Peak Oil and Gas

Ever since the 1970s, Britain has been one of the world’s major oil and natural gas producing countries.

The oil and gas fields in the North Sea have supplied homes and businesses in Britain for years, making us self-sufficient in energy and bringing in hundreds of millions of pounds in tax revenues to the Exchequer, money which successive governments have spent on everything from schools and education to defence and the NHS.

However, good things do not last forever, and from a peak in 1999, Britain’s production of oil and gas has dropped as the North Sea reservoirs are exhausted, so that now the North Sea only produces as much oil as it did in the early 1970s, and Britain is once again an importer of oil and gas supplies.

This means that in the future, we will have to import almost all our oil and gas from abroad, which means higher prices as we are in competition with other countries in the world for limited supplies. It also means that Britain will no longer have the security of guaranteed fuel supplies from our own fields in the North Sea.

In short, the cost of our energy will continue to rise, and there will be an increasing risk that we will not be able to secure the supplies we need at all.

Oil and gas are the lifeblood of our economy – gas to power many of our electricity generating power stations and heat our homes and businesses, and oil for all the cars, buses and lorries which use our roads every day to transport goods around the country.

Without oil and gas, there are very few aspects of modern life which could continue in the way we have come to know. Even our farms use fertilisers made from natural gas, crops are planted and harvested by tractors and harvesters burning diesel fuel made from crude oil, and our food is distributed to supermarkets by lorries burning the same diesel fuel.

These problems are not only limited to Britain – just as our North Sea oil and gas supplies have been exploited and are running out, all the oil and gas producing countries in the world are subject to the same laws of physics which say that as oil and gas reserves are extracted, the rate at which we can supply oil, gas and oil products such as petrol also falls. So, just as Britain’s production peaked in 1999, the world’s production also peaked in 2006, according to currently available data.

This means that just as big new world economies such as China and India come online, with their increasing thirst for oil and gas to power their economic development, world production of these essential fuels is going into decline. Britain, along with all other countries which use oil and gas, will be involved in ever more intense competition for these diminishing vital resources, which means that the countries still producing will sell their precious supplies to the highest bidder on world markets. This in turn means ever-higher prices for all of us – not just for oil and gas, but also for electricity, much of which is produced by gas-burning power stations.

What Can We Do?

There are many things we can do to reduce our reliance on oil and gas supplies.

For those of us who own our own home, there are many changes we can make to protect ourselves from oil and gas shortages:

• Insulate loft space and wall cavities to prevent heat escaping from our home.
   
• Install solar hot water panels and/or solar photovoltaics for electricity on South-facing roof space.
   
• Install an air-source or ground-source heat pump system for home heating.
   
• Clean-burning wood stoves can be used for space heating in smokeless zones, but must be DEFRA-approved appliances which have been tested for low particulate emissions.
   
• Keep items which will work during a power cut, for example wind-up torches and radios, or even a low-voltage solar powered circuit to run lights and laptop computers or mobile telephones.