What's the 'Energy Beyond Oil' theme about?

The original purpose of the Energy Beyond Oil Project was to identify how we use energy in the UK, and how this affects our use of renewable energy. In fact, when looking at the energy issue in the UK, and incorporating the trends that will increasingly constrain our use of energy (peak oil, peak gas and climate change), we found that the energy issue was far more complex. Rather than focus on technologies we found that we had to look at the basic physical principles of how we use energy today.

At the global scale we use a vast amount of energy – to give an idea of the scale if we harvested all the biomass that grows each year (all the plants and tress around the world, including all our food) to produce electricity, humanity is already using about a thirds of that. Each year, of the commercially traded energy (about 90% of human energy use), 88% (36% oil, 24% natural gas and 28% coal) is based upon fossil fuels – which of course is why we have climate change. Within the UK the the way we use energy has changed significantly. Today we are more dependent upon natural gas than oil, so in this sense peak oil is not the problem it is peak gas.

The greatest problem we have in the UK is that the popular debate about energy bears no relation to the actual use of energy. In the media, and in the pronouncements of politicians, we might believes that it is our homes that are the problem. Whilst our homes are significant, the fact is that transport, and the industrial and commercial use of energy, are as significant if not more so – and the trend is the same when we look at carbon emissions. This means that we spend most of our efforts worrying about only a small part of the problem and so by default our solutions will not provide a realistic solution. The same is true about energy sources; we spend much of our time looking at electricity, but in reality electricity constitutes just less than a fifth of UK energy consumption.

Our concern is this: very soon, perhaps today (but it will take two or three more years of data to prove it), global oil production will reach a peak and go into irrevocable decline; perhaps as little as a decade later, global gas production will reach a peak and enter an even faster decline; together these two trends constitute "peak energy" – the point at which humanity's total energy supply reaches a peak and then goes into decline. Arguably we will have to undergo a fundamental change in the way we work, live and produce our food and other needs to meet this imminent change in the thermodynamic basis of how society operates. Given that we're already (within the UK) using more energy than we could produce from renewable energy we will have to have less because there is no other way to produce that energy – there are no more significant sources of energy on the globe (in fact, over half of the UK's "renewable" energy is produced using waste materials, and arguable it takes more energy to produce this waste than it produces).

As individuals, we need to change our lifestyles as quickly as possible: our priority should be to get our of debt – debt not only bleeds money from our lives which could be used to change, but it also means we have to keep working in unsustainable jobs, and the lifestyle that this requires, to service the debt; we need to significantly reduce our use of energy in the home, and the way to do this isn't to install lots of gadgets but instead to turn down the level of our space and water heating and wear thicker clothing in the home; finally we have to set ourselves up to travel a lot less within the next decade or so because transport will become increasingly expensive and problematic.

Many see peak oil (or as we prefer to put it, because it more adequately sums up the problem, "peak energy") as a negative thing. That's only true if you are wholly wedded to the current system of how society produces wealth and spends it. To sum up what fifty years of consumerism have done for us, it's de-skilled us relative to our grandparents. In practice it takes a lot of skills to live with less energy, and it's those essential skills, which in cultural terms have defined what we are as human beings for many centuries, that we have to regain to deal with this problem. The other important fact is that consumerism has not made us any happier; since the 1950s, when the global movement of the consumer society began to develop, western society has not become more content or secure due to the acquisition of greater material wealth.

Oil, gas and other fossil fuels are on their way out, and whether we like it or not there's nothing that science and technology can do to replace the energy they provide. Humanity has been through similar revolutionary changes before – after the end of Feudalism, the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Technological Revolution. Consequently we can look upon peak energy as just another point of change in the evolution of the human species.