Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience
240
Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience
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Overview
We live in an oil-dependent world, and have become reliant in a very short space of time, using vast reserves of oil in the process – and without planning for when the supply is not so plentiful. Most of us avoid thinking about what happens when the oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but the reality may not be as bad as we think.
The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead could have a positive effect. Written by permaculture expert Rob Hopkins, he discusses the possibility of a rebirth of local communities, which will generate their own fuel, food and housing. These will encourage the development of local currencies, to keep money in the local area, and unleash a local 'skilling-up', so that people have more control over their lives.
The growth in interest in the Transition model continues to be exponential. There are now more than 35 formal Transition Initiatives in the UK, including towns, cities, islands, villages and peninsulas, with more joining as the idea takes off. With little proactivity at government level, communities are taking matters into their own hands and acting locally. If your community has not yet become a Transition Initiative, this upbeat guide, filled with beautiful black and white photographs, offers you the tools to get started.
The Transition Handbook is the perfect manual to guide communities, as they begin this 'energy descent' journey.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781900322188 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury USA |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2008 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Transition Handbook
From Oil Dependency To Local Resilience
By Rob Hopkins
Green Books Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Rob HopkinsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-900322-18-8
CHAPTER 1
Peak oil and climate change
The two great oversights of our times
"Sometime in 2006, mankind's thirst for oil will have crossed the milestone rate of 86 million barrels per day, which translates into a staggering 1,000 barrels a second! Picture an Olympic-sized swimming pool full of oil: we would drain it in about 15 seconds. In one day, we empty close to 5,500 such swimming pools."
– Peter Tertzakian (2006), A Thousand Barrels a Second: the coming oil break point and the challenges facing an energy-dependent world, McGraw Hill
What is peak oil?: why it isn't the last drop that matters
There are plenty of other people better qualified than myself to tell you about peak oil. I have never worked in the oil industry, am not a geologist, and other than having grown up in what is now one of the most rapidly depleting oil-producing nations in the world (the UK), I have no first-hand experience of oil production or geology. Prior to September 2004 I had never heard of the concept of peak oil, and had always assumed that oil in our economy worked in the same way as petrol in the tank of a car; that whether the engine was full or almost empty, it would run exactly the same. I thought we would potter along until some day in the distant future someone would put the very last drop of oil in their car and that would be that, a bit like the last truffula tree falling in Dr Seuss's The Lorax. I was later to discover that I was somewhat wide of the mark, as I started to delve deeper into this incredibly important subject.
For me, learning about peak oil has been profoundly illuminating in terms of how I see the world and the way it works: the precarious nature of what we have come to see as how a society should function, as well as elements that any community responses we develop will need to have. Don't take my word for it – read around, inform yourself. Climate change – an issue of great severity – is only one half of the story; developing an understanding of peak oil is similarly essential. Together, these two issues have been referred to as the 'Hydrocarbon Twins'. They are so intertwined, that seen in isolation, a large part of the story remains untold.
Without cheap oil, you wouldn't be reading this book now. The centralised distribution of books would not have been feasible, and if you did have a copy, it would be one of only a very few books you had, and you would consider it a very precious possession indeed. I would not have been able to type it on my laptop, in a warm house, listening to CDs. When you really start thinking about it, it's not just this book that would not be here. Most things around you rely on cheap oil for their manufacture and transportation. Your furniture, entertainment, recreation, food, household appliances, medicines and cosmetics are all dependent on this miraculous material. This is not a criticism – it's just how it is for us all, and has been for as long as most of us can remember. It is almost impossible to imagine anything else.
It is entirely understandable how we got into this position. Oil is a remarkable substance. It was formed from prehistoric zooplankton and algae that covered the oceans 90-150 million years ago, ironically during two periods of global warming. It sank to the bottom of the ocean, was covered by sediment washed in from surrounding land, buried deeper anddeeper, and over time was heated under extreme pressure by geological processes, and eventually became oil. Natural gas was formed through similar processes, but is formed more from vegetal remains or from oil that became 'overcooked' when buried too deep in the Earth's crust. One gallon of oil contains the equivalent of about 98 tons of the original surface-forming, algal matter, distilled over millennia, and which had itself collected enormous amounts of solar energy on the waves of the prehistoric ocean. It is not for nothing that fossil fuels are sometimes referred to as 'ancient sunlight'. They are astonishingly energy-dense.
I like to think of fossil fuels being like the magic potion in Asterix and Obelix books. Goscinny and Uderzo's Gaulish heroes live in the only village to hold out against Roman occupation, thanks to a magic potion brewed to a secret recipe by their druid, Getafix. The potion gives them superhuman strength and makes them invincible, much to the chagrin of Julius Caesar. Like Asterix and Obelix's magic potion, oil makes us far stronger, faster and more productive than we have ever been, enabling our society to do between 70 and 100 times more work than would be possible without it. We have lived with this potion for 150 years and, like Asterix and Obelix, have got used to thinking we will always have it, indeed we have designed our living arrangements in such a way as to be entirely dependent on it.
It is estimated that 40 litres of petrol in the tank of a car contains energy equivalent to 4 years human manual labour. It is no wonder that we in the West consume on average about 16 barrels of oil a year per capita – less than Kuwait, where they use 36 (what do they do, bathe in it?), but far more than China's two, or India's less than one. The amount of energy needed to maintain the average US citizen is the equivalent of 50 people on bicycles pedalling furiously in our back gardens day and night. We have become dependent on these pedallers – what some people refer to as 'energy slaves'. But we are, it should also be acknowledged, extremely fortunate to live at a time in history with access to amounts of energy and a range of materials, products and possibilities that our ancestors couldn't even have imagined.
A FEW OF THE THINGS IN OUR HOMES MADE FROM OIL
Aspirins, sticky tape, trainer shoes, lycra socks, glue, paints, varnish, foam mattresses, carpets, nylon, polyester, CDs, DVDs, plastic bottles, contact lenses, hair gel, brushes, toothbrushes, rubber gloves, washing-up bowls, electric sockets, plugs, shoe polish, furniture wax, computers, printers, candles, bags, coats, bubble wrap, bicycle pumps, fruit juice containers, rawlplugs, credit cards, loft insulation, PVC windows, shopping bags, lipstick ... and that's just some of the things made directly from oil, not those that needed fossil fuels and the energy they consume in their manufacture (which is pretty much everything).
"What is remarkable is the failure of politicians to start planning in any way for this inevitable transition, or even to start preparing their electorates for its inevitability."
– Jonathan Porritt (2007),
Capitalism as if the Earth Matters,
Earthscan
"Peak oil is a turning point in history of unparalleled magnitude, for never before has a resource as critical as oil become headed into decline from natural depletion without sight of a better substitute."
– Colin Campbell
Figure 1 presents one of the best researched graphic representations of what we might call the 'The Petroleum Interval', the brief interlude of 200 years where we extracted all of this amazing material from the ground and burnt it. Viewed in the historical context of thousands of years, it is a brief spike. Viewed from where we stand now, it looks like the top of a mountain.
Oil has allowed us to create extraordinary technologies, cultures and discoveries, to set foot on the Moon and to perfect the Pop Tart. But can it go on forever? Of course not. Like any finite material, the faster we consume it, the faster it will be gone. We are like Asterix and Obelix realising, with a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach, that the cauldron of potion they have in front of them is the last one. We can see the possibility of life without potion looming before us.
The key point here is that it is not the point when we use the last drop that matters. The moment that really matters is the peak, the moment when you realise that from that point onward there will always be less magic potion year-on-year, and that because of its increasing scarcity, it will become an increasingly expensive commodity. This year (2008), oil has for the first time broken through the $100 a barrel ceiling. Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review magazine, defines peak oil thus, "the point when further expansion of oil production becomes impossible because new production flows are fully offset by production declines". It is the midway point – the moment when half of the reserves have been used up, sometimes referred to as 'peak oil' or the 'tipping point' that is important. It is a moment of historic importance. All the way up the slope towards the peak, since Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859, demand has driven supply. The more oil the world economy needed, the more the oil industry could produce.
'Swing producers' – that is, nations with large reserves which could increase output as required – ensured that supply could be increased whenever necessary. During the 1930s and 1940s it was the US that acted as that swing producer; in recent years it has beenSaudi Arabia. Once we pass the peak, supply begins to dictate demand, meaning that the prices start to rise suddenly and steeply, and the people with control of the remaining oil really get to start calling the shots.
A"Fifty years ago, the world was consuming 4 billion barrels of oil per year and the average discovery was around 30 billion. Today we consume 30 billion barrels per year and the discovery rate is approaching 4 billion barrels of crude per year."
– Asia newspaper, 4 May 2005
"Energy experts no longer debate about whether Hubbert's peak will occur, but when".
– Fox News, April 28, 2006
OIL-PRODUCING NATIONS THAT HAVE ALREADY PASSED THEIR PEAK
Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Barbados, Belarus, Benin, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Congo (Kinshasa), Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, France, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia & Montenegro, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Surinam, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, Yemen.
– from www.EnergyFiles.com
Some key indications that we are nearing the peak
How might we know we are at or close to the peak? Firstly, there is an observable pattern that gives us an indication. Most oil-producing nations follow the same pattern – the peak in discovery tends to occur 30-40 years before a peak in production. Clearly one has to discover oil before one can produce it, and we tend to exploit the larger and easier reserves first. This pattern has been seen in the UK, the US, Russia and many more now-declining oil producing nations (see left). Given that the world as a whole peaked in discovery in 1965, we might, if the same pattern applies, imagine that we are close to, or at, the peak of production. This was first observed by geologist M. King Hubbert, who predicted in 1956 that the US would peak in production in 1970 (it had peaked in discovery in the 1930s). He was ridiculed, but eventually proved correct.
Another indicator is that since January 2005, world oil production has stayed at between 84 and 87 million barrels a day (mbd), in spite of a very high price environment. While the world economy desperately wants to increase consumption (the International Energy Agency has predicted that world production will reach 120mbd, a figure few in the industry take seriously), and oil prices have risen from $12 a barrel in 1988 to come close to $140 a barrel in June 2008. Its inability to keep up with burgeoning demand (see Figure 4, p.29) is a strong indication that matters geological, rather than matters political or economic, are increasingly playing a role.
Discoveries have fallen since their peak in 1965. This downward trend in discovery is also due to the fact that although we are still finding oil, the average size of the fields we are discovering is falling. In 1940 the average size of the fields found over the previous five years was 1.5 billion barrels, by 1960 it had fallen to 300 million barrels, by 2004 it was just 45 million barrels, and it continues to fall. Indeed, during the Oil Age, 47,500 oil fields have been found, yet the 40 largest ones have yielded 75% of all the oil ever discovered. As Figure 2 shows (page 21), the fall in discovery has been accompanied by rising consumption. 1981 was the year this gap began, and it has widened steadily ever since, to a point where we now consume about four barrels of oil for every one we discover. In public, oil companies speak of high reserves and of a lucrative future. BP state that 'there is no reserves problem', Exxon that there is 'no sign of peak' and Aramco that there is 'no reserve problem'. Behind the scenes, however, they are increasingly aware of the nature of the problem. In November 2006, an event took place at Colorado Springs called the Hedberg Research Conference on Understanding World Oil Resources. The event was by invitation only, and brought together people from across the oil industry, as well as from bodies like the United States Geological Survey, the International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Administration. No press were allowed, and people's presentations weren't shared. The day featured open and frank discussions, along the lines of "my company says this, but the data says this."
The intention of the conference was to reconcile the enormous difference in the estimates of likely future reserves additions between, on the one hand, what the US Geological Survey, creators of the most optimistic scenarios, produces; and, on the other, what other organisations believe to be the case. Companies brought along their detailed proprietary data, which is not made public, and tried to see if there was a clear pattern emerging. The results of this "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours" session were striking. The USGS had put forward a figure of 650bn barrels yet to be discovered, but the conference put the figure at just 250bn. It also argued that the non-conventional oils (tar sands, deep water etc.) would never produce more than 4–5 million barrels a day, and indeed would struggle to achieve that, again much lower than the USGS. This kind of behind-the-scenes confidential meeting was also instrumental in the early days of climate change, leading to the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A further indicator that we are nearly there is the nature of the new discoveries that the market gets excited about these days, and which are increasingly being expected to make up the shortfall as conventional oil production begins to decline. One of the new 'unconventional' sources of oil generating excitement is the Alberta tar sands in Canada. The problem with the tar sands is that the oil is very dense and viscous, more like sandy bitumen than oil. There are two ways the oil is extracted. The first is to dig it out with huge diggers, move it around in trucks the size of a house, and 'wash' the sands in the equivalent of a huge washing machine. Around 20% of it is produced this way. The rest is extracted in situ, where steam is pumped underground and the oil sucked out. The resultant low-grade 'synfuel' is then refined into usable oil products. If the Alberta tar sands are the best we can do, we really are in trouble. Alberta is estimated to contain 175 billion barrels of oil, which makes Canada one of the top four or five oil-producing countries in the world. Oil from tar sands is far more expensive to produce than most other sources of oil, but with the price of oil rising, these harder-to-extract oil sources become increasingly financially viable. Oil companies are moving into the area, and Fort McMurray, the area's main town, is becoming a boom town. Clive Mather, CEO of Shell Canada, describes Shell's operation in the area as the biggest thing he has ever seen the company undertake. People from all over the world are moving there for the 'New Gold Rush'.
Tar sands production is somewhat akin to trying to remove the cocoa powder from a huge chocolate brownie. Greenpeace estimate that by 2011, annual carbon dioxide emissions from tar sands production will exceed 80 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, more than that currently emitted by all of Canada's cars. Tar sands production also requires the felling of large areas of ancient boreal forest. The two principal weaknesses of the process are how the steam that separates the oil and sand is produced, and where the water to make that steam comes from.
You take clean, precious natural gas (a resource also on its own trajectory of depletion), and burn it to make steam to produce 'synfuel', a poor quality dirty crude oil. It is madness. This is no 'gold rush'. Indeed, Matt Simmons, an energy industry investment banker, once described it thus: "Gentlemen, we have just turned gold into lead." It is literally scraping the barrel, and rather than negating the peak oil argument – as those who say "look, see, there's loads left" propose – this confirms the peak oil argument: that we have reached the mid-point of the Oil Age, and the era of cheap oil is well and truly over.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins. Copyright © 2009 Rob Hopkins. Excerpted by permission of Green Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Richard HeinbergIntroduction: tantalising glimpses of resilience
Part 1 - The Head: why peak oil and climate change mean that small is inevitable
Part 2 - The Heart: why having a positive vision is crucial
Part 3 - The Hands: exploring the transition model for building local resilience
Some closing thoughts
Appendices
Resources