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Opinion Crunch time?


Engineers are rightly focused on creating low carbon solutions. But, says Chris Jones, they may also be neglecting a potentially more urgent crisis – the sudden arrival of ‘peak oil’


T


he latest climate science indicates a stark choice: make extreme reductions in carbon emissions, or generate extreme climatic impacts on our world. The UK policy focus


has been on long-term carbon reductions,but is energy supply another global predicament – and is it being underestimated by many in the engineering professions? Certainly, CIBSE ‘s national conference earlier


this year did cover UK energy security, but the prospect of an oil crunch was not on the agenda. Oil is woven into every aspect of the economy: food, materials, medicine, transport and complex financial instruments; and many observers suggest that very soon there will indeed be a ‘crunch’, whereby oil shortages lead to soaring prices, potentially resulting in social unrest. Despite the long-established trends where new


oilfields have become smaller and volumes of oil being discovered have declined, the confident view still says that the resources are there and oil price volatility is constraining the huge investment needed to replace capacity. Environmentalists point to the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil leak as just one example of how oil is increasingly difficult, risky and expensive to produce. Certainly there’s a consensus that the age of easy oil is fading. The International Energy Agency warns that a shortfall in oil supply can’t be ruled out by 2014- 15. Last October the UK Energy Research Council reported a ‘significant risk’ of global oil production peaking before 2020. The previous UK government said, at last, that there would be an advisory panel on oil depletion. We at Peak Oil Consulting predict that demand for


oil will exceed supply by 2014-15, because depletion of existing fields will outpace new production capacity. After 2015, we expect global oil production – including unconventional oil such as tar sands – to fall. In April this year, the US Joint Forces Command stated: ‘By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10m barrels per day.’


20 CIBSE Journal August 2010 Less optimistic observers forecast that this oil


crunch signals the arrival of ‘peak oil’ – the point where production reaches its final limit and settles into irreversible decline, year on year. Peak oil does not mean running out of oil, but it does mean the end of cheap oil, forever. Hitting peak oil by 2015 would be far earlier than policymakers across the globe said they expected; it is also very early in establishing low carbon economies. Without decades of planning, preparation and transition, the abrupt resource constraint, the speculation and the competition would combine to be socially, economically, environmentally and administratively disruptive. To better understand the supply


We cannot just cut carbon,


situation, some have pressed for a global audit to establish productivity trends. That audit could be relatively fast, but it needs global co-operation. Seeking a more orderly global transition, the Post Carbon Institute in the US has proposed an ‘oil depletion protocol’, under which countries would commit themselves to reducing their oil consumption year on year, to match depletion in capacity. The challenge now is to get nations to begin signing up to this (visit www. oildepletionprotocol.org). This century, oil is likely to be just one among


a number of depleting and increasingly costly resources. The question, with an ever-growing population, is whether technological advances and substitution can outrun so many concurrent limits on resources? Moreover, should not engineering professionals,


and institutions such as CIBSE, be pushing these concerns harder than they are at present? We cannot just cut carbon, we also need planned reductions in oil, gas and coal dependency. Otherwise, any crisis ensuing after the ‘crunch’ could easily overshadow the low carbon agenda. l


Chris Jones is principal mechanical engineer at URS Corp.


we also need planned reductions in oil dependency


www.cibsejournal.com


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