Date published: 2007/03/29
The BBC says:
Many people think that running out of oil, or "peak oil", would be good for the climate. In his new book The Last Oil Shock, David Strahan begs to differ; he suggests it may bring catastrophe.
"It is becoming increasingly clear that global oil production will soon go into terminal decline, with potentially devastating economic consequences.
Although the idea of peak oil has traditionally been ridiculed by the industry, now even some of the world's most senior oilmen concede the case.
...
It is mathematically impossible that peak oil will solve climate change.Although oil is the biggest single source of energy-related greenhouse gases, coal and gas combined are bigger still, and the expected growth in their emissions would overwhelm any reduction from oil.
As I demonstrate in The Last Oil Shock using the International Energy Agency's "business-as-usual" forecast, even if oil production peaks in 2010 and immediately starts to fall at 3% a year, total emissions would still rise by 25%, reaching 32 billion tonnes in 2030.
...
In fact peak oil could even make emissions worse if it drives us to exploit the wrong kinds of fuel.Burning rainforest and peatlands to create palm oil plantations for biofuels releases vast amounts of CO2, and has already made Indonesia, according to some ways of calculating it, the world's third biggest emitter after the US and China.
...
Biofuels can be produced sustainably and with real CO2 reductions, but in the industrialised world there simply isn't the land.In the developing world, however, there are vast swathes of land which could be put to sugar cane in a sustainable fashion; but the scale of the task of replacing crude oil would still be monumental.
I calculate that to substitute the fuel lost through a post-peak oil production annual decline of 3% would mean planting about 200,000 sq km - equivalent to the land area of Cuba, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea - every year.
Alternatively, if we decided to run Britain's road transport system, say, on cleanly produced hydrogen - electrolysing water using non-CO2-emitting forms of generation - our options would be:
- 67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations
- a solar array covering every inch of Norfolk and Derbyshire combined
- or a wind farm bigger than the entire southwest region of England.
When oil production starts to fall, the economic impacts could well be devastating.
Soaring crude prices could tip the world into a depression deeper than that of the 1930s, and collapsing stock markets cripple our ability to finance the expensive clean energy infrastructure we need."
All pretty obvious stuff. Less oil could well mean that more coal is being used, and coal is much worse than oil. On the other hand, predicting anything far into the future is a waste of time (unless you have a book to sell). In particular, claiming that it is "mathematically impossible" for such and such to happen is silly, because mathematics only kicks in once you have a model, and the model can easily be wrong.
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").