For the last couple of hundred years or so, the UK economy, like almost every other industrialised economy in the world, has depended for its energy on coal, oil and gas. These carbon based sources of fuel have produced amazingly cheap energy that’s transformed the lives of nearly everyone on the planet over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
On 10 March 1776 an unnamed engineer pulled a lever on a strange contraption on the outskirts of Birmingham. As steam entered the device’s orifices and chambers, wheels began to turn and a gush of water showed that the machine was doing what it had been designed to do – pump water out of a mine shaft. The machine was the first of a new kind of steam engine designed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton, at their nearby factory. As well as firing the starting gun for the industrial revolution, Boulton and Watt were also unleashing a new kind of economy: an economy based on energy from hydrocarbons – coal, oil and gas.
They started it all
Up until that day, pretty much the only source of power in the world was muscle power – from beasts of burden or human beings. Watermills and windmills had harnessed what we would now call renewable energy for centuries, but they were unreliable and dependent on geography. The beauty of coal, at least when you fed it into the boiler of a steam engine, was that you could unleash its immense power anywhere. Once other engineers – including the third man in the Birmingham gold statue, William Murdoch – had refined the basic design, a single steam engine could provide the power of 50 horses – pretty much anywhere you wanted it. The hydrocarbon economy was born. As Matthew Boulton himself once said, when asked what he made in his Soho factory: I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – power.
For over a hundred years the world continued to depend on hydrocarbons in the form of coal. Then, on 10 January 1901 a Croatian born engineer called Anthony Lucas was drilling near Beaumont, Texas when there was a sudden jet of gas followed minutes later by a jet of crude oil that gushed more than 60m into the air. The second phase of the hydrocarbon economy had begun. Not only does oil release more energy than coal, it is easier to transport. When Henry Ford got to hear of Lucas’s discovery, it didn’t take him long to re-engineer his newfangled horseless carriages to run on oil instead of biofuel – his original choice.
Throughout the twentieth century, and in to the early decades of the twenty first, hydrocarbons have continued to supply the world with most of its energy needs – for transport, electricity generation, heating and lighting. Fossil fuels, carbon based fuels, hydrocarbons, call them what you will, have transformed the lives of almost everyone on the planet by providing cheap and convenient energy. If you had to rely on human power, rather than hydrocarbon power, for your energy needs, you would need the equivalent of 150 human slaves working for you, 24 hours a day.
If everyone desires power, in the form of cheap energy, why do we have to move to a low carbon economy – an economy where little or none of our energy is derived from carbon based fuels like coal, oil and gas?
When you burn coal, oil or gas, you release Carbon Dioxide into the air. Every year the world releases about 30 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, and most scientists believe that that’s why the world is now 0.74 degrees warmer than it was in Boulton and Watt’s time. Most scientists – and more to the point most governments – believe that if we carry on putting this amount of CO2 into the atmosphere the world will warm to an unacceptable degree. The UK is fairly typical of many western governments in that it has committed us to a 34% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020 and an 80% reduction by 2050 (compared to 1990 levels). You may or may not be personally convinced by the climate change science – but the UK government is convinced enough to mandate CO2 reductions. The only way to meet these targets is to reduce our use of carbon based fuels. This is reason number on for the low carbon economy.
Coal, oil and gas are finite resources. Once they’re used up, they’re gone for ever. The good news is that there’s plenty left – we’ve probably only used up about half the world’s total resources of oil, for example. The bad news is that from now on, the supply of oil will decline, while the demand for oil – from a growing world population and the increasing energy needs of China and India – will push the price ever upwards. This is reason number two for the low carbon economy: even if you are happy burning the stuff, you won’t be able to because it will be too expensive.
Finally, the UK faces some particular problems of its own. We’re closing old power stations faster than we’re opening new ones. Demand for electricity continues to increase. Unless something radical happens, sometime in 2015 we’ll run out power. Homes and businesses will face regular power cuts simply because peak demand exceeds peak supply. If we want to avoid this, we’re going to have to reduce our energy needs, or generate more power from non carbon sources. This is reason number three for the low carbon economy.
No one knows exactly what the low carbon economy will be like, but here are the key features:
Only part of the picture
- More power generation from renewables and nuclear
- Alternatives to petrol and diesel drive cars and other vehicles
- More frugal use of energy
This will lead to:
- More efficient buildings that require less energy to heat and light
- A resurgence of all things local, as transport costs increase
- Increased consumer demand for products and services with a low carbon footprint
- Huge opportunities for businesses that provide innovative products and services for the low carbon economy.