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Measuring Irish Oil Dependency
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03-04-2010 9:40pm#1In light of the discussion about peak oil, I decided to explore Irish oil dependency. This post will contain several graphs to benchmark where we are and then hopefully we can start the discussion on how Ireland could alter our dependence.
Figure 1 shows the history of Irish oil consumption. In 1965, we consumed 20mb/yr (million barrels per year), this rose to 45mb/d in 1978 then plunged to 30mb/yr during the '80s. Then demand rocketed up to 71mb/yr in 2006, before declining to 69mb/yr in 2008. Data source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy. BP's figures overstate consumption by several mb/d but the trends are the same
Figure 2 shows the breakdown of Irish primary energy from 1990-2008. It then takes SEAI's forecast from December 2009 out to 2020. The forecast by SEAI assumes we meet all renewable targets, and incorporates the expected savings from the government's White Paper and other initiatives like the Sustainable Transport Action Plan.
The hashed efficiency section is the difference between SEAI's reference scenario and the gains expected from government initiatives. Historical data here, forecast data here. SEAI used the ESRI's optimistic 'world recovery' scenario, which has Ireland growing on average from 2010-2015 by 5.2% and by 3.3% from 2015-2020. It can be seen that even with the assumed 250,000 Electric Vehicles and with 8% of transport energy coming from biofuels by 2020, oil consumption does not materially drop from current levels.
According to the UK Peak Oil Task Force global oil production capacity will peak and then plateau next year at about 91mb/d. When global demand (currently about 84mb/d) reaches production capacity depends on world GDP growth. A strong recovery and it happens around 2014, a weaker one maybe 2018.
Figure 3 shows the Figure 2 data in a more digestible format, ie the proportionate breakdown of Irish energy consumption. It is seen that even with the introduction of 15% of renewables, oil still counts for over 50% of Irish Primary Energy Requirement (PER).
So it's safe to say that current government policies do not address our oil dependency. We are one of the most oil dependent societies there is. Figure 4 shows this. Data from BP & SEAI.
Figure 5 shows the makeup of our oil demand. Data from SEAI. You can see that Irish oil consumption is quite fragmented. Our consumption is perhaps 5% lower due to fuel tourism, which is SEAI's estimate. Our consumption is 50% on transport and 50% other. The easy gains have already been made, with the reduction in oil fired power generation. The nation's 2.5m cars account for 25%, road freight another 10%, buses and rail only a few %, and then international flights (mainly for junkets) accounts for 10%. Residential heating accounts for 15% of our oil consumption.
Ok, that's enough graphs. Time to get your input.- How aware do you think the general population are about peak oil?
- Is concern about peak oil warranted?
- How would a spike up to say $150/bbl affect your discretionary expenditure?
- Do you heat your home with oil? Did you cut back on useage with the 07/08 price spike? Are there any other viable options for you?
- The typical Irish petrol car travels 15,000km (diesel 25,000) per year. How much of those miles do you think are discretionary? Is cycling/public transport a viable alternative for much of these kms?
- Politicians are aware of Peak Oil. They include Eamon Ryan, George Lee, Liz McManus, Simon Coveney, Sean Barrett, and so on. Yet they don't seem to be tackling it head on. Oil consumption is targeted obliquely through climate change. Why the reluctance - is it because it doesn't sell well on the doorstep?
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Thanks Silverharp.Silverharp2 wrote: »I'm guessing that would be about €1.60/70 per ltr. Its not a life changer. It would probably affect the Americans more. However it would affect consumer consumption, fuel and other high embedded energy products would take up a bigger % of peoples income so something would have to give.
Good point. About half the forecourt price in the EU is tax. So a doubling of price only leads to a 50% increase. For someone on the dole or minimum wage, would petrol be a significant expense? In America, tax is much less. Anything that comes to Ireland requires oil-based transport. For some things, like steel, oil is a significant proportion of the retail price. Have you seen anything on how much embedded oil we import in e.g. clothes (polyester is oil)?Silverharp2 wrote: »I think in the medium term 5 to 10 years people will adjust and would barely notice PO. the longer term is more interesting and one would hope from a European perspective that there would be a gradual shift away from oil/gas energy electricity production to a nuclear backbone with all the other good stuff supporting at the edge.
If peak oil implies high oil prices, and that implies a reduction in consumer spending, particularly American consumers, is that not a harbinger of recession? The principal use of oil is in transportation as Figure 1 shows. Source here. Eighteen percent is used for heating and power. The OECD, Ireland included, have largely removed oil from power generation due to the 1973, 1979 and 2003-2008 oil price shocks. Heating has, where economical, been switched to natural gas. The Middle East still uses some oil in power production, but that's because in Saudi Arabia, for example, utilities are by law entitled to buy oil at $3/barrel.
Silverharp2 wrote: »It would seem to be a transportation issue first. However people will still be able to get from A to B , it just maybe by bus rather then car.
Right, people might be able to use buses. However that still requires energy, oil based energy. I haven't tried to get figures for Ireland, but Figure 2 shows the American experience with the energy intensity of various transport options.
The figures compiled by the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics show that the passenger mile consumption of oil by buses is only marginally better than passenger cars. Bearing in mind that Irish cars are much more efficient than American cars, I'd be interested to see how things square for the Irish situation. Buses travelling half empty to the back arse of Mayo might not be that fuel efficient.
It certainly could. However the marginal utility of a barrel of oil is much higher in China than in Ireland, and the Chinese government also subsidises oil prices. Millions of Chinese dream of owning a car, and their economy has continued to grow robustly despite a high oil price, with the Chinese middle class expanding rapidly. Figure 3 shows Chinese car sales.Silverharp2 wrote: »It would call into question the ability of countries like China and India to continue developing as they are at the moment.
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Thanks Heroditas.
You've probably been following oil longer than me, and certain folk have been predicting the exact date of peak oil for years, which can lead to peak oil fatigue! However if you read this pdf of a Scientific American article from 1998 by Colin Campbell he actually predicted the peak roughly around 2010. Figure 1 shows production versus discoveries. I'm not sure what aspect of technology you speak of, but in terms of finding oil, there seems to be no correlation with oil price or indeed the better technology of oil firms.I'm honestly not too sure. Peak oil seems to be constantly "imminent" or "just around the corner".
Technology is continually advancing so the peak will keep moving
Here's a 2008 quote from the Conoco Philips.
Oil companies have been diversifying away from oil for years. They have been buying back shares instead of investing in new production. They've been buying up natural gas companies. They've been investing in very expensive ($80/barrel) tar sands. Why? Because it's getting increasingly difficult to justify the great risk involved with offshore drilling ($100m per hole drilled).Could we spend $20 billion or $25 billion [on exploration]? Absolutely," Conoco spokesman Gary Russell said at the time. "Could we do it effectively, in a way that provides ultimate value to our shareholders? Probably not.
You seem smart, so I'm going to guess you earn above the average wage. Your attitude is what I expect of most people - oil demand is relatively inelastic because it's a smallish part of the overall budget. The same appears evident in America, that people grumble but take the pain, until a break point is reached, which is apparently around $4/gallon.It wouldn't affect my discretionary expenditure. I might use my car a bit less if I was going out but apart from that, I would carry on as normal.
Petrol accounts for quite a small % of my annual expenditure
I do too, but I suppose we're lucky because we have that option. I think I read that 630,000 homes use natural gas. The rest, apart from a smattering of wood chip boilers, use oil. The economics of natural gas pipeline expansion depend on population density, unfortunately Ireland is not dense. Would you know anything about the possibility of expanding the natural gas network?No I use natural gas. It's the best relatively cheap option at the moment.
Good point re public transport economics. I live in Dublin and cycle, it's grand for getting around. Is it as easy to cycle in places like Cork or Galway?I would reckon half of those miles are discretionary. However, we're still a relatively rural population so public transport wouldn't be a viable alternative unless it's heavily subsidized.
As a result, that would imply the public transport isn't sustainable.
Cycling might be an option for some peopleThe fact is that is public knowledge is raised, the politicians will be met with the wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by "well what are we supposed to do? Why isn't the government helping me to heat my home using different methods? WE WANT SUBSIDIES AND GRANTS!"
Hehe, true.
I'm not convinced SEAI are on top of this. If you read their latest 5 year plan, there is not one mention of peak oil. In their security of supply review from 2007 they mentioned it in passing, and then said they would commission a further report on Irish vulnerability. I can't find that report on their website.Anyway, the politicians are out of their depth dealing with issues like this. SEAI are doing a very good job in this area.
What were the aspects you disagreed with?I disagree with some of the data that is used in SEAI's report and these reservations were raised by several people at the report's launch when it was released last December.
It makes several assumptions that were wrong and out of date0 -
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Like this you mean.* Is concern about peak oil warranted?
Not really. We've had "peak oil fatigue" for some years now, indeed I recall P.O. being given as the reason for the surge in '07 and '08.
As to why I don't worry about Peak Oil, it's because the price of oil will not surge rapidly, there will be time for an orderly change: that is, there will be time for new car buyers to buy electric, hydrogen, LNG, LPG cars etc. .
Oil prices have been creeping up now for the past three years or so, if you ignore the spike and overshoot in 2008.
PO is a "boiling frog" type of problem, but with the chinese taking up the slack there is every risk of panic buying in the future,0 -
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I'll add my two cents about hydrogen, because as it happens I've to do a presentation on the hydrogen economy tomorrow.
Firstly, hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy carrier. You always lose energy when you use hydrogen. Figure 1 shows the 'net energy cliff' diagram, which some of you may have seen before. When we found oil 100 odd years ago, it took very little energy to extract. These days you have to construct vast platforms, with miles of steel to extract it. Heavier oil, the kind increasingly being produced, requires more processing energy to refine it. You must invest energy to make energy. And, even with oil, the return you get on this investment is steadily declining.
You would not be able to power modern society on less than an EROI (energy return on investment) of 5. Tar sands, corn ethanol, and especially hydrogen (it's a negative energy sink) fall below this threshold.
So you have to make hydrogen from something. A couple of the candidates for this are wind, solar and nuclear. The idea is that you convert the electricity output into hydrogen whenever the sun is shining or wind blowing, store it in a tank under your gaff, then reconvert it to electricity whenever you please, or transfer it to your hydrogen car. However, when you change from electricity to hydrogen and back again, you lose 60% of the originial energy.
When you combine this loss with the energy needed to make the wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear stations in the first place, the returns get fairly marginal. If you were to add in the energy needed for the countless fuel cells, hydrogen pipelines and so forth, it could push wind and nuclear off the cliff.
When you try converting the electricity output to transportation energy, it gets worse, with only 25% or so reaching the wheels, the same as a combustion engine, as Figure 3 shows.
This compares with 86% for electric vehicles as Figure 4 shows.
If Irish onshore wholesale wind costs 7c/kWh (my guess), and petrol excluding taxes, @$80/barrel, costs 50c/litre (5c/kWh), then your cost per mile will be 40% higher for hydrogen. Also, with Ireland's 65TWh of transport energy in 2008, you would need 25 GW of wind (1GW of wind @ 30% capacity factor = 2.6 TWh). There's about 10GW of onshore wind potential, with lots more offshore & wave, but that's more expensive again.
Add to that the fact that hydrogen is a terrible energy carrier. Its volumetric energy density is quite horrible. Your options are to compress it to super high pressures (700 bar) or super low temperatures (-250C) in order to increase energy density. At 700 bar hydrogen contains 5MJ/litre, versus 35MJ for diesel/gasoline (Figure 5). The efficiency is about double once in the car, so the effective energy contained would be 10MJ/litre. Still, for the same sized tank, you'll only go 1/3 as far as a gasoline engine.
Furthermore, all existing pipelines and other infrastructure is incompatible with hydrogen, because it leaks through everything and also causes steel embrittlement.
I'll leave you with George Bush's 2003 quote:
“Hydrogen power will dramatically reduce greenhouse gas admissions”0 -
Inscrutable wrote: »Figure 5 shows the makeup of our oil demand. Data from SEAI. You can see that Irish oil consumption is quite fragmented. Our consumption is perhaps 5% lower due to fuel tourism, which is SEAI's estimate. Our consumption is 50% on transport and 50% other. The easy gains have already been made, with the reduction in oil fired power generation. The nation's 2.5m cars account for 25%, road freight another 10%, buses and rail only a few %, and then international flights (mainly for junkets) accounts for 10%. Residential heating accounts for 15% of our oil consumption.
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Looking at the oil useage breakdown, it would be interesting to see each what percentage in each sector could be saved with little effort and also with little inpact on day to day living.
For example, Logistics companies route lorries via the most fuel efficient routes rather than the quickest (for the payload). Fast food resturants reduce their use of plastic disposables, wooden chop forks instead of plastic. Most of industry is still geared to speed as in having the goods through the process as fast as possible even if it involves high energy intensive processes that could be avoided if more time was allocated to the process, for example letting something dry naturally instead of blasting it with hot air.
The reintroduction of returnable glass bottles for milk, beer etc, where a small deposit was taken for the bottle and refunded when you returned it.
Of course these changes will increase the cost of the goods to the consumer, but so will the increase in oil prices in the future.
BTW what is "Fuel Tourisim"?0 -
@ dolanbaker
Some good suggestions.
On efficient driving, freighters should already be incentivised to do that. In fact, as far back as 2006, USPS was already doing this. Here's a quote: "the parcel carrier has technology in its systems that help map this out routes that minimize the number of left turns the driver has to make". However I'm sure there is scope for Irish hauliers to improve, I just don't know by how much.
Figure 1 shows the breakdown by fuel type of our oil consumption. Plastics come from the light end of the barrel of oil, or sometimes from wet gas (ie methane with some heavier hydrocarbons), I wonder if Corrib will have any of those? Petrochemical feedstocks are ethane (C2H6), propane (C3H8, the main component of Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG)), butane (C4H10, the minor component of LPG), naptha (C5H12) & natural gasoline (mostly C5H12, with some C6H14). According to the SEAI data, this is predomninantly used in the 'electrical and optical equipment' industry subsector.
However as we can see, it's pocket change in the scheme of things, although it makes up 10% of industry consumption (Figure 2). Doing things like recycling plastic bottles might make the casual consumer think they're making a difference. Unfortunately, they're not, and while recyling should be done, this tokenism is sometimes counter productive because people think they're doing their part. In fact they've probably used more oil driving to the recycling bank! The same effect has been witnessed in consumers' CO2 saving efforts. There's a term for it, but I can't recall it.
Figure 2 shows the breakdown of industry consumption by fuel type.
Taking the biggest segment there, fuel oil, Figure 3 shows in what sectors consumption takes place. It's mainly in basic metals. Fuel oil could only be used to generate heat, perhaps these are metal plants which aren't on the natural gas pipeline network. Or maybe the high heat temperature can't be reached with natural gas. Either way, generating heat should already be efficient, so I'm not sure if there's scope for improvements there. Would you have any insight?
The wood industry uses a negligble amount of oil, only a few ktoes according to the stats.
Fuel tourism is Nordies crossing the border to buy petrol. We buy their smirnoff, they buy our oil; a dividend of peace, I suppose. Can anyone think of other potential savings and I'll see what the data tells us?0 -
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@db
An insightful comment there. It's something I came across when I was looking at the American situation. You're correct that the ratio of refined products a refinery can output are limited, which depends on how the refineries are configured. I'm not familiar with how the Whitegate refinery operates, though. Figure 1 shows the output from Irish refineries.
However we only import 1/3 of our oil as crude oil, the rest we import as refined products. Figure 2 shows our crude oil imports.
I don't know the countries of origin of the refined products we import, do you? They're probably fluid, depending on market conditions. Either way, were things to get tasty in the oil arena, we're surely more vulnerable than most since we can only import 1/3 our oil as crude. That said, if sh*t got real, 22mb/yr would probably be enough to cope.0 -
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Yes I am certain that there is a clear connection between the credit crunch, peak oil production and the recession.
The video below is a more uptodate version of what Colin Campbell was saying, it is one of a series of five and is aimed at UK Local Authorities to help in future strategy planning.
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![[Deleted User]](/applications/dashboard/design/images/defaulticon.png)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9mP-govL5E
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