of global energy demand is met by geothermal, solar
and wind.1
50% of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal.2
There are the equivalent of more than fi ve hundred, 500
megawatt, coal-fi red power plants in the United States with
an average age of 35 years.2
China is currently constructing the equivalent of two, 500
megawatt, coal-fi red power plants per week and a capacity
comparable to the entire UK power grid each year.3
One 500 megawatt coal-fi red power plant produces approximately
3 million tons/year of carbon dioxide (CO2).3
The United States produces about 1.5 billion tons per year of
CO2 from coal-burning power plants.
If all of this CO2 is transported for sequestration, the quantity
is equivalent to three times the weight and, under typical
operating conditions, one-third of the annual volume of
natural gas transported by the U.S. gas pipeline system.
If 60% of the CO2 produced from U.S. coal-based power
generation were to be captured and compressed to a liquid
for geologic sequestration, its volume would about equal the
total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.
At present the largest sequestration project is injecting one
million tons/year of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Sleipner
gas fi eld into a saline aquifer under the North Sea.3
Notes
1. IEA Key World Energy Statistics (2006)
2. EIA 2005 annual statistics (www.eia.doe.gov)
3. Derived from the MIT Coal Study

Posted: **16 Mar 2007, 19:19**

I've just spent the last three months studying the legal obstacles for CCS in the EU. I've been lucky to work with some of the greatest CCS minds in the world, and despite their enthusiasm I've become quite cynical about the whole technology from an embodied carbon point of view, and also because it's an elastoplast technology that doesn't solve the real issue and will enable us to continue business as usual until we hit the next environmental brickwall.

Chris, from what I know of Mark - he's trying to turn his local village (a suburb of Oxford a couple of miles from me) zero carbon, he is peak aware - but I guess he has focussed on CC to the detriment of PO. Maybe one can only cope psychologically with knowing one depressing subject in depth?

Has anyone made a good synthesis of the two issues? I've read Leggett's half gone, and Kunstler's long emergency, and whilst they have the breadth they don't really have the depth.

Posted: **16 Mar 2007, 20:06**

cat.wasilewski@gmail.com wrote:I've read Leggett's half gone...

Leggett is disingenuous, he uses different (and mutually exclusive) data sets depending on the point he's trying to make. Half Gone was my favourite peak oil book until I delved a little deeper into the numbers.

Did you real my two stabs at bringing the two subjects together?

Peak Oil and Climate Change
IPCC Summary and Fossil Fuel
(I used too high a carbon content for coal in the 2nd one, so the situation is quite a bit better than the article makes out).

Posted: **16 Mar 2007, 22:02**

cat.wasilewski@gmail.com wrote:I've just spent the last three months studying the legal obstacles for CCS in the EU. I've been lucky to work with some of the greatest CCS minds in the world

Cat, have you got any links/references on CCS technology? It's something I know very little about and seeing as it is the likely direction of UK electricity generation I'd like to be better informed. Has anyone run the numbers to estimate how long coal reserves will last if we increase coal power generation and at the same time decrease it's efficiency through CCS?

Posted: **17 Mar 2007, 11:30**

cat.wasilewski@gmail.com wrote:I've just spent the last three months studying the legal obstacles for CCS in the EU. I've been lucky to work with some of the greatest CCS minds in the world

Got any figures on the energy expenditure for CCS?

The only figures I've seen came out of the Commons inquiry, and said that a quarter of the output of a coal-fired plant would be required for CCS. There's two ways to look at that:

# If you factor in storage to efficiency, an IGCC plant would have a worse efficiency than the current open bed combustion plants; or

# In effect, you're throwing away a quarter of your energy resources to store the carbon.

Wouldn't it be easier just to stop using the energy in the first place? (albeit that no politician would ever do that because the reduction in energy supply would, in GDP terms, produce a "recession").

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Letter to the Times

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