rss feedWhoopee for Greenland
There is a lot excitement at the moment about the fact that Greenland seems to be in the money, or, to be more precise, in the oil. Exploratory wells around this vast land mass which is largely occupied by nothing suggest that the 60,000 human inhabitants will soon be the beneficiaries of untold oil wealth. Recent discoveries indicate the presence of a field containing, wait for it, 20 billion barrels. Now that really is something. It’s enough to power the world for about eight months. End of excitement. To be fair, the U.S. Government Geological Survey has assessed the total reserves at 90 billion barrels but at the moment there seems to be precious little sign of such riches being turned up.
Gloomy types point out that it is global warming that has made this oil accessible and has incidentally, recently allowed the Greenlanders to grow such exotica as potatoes and carrots. Finding more oil is not therefore, a step in the right direction, particularly as the Greenland glacial cover is melting at a hitherto unprecedented rate. The melting of the Arctic ice sheet is bad for all sorts of reasons but it will not raise sea levels. If the ice cubes melt in your gin and tonic, the drink doesn’t spill over the top of the glass. The Greenland ice is however on land. When it melts we really will see catastrophic rises in water levels.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world the oil price is hovering around the $70 to $80 a barrel mark. This is important because at around $90 a barrel it becomes economically viable to extract the stuff from oil tar in deposits in Canada and elsewhere in the more beautiful and fragile parts of the world.
Recently the British government has, if newspaper reports are to be believed, been taking the idea of oil depletion seriously. The Wickes report which, two years ago, set out government views and policy on energy made much of the security of supply provided by the oil tar resources. The reality is that they will not provide that security; mostly because of something known by its acronym, ERoEI, that is, Energy Return on Energy Invested.
What it boils down to is this. In the early days of oil exploration 100 barrels of oil were produced from the equivalent in energy terms of I barrel. The ERoEI was 100/1. Today that margin has been eroded but the big conventional fields still produce a good net gain of oil produced over energy put into the production process.
The Tar sands in Alberta produce oil at a cost in energy terms which is greater that the energy value of the oil which is produced. That is why its production is not viable until the oil price reaches around the $90 point. Fortunately, there is a lot of gas in the area which can be used to process the oil tar which is mined there. Without this free gas the oil tar would not be viable.
Other popular choices for oil replacement suffer from the same problem. I read recently an article by the rather splendid Jeremy Clarkson extolling the future of hydrogen as a fuel for cars. Great stuff hydrogen, clean and efficient but it is not fuel. A fuel like oil or coal can be sucked or dug up and will produce energy. Hydrogen by contrast, has to be produced by a process that uses electrical energy. It is in effect a kind of chemical battery. Moreover, because of the process described by the second law of thermodynamics takes more energy to produce than it actually releases.
The same is true in varying degrees of all the oil alternatives for transport use. So if we are to convert all our cars, trucks, tractors, motorcycles and war-machines to another energy source we shall need a good supply of electricity. The next question is; how much energy is represented by all that oil we use?
Let’s think small.
There are 159 litres of oil in a barrel of oil. A litre of petrol is produced from about 1.4 litres of oil and other chemicals. So a barrel of oil which today costs around $80 yields about 115 litres of petrol. These are not exact figures but they are good enough for the present purpose.
A litre of petrol provides the equivalent of 10KWatts of energy for one hour.
So, what the hell does that mean?
It means this.
Go to your gym and get on a running or rowing machine. Look at the digital counter that shows you the energy level you are exercising at in Watts. If you are fit and you exercise hard you will be able to reach 100 Watts. Perhaps, you could keep that up for a few minutes. Were you very fit you would be able to go on at that rate for a quarter of an hour or so. Try it.
If you continued exercising at that rate for 100 hours, that is, four days and nights, you would burn the equivalent of the amount of energy contained in a litre of petrol. How much would you have to pay someone or more likely, a team of people, to pedal or row for four days at the rate of 100 Watts?
A litre of petrol costs around one pound twenty – that is less than a pint of beer. Not even your Polish plumber could beat that price for four days and nights of super-hard work.
To power all the transport that currently runs on oil we are going to have to produce a lot of energy. It won’t be the same amount as we put in our petrol tank because only about 30% of motor fuel is used to propel a vehicle, the rest is wasted in creating heat, but it is still a lot of energy. We have a looming energy gap even before we factor in this additional need. Things are going to get very difficult in the next few years unless we change radically the profile of our society.
One thing is certain, as oil gets more and more expensive we will use oil powered transport less and less. With a little foresight we will plan ahead and start supplying our food and other needs, where possible, from local sources. We will travel less but perhaps, the time that we hitherto spent in leisure travel on planes and in cars will be used in more creative pursuits. The ability that we have to spend so much time travelling is a huge waste of energy both the planet’s and ours.
Robert Urquhart Collins
