Vocal Voices

A number so large it is hard to imagine, yet that is thought to be how many barrels of oil there are under the South of England. Only 15 billion of those are thought to be available with today's technology, but come ten years time, who knows.

Say goodbye to the South Downs and New Forrest and say hello to a nodding donkey at the end of every street, Horsham and Winchester refineries and Worthing oil terminal. Sit with your sarnies and flask on the beach at Bognor and watch the tankers drift past. Loverly jubbly.

Oh well. If it does yield as much oil as they say, most people will think,
"How wonderful". and the world will roll on towards the day when the
human race will finally reach the point when it faces the end of life as
we now know it. What a depressing prospect.

Who would have thought, when the internal combustion engine - [or
as Churchill once said, "the infernal combustion engine"], was invented,
that it would lead one day to the ultimate destruction of mankind?

Aggers the internal combustion engine only altered the pace. We have been set on this path since the first steam engine. Whilst human automation has been going for hundreds (or more), of years, with wind and water mills, the Newcomen steam engine replaced a method of working which is older than the Romans. Namely the mine which it was placed in used a herd of 450 or so horses, that ran the water pumps, with one steam engine. Whilst wind and water were viable power sources in some respects, steam brought the power to the exact place needed for as long as we burned coal to produce it. The Newcommen engine was perfect, it ran the pumps for a coal mine, so the running cost was minimal.

There is no reason why the human race could not have taken the advances of steam, oil and electricity and produced a clean running infrastructure which does not damage our liveable habitat. So far as we know every species which has inhabited the planet in the last billion or so years has been subject to the changes of the climate, they have not cultivated in the way we do so they have simply died out when the climate has changed. That is not so today.

It has been said and I fully agree, that oil is too precious to burn. Everything we make today contains oil products. The keyboard I am typing on now would be extremely different if we had no oil left. Lubrication is another field, how good would those infernal combustion engines be if we had no oil to lubricate them, or all the other things we use oil to lubricate. Yet we burn it as if it will go on forever with no regard to what it will do to our society when it finally ends. Just like we hunted the whales to near extinction for the whale oil.

I must admit I find the rapacious attitude of those who provide it and those who perpetuate it, to be rather short sighted. But as peak oil (half of the possible reserves consumed), is still around 20 years away, I doubt anyone will do anything about it. Perhaps they might concern themselves a touch more if they thought that the remaining oil needs to serve our species for the next few billion years. Well either that or we have to consume extreme levels of energy to make oil artificially.

Back to the oil field. I note WM says 15bn (today). In the article I read, it said that we had recovered 45bn barrels of oil from the North sea to date with about 25bn left. In this case, with payback for advances of recovery and extraction techniques being so high, I expect a few jumps in that field which would probably mean we recover more like 25%-35% as a minimum.

Given how North Sea oil turned around the economy of the UK in the 80's I expect that there will be a very serious effort made to ensure this extraction happens. Also I would expect further testing and drilling all over the UK to see just how much Oil we do have under the ground. In energy Britain is rather rich, given that we also have about 300 years of coal reserves at 1970's level of consumption.

I'm not sure about the nodding donkeys or the ships, I would predict a few larger structures for the pumping stations and also some rather larger rigs in the first place to do the horizontal drilling. The extraction is quite a lot smaller. I would also expect pipelines for the pumping of oil rather than shipping.

Probably our environmentalists would want the extraction pumps to be enclosed or even underground.

Honestly they could probably extract it with very little visibility from the public. Once it is set up it will just pump.... Given the obvious benefits in energy security and profit, we can't expect anything other than extraction to be carried out.

The only slightly more hopeful message to all of this is that the oil is so deep that it is unlikely to mix with ground water and cause pollution to the water supply. Even with hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Isn't it funny how we can make gas and oil pipeline backbones for our country but we can't do the same with water. Leading to constant summer water issues. It's a funny old wold we live in. We don't need oil to live from day to day...

You make some relevant points, Suff.

There are so many considerations to this subject that it seems likely that
agreement on our future policy regarding oil will never be forthcoming.

What a pity we can't time travel into the future.

My reference to nodding donkeys and tankers in the Channel was TIC and a bit of a reference to it "being grim up north" when every village had a pit compared to the beauty of the South Down and New Forrest where there will be some disruption.

Mining technology has come on apace since the UK gave up on coal, and so has oil extraction. As the years go by I expect 33% to be a minimum figure rather than the maximum.

My big worries are manifold. One is not so much that we will try to get it all, but that we will burn most of it. We will not use the time it takes, or the money it provides, to give us breathing space to develop alternative, and highly efficient, renewable energies. We will bathe in the warm glow of our new-found energy security while the planet's population grows by another two billion and in a few decades we will be where we are today, but with no reserves left.

Workingman wrote:My big worries are manifold. One is not so much that we will try to get it all, but that we will burn most of it. We will not use the time it takes, or the money it provides, to give us breathing space to develop alternative, and highly efficient, renewable energies. We will bathe in the warm glow of our new-found energy security while the planet's population grows by another two billion and in a few decades we will be where we are today, but with no reserves left.

Very true. All the political parties in this country have been guilty of short termism, of not looking to the future.

But if the oil is there it will be coming out of the ground sooner or later, there's nothing more certain.

Yes I missed that WM, the "mills and the pits" are a constant feature of the Midlands and the "beauty of the south" is rabidly protected.

The point about not using the time and the money to position us for what comes "after" is very well made. Nobody in politics will want to deny the country the "benefits" of the oil for something so nebulous as a sustainable energy infrastructure.

We are already in the position where successive governments have given away massive sums of money based on short term incomes such as oil. This can only make it worse. Basing benefits and social "give-aways" on finite resource revenues like oil is insanity. Something no politician will tell you until it is way too late.

There is no way they will leave it in the ground. Also there is no way they will do the right thing with it.

In some ways it would have been better had this been discovered 50 years from now, after we are forced to create the clean energy infrastructure due to lack of oil. Then it would have been used for benefit, not just to line some pockets as fast as possible.

What we can determine from this is the current scarcity of new reserves. Nobody would have paid for this kind of research if there were large finds of new oil to be had which can be drilled and simply pumped to the surface. Which means peak oil is rapidly approaching.

The next big signal will be viable mining of methane clathrates. Of which the reserves are far greater than all the oil and coal burned since Roman times. Yet another opportunity to completely trash our planet.

This year the global high point of CO2 in the atmosphere will go over 400ppm. By 2018 the global low point will be over 400 and the high point will be heading for 406. There is clear evidence that when the low point hits 450, then the climate starts to self reinforce with CO2 and the system starts to go out of control.

As a reality check for that one, the climate will hit 450ppm somewhere between 25 and 35 years from now because we are simply not reducing our emissions fast enough. In fact our emissions are increasing decade by decade, although the increase is slowing (maybe the 2010's are not over yet).

On average per year over the decade starting with the first figures in 1959

1960's 0.8ppm
1970's 1.2ppm
1980's 1.7ppm
1990's 1.5ppm (however there was Mt Pinatubo in 1991 which messed up the stratosphere for some time)
2000's 1.9ppm

2010's, so far, counting 2009 because I started from 1959 and I'm counting decades, 2.1ppm and that includes a low value for 2009.

So we are on a fast track to a non viable climate for human survival and the last thing we need is more large oil finds....

[update]

About time I re-posted this, it's been updated to include 2014.

The Saudis are said to have about 750bn barrels left, of which 40% are extractable. If we were to match their current extraction rate, from the new find, we would produce a UK surplus, with NS Oil, of nearly 40m barrels per day. At current prices that would produce £2.4bn every single day.

In two years we could clear our entire national debt.

But.............. shareholders have to be paid, taxes have to be paid, licences have to be bought, nimbi's have to be bought off, prices can go up or down - and if we flood the market the price will go down - and all the time this is happening the environment will be trashed.