At the coal face
I was only six-years-old at the time, but I remember October 1973 like it was yesterday. For me, OPEC and the oil embargo that followed the Yom Kippur War meant cold baths, playing Monopoly and Scrabble by candle light; Dad buying a paraffin heater and then hunting around for some paraffin; toasting bread at the fire place, if we were lucky to find some coal; NO TV; and, worse of all... early to bed, early to rise and having to walk to school.
For others it meant queuing, and sometimes fighting at filling stations; signs that read: 'NO GAS HERE'; and for Those in the USA, checking the first number of your car's registration plate to see if it was an odd or an even day on which you could 'fill up'. Dark days, indeed!
Today with the escalating geopolitical crisis in the Middle East, which pundits say is now threatening to spread beyond Iraq to Saudi Arabia, the world's largest exporter of crude oil, together with the unlimited demand for crude oil in China and, to a certain extent India, the oil crisis that looms could dwarf that of the 1970s.
Many believe we have now passed Hubbert's Peak; the theory developed the 1950s which described the basic laws governing the depletion of any finite resource, i.e. production starts at zero and then rises to a peak which can never be surpassed. Once the peak has been passed, production declines until the resource (in this case crude oil) is depleted. By all accounts we have almost plundered the world of this natural source of fuel. The Energy Institute in the UK told me that the world will have completely run out of natural oil and gas by about 2050 - and that's being optimistic, they say.
So what does the future have in store and what will tomorrow's marine diesel engine run on? There is nuclear power of course, but despite environmentalists arguing over many years for a drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels, they have probably put the kybosh on this clean energy resource by turning the tide of public opinion against nuclear power through lobbying and demonstrating outside the UK's Sellafield plant and the Faslane naval base - and there's an oxymoron if ever there was one!
There's biomass, which all the main marine engine builders are looking into, and orimulsion continues to be mooted every so often, but what about coal as the energy for the future?
Admittedly a fossil fuel, but if all the coal mines in the UK alone were re-commissioned, there would be enough fuel to propel us through to the 22nd century. Coal can be used to produce liquid fuels suitable for transportation applications by removing its carbon element through pryolysis or liquefaction. The technology is already in place, it's just a matter of economics before coal liquefaction can enter full-scale commercialisation.
Until recently, the cost of extracting and then liquefying coal has been much higher than the cost of refining crude oil, but the economics will change with the unavailability or increasingly exorbitant cost of crude oil and its by- products.
This article first appeared in the September edition of MER and has been published in Forum with kind permission of its author and publisher
Patrik Wheater日付: 07 January 2005
