PowerSwitch

Will transport in the future be powered by electricity/fuel cells and electric motors, or will the internal combustion engine prevail, being fuelled by biofuels such as ethanol, methanol and biodiesel?

Does the UK have the capacity to grow enough trees/crops to produce meaningful amounts of liquid fuels? Do internal combustion engines take too much energy to produce, and are they too complicated in design, or will recycling of existing vehicles provide the means?

Will the UK be able to produce enough electricity from renewable resources, nuclear, clean coal etc to run an electrified transport network? Will the future be transported with electric cars for individuals, and a network of electric trains and buses for public transport?

Or will we resort to horses, carts, bicycles, boats and canals?

Or will it be a mixture of these?

What do we think?

What about proportions then? Material for another poll maybe? I would dare to guess 8/2/90 for the proposed alternatives.

Yes, the 'mix of the above' seems to be the ultimate cop-out option!

I would probably go for 10%-10%-80% myself. Call me an optimist!

5-35-60

A mix, definitely.

Exactly what I wouldnt like to even guess. "Depends, dunnit" he said usefully.

At a certain point the privately owned gasoline and diesel driven car population will max out and then start to decline purely in response to rising prices. Before WW2 cars were too expensive to buy and run even for most of the middle class in the UK. We are heading back to the future on that one.This will benefit public and two wheeled transport with emptier urban roads.

An increase in motorbike, scooter, and bicyle ownership. The return of the side car!

Global large scale biofuels substitution for petrol and diesel is a nonsense for the reasons interminably discussed. It will be adopted locally (as in Brazil) and in special circmstances.

One special circumstance is agriculture. Its a trend already visible, and eventually will become common that farmers will produce their own fuel on the farm - biodiesel from a crop planted for that purpose(e.g Sunflowers, as currently being grown by French farmers to produce their own fuel in the Midi) and natural gas from anaerobic digestion of farm waste. The current trend towards organic farming will intensify.

Canals I'm not sure about. Does enough of a network still exist in the UK to make this very slow means of transport viable? I suspect the cost of resurrecting the canal system would be prohibitive and that the railways make canals as irrelevant as they did in the early 19th century.

Railways will be more heavily used in years to come. Depending on how things go it might even become economic to ressurect some of the more recently closed lines as light rail - like the Docklands light railway in London. Electrification of the entire system ought to proceed as swifly as is possible.

Horses? Nice thought, but not too relevant to the largely urbanised population of the UK , and I expect most farmers will prefer the tractors they've been used to, even if in means turning over a portion of the farm to grow some high oil content crop to run them.

'Set aside land ' at some point will be a thing of the past - just about every square inch of nonurban land that isnt at a 45 degree angle will be in production. More like Japan is today. When I was kid we had a Japanese businessman who was in the same line as my dad stay with us. We went on an outing at the weekend by train. The appearance of the English countryside shocked him - so much land apparently just sitting there doing nothing, and our house which had a gasp! garden with a lawn. Such extravagant wealth. Such luxury. Not something even a fairly well off middle class office worker from Tokyo could afford. His house in a tokyo suburb, was he said, a third of the size of ours and had no garden.

I see Ive wandered. Horses. Maybe some resurgence. Dont know. Takes a lot of fodder to keep a horse going, which requires a fair ammount of land to grow. Horses also need more looking after than a tractor. When the weather is bad and you cant work the land, a tractor can just be safely ignored and left to its own devices in a shed. A horse still has to be mucked out, fed, groomed exercised, even if it cant work.

All the above is speculative, it may or may not happen. Scientific progress and techological development ( not that Im relying on it!) is unpredictable at the best oftimes. Under stress it tends to go into overdrive - and much depends on what the global peak in hydrocarbons and subsequent decline curve is going to look like.

If it's anything like the decline in output from the North Sea then we're stuffed. I've no idea what will happen, but it wont be in any way pleasant. If with a high effort the global decline can be kept to a percent or two a year after a decade long 'bumpy plateau' then adaption is possible (I hope)

Neccessity is the mother of invention, and the development and adoption of energy efficiency measures both technical and systemic will go into high gear. Energy saving will be a very cost effective means of maintaining profitability. Consultants with the energy engineering ability to look at and squeeze every last uneccessary joule out of processes ( anything from the production of the latest widget to how a domestic rubbish collection company can do their business while using less fuel ) will be in high demand. Probably a good career move!

... now where did I put that clip on nuclear fusion pack for the iPod?..always losing it...

Good questions Andy. And, as usual, good post from sceptik.

I have been in Morocco on business a couple of times in the last 18 months. I was in Rabat for a few days each time and had to travel across town to the factory and premises where I was doing some IT upgrade work.

It was a very interesting experience being in Africa (that is an under-statement). Apart from the fact that it is clear life is much cheaper in locations like this, it was also very clear how much closer to the raw side of life things are there. Basically, if you didn't sell, trade or work to provide some essential service, you didn't eat.

It was amazing to see the number of people walking - many people walked to work it appeared. Many others riding little 50cc scooters/motor cycles which probably do 200 mpg - I came away the second visit with a real desire to get one of these! Many of these motor cycles had 2 or 3 people on them - sometimes whole families of 4 people - young ones in back wraps or kids facing backwards and/or on the handlebars.

Others drove old rickety cars - 15/20/25 years old or older. Often 6 or 7 or 8 in a car. Lots of small engineering workshops by the roadside -garages with flat roofs, say 18ft x 18 ft, with mechanics as we used to have them fixing up broken down engines, suspensions, body parts. Everything being recycled and reused to get cars operating. Even our food leftovers were made use of. Anything left over from our meals - a roll or sandwich or some lamb, was given to the security guards in the gate-hut to finish off. Strangely I don't recall seeing many buses, but there was a good rail line in and out of the city serving the surberbs and beyond with long trains and what seemed a regular service.

There were no horses, but lots of donkeys / mules that seemed to be very poorly-treated pulling carts loaded very high with all sorts of vegetables, fruit and generally anything that was grown and was edible. Loads of people were involved in this kind of trade and it was common to see men pulling the carts where they obviously couldn't afford / didn't have a mule to pull the cart. This was quite amazing to me and must have been extremely strenuous. Also everything kicked off very early in the mornings - first light or before. Long working days were required it seemed to be able to earn one's keep!

All in all I would say it was a real awakening to a completely different (but much more real) way of life for me - the second time I went I was PO aware and boy did I draw some conclusions! I won't spell them out.....

I really loved the experience. In a way it made me think this is how life should be - nothing wasted, everything reused, helping others even asking them to eat with you or giving them any leftovers (not in a begging way, but in a spirit of waste not want not). It certainly made me think of life and the arrangements we have in the West. Our affluence can be very ugly when you think about it from time to time.

One special circumstance is agriculture. Its a trend already visible, and eventually will become common that farmers will produce their own fuel on the farm - biodiesel from a crop planted for that purpose(e.g Sunflowers, as currently being grown by French farmers to produce their own fuel in the Midi) and natural gas from anaerobic digestion of farm waste. The current trend towards organic farming will intensify.

Humm, do we have any numbers for this, I suspect that the situation on a farm would be the same for the country as a whole (not enough land for both fuel and food). I would hazard a guess that a farmer would need to 'give over' approximately 150% of his land to become self sufficient in biofuel. (no numbers just a hunch).

Maybe Paul S has a better feel for this, on a typical 60 Acre farm how much fuel is consumed, and how much fuel could be produced from say 25% of the land?

I get the feeling that fossil fuel supports this, and subsidies encourage it, I would love to be shown to be wrong!

One special circumstance is agriculture. Its a trend already visible, and eventually will become common that farmers will produce their own fuel on the farm - biodiesel from a crop planted for that purpose(e.g Sunflowers, as currently being grown by French farmers to produce their own fuel in the Midi) and natural gas from anaerobic digestion of farm waste. The current trend towards organic farming will intensify.

Canals I'm not sure about. Does enough of a network still exist in the UK to make this very slow means of transport viable? I suspect the cost of resurrecting the canal system would be prohibitive and that the railways make canals as irrelevant as they did in the early 19th century.

Railways will be more heavily used in years to come. Depending on how things go it might even become economic to ressurect some of the more recently closed lines as light rail - like the Docklands light railway in London. Electrification of the entire system ought to proceed as swifly as is possible.

I think in the short- and medium-term, we will see a lot of privately-owned petrol-fuelled cars disappear, but the situation may well be different for diesel vehicles. A lot of diesel vehicles are used for food transport, farming etc, and I think that biodiesel production in the UK will probably be reserved for this kind of transport. In addition, production of diesel fuel from coal will probably give significant quantities of fuel, whilst coal reserves hold out, so I think anyone with a diesel car may find they can still get fuel in the short-term, albeit at a hugely inflated price.

Ethanol and methanol could possibly be a replacement for petrol, but I really think that wood from forests will be used primarily for home heating, and secondarily for construction. Waste ethanol from the production of alcoholic drinks is a possibility, but will be very small-scale. So I think we can pretty much forget petrol-fuelled transport.

Again, in the short- to medium-term, assuming the expanded use of coal for electricity generation, and possibly nuclear (as well as renewables of course), a 100% electrified national rail system seems like the obvious solution - with the exception of course of the coal-fired steam trains which still operate on certain lines. The Flying Scotsman may have its day once more! We may see some electric cars, too - for around town deliveries, like milk floats etc.

Canals - I really think there is huge potential for canals. Certainly here in the North, there is a huge network of canals which are currently being cleaned up, dredged and renovated - mostly for tourism purposes. And yes, transport by canal is slow, but requires very little energy. It's here that horses may well be used again, if not in agriculture. I can really see it happening, especially here in the North. We could import huge quantities of stuff by sailing ship via the Manchester Ship Canal, and distribute it by the canal network. Quite what we will import is another matter, though! We could definitely export water, though!

Long-term, it's going to be walking, bicycles and horses though, in the main, I think!

Humm, do we have any numbers for this, I suspect that the situation on a farm would be the same for the country as a whole (not enough land for both fuel and food). I would hazard a guess that a farmer would need to 'give over' approximately 150% of his land to become self sufficient in biofuel. (no numbers just a hunch).

You never know - if the UK goes the same way as Cuba, growing large amounts of food in the cities, the role of farmers might change to growing fuel and energy crops in the main, as well as smaller quantities of food.

Ballard wrote: I would hazard a guess that a farmer would need to 'give over' approximately 150% of his land to become self sufficient in biofuel. (no numbers just a hunch).

Ha! No, I dont have any figures but it's a lot less than that!. Otherwise the French guys featured in the BBC TV article I saw wouldnt be doing it!

Found this... havent verified any of the figures give.

"In round figures, one hectare of land (UK) should produce an average 3 tonnes of rapeseed at 40% oil content. Pressed at a 90% extraction rate, this gives 1100kg of oil, which is treated with 150 kg of alcohol to give in excess of one tonne (1100 litres, 242 UK gallons ) of biodiesel and 120 kg of the valuable by-product glycerol. It requires around 15% energy input to produce the biodiesel - almost exactly the same as for petrodiesel extraction and refining."
http://www.biofuels.fsnet.co.uk/sustain.htm

So if the average UK Farm is 57 hectares, the question is how much diesel does the average farmer use per annum and how many hectares does he have in set aside.

In reality, all of those figures are going to vary enormously across the country according to farm type. The average upland sheep farmer doesnt even get a look in, having no suitable land to grow an oil crop.

OK

242 gallons per hectare

57 hectares

7 mpg per tractor (an optimistic guess from looking on the web)

Gives? 96,500 tractor miles per farm max production.

So 10% of land gives 10000 tractor miles approx ?

Great? Sounds plausible.