Section 15. Peak Oil/Peak Gas in the UK | |
Slide A, Peak Oil/Peak Gas in the UKThose who oppose or disparage the concept of peaking/peak oil refer to it as "peak oil theory". In the UK peaking of oil and gas (and for that matter, coal too) is not a theory, it's a reality – and many of our recent and future economic problems will derive from the peaking of UK oil and gas production and the effect this has on the macro-economy of Britain. North Sea oil was discovered in the 1960s and production began in the mid-70s (the light red line above). Until then much of Britain's oil had been imported through companies with interests in the then oil producing states – in Britain's case, with Iran and Iraq (the US had links with Saudi Arabia). Production rose and Britain became an oil exporter, and this had significant effects on the economy. For example, Andrew Marr, in his History of Modern Britain, discusses at length the important of North Sea oil production to the British economy and to the re-working of economic policy under Margaret Thatcher. Now that we are once again importing oil we are faced with many of the problems the country experienced in the 1970s, following the early 70s oil crisis, but with the added problem that because of the global shortage of oil many of those problems will become more difficult to solve. The dip in oil production was due to the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988, when a proportion of the North Sea's production capacity was shut down for safety checks. This extended the period of time before production peaked by a few years, but in 1999, long before it was predicted by the government and the International Energy Agency, the British sector of the North Sea went into decline. A new oil field that opened in 2007 briefly paused the decline for a year (it didn't actually increase production) but there are not enough untapped resources in the North Sea to expand production once again – despite what any politician or government minister might say! Slide B, Peak Oil/Peak Gas in the UKThe peaking of natural gas production, like oil, is not a theory in the UK – it happened in 2003/4. In the 1960s much of the gas used in the UK came from town gas (or coal gas) works where gas and was made from coal. During the 1970s the amount of town gas used fell (the orange line) as we began to import gas, initially in a liquefied form from Algeria. Then during the 1970s gas production commenced in the North Sea and we began to use our own, as well as importing, natural gas. In the 1990s Britain became a gas exporter as capacity increased but then, over the course of late 2003/early 2004, gas production in the British sector of the North Sea reached a peak and went into decline. In terms of the UK economy natural gas is more important than oil. Oil contributes a little less energy to the economy than gas, but much of that oil is used in the transport sector and if pushed there are ways we could save large quantities of fuel in transport. Natural gas contributes just over a third of the fuel for electricity generation, and (including electricity generation as well as direct supply) just over three quarters of the energy consumed in our homes – and this fuel is largely non-substitutable, especially in Winter when it is needed the most. Within 10 years, Britain's natural gas production will no longer be at a viable level to meet our needs (as outlined in Section 16). Slide C, Peak Oil/Peak Gas in the UKWhilst we're on the subject of the 'peaking' of energy resources in the UK, it's a fact that the peak of UK coal production was long ago – during the latter half of the 1920s. The graph above uses the government's long-term coal production data to provide a view of how coal production in the UK has changed over the last one and a half centuries. Deep mined coal production is in red. The stripes before 1913 are because the BERR's data only has an average figure for each decade before 1913 and so the data for these years has been interpolated to produce a realistic projection of the change in production over the whole period. Open cast coal production is shown in the lighter shade of red that begins to show up after 1943. In the last part of the graph the rise of coal imports is shown in blue. The smoothed production line, demonstrating the peak of production, is shown in pink. The amount of coal exported (the UK was a major coal exporter a century ago) is shown in green. The green lines are not additional to the annual production figures, they are part of it – they are included in this projection in order to show the scale of UK production that went for export at the beginning of the last century. Clearly the UK doesn't have a lot of coal remaining because we're so far down the depletion trend – but the level of production since the early 1970s has been significantly below the trend as successive governments have switched to oil and more recently natural gas to sustain electricity production. Even if we were to expand coal production in the UK it would not last for many more years, and we would still be reliant upon imports to fulfil our current demand for coal. Background Information
Wikipedia:
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 The Energy Beyond
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Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2008
Coal: Resources and Future Production
The Future of UK Gas Supplies
Town gas
Peak Energy
