Peak oil: the five most common misconceptions

Energy Bulletin has a post from Robert Rapier on some of the confusion surrounding peak oil - Peak oil: the five most common misconceptions.

Misconception 1: Peak Oil = Running Out of Oil

This one is surely the most common. Many articles that seek to debunk the notion of peak oil start with that premise, and then respond by highlighting other historical instances where someone influential suggested that we could be running out of oil. In fact, anyone concerned about peak oil will readily acknowledge that we are going to be producing oil for a very long time, and when we stop there is still going to be a lot of oil left in the ground.

So what then is the definition of peak oil? In its simplest form, peak oil means that just as oil production in the United States peaked in 1970 and began to decline, so shall the rest of the world. Once you get past that basic premise – one in which there is near-universal agreement once people understand that is what you mean when you say “peak oil” – there are many different opinions of exactly how events will unfold.

Misconception 2: Peak Oil Beliefs are Homogeneous

The beliefs among people who are concerned about resource depletion cover a wide span. There are those who believe that a peak is imminent, followed by a catastrophic decline. Included in this group are people who have vocally and (to this point) wrongly predicted dates and catastrophic consequences as a result of peak oil. These are the real targets of those who claim that peak oil is nonsense. What they really mean – but perhaps don’t say due to misconceptions about peak oil beliefs – is that the idea of imminent, catastrophic decline is nonsense. But that isn’t the same thing as arguing that peak oil is nonsense.

But there are also people who believe peak oil will inevitably lead to cleaner environments, closer communities, and healthier food. Then there are those who believe that peak oil will lead to a dirtier environment as we become more desperate for energy and turn to more oil sands and coal to replace declining oil supplies. There are people who believe peak oil will be a minor inconvenience because there are plenty of sources capable of replacing oil. And there are those who believe certain elements of all of the above.

Misconception 3: Peak Oil is a Theory

It is also common among those writing articles seeking to debunk peak oil to refer to the “peak oil theory.” As in the previous example, this paints with a very broad brush. When someone describes peak oil as a theory, what they are really referring to is the belief that a production peak is both imminent and the results promise to be catastrophic. I doubt that’s the majority view, and I would estimate that the percentage of people holding that view has declined over the past five years as some of the catastrophic scenarios failed to materialize on schedule. But peak oil itself is an observation, not a theory.

Misconception 4: Peak Oil was Dreamed Up By Big Oil to Inflate Prices

In fact, most of the major oil companies argue that oil production will not decline for decades. This has been the public view of ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute. But within oil companies, there have been some executives who have publicly expressed concern that oil production could not grow to the levels projected by various agencies. I am unaware that this is the official position of any major oil company, but I would submit that the reason some executives expressed concern is because they are concerned.

Misconception 5: Peak Oil is Denied by Oil Companies Worried about Alternatives.

This view is the opposite of the previous misconception. The idea is that if oil companies acknowledge peak oil, governments will redouble their efforts to develop alternative fuels, hastening the end of Big Oil. There are two flaws with this reasoning. First, from my view inside the oil industry, most people in the industry deny peak oil for the simple reason that they have either never given it much thought, or subscribe to one of the misconceptions. I frequently had conversations with people about peak oil in which the response was “They have been saying that we are running out of oil my entire life.”

The second flaw in this argument is that I have never seen anyone in the oil industry express anything resembling worry over the alternative energy industry. They may be annoyed at mandates that force them to do something they don’t want to do (like blend ethanol) but then they can respond by getting into the business themselves. And in fact, I have yet to see an alternative energy scheme that Big Oil wasn’t already working on: Algae, cellulosic ethanol, butanol, solar – oil companies have major efforts in every one these areas (and have been working on them for years). It is just that in most cases, they don’t publicize and hype those efforts because they aren’t out trying to raise funds. It is just a part of the basic research that oil companies do. The scientists and engineers that work at oil companies aren’t just sitting around basking in the final days of the age of oil – a very common misconception. They are thinking about what comes next, and investing to make sure that when it does come, the oil companies are in the position to provide it and profit from it.

Conclusions

So I think as far as peak oil goes, most of us can agree that just as it did in the U.S. in 1970, global oil production will inevitably decline. The points of contention are the timing, the steepness of the decline, the impact on the global economy, and the ability of other energy sources to fill the supply gap. Some believe it will be a non-event, and some people believe it will be catastrophic.

What do I believe? I think of peak oil as supply struggling to keep up with demand, which will keep prices at recession-inducing levels. I think that we will probably eek out a bit more global production, but I will be surprised if the world gets past 90 million barrels per day. I believe that shale gas and oil sands production will continue to rise, and global carbon emissions will continue their upward march.

I still believe in the Peak Lite scenario; in fact I think that view has been validated. I also believe that my view on the Long Recession is supported by the state of the economy as well as the continued strength in oil prices. As far as the consequences of peak oil, I believe that what we are seeing now with respect to the economy is a prelude to what we will see for the next few years. I expect a slow squeeze on western economies as developing countries continue to raise their standards of living – keeping fairly constant upward pressure on oil prices. I believe we have entered the long recession, but if the economy shows major strength within the next couple of years I will concede that at least my timing was too early.

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The Declines Incline

SP at TOD ANZ has a post linking to an article from Sceptical Science with a nice graphic showing how a global temperature decline, or series thereof, is confected from the obvious long term trend - The Declines Incline.

Right now we're in the midst of a period where most short-term effects are acting in the cooling direction, dampening global warming. Many climate "skeptics" are trying to capitalize on this dampening, trying to argue that this time global warming has stopped, even though it didn't stop after the global warming "pauses" in 1973 to 1980, 1980 to 1988, 1988 to 1995, 1995 to 2001, or 1998 to 2005 (Figure 1).

As Figure 1 shows, over the last 37 years one can identify overlapping short windows of time when climate "skeptics" could have argued (and often did, i.e. here and here and here) that global warming had stopped. And yet over the entire period question containing these six cooling trends, the underlying trend is one of rapid global warming (0.27°C per decade, according to the new Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature [BEST] dataset). And while the global warming trend spans many decades, the longest cooling trend over this period is 10 years, which proves that each was caused by short-term noise dampening the long-term trend.

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Italy’s Monti appointment a concession to bewilderment

I find myself somewhat bemused by the way democracy has simply been brushed aside in Greece and Italy with EU technocrats simply installed as the new Prime Ministers. Crikey's Guy Rundle casts a cynical eye over the proceedings, noting that conspiracy theorists couldn't have invented a more caricatured representative of the New World Order if they'd tried (Cryptogon - and no doubt all of the others - has already noted this - Chairman of the European Branch of the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Member Becomes Leader of Italy) - Italy’s Monti appointment a concession to bewilderment.

Silvio Berlusconi has departed as prime minister of Italy. After 17 years dominating Italian politics, he was effectively edged out by President Giorgio Napolitano, a former Communist, and will be replaced by Mario Monti, a former European Commissioner. Crowds gathered outside Parliament were quoted as saying that they wouldn’t believe he was gone until they saw it for themselves. They were right. Berlo was barely out of the gates before making a statement that he would be around politics for years to come.

Monti is a lifelong bureaucrat. He’s been appointed senator for life, to make him eligible for the post of Prime Minister. In Greece, new Prime Minister Lucas Papademos is an ex-ECB deputy head, and won’t go into Parliament at all — the Greek constitution makes no explicit demand that the PM be an MP. Their dual appointment has stabilised Europe and the eurozone — for the moment. But it has also undermined the European project, by laying bare its power relations.

Some have been describing what has happened in Greece and Italy as a coup. But it is rather the opposite — a coup occurs as a response to a strong oppositional force. What has happened in southern Europe has been a total collapse of legitimacy, in the absence of a clear alternative and an opposition. In Greece, the majority of the population want to remain in the EU and the euro, but they don’t want to accept the October 26 austerity agreement that comes with it. The forcing out of Papandreou and the appointment of Papademos has simply deferred the handling of that contradiction, allowing for the €8 billion payment that will forestall a pre-Christmas default.

Italy lacked even the organised and forceful opposition of Greece, and the appointment of Monti was simply a concession to bewilderment on all sides. The anti-Berlusconi movement, which had taken up the colour mauve, for reasons best known to itself, tended to be civic and abstract in its concerns and rhetoric. Focused on Berlusconi and co’s mammoth corruption, it had been overtaken by the sudden shift in Italy’s fortunes and prospects, as dictated by the sudden, and contrived, jump in 10-year bond yields.

In Greece, the Communists can draw on an uninterrupted militancy and a long-standing refusal of consent to notions of parliamentary democracy. In Italy, the Left has long since consented to the parliamentary process that Berlusconi and his assets and allies in the media and the establishment, have wrapped around their little finger. The accession of Berlusconi in the ’90s, with parties more like football teams — Forza Italia — drawn from a mix of technocrats, ex-fascists, and “radish” communists (red on the outside, white — i.e. conservative — within) — was a group whose interests never coincided.

Some wanted simply to keep the Left out, others to push forward modernisation perpetually stalled under the pre-1994 party system, and others just wanted to make money. Political determination was supplied by the Northern League, with its obsessive anti-immigrant politics, its petit-bourgeois resentments, and its celebration of an invented country — Padania — cobbled up because the separate northern movements, of Lombardy, Piedmont, etc, lacked critical mass unless united.

The weakness of the Right was a direct product of the Left it defined itself against, which had failed to understand how Italy had changed politically and culturally, after the end of the Cold War, and the final collapse of Communism. Pundits writing obituaries of the Berlusconi era will focus on the persona he projected, of the one who gets away with it, and everyone, Italian commentators included, will exaggerate its importance. True, there was very little that could shift it, even when the stories stopped being about tax evasion and started to be about underage prostitutes.

Yet his success had far more to do with the ability of his political machine to successively reshape the electoral rules, so that Parliament could be stuffed with a series of faceless cronies. In a generation, Italy had gone from being a country where politics was lethal on a grand scale, to one wholly inverted, where a prime minister could send to the European Parliament a list of MEPs consisting almost entirely of exotic dancers. weather girls and the like, a two-decade dell’arte recapitulation of the country’s post-war trauma.

The political vacuum created by a top-down Europe made that possible, and the same top-down Europe brought it to an end when required. Monti is an ex European commissioner, Bilderberg member, Trilateral member, a consultant to Goldman Sachs and Coca-Cola among others. Had he not existed, it would have been necessary for 9/11 truthers to invent him. Yet the very fact that he and Papademos can step so easily into their appointed roles is clear evidence that the European political crisis began long before they got the call.

In the last analysis this crisis was not an economic one, it was political — and a good thing too. Brought on by the refusal of Greeks to pay with a blank cheque for a crisis largely talked up by bond traders, it wouldn’t have happened had the Greeks simply knuckled under, as did Ireland. That would suggest that it is far from over — not least because these periodic crises have become so lucrative for the money markets. With Italy squared away, it would be surprising if Portugal was not suddenly, in the days ahead, a place about which something must be done. And then Spain. And then, God knows.

Rundle has a follow up looking at the mood on the ground in Athens - Mogadishu with spanakopita, and the mood is dangerous.

Europe, having narrowly avoided crisis with the departure of Silvio Berlusconi, appears to have been plunged into it again, when Greece — or shift-F1 on the keyboard as I like to call that sentence —  again backtracked on its commitment to usher through the full package of October 26 austerity measures.

With new Prime Minister Lucas Papademos addressing Parliament last night — a Parliament of which he is not a member — and inaugurating a two-day debate leading to a vote of confidence on Wednesday, the momentary consensus that made the new government possible has already been put on hold.

New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras, having accepted the terms of the deal, is now making objections both to the full implementation of the austerity package, and also to a further demand by commissioner Olli Rehn, that a commitment to the deal be signed by not merely the PM and President, but also major party leaders and the head of the Greek state bank.

The letter is clearly of no legal standing, and Samaras insists that it’s a deeply humiliating bit of political theatre. It is, but like the proverbial million dollar proposition, objections on grounds of dignity seem a bit beside the point. We’ve already established what kind of girl Greece is; now we’re just haggling about the price. ...

As the three-party government — which Samaras, bizarrely, suggests New Democracy is not a part of — finalises a more detailed program, the news has come that unemployment has officially hit 18.75% — and is almost certainly closer to 25%.

Unemployment benefits — a maximum of €115 a week — run out after a year, and usually before, and the country is now seeing a slow accumulation of social fraying following on from economic collapse.

Athens, a scruffy but lively city, has been, for the past two years, portrayed as Mogadishu with spanakopita in a half a hundred profiles. Now, the prophecy is starting to come true. Even at the centre, building proches and colonnades are filling with homeless, and at night, the police presence is massive.

Crime is slowly but remorselessly on the rise. And while it is always dangerous to generalise on such matters, one could also say that the mood on the street has changed decisively. There is a dourness here, in the shops and streets, beyond the usual east European style of hospitality.

The mood spells danger for both major parties. Should they go to the election with no great change in their image, they will both lose out, but New Democracy will lose out more. PASOK will get some credit for tackling the crisis — from those who are still willing to vote for either major party, or at all.

Samaras is also facing opposition from within New Democracy — with one veteran MP arguing that the party is being infiltrated by far-Right figures betraying the party’s original vision, under Samaras’s watch — just as Papandreou is also facing a threat to his party leadership.

The result is that Greece is repeating the farcical process which attended the last days of Papandreou – the country is heading for a vote of confidence which will be won, but with no actual confidence being expressed in the lead-up to it.

The vote is timed for the evening of November 16, on the eve of Polytechnic Day, which will have its traditional large Left rally to commemorate the fight against the junta. The march usually ends at the door of the US embassy, to make clear where the real power lay.

Always rambunctious, this year it promises to be something more — as the old law of university sanctuary — by which the police could not go on campus grounds — has been removed. Frequently a running battle, this time it promises to be more of a pitched one.

By that time, Papademos won’t even be in the country. He’ll be in Brussels, a location presumably based on the idea that there is no point even pretending that he is the choice of the Greek people. Removing himself to the capital of Europe removes one component of any symbolic challenge, such as another storming of Parliament.

To say that this is far from the north European idea of smooth technocratic government is an understatement. But it is simply a reflection of the key fact underlying the whole process — that there is something weird about the whole set-up, a government that has the people’s consent, gauged only by opinion polls, gaining confidence by a vote from parties that have none, to implement a deal the people would reject if they could. And the health of the world economy still hinges on it. New democracy you could call it …

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Lab-Grown Meats Face Long Road to Supermarket

Wired has a look at this recent Reuters report on in-vitro meat" (a topic I've covered previously - Lab-Grown Meats Face Long Road to Supermarket.

On Friday, Reuters ran a story about a Dutch scientist who is attempting to make the first synthetic animal meat, starting with nothing more than stem cells. In it, the reporter focused on some of the grim numbers that make our current trajectory of livestock-based agriculture unsustainable, and suggested that the economics of meat from a tissue culture dish would eventually cause it to win out. But that eventually might be a long way away, as the first burger-sized samples of artificial meat are estimated to cost about a quarter of a million euros.

Can artificial meat’s price eventually come down? Absolutely. But there are a lot of technical hurdles that will need to be cleared out of the way first, and some of them might not be all that easy to clear.
Reuters’ story doesn’t spend much time on the current costs, but goes on at length about a somewhat related issue: the taste. Right now, the artificial meat consists of little more than muscle tissue grown from stem cells. An actual piece of meat is substantially more complex, as the muscle fibers have integrated into a coherent tissue and built up through use. Associated tissues, like blood and fat, also contribute to taste, appearance, and texture.

It might be possible to overcome these hurdles. Stem cells for blood and fat have been identified, and culturing them and getting them to differentiate into mature tissues is probably not much more complex than getting muscle fibers to grow in a dish. But this comes back to cost: getting any cells to grow into mature tissues is ferociously expensive, and adding additional cell types will increase the complexity and cost.

Show me the money

Our bodies expend lots of energy creating an environment in which a variety of cell types can flourish. Tissues are bathed in appropriate combinations of fuel, salts, minerals, hormones, and signaling molecules. They’re in contact with neighbors and various beds of proteins that the neighboring cells create. Without all of this extensive support, most cells get very sick very quickly.

Recreating this sort of environment is really difficult. Some things, like reasonable concentrations of salts, are easy. Others, like the right mix of growth factors, is phenomenally challenging — so challenging, in fact, that the first work with stem cells didn’t even bother. The first stem cells were cultivated on a layer of feeder cells that provided them the right kind of surface to grow on. Instead of trying to get the right mixture of proteins in the growth medium, researchers turned to a natural source: the serum of blood obtained during the slaughter of livestock.

Let that sink in: initial efforts at creating artificial meat would have had to rely on the agricultural system it was intended to replace.

Even then, the serum wasn’t enough for stem cells, and the medium had to be spiked with a cocktail of growth factors purified from other sources. Many of those growth factors are purified form vertebrate cells, probably ones grown in medium that uses (you guessed it) serum.

Over time, experience and experimentation has gotten rid of a lot of these requirements. Feeder cells are a thing of the past and we’ve got a much clearer sense of which growth factors help keep which cell types growing happily. However, the need for serum has been a difficult one to shake. A paper from last year managed to get one type of cell growing without serum, but called the result “unique.” Just this year, however, we’ve managed the same trick with adipose stem cells, which are a bit closer to what we’d need to incorporate into meat.

That doesn’t mean things are cheap, however. The serum-free medium that helps these stem cells grow costs about $250 for a half-liter; the company that sells it estimates you’ll need nine liters to expand out a stem cell population to the point where it’s possible to do something with it. And that still doesn’t get into the cost of the various growth factors that are necessary for most cell types to grow in culture.

Can we overcome more of these hurdles and bring the cost down so that it’s competitive with current agriculture? Maybe, but it’s not a sure thing.

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Energy for the 99 Percent

The Center For American Progress has a look at the subsidies directed to the fossil fuel industry in the US and possible alternative futures - Energy for the 99 Percent.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are focusing Americans’ attention on the fact that power is increasingly consolidated into the hands of very few individuals and corporations. This is especially true in the energy sector. Two weeks ago the country’s five largest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—released their third-quarter profits and once again revealed that high gas prices are bad for consumers but great for Big Oil, which pulled in a staggering $101 billion in profits during the first nine months of 2011.

Today Washington politicians publicly bicker over renewable energy credit programs that will only cost taxpayers $2.5 billion while the oil-and-gas industry quietly pulls in $7 billion in annual subsidies. But even that is not enough for Big Oil. These companies are now lobbying hard for even more federal government support, for even more of the public’s waters and lands to be opened up for drilling rigs or pipelines, and for even fewer health and safety standards to govern those projects.

At the same time, those of us who pay the taxes that subsidize Big Oil—call us the 99 percent, though in reality we’re more like the 99.99 percent—must continue paying out precious dollars at the pump and must suffer from the ill-health effects of fossil-fuel pollution because we have very little choice in how we power, or fuel, our lives.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We have the power to choose a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future.

What could that future look like? Fast forward to America in 2030. Picture rolling up to the gas pump and having a choice of a petroleum product or a bio-based one, maybe from algae or switchgrass—or instead just plugging your electric or hybrid vehicle into the fast-charging electrical outlet located nearby. In 2030 conventional cars and light trucks will average at least 54.5 miles per gallon, saving our nation the expense of importing 2.2 million barrels of oil per day.

Picture an America where you don’t have to drive at all because buses, trains, and light rail systems are convenient and accessible. Bike lanes are no longer a luxury of certain coastal cities but are the norm along heavily trafficked commuter corridors. And cities are designed to allow workers to live much closer to their jobs, avoiding long commutes altogether.

Picture an America where at least half of our electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind, solar, wave, and geothermal. Sound impossible? It’s not. Other countries, especially in Europe, are already on track to get there. Germany has set a goal of 45 percent renewable energy by 2030 and Denmark is hoping to be completely fossil-fuel free by then.

In 2030 Americans could have the choice of whether to buy power from big utility producers or instead to install household or community-scale energy systems themselves—systems that allow excess power to be sold back into the grid, making the consumers the owners of America’s energy system. We could have a smarter grid, where home appliances and even plug-in electric cars could “talk back” to power distribution centers, which would distribute power more efficiently and effectively across the entire system and avoid costly blackouts. We could see homes built and renovated to efficiency standards that allow consumers to use far less electricity, for far less money, than they do today.

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Coal Seam Gas and The Great Artesian Basin

The SMH says "Protecting the water wealth of the Great Artesian Basin is the latest challenge for the coal seam gas industry" - Grappling with science and sceptics.

Beneath the bone-dry surface of inland Australia, west of the Great Dividing Range, a vast body of water is slowly flowing towards the sea.

If the Great Artesian Basin could somehow be sucked up from underground and put in one place, it would form a water cube of 40 kilometres, holding more than 100,000 times as much water as Sydney Harbour.

As it is, the water is squashed between thick layers of sandstone into an interlinked network of aquifers that stretch from Dubbo in NSW, through most of Queensland and parts of the Northern Territory and South Australia. It ''flows'' through pores in the rock at the glacial pace of a few metres per year.

The basin has existed in its current form for millions of years, but one of the biggest tests to its existence will come in the next decade. Beneath the layers of water lie some of the world's most extensive coal seams. Just as the sandstone aquifers contain water, so the coal seams contain methane.

To get the methane to the surface so it can be burned as a fuel, tens of thousands of shafts, most of them only about 10 centimetres wide, will be threaded through the aquifer layers. In most cases, water, sand and chemicals will then be forced down the shafts at high pressure, to fracture the coal seams and get to the gas. Large amounts of underground water will also have to be pumped out. After a few years, the wells will have to be sealed so that no gas or water leaks out, ever.

This will all have to be done without turning the fragile Great Artesian Basin into a continent-sized pin cushion.

It is probably one of the greatest engineering challenges undertaken in Australia, and the companies planning the operation exude confidence that the technical problems can be overcome. About $50 billion in investment, not to mention the long-term integrity of Australia's groundwater, is riding on them being right. Their optimism rests on several decades of collective experience in drilling through and around aquifers, mostly without known adverse effects. For the past five years, an elite corps of hydrologists, geologists and engineers, many of them Australian but with a large international contingent drawn here by the mining boom, has been grappling with the specific problems posed by drilling through the basin without wrecking it and managing the water that will be pumped out.

Philippa Kassianos, the leader of the water studies section at the resources company Santos, estimated this week that its gas drilling project on the eastern edge of the basin would bring 344 billion litres of water to the surface over the next 30 years, about one-tenth of the amount of water needed to restore the health of the Murray-Darling river system.

Most of it would be brackish and unsuitable for agriculture, but the company is planning to build water treatment plants that mean 90 per cent of the water can be sold to farmers or injected back underground. The remaining 34 billion litres of salty brine will stay on the surface in storage ponds until a use can be found for it. The process is not new - Santos has been extracting coal seam gas for 15 years in Queensland - but the scale is unprecedented. ''Santos needs to be as good at handling CSG water as we are at handling gas,'' Kassianos said.

The coal seam gas industry as a whole could extract 300 billion litres per year over the next 25 years, most of it from the Great Artesian Basin, according to federal government estimates. As farmers are grappling to do more with less and adapt to a more stringent licensing system, the water being sucked up from the basin as a by-product of coal seam gas extraction will see the total volume brought to the surface rise by 60 per cent.

Queensland's Department of Environment and Resource Management is the main agency on the spot, and it has issued a flurry of edicts designed to curb some of the more cavalier elements of the gas industry, including a ban on some fracking chemicals and tighter drilling regulations.

It is completing a detailed study of the expected impacts of the new gas fields on the eastern artesian basin, but has already expressed its desire for as much water as possible to be injected back into underground aquifers. ''It's a period of epic growth across the industry,'' said the department's director-general, Jim Reeves. ''We, as a department, are dealing with changes we have not faced before.''

Even before drilling on a large scale is under way, there have been mistakes and some isolated pollution incidents. In 2009, near Dalby, a well operated by the Queensland Gas Company undergoing hydraulic fracturing ''unintentionally provided a route for water in the aquifer'', the company said. Upwards of 100 litres of fracking fluid mingled with underground water, but this was not reported to authorities for 13 months. ''QGC believes the risk to human health or to water supply, or to both, have been negligible,'' the company said.

But the real impact on the basin is likely to come from the cumulative, long-term effects of large-scale drilling and pumping. The National Water Commission says the potential water impacts of the coal seam gas boom are not well understood, but are likely to have adverse effects on other water users.

''Extracting large volumes of low-quality water will impact on connected surface and groundwater systems, some of which may already be fully or over-allocated, including the Great Artesian Basin and Murray-Darling Basin,'' its latest advice on the matter says.

Drilling of the 40,000 planned wells could have a series of consequences, it says. These include changing pressures in underground aquifers so that potable water mingles with unusable water, fouling bores, reduced flows in rivers and land could subside ''over large areas, affecting surface water systems, ecosystems, irrigation and grazing lands.''

The water commission, a government agency, is reluctant to be seen as partisan in the coal seam gas debate, but last month it expressed doubt about the long-term effects of the gas boom.

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IEA World Energy Outlook: “If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re heading”

SP at TOD ANZ has a look at the latest IEA report - “If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re heading”.

That is the prominent quote headlining the English language executive summary of the World Energy Outlook Report of the International Energy Agency released Wednesday.

The following are selected passages from the projections made by the IEA. Bolding is as in the original, underlining and [text ] added.

There are few signs that the urgently needed change in direction in global energy trends is underway. Although the recovery in the world economy since 2009 has been uneven, and future economic prospects remain uncertain, global primary energy demand rebounded by a remarkable 5% in 2010, pushing CO2 emissions to a new high. Subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption of fossil fuels jumped to over $400 billion.
…
Despite the priority in many countries to increase energy efficiency, global energy intensity worsened for the second straight year. Against this unpromising background, events such as those at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the turmoil in parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have cast doubts on the reliability of energy supply, while concerns about sovereign financial integrity have shifted the focus of government attention away from energy policy and limited their means of policy intervention, boding ill for agreed global climate change objectives.

The assumptions of a global population that increases by 1.7 billion people and 3.5% annual average growth in the global economy generate ever-higher demand for energy
services and mobility. A lower rate of global GDP growth in the short-term than assumed in this Outlook would make only a marginal difference to longer-term trends.

The age of fossil fuels is far from over, but their dominance declines. Demand for all fuels rises, but the share of fossil fuels in global primary energy consumption falls slightly from 81% in 2010 to 75% in 2035; natural gas is the only fossil fuel to increase its share in the global mix over the period to 2035. In the power sector, renewable energy technoogies, led by hydro-power and wind, account for half of the new capacity installed to meet growing demand.

We cannot afford to delay further action to tackle climate change if the long-term target of limiting the global average temperature increase to 2°C, as analysed in the 450 Scenario, is to be achieved at reasonable cost. In the New Policies Scenario, the world is on a trajectory that results in a level of emissions consistent with a long-term average temperature increase of more than 3.5°C. Without these new policies, we are on an even more dangerous track, for a temperature increase of 6°C or more.

Four-fifths of the total energy-related CO2 emissions permissible by 2035 in the 450 Scenario are already “locked-in” by our existing capital stock (power plants,  buildings, factories, etc.). If stringent new action is not forthcoming by 2017, the energy-related infrastructure then in place will generate all the CO2 emissions allowed in the 450 Scenario up to 2035, leaving no room for additional power plants, factories and other infrastructure unless they are zero-carbon…  Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment avoided in the power sector before 2020 an additional $4.3 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.

In the 450 Scenario, we need to achieve an even higher pace of change, with efficiency improvements accounting for half of the additional reduction in emissions. The most important contribution to reaching energy security and climate goals comes from the energy that we do not consume.

Rising transport demand and upstream costs reconfirm the end of cheap oil. All of the net increase in oil demand comes from the transport sector in emerging economies, as economic growth pushes up demand for personal mobility and freight.

Four-fifths of oil consumed in non-OECD Asia comes from imports in 2035, compared with just over half in 2010. Globally, reliance grows on a relatively small number of producers, mainly in the MENA region, with oil shipped along vulnerable supply

Coal has met almost half of the increase in global energy demand over the last decade. Whether this trend alters and how quickly is among the most important questions for the future of the global energy economy. Maintaining current policies would see coal use rise by a further 65% by 2035, overtaking oil as the largest fuel in the global energy mix.

China’s consumption of coal is almost half of global demand and its Five-Year Plan for 2011 to 2015, which aims to reduce the energy and carbon intensity of the economy, will be a determining factor for world coal markets. China’s emergence as a net coal importer in 2009 led to rising prices and new investment in exporting countries, including Australia, Indonesia, Russia and Mongolia.

India’s coal use doubles in the New Policies Scenario, so that India displaces the United States as the world’s second-largest coal consumer and becomes the largest coal importer in the 2020s.

If the average efficiency of all coal-fired power plants were to be five percentage points higher than in the New Policies Scenario in 2035 … CO2 emissions from the power sector [would be lower] by 8%

…CCS plays a role only towards the end of the projection period…

…If CCS is not [or can not be] widely deployed in the 2020s, an extraordinary burden would rest on other low-carbon technologies…

 For further detail go to the website. There is a 6 page factsheet ...

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