How to Cook? Sunday December 2nd 2035
Posted: October 31, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Energy | Tags: 2035, Pollution, Rain Leave a commentfrom Pam Brown’s 2035 diary
Power cut just as I was cooking dinner in the electric oven, transferred everything to the top of the wood stove as it’s awkward connecting the generator to the cooker. I’d like one of the multi-fuel cookers but can’t help worrying about air quality. The government can’t ensure continuous electricity, rejects gas and oil, but has prohibited so many wood and coal heaters and stoves that it’s a real dilemma – to keep to the regulations and be unable to cook or keep warm, or burn what we have available and suffer polluted air? Life is about impossible questions these days.
Mar e Lago Under Water: Saturday December 15th 2035
Mar e Lago at Palm Beach, the glitzy Florida country club residence of former US President and near-nonagenarian Donald Trump, is under water, so it’s not glitzy, gaudy or even functioning anymore. Florida is changing shape, shrinking, and people with money are moving to where they think they may be safer. Donald Trump was a climate-change denier, maybe still is, I don’t know, but denying that such a serious problem exists, when there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary, is like wandering onto a battlefield wearing a blindfold and ear defenders.
Rainy Christmas: Tuesday December 25th 2035
Christmas Day, warm, wet and quiet. When I was at school we were taught that Mediterranean climates had warm wet winters and hot dry summers. The heat is Mediterranean but we have a deal more rain, often so heavy that the drainage network is overloaded and the force of the flow lifts manhole covers. People walking in flooded streets have drowned after falling into open drains. That’s a sad comment for today, but there you are, climate disruption is not a happy story. You can’t plan for the future when conditions are so unstable, and you can’t keep on repairing damaged infrastructure. It’s throwing money down the flooded manholes.
I had a microwave dinner – microwaves are frugal users of energy, at least – and video calls with Rose, Wil and Seren, and elder grandson Jac. I enjoyed those.
Nuclear Not Happening
Posted: October 24, 2022 Filed under: Energy, Society Leave a commentSaturday November 17th 2035
No mains electricity for the last two days, the fifteenth cut of the year lasting more than 24 hours, no sun for the photovoltaics we got ten years ago, no wind for the roof turbine. Main problem is the freezer. If there’s no power tomorrow, no sun and no wind, we’ll have to put the generator on. That’s not the automatic response any longer, because it’s an elderly model running on petrol, which is super expensive while pensions are meagre.
We have five gallons in a drum and we try not to use it. Why has the power failed when we haven’t had a storm? Simple, we are over-dependent on sun and wind for our electricity, and the nuclear stations that we were promised are still mired in delays. Only three stations are still working, that’s Sizewell B, and the two at Hinkley Point C. They have a total capacity of 4,476 MW, and I think last year they produced about 33 billion kWh. That’s about 470 kWh for each of Britain’s 70 million people compared with 910 kWh from nuclear generation for each of the 65 million back in 2020.
It’s about time we stopped using our freezer at all and relied wholly on preserving jars, smoking and salt!
Laughing at a Good Life
Saturday November 24th 2035
The power returned on Monday. Wil cycled over today and we watched an ancient comedy repeat from about 60 years ago, called The Good Life about a couple called Tom and Barbara Good who decided to become mini-smallholders in their home in suburban Surbiton, and to live entirely on the output from their garden and allotment, to the chagrin of their conventional friends and neighbours, status-aware Margo Leadbetter and executive husband Jerry. The Goods are cash-poor but live in a comfortable house and always have fuel for their range. They have clothes from their old life, vegetables and eggs from their expansive super-sized garden and no need of entertainment because the Leadbetters unknowingly provide all of that. Margo is forever in social combat with Mrs Dooms-Paterson, who is at the pinnacle of the Surbiton suburban hierarchy. The Good Life ended after three years, about the length of time that Tom and Barbara could reasonably survive on garden produce and items they had bought earlier, before the roof of their middle-class house began to leak and the paintwork to flake off. It’s different now, not a choice any longer, and even tougher because houses with large gardens have not been built for decades. The surnames are revealing: who could quarrel with the Goods, trying their best, but Leadbetter, lead-better, suggests we should regard the rebels as crazy and follow the Leadbetter path to salaried material contentment. While it lasted.
Shoving People Aside: The Kleptogarchy part 28
Posted: October 7, 2022 Filed under: Energy, Environment | Tags: Three Gorges Dam Leave a commentShoving People Aside
Endemic viruses weaken communities. Expulsions break communities up. In China, an unpublished number of people were displaced, moved out, by the mammoth Three Gorges Dam, on which work began in 1994. The estimated totals range from 1.3 million (Chinese Government), 1.4 million – 1.5 million (Antoine Vedeilhe and others for France 24) to 6 million (Dr Brooke Wilmsen at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.[1]) Brooke Wilmsen expanded the count to include people like fishermen whose livelihoods evaporated, and those whose homes disappeared in landslips or floods. It is not done in China to criticise the government, so fears about instability and collapse come mainly from outside the country. Hydraulic engineer Dr Wang Weiluo, working in Germany and not allowed to publish in China, told France 24 that there is distortion in the dam, and that if it broke, the wall of water would submerge Wuhan some 400 kilometres (250 miles) downstream. Coincidentally, Wuhan is widely accepted as the source of Covid-19.
News channel France 24’s ‘China’s Three Gorges Dam Revisited’[2], released in October 2020, reveals the low compensation paid to those whose homes and farmlands were to be submerged as the waters behind the dam rose 175 metres, just on 569 feet. A displaced farmer said he was offered €3,000 (about £2,520 at the rate on November 21st 2021) a pension of €6 (£5) a month, and accommodation 800 kilometers (500 miles) away. He chose to remain in a nearby town, renting a tiny room, and is poverty-stricken.
The world’s largest hydro-electric plant is at the dam, with a capacity of 22,500 MW. Each year the plant generates about 85TW hours of electricity, nearly 10% of China’s requirements[3], and saving over 100 million tonnes of CO2. The US Energy Information Administration reckons that, when burned, one ton of coal with 78% carbon content releases 2.86 tons of CO2. So the dam, the largest of 98,000 throughout China, and its hydro plant are better for the environment than coal-fired power stations, surely? Dams create a giant carbon footprint, though. The Three Gorges dam wall contains 27.2 million cubic metres of concrete. The manufacture of each cubic metre emits between 100 and 300 kg of CO2, depending on the composition, so 27.2 million cubic metres would have emitted between 2.7 million and 8.2 million tonnes, which at the upper estimate is a quarter of the annual CO2 emissions of Wales. The dam contains 463,000 tonnes of steel, embodying nearly 857,000 tonnes of CO2. Then there are the 102.6 million cubic metres of earth bulldozed out of the way, the turbines, all the ancillary works, and the ongoing maintenance. Is it fair, then, to class hydro power as renewable?
In operation, hydro power stations are ‘clean’ compared with burning coal. If the 85TW hours of electricity were generated from coal, around 67 million tonnes of CO2 would be added to the atmosphere. That is twice the total emissions from Wales and can be pictured as 13.4 million five-tonne African elephants flying around the sky.
Yet dams are no panacea. Just in China, in August 1975 up to 240,000 people died – no one is quite sure — and 11 million lost their homes, when the Banqiao and Shimantan dams, and 60 others, in Henan province failed after torrential rains.
What often accompanies global heating?
Torrential rains.
[1] https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/announcements/2017/the-dam-that-moves-a-mountain.
[2] Video by Antoine Vedeilhe, Angelique Forget, Camille Despierres, Antoine Morel and Charlie Wang, October 3rd 2020, on YouTube.
[3] https://www.power-technology.com/projects/gorges/, accessed November 21st 2021.
Energy Return on Energy Invested: The Kleptogarchy part 21
Posted: September 1, 2022 Filed under: Economics, Energy | Tags: Energy return on energy invested, EROI, Law and economics Leave a commentEnergy Return on Energy Invested
Fossil fuels still dominate global energy because they appear to have high positive returns on the energy invested in extracting and processing them. Uncomfortably, this is true only because we have not counted the millions of years of geological time that have passed since they were living carbon. These eons of time are among the ‘externalities’ that organisations leave out of their profitability calculations. With each passing decade, oil, gas and coal experience a fall in Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI or EROI) because extractors have to mine deeper, in more problematic places, at escalating cost. Research at the University of Leeds warned in 2019 that the EROIs for fossil fuels have become much closer to those for renewable energy, around six units of output to one of input, down to three to one for electricity generation.[1] Back in the early 1990s estimates for the EROI for oil and gas traded on the world market were more like 30:1.
“The EROI for petroleum production appears to be declining over time for every place we have data,” researchers wrote in 2014.[2] They listed several examples of EROI, showing that coal and natural gas had the highest figures from extraction to end of processing, up to 60:1 for coal and to 67:1 for natural gas since 2000. For oil, the most recent figures quoted, for 2010, were 10, 11 and 15 to one.
Fuel from biomass, in this table, was scarcely worthwhile, with EROI figures between 0.8 and 1.6 for ethanol and 1.3 for biodiesel. Nuclear was 15:1 to 5:1, similar to electricity from photovoltaic panels. Wind power had an EROI of about 18 to one, relatively high, and hydropower had the highest figure in the list, over 100:1, although that was a figure from the 1980s. Hydropower still has benefits for clean electricity, but droughts impact the quantities of water available.
For flexibility and usability, nothing competes with oil. It is the super ingredient of modern materials and the energy source for the bulk of the world’s mechanised transport. There is nothing as cost-effective that can replace it. The best answer, for the sake of lower emissions and a liveable planet, is to use LESS. The conditions for this to happen include:
- Local economies that are self-sufficient in essential goods and in services such as health and education.
- Pleasant living environments where people are content to spend their leisure time.
- Energy and fuel rationing to avoid excessive capture by the wealthy.
If the law-and-economics philosophy holds sway (see Law and Economics in The Kleptogarchy part 7), rationing would contradict the rights of wealthy people to acquire as much as they want; people will only live in pleasant environments if they can buy them; and if current concepts of market efficiency are paramount, resilient local economies will struggle to develop. The spread of law-and-economics over legal systems, reinforcing the capacity of the presently powerful to resist change, has slowed meaningful action to limit global heating.
According to the Environmental Performance Index 2022 from the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network,[3] the top countries for sustainability and environmental protection are Denmark, the United Kingdom and Finland. The leading sixteen are all in Europe. The high standing of the UK seemed surprising, until interpreted in the light of other nations’ lack of progress. The bottom six, as published in the Index, are all in Asia: Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Myanmar and, bringing up the rear, the giant, environmentally degraded former British colony of India. The six were all colonised by European powers, mainly the UK. The French colonised Vietnam (as well as Laos and Cambodia) and the Germans controlled part of Papua New Guinea. Colonisers exported capitalism as the organising principle, extracting resources for use ‘back home’, and they deployed aspects of their contemporary understandings of Christianity as legitimising concepts, such as work is virtuous, obedience is virtuous, reference to a higher authority is virtuous.
At the other end of the Index, the UK’s apparently praiseworthy position relative to others appears to grant leeway to ‘temporary’ strategies to extract more fossil fuels from the North Sea and elsewhere, but the climate does not appreciate relative positions in league tables, or national borders, all of which are human constructions.
[1] ‘Estimation of Global Final Stage Energy-Return-on-Investment for Fossil Fuels with Comparison to Renewable Energy Sources’, by Paul Brockway, Anna Owen, Lina Brand-Correa, and Lukas Hardt, Nature Energy July 2019, reported in Science Daily, July 11th 2019. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190711114846.htm, accessed April 24th 2022.
[2] ‘EROI of Different Fuels and the Implications for Society’ by Charles A S Hall, Jessica G Lambert and Stephen B Balogh, Energy Policy Vol.64, January 2014, pps.141-152. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856, accessed April 25th 2022.
[3] https://epi.yale.edu/, accessed June 8th 2022.
Electric Dreams: The Kleptogarchy part 20
Posted: August 31, 2022 Filed under: Energy | Tags: Democratic Republic of Congo, Lithium-ion batteries Leave a commentElectric Dreams
All we need to do is switch to electric vehicles! “I’m doing my bit, I’ve bought an electric car,” I have heard people say. Yet although electric cars are not emitting greenhouse gases when in motion, that is not the end of the story. They have large batteries. Emma Woollacott, technology and business reporter with the BBC:
“While traditional lead-acid batteries are widely recycled, the same can’t be said for the lithium-ion versions used in electric cars. EV batteries are larger and heavier than those in regular cars and are made up of several hundred individual lithium-ion cells, all of which need dismantling. They contain hazardous materials, and have an inconvenient tendency to explode if disassembled incorrectly.”[1]
Lithium-ion batteries are energy-intensive to deconstruct, a big problem when governments expect millions of electric vehicles to be on the roads by the 2030s. The components, including manganese, cobalt and nickel as well as lithium, would have to be mined and transported in vast quantities, not environment-friendly activities. Lithium is extracted mainly from Western Australia, also from Argentina, Bolivia and Chile in South America. Nickel centres are in Russia, Canada, Australia. China controls the supply of manganese, and 60% to 70% of the world’s cobalt comes from the poverty-stricken Democratic Republic of Congo, where tens of thousands of miners are children. It does not take much imagination to foresee states and corporations trying to tightly control the supply of these minerals.
Cobus van Staden, managing editor of the China Global South Project, wrote in June 2022 that:
“The world cannot mine and refine the vast amounts of minerals that go into batteries – lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, palladium, and others – at anywhere close to the scale for this rapid transition to electric vehicles to occur. The dirty secret of the green revolution is its insatiable hunger for resources from Africa and elsewhere that are produced using some of the world’s dirtiest technologies. What’s more, the accelerated shift to batteries now threatens to replicate one of the most destructive dynamics in global economic history: the systematic extraction of raw commodities from the global south in a way that made developed countries unimaginably rich while leaving a trail of environmental degradation, human rights violations and semipermanent underdevelopment across all the developing world.”[2]
So electric vehicles, with their heavy, dirty batteries, are not as green as drivers might think. On top, there is the charging question, particularly in rural areas where there is no commercial justification for installing charging points. According to a BBC report, a rapid charger costs in the range £20,000 to £30,000, and connection to the electricity grid could be another £10,000 to £15,000.[3]
Electric vehicles for the masses, in perpetuity, are a dream.
[1] ‘Electric Cars: What Will Happen to All the Dead Batteries?’, BBC News, April 27th 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56574779 accessed May 21st 2022.
[2] ‘Green Energy’s Dirty Secret: Its Hunger for African Resources’, foreignpolicy.com, by Cobus van Staden, June 30th 2022. https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/30/africa-congo-drc-ev-electric-vehicles-batteries-green-energy-minerals-metals-mining-resources-colonialism-human-rights-development-china/, accessed July 1st 2022.
[3] ‘How Easy is it to Drive across Wales in an Electric Car?’ by Tomos Morgan and Becky Dale, May 20th 2022. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61505025, accessed May 21st 2022. The answer? Only with careful planning , and the luck that chargers are actually working. About one in ten fast chargers are out of service at any one time, Morgan and Dale reported.
The Hydrogen Rainbow: The Kleptogarchy part 19
Posted: August 30, 2022 Filed under: Corporations, Energy | Tags: Blue hydrogen, Energy return on energy invested, Green hydrogen, Pink purple and red hydrogen Leave a commentThe Hydrogen Rainbow
Blue
The UK’s Energy Security Strategy skates over the carbon challenges. One reason may be that hydrogen in many hues has high billing in the strategy. There is ‘blue’ hydrogen for example, derived from splitting natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Hydrogen produced this way is not low-carbon. The Smithsonian Magazine commented:
“A peer-reviewed study published in Energy Science & Engineering, an open-source journal, concludes “the greenhouse gas footprint of blue hydrogen is more than 20 percent greater than burning natural gas or coal for heat and some 60 percent greater than burning diesel oil for heat,” according to the paper.
“In addition, carbon dioxide is a byproduct of blue hydrogen production. While the plan is to capture and store the gas, the question remains as to what to do with that supply in the future. There is also concern about the long-term viability of holding it underground, reports Loz Blain of New Atlas.”[1]
Surely, enough reasons to question the priorities in the strategy?
Hydrogen comes with health and safety warnings. The gas is so flammable that explosions are a real risk. Accidentology Involving Hydrogen, a report from the Ministry of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and Town and Country Planning in France, summarises:
“The properties of hydrogen such as its tendency to escape due to its small size, wide flammability range, low ignition energy and faculty to detonate make it especially dangerous in confined or semi-confined spaces (high points, recesses of tanks, roofs, etc.) Thus accidents involving hydrogen are 84% fires and/or explosions with serious human consequences. The best strategy adopted in battery charging or electrolysis workshops include opting for unconfined, non-congested open environments or workshops with good ventilation.”[2]
Airships fell out of favour after a run of serious accidents in the 1930s, including the R101 in 1930, the USS Akron and USS Macon in 1933 and 1935, and the Hindenburg in 1937. The R101 and the Hindenburg were hydrogen-filled, while helium buoyed the American airships. The massive 804-feet-long Hindenburg, containing 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen and fitted out like a hotel, was approaching Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6th after crossing the Atlantic from Frankfurt, a journey of some 60 hours when the fastest ocean liners took five days. The explosion and inferno were filmed from the landing ground, and cinemagoers all around the world were soon watching the tragedy on newsreels. There were survivors, 62 of the 97 on board, because the Hindenburg was so close to the ground that people were able to jump out, but the accidents of the 1930s ended airships’ rise as luxurious passenger transport.
Pink, Purple, Red
Nuclear expansion would create test beds for pink/purple/red hydrogen. If you are willing to overlook the inherent dangers of nuclear power generation and storage, then producing hydrogen from nuclear operations is a logical step.
Robert Rapier on Forbes.com[3] explains that if hydrogen is to have a substantial role in the world economy, production has to be large-scale, and that is possible from nuclear power. Hydrogen can be produced from nuclear power in a scalable fashion in two different ways. Firstly, the electricity can electrolyse water to split hydrogen from oxygen, with a claimed similar carbon footprint to hydrogen electrolysed from electricity generated from renewables. The electrolysis process absorbs about 20% of the electricity used, so the maximum output is 80% of the input.
Secondly, steam from nuclear power generation can enable steam methane reforming, called SMR. In this process methane is thermally decomposed to hydrogen and carbon. Robert Rapier reports that a single 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor could produce more than 150,000 tonnes of hydrogen each year. That quantity of hydrogen could be enough to fuel a car over nine billion miles, over 361,000 times the circumference of the Earth.
The huge question hanging over hydrogen is its economic viability. To separate one unit of hydrogen from oxygen by electrolysis requires four or five units of electricity. The energy return on energy invested is negative, even before the hydrogen is contained in fuel cells and transported to users. The Global Association for Transition Engineering explains why diesel is more energy-efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell:
“So whereas in the Diesel Fuel System, the investment of 4 MJ [megajoules] of energy returned 80 MJ of fuel (EROI [Energy Return on Energy Invested] = 80/4 = 20) and some useful other products.
“In the Hydrogen Fuel System, the investment of 66.75 MJ of energy returned 8.4 MJ of fuel (EROI = 8.4/66.75 = 0.126) and some toxic by-product CO [carbon monoxide] and as much GHG CO2 [greenhouse gas carbon dioxide] after the CO is hopefully combusted as diesel fuel system PLUS the GHG CO2 emissions from the energy input.”[4]
Hydrogen fuel cells require more energy to produce them than they provide to end users, such as drivers of hydrogen-powered vehicles. The Japanese are at the forefront of hydrogen technology for transport. A Hyundai hydrogen car, the Nexo, has been advertised, costing just under £66,000 in 2019. In 2022 there are no refuelling stations or service garages at all in Wales, and few elsewhere in the UK except for the London area. The Nexo’s tank takes 6.33kg of hydrogen, costing £10 to £15 per kilo. A full tank is enough for about 400 miles, and so outside London the dearth of refuelling stations is a barrier to the hydrogen car market.
Toyota is another Japanese manufacturer with a hydrogen car, the Mirai, costing upwards from about £50,000, advertised as offering zero-emission motoring. That appears to be its main benefit, because there are emissions associated with manufacturing the vehicles, and the hydrogen has a negative return on the energy invested in its production. Driving a hydrogen-powered car is maybe a form of virtue signalling for wealthy residents in affluent cities, but it is not an answer to global heating.
Green
Green hydrogen is so-called because it results from using renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Early days, but development is under way. Wiesbaden, Germany-based Hy2gen was founded in 2016 for this task, “the first international group to produce green H2 at industrial scale”, according to its website. By March 2022 Hy2gen, backed by French investment house Ardian and Switzerland-domiciled investment manager FiveT Hydrogen, had secured €1 billion in funding for its programme to commercialise green hydrogen. The Australian airline Qantas plans to use synthetic hydrocarbon aviation fuel from the mid 2030s. The idea is to separate hydrogen from water with renewable electricity and to mix it with carbon extracted from the air. Qantas’s chief sustainability officer Andrew Parker was quoted in the Financial Times[5]as saying Australia is the ideal place to produce synthetic hydrocarbon fuel because of large areas of land on which solar and wind farms could be installed, to generate the renewable electricity without which the aviation fuel would absorb more energy than it could yield. Synthetic hydrocarbon fuel is likely to be a lot costlier than kerosene jet fuel. According to management consultants McKinsey, current ‘sustainable’ aviation biofuels cost twice as much as kerosene fuel. Green hydrogen and carbon synthesised into new generation fuels, requiring complex infrastructure for carbon capture and hydrogen extraction, are unlikely to cost significantly less than biofuels. Flying will not be cheap.
The sums don’t add up. Hydrogen is not a hallelujah saviour, not for anyone who is terrified by global over-heating. Even if corporations regard hydrogen as open roads into the future, several may become cul-de-sacs sooner than they expect.
NEXT TIME – ELECTRIC DREAMS
[1] ‘‘Blue’ Hydrogen May Not Be a Very ‘Green’ Energy Source After All’ by David Kindy, August 17th 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/blue-hydrogen-20-worse-burning-coal-study-states-180978451/, accessed April 13th 2022.
[2] https://www.aria.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/wp-content/files_mf/SY_hydrogen_GB_2009.pdf, accessed June 7th 2022.
[3] ‘Nuclear Reactors Could Provide Plentiful Zero-Carbon Hydrogen, If Only We Let Them’, by Robert Rapier, April 29th 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2021/04/29/clean-hydrogen-from-nuclear-power/, accessed April 13th 2022.
[4] https://www.transitionengineering.org/pop_the_hydrogen_bubble, accessed April 23rd 2022.
[5] ‘Qantas Says Synthetic Fuel Could Power Long Flights by Mid-2030s’, by James Fernyhough, Financial Times, May 24th 2022.
UK Cop Out: The Kleptogarchy part 18
Posted: August 29, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Energy | Tags: Boris Johnson, Bradwell B, Carbon capture and storage, Energy Security Strategy, Galileo Galilei, JPMorgan Chase, Peter Kalmus, Sizewell C Leave a commentUK Cop Out
On April 6th 2022, forty-one days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the UK Government released an ‘Energy Security Strategy’[1] focusing on new nuclear power stations, offshore wind, and renewed efforts to extract fossil oil and gas from the North Sea. And on-shore fracking, probably. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in the Foreword:
“And as even the most evangelistic environmentalist would concede that we can’t simply pull the plug on all fossil fuels overnight without the lights going out all over Europe, we’re going to make better use of the oil and gas in our own backyard by giving the energy fields of the North Sea a new lease of life.”
This language frames anyone who objects to fossil fuel extraction as beyond extreme, as on the lunatic fringe of environmentalism, if there could be such a place. The Prime Minister’s statement normalises the message that ‘of course we must continue using fossil fuels’. Yet at the same time as the ‘strategy’ appeared, climate scientists all over the world were demonstrating and getting arrested for warning about the planet’s profit-driven forced march to a wasteland.
Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and three colleagues locked themselves to the doors of a JPMorgan Chase Bank building in Los Angeles. JPMorgan Chase continues to finance fossil fuel extraction and between 2016 and 2020 was the world’s largest funder of oil, gas and coal companies, providing them with $268 billion[2] (£209 billion at the average exchange rate for 2020). In comparison, the USA plans to put about $45 billion of public funds into the development of renewable energy in 2023, only two-thirds of JPMorgan Chase’s annual average ‘investment’ into fossil fuels.[3] Dr Peter Kalmus, educated at Harvard and Columbia, wrote on Twitter on April 10th 2022:
“The LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] showed up with at least 100 riot police. They pushed press and supporters out of camera range before the arrest. Handcuffed in the police van, we passed about 50 squad cars and 2 fire trucks. All for 3 nonviolent scientists and 1 engineer pleading for a livable Earth.”
Peter Kalmus knows the data. He is willing to be arrested for warning humanity. This is a modern-day rerun of the then heretical notion that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, that it circuits our sun, as do all the planets in our solar system. Wind back to Galileo Galilei, the visionary mathematician, philosopher and physicist born in 1564 in the Duchy of Florence. Galileo developed the work of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), who theorised that Earth rotates around the Sun. This conflicted with Christian doctrine and angered the Pope, Urban VIII. Galileo was imprisoned, forced to recant, and for the final decade of his life until he died in 1642, was under house arrest. New knowledge is subject to vicious repression when it threatens existing power hierarchies.
There is little in the UK’s Energy Security Strategy to threaten powerful interests. Indeed, the press release published the same day refers to “ambitious, quicker expansion of nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, oil and gas, including delivering the equivalent to one nuclear reactor a year instead of one a decade”.
One reactor a year? The UK has not achieved one in a decade since the 1990s (Sizewell B in Suffolk) and none at all in the 21st century. The ‘small print’ of nuclear power includes short operating lives, the need for ongoing high-level technical expertise and management, the permanent problem (from a human perspective) of waste disposal, and the risks of flooding due to rising sea levels and catastrophic accidents potentially affecting millions of people. All of the 26 Magnox reactors started up in the UK between 1956 and 1972 have closed. The first, Calder Hall 1, operated for 47 years and shut down in 2003. The last, the two reactors at Wylfa on Anglesey, opened in 1971 and closed in 2012 and 2015. The next generation, Advanced Gas-Cooled (AGR) reactors, comprised 14 switched on between 1976 and 1989. Eleven of the reactors on four sites, all operated by EDF (Electricité de France) were still working in 2022, but all are slated to close before 2030. The sole Pressurised Water reactor, Sizewell B, is scheduled to run until 2035 but EDF is reported to be considering an extension of 20 years to 2055, to cost an additional £500-£700 million. Sizewell B generated about 2.35% of the UK’s electricity use in 2020, but in 2021 was shut for maintenance and repairs for four-and-a-half months. Thermal sleeves in the control rod mechanism proved to be worn and had to be replaced.
The UK Government bears about two-thirds of the cost of decommissioning nuclear power stations, which totals £3.2 billion a year in the early 2020s, but every single working nuclear reactor in the UK is operated by EDF, and EDF is owned by the French state.
Nuclear power has a declining share of the UK’s generating capacity. In the late 1990s nuclear plants produced about 25% of the nation’s electricity, but this had declined to 16% by 2020, and in 2021 there was a further fall to 14%. Given the impending closure of most nuclear power stations that are still operating, and the Government’s reluctance to invest public money in new power stations, it is hard to reconcile the optimism in the Energy Security Report with the reality of ballooning costs and scarce funds. There is only one new nuclear power station under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C on the Somerset coast near Bridgwater, financed by EDF and China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC). The construction is costing more than £20 billion, perhaps up to £25 billion, which UK electricity users will have to repay through their bills. When it is operational, some time from 2026, the twin reactors might generate about 7% of the UK’s 2021 electricity consumption, but given the planned shift to electric vehicles and therefore expanded electricity use, Hinkley C would be making only a minor contribution.
EDF has a proposal to build, on the eroding Suffolk coast, a twin reactor power station, Sizewell C, also a £20 billion-plus project, in which China General Nuclear Power Corporation was a minority partner. At the only other proposed site, Bradwell B on the low-lying Dengie Peninsula, Essex, CGNPC was to take the lead and construct two Hualong One pressurised water reactors. The UK’s government got cold feet about CGNPC’s involvement, and in March 2022 decided to end it for Sizewell C. EDF and the UK Government would both have a 20% stake, with the rest to come – maybe – from other investors.[4] It is likely to be a hard sell, because Sizewell C will be short of cooling water, and cannot operate without it.
Water supply at Sizewell is the responsibility of Northumbrian Water, which had proposed an 18-mile pipeline from the river Waveney on the Suffolk-Norfolk boundary, to Sizewell. Yet the Environment Agency warned of a significant risk that no fresh water could be supplied to Sizewell C. Suffolk is a dry county, with no large rivers. EDF argued that the Water Industry Act 1991 required the statutory water supplier, in this case Northumbrian Water, to ensure a supply. How this could be done if no water existed was not explored. It emerged later that the statutory responsibility is to supply domestic properties, not commercial ones. There would not even be enough fresh water available during construction of the power station, and a desalination plant would have to be installed, to be powered by diesel generators and with a heavily negative return on energy invested[5].
Both Sizewell C and Bradwell B are long-term projects, if they happen at all. They do nothing to provide clean renewable energy that can be safely managed into the future. As for the Energy Security Strategy’s confident assertion of a new reactor every year, there is no evidence to support it. Rolls Royce has a vision of Small Modular Reactors, each delivering a quarter to a third of the power of Sizewell B, for example, possibly for less than £2 billion each, but they are nowhere near commercial application.
Nuclear power does not stack up commercially because of high construction and decommissioning costs in relation to their short operating life, typically about 40 years. When environmental damage and risks, and the heavy carbon footprints of construction are taken into account, nuclear power stations are even less attractive, or justifiable.
Onshore wind power is not part of the Energy Security Strategy, unless local communities ask for them. Offshore wind is in the mix, despite being more expensive than onshore generation, probably because there are fewer voters to object to them. The Westminster government is going all out for offshore wind power, aiming for 50GW by 2030, “more than enough to power every home in the UK”, but according to two analysts, John Constable and Professor Gordon Hughes:
“The combination of increasing operating and maintenance costs with the decline in yields due to ageing means that at current market prices the expected revenues from electricity generation will be less than expected…”[6]
While wind could generate more electricity, problems of wind strength variability and surplus electricity storage remain. Turbines operate safely at wind speeds between 7-9mph and 50-55mph. Storms in a heating world affect wind velocities, which may be more volatile than in recent history. Effective long-term storage for electricity does not yet exist. The Westminster government launched a £68 million fund in 2020 to find reliable storage methods, but £68 million is a drop in the ocean when between April and October 2022 households in the UK are likely to pay about an average of over £85 a month for electricity, in total around £2.4 billion every month, 35 times more than the storage prize fund.[7] And prices were due to rise by a further 80% in October 2022, with further increases expected in January and April 2023.
The Energy Security Strategy also focuses on heat pumps, but without any public investment except “up to £30 million” to encourage firms to make heat pumps in the UK, and a reduction of tax revenues because heat pumps and solar panels are exempted from VAT between 2022 and 2027. The £30 million public investment would buy about a quarter of a single 100-metre super yacht of the type favoured by oligarchs. Heat pumps are effective only in exceptionally well-insulated homes, and are expensive to install – often £9,000 to £12,000 — because water storage tanks, pipework and radiators often have to be changed too.
Back to oil and gas, which should be left where they are under the sea. For the UK’s government, though, “producing gas in the UK has a lower carbon footprint than imported from abroad”, which is a poor reason in a climate emergency when respected scientists are protesting and risking arrest.
Solar power gets a mention, but no money to speak of, only a consultation on loosening planning restrictions.
The Energy Security Strategy features (1) old climate-damaging technologies, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that we are sliding towards the exit from the Last Chance Saloon, and (2) token investments in cleaner technologies that carry problems of storage, or cost, or both. No mention of a mass insulation programme, or of cutting consumption, both of which would be cheaper and safer than betting on a nuclear future. Cutting back will happen when individuals cannot afford heat, power, fuel, travel, but rationing by price is inequitable and a recipe for civil unrest, regardless of the anti-protest law that Parliament has passed.
People with access to money will be able to respond to escalating energy costs by improving their own insulation, in their homes and to their own clothing, and the Westminster government appears to be relying on this:
“On cost, there are many measures for reducing energy bills including cavity wall insulation, which typically costs between £1,000 and £3,000. Measures that improve the efficiency of our homes, on average, reduce bills by £300.
“On aesthetics, upgrades can retain and enhance building’s character with measures being easy to install and beautiful in design.
“On choice, this is not being imposed on people and is a gradual transition following the grain of behaviour. The British people are no-nonsense pragmatists who can make decisions based on the information.”[8]
The wording “this is not being imposed on people” and “the British people are no-nonsense pragmatists” conveys a transfer of responsibility from government onto individuals, to pay for their own energy efficiency improvements if they wish. There is no clear mention of the need to stop fossil fuel use to try and limit runaway global heating. Indeed, the intent in the strategy to develop hydrogen energy depends in part on continuing to exploit oil and gas.
No matter that all oil and gas burned from now on will work against clean energy measures already in place, the Johnson government insisted that it makes the UK more ‘secure’, but an unliveable world has security for nobody. The strategy says:
“Gas is currently the glue that holds our electricity system together and it will be an important transition fuel. We are taking a balanced approach to this unique subterranean asset. There is no contradiction between our commitment to net zero and our commitment to a strong and evolving North Sea industry. Indeed, one depends on the other.
“On decarbonisation, the flexibility of gas has underpinned our world-leading rollout of offshore wind and UK gas has a lower carbon footprint well under half that of most imported gas.
“On longevity, estimates suggest 7.9 billion barrels of oil reserves and resources remain under our seas, and 560 billion cubic metres of gas.
“On profits, the industry is set to invest billions in the development of nascent clean technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture.”[9]
Theoretically the stated reserves are equivalent to 18 years of oil consumption in the UK at 2020 levels, and fewer than eight years of gas. Government appears to view oil and gas extraction as an opportunity to develop carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies, stating that it wants “a new lease of life for the North Sea in low-carbon technologies”. Easier said than done:
“There is no doubt the main challenge to CCS [carbon capture and storage] deployment is commercial. CCS requires investment in capital-intensive long-lived assets. In addition to the capture plant, those assets include CO2 transport pipelines and geological storage resources which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to appraise, build, and develop. The service CCS provides, emissions abatement, has no or low value in most markets. Whilst capture technologies are well developed and proven, their application in most industries has been very limited which increases perceived risk. In most jurisdictions, regulations covering the geological storage of CO2 are absent, creating compliance risk. Long term liability for stored CO2 in those jurisdictions generally rests with the operator in perpetuity which can disqualify investment.”[10]
Oil giant Chevron (see ‘Jailing Steven Donziger’, The Kleptogarchy part 6) has the US$2 billion ‘Gorgon’ carbon capture and storage installation, the world’s largest, sited at the liquified natural gas plant on Barrow Island, Western Australia. Sonali Paul, reporting for Reuters, wrote that Chevron Australia had to buy carbon credits to make up the difference between its targets and the actual performance. The plan was for four million tonnes of CO2 to be buried annually, but in 2021 only 2.1 million tonnes was achieved. Scaling up is proving a problem.[11]
Storing carbon dioxide in practice is a lot harder than theory may suggest. Could a switch to hydrogen ease the global heating problem?
NEXT TIME – THE HYDROGEN RAINBOW
[1] British Energy Security Strategy policy paper from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Prime Minister’s Office, April 6th 2022. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/british-energy-security-strategy/british-energy-security-strategy, accesses April 7th 2022.
[2] Forbes.com reporting on Banking on Climate Change 2020 from Rainforest Action Network, Banktrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oilchange, Reclaim Finance and the Sierra Club. http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2020/03/Banking_on_Climate_Change_2020.pdf, accessed April 11th 2022.
[3]‘ Quantifying Risks to the Federal Budget from Climate Change’, The White House, April 4th 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2022/04/04/quantifying-risks-to-the-federal-budget-from-climate-change/, accessed April 11th 2022.
[4]‘ UK Seeks Investors for Nuclear Plant as it Eases Out China’s CGN’ by Jim Pickard and Nathalie Thomas, Financial Times, March 3rd 2022. https://www.ft.com/content/95524dfc-6503-48c7-85ad-a116bdf2c9ed, accessed May 17th 2022.
[5] See William Atkins’ absorbing article ‘On Sizewell C’ in Granta No.159, April 28th 2022. https://granta.com/on-sizewell-c/, accessed May 17th 2022.
[6] ‘The Costs of Offshore Wind Power: Blindness and Insight’ by John Constable and Professor Gordon Hughes, September 21st 2020. https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/the-costs-offshore-wind-power-blindness-and-insight/, accessed April 12th 2022. Professor Hughes is in the School of Economics, University of Edinburgh, and Dr John Constable is energy Editor, Global Warming policy Forum.
[7] About 28.1 million households, typical annual electricity usage 2,900 kWh, at 28p per kWh plus standing change and VAT.
[8] Energy efficiency section in the Energy Security Strategy. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/british-energy-security-strategy/british-energy-security-strategy, accessed April 12th 2022.
[9] Energy Security Strategy, under Oil and Gas.
[10] ‘Carbon Capture and Storage: Challenges, Enablers and Opportunities for Deployment’, July 30th 2020, Global CCS Institute. https://www.globalccsinstitute.com/news-media/insights/carbon-capture-and-storage-challenges-enablers-and-opportunities-for-deployment/, accessed April 13th 2022.
[11] ‘Chevron Says World’s Largest Carbon Capture Project has ‘A Ways to Go’ to Meet Goals’, https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/chevron-says-worlds-largest-carbon-capture-project-has-a-ways-go-meet-goals-2022-05-16/, accessed May 17th 2022.
Energy Charter Treaty with Knots: The Kleptogarchy part 17
Posted: August 27, 2022 Filed under: Energy, Politics | Tags: Energy Charter Treaty, Permanent Court of Arbitration, Vattenfall, Yukos Leave a commentEnergy Charter Treaty with Knots
In the more optimistic times after the breaking of the Berlin Wall and the parting of the Iron Curtain, the Energy Charter Treaty came into being. It’s had a low profile. The idea was to encourage international co-operation in the energy sector, and the treaty, signed in 1994, started with a plan to integrate the energy industries of the former USSR into the world energy market. Russia, the largest nation emerging from the USSR, was a signatory then, but in August 2009, before Vladimir Putin had achieved constitutional change and was prime minister (but still in charge) after his first two terms as president, Russia withdrew, a decision reiterated in 2018.
While more than 50 countries and organisations are signed up, many like Macedonia, Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus have limited presence in energy markets. Canada, China, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, the USA and Venezuela, all with substantial energy resources, are among the ‘observers’ and do not have membership.
Probably the most notorious case raised under the treaty relates to the Russian oil and gas company Yukos. In 1995 and 1996 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the boss of the Russian bank Menatap, acquired over 90% of Yukos. The stage was set for a violent struggle between Putin and Khodorkovsky, resulting in the Russian state forcing Yukos into liquidation on charges of tax evasion. The Russian state nationalised Yukos in November 2007, and Khodorkovsky was jailed in December 2010, alongside his business partner Platon Lebedev. Having secured the assets of Yukos, Putin’s government freed Khodorkovsky in December 2013 and Lebedev in January 2014. Legally, this was not the end of the matter. Following Russia’s original commitment to the Energy Charter Treaty, disputes against the Russian state could be and were opened. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague began hearing claims from the pre-nationalisation shareholders of Yukos in 2005, and in 2009 ruled that the shareholders could continue their case. Menatap’s new incarnation Group Menatap Ltd (GML) sued the Russian Government for over $100 billion, and in July 2014 the court in The Hague awarded GML and minority shareholders $50 billion in damages. Russia has never paid up, a refusal that was given succour by a Dutch court which decreed that Russia was not bound by the Energy Charter Treaty, having refused to ratify it. Four months earlier, Russia had invaded Crimea and removed the region from the jurisdiction of Ukraine. Putin was set on ‘Making Russia Great Again’.
The Yukos tale illustrates the havoc that a small number of ultra-powerful individuals can create as they try to maximise rent value for themselves, and the difficulties in the way of regulation by international treaty. Action to try and cope with other crises – including global heating, land degradation, pollution, poverty – is similarly hampered by rent seekers’ ferocious efforts to preserve their privileged status, and their levels of consumption.
The treaty itself protects fossil fuel networks by enabling companies to sue member countries which pass laws to restrict greenhouse gas emissions, the argument being that companies will have invested in their production operations and thus deserve compensation if governments order them to stop. Equal Times, a news service funded by the International Trade Union Confederation, International Labour Organization, the European Union and others, revealed in September 2020 that several such disputes were ongoing. Uniper, a German energy company which started generation from a coal and biomass plant in the Netherlands in 2016, was suing the Dutch government for its 2019 law to stop coal-fired power generation by 2030. Germany itself has opted to phase out nuclear power plants, resulting in a claim for €6.2 billion from Vattenfall, a renewable energy company owned by the Swedish state. Vattenfall operates two nuclear power stations in Germany and has a minority stake in a third. Equal Times gave several other examples of companies suing countries, creating conflicts between states’ desired climate policies and the commercial objectives of companies (even state-owned ones).[1] By autumn 2020, 131 compensation cases had been opened under the terms of the Energy Charter Treaty, two-thirds of them involving members of the European Union. Germany’s own plans to close nuclear power stations and to phase down generation from fossil fuels were shoved off course in 2022 when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to popular demand for imports of Russian gas to stop. This gas provides about 30% of Germany’s energy usage, and despite the German public’s green credentials, to prevent widespread power cuts old coal-fired power stations might have to be brought back into use. Meanwhile, Germany set about amassing strategic coal reserves.[2]
[1] ‘How the Little-Known Energy Charter Treaty is Holding Environmental Policy Hostage’ by Benjamin Hourtica, September 7th 2020, https://www.equaltimes.org/how-the-little-known-energy?lang=en#.YkQzHCjMLIU, accessed March 30th 2022.
[2] ‘Germany Reactivates Coal Power Plants Amid Russian Gas supply Threats’, by Nikolaus J Kurmayer, March 9th 2022, https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-reactivates-coal-power-plants-amid-russian-gas-supply-threats/, accessed March 30th 2022.
Emptying the Storehouse: The Kleptogarchy part 15
Posted: August 25, 2022 Filed under: Energy | Tags: Fossil fuels, Nuclear fission, Nuclear fusion, Solar radiation modification Leave a commentEmptying the Storehouse
Imagine you are shipwrecked and by good fortune your rowboat comes to rest on a deserted beach on a desert island. It’s a small island, you can walk all round it in less than two hours. You discover a streamlet of fresh water and many plants you do not recognise. There is no village, only a wooden building on stilts that, you soon discover, is a food store. “What a stroke of luck,” you think, and investigate the 300 or so ring-pull tins of fish, meat, vegetables and fruit. “At two tins a day, enough for 150 days! Surely I will see a ship close by before then.” So you get into the habit of eating the contents of two tins daily. Sadly, after 100 days there has been no glimpse of a passing ship, and only 100 tins left. You cut down to one tin a day and realise you must grow some food of your own, and fish out at sea. Not much time though, and you don’t know which plants can be eaten safely, and which are poisonous. You decide to try, one by one, tiny amounts of fruits that might be nutritious, and if there are no ill effects, to increase the quantity. A brown fruit makes you very sick, so you scrub that from the experiment. After four weeks you have decided which seeds to plant, but beware! You don’t know how long it will be before they crop. It might be years! In the meantime, you will have to rely on the plants growing naturally around you, and on the fish you catch with your homemade rod and line. You bring firewood into the rudimentary shelter you have made, so the wood can dry and you can, you hope, light a fire for cooking.
If only a ship would come to your rescue!
Fossil fuels are like a storehouse of tinned foods. Every tin used is one less on the shelf. Yet fossil fuels accounted for 83% of the world’s primary energy consumption in 2020, when the climate emergency became impossible to ignore. The split was 31% oil, 27% coal, and 25% ‘natural’ gas.
Just 17% of primary energy came from other sources – 7% from hydro-electric schemes, 6% from all other renewables, and 4% from nuclear power stations. Nuclear power from fission, long touted as a solution to energy shortages, has brought meltdown disasters, radioactive spent-fuel storage headaches, and huge demands for cooling water, without even taking into consideration the carbon footprint of building a nuclear power station. In the UK there remain plans to build new nuclear power stations (see ‘UK Cop Out, coming in a future post). Power from nuclear fusion, imagined to be less dangerous, has been talked of for decades, but the fuel, hydrogen isotopes, has to be heated to at least 100 MILLION degrees C. The core of our Sun is ‘only’ 15 million degrees C, and who would want to live close to an experimental plant seeking to heat anything to that colossal temperature? Yet local authorities and ‘partnerships’ have not been slow in coming forward to offer locations for the UK’s planned fusion reactor. A ‘long list’ of sites was published in June 2021, five in Scotland, eight in England and two in Wales.
There are as yet no working fusion reactors anywhere on Earth. The technology is unproven at scale, and the reactor would cost upwards of £2 billion to construct. The target is an energy gain of 100MW, so the building phase, before adding in operations and maintenance, would commit £20 million per megawatt, six times more than a coal-fired power station with the same energy yield. No wonder the Chinese are pressing on with their construction programme of new coal-fired power stations, to add 290GW – almost 30% — to its present capacity by 2030.
No surprise, then, that China including Hong Kong emitted 30.9% of the world’s carbon dioxide total in 2020.[1] China will be increasing emissions until at least 2030, unless some climate-related catastrophes between now and then prompt a change of the Communist Party’s collective mind. There is no immediate shortage of coal, the world having 1,074 billion tonnes[2], over 130 years’ worth at 2020’s mining rate of 8.17 billion tonnes, but there is no way all that could be burned without climate change making much of the globe, including China itself, uninhabitable. At best, parts of the world would be intermittently habitable, but most life species cannot go into a state of suspended animation for as long as it might take for habitability to return.
Given the danger of the road we are on – a slide downward towards a cliff edge – it’s hardly a surprise that governments turn to unproven, hazardous notions like nuclear fusion, hoping it will save us from falling over the cliff.
Solar radiation modification is another unproven set of technologies. The IPCC’s report in February 2022 commented:
“Solar radiation modification approaches, if they were to be implemented, introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems which are not well understood (high confidence). Solar radiation modification approaches have potential to offset warming and ameliorate some climate hazards, but substantial residual climate change or overcompensating change would occur at regional scales and seasonal timescales (high confidence).”[3]
NEXT TIME: DAMN THE DAMS
[1] BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2021, p.15: 9.968 BILLION tonnes of the global total of 32.284 billion tonnes. Only one other nation exceeded 10% of the world total, the USA with 13.8%. The UK’s emissions share was just 1%, but the data has to be treated as an under-estimate because it related solely to “consumption of oil, gas and coal for combustion related activities and natural gas flaring” according to BP’s review. https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2021-full-report.pdf, accessed February 1st 2022.
[2] BP, as above, p.46. The review was compiled by the Centre for Energy Economics Research and Policy at Heriot-Watt University.
[3] ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, February 2022, Summary for Policymakers, SPM 20 (B.5.5).
No Happy Medium: The Kleptogarchy part 14
Posted: August 24, 2022 Filed under: Economics, Energy | Tags: China, Coal emissions Leave a commentEconomic Growth and Energy Reductions?
Countries, those accidents of geography and history, differ massively in primary energy use. The average across all nations in 2020 was 71.4 gigajoules per capita, but eight of the countries listed by BP it its Statistical Review of World Energy[1] recorded more than 300 gigajoules per head. Qatar was highest with 594.2 gigajoules per person, and Singapore was close behind with 583.9 gigajoules. Six of the energy-intensive eight are major fossil fuel extractors – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Norway and Canada, as well as Qatar. The other two are Trinidad and Tobago, with energy intensive heavy industry, and the highly industrialised city state of Singapore.
The UK used 101.6 gigajoules of primary energy per capita, below the European average of 113.6 and 0.5 of a gigajoule more than China. The fairly low figure for the UK probably reflects the offshoring of industry more than deliberate cutbacks.
If we all achieved the low level of primary energy consumption in Africa apart from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and South Africa, namely 6.2 gigajoules per capita, we would be using only one-eleventh of current worldwide consumption. A relatively affluent country like the UK (despite its downward trajectory) would have to reduce to one-sixteenth of 2020’s consumption. Heavily urbanised economies could not function in such conditions of energy scarcity. Governments are still desperate to achieve economic growth, although mostly they also claim to have programmes to cut both energy use and damaging emissions.
Yet even in 2020, Covid Year 1, when economic activity slowed across the globe, carbon dioxide emissions declined only 6.0%, and were higher than in 2011. Emissions from mainland China, where Covid-19 was first identified, increased by nearly 1%, an alarming 88.8 million tonnes more. Hong Kong, recorded separately, had a fall of 28%, but even that, 26.5 million tonnes, was considerably less than China’s growth. Between 2010 and 2020 emissions from mainland China, the world’s leading polluter throughout the decade, soared 21.5%. And at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, China refused to commit to phasing out coal.
We cannot cut energy use by anything like the extent required, and continue to expect economic growth. We know that, China knows that, but on this conundrum, the most powerful voices are silent.
[1] https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2021-full-report.pdf, accessed February 1st 2022l; Primary energy consumption per capita, p.13.
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