International Energy Agency and oil: How much is left, and what are the alternatives, part 1

The International Energy Agency (IEA) report, issued on Tuesday, makes for grim reading. The report is used by governments all over the world to set energy policy.

Business as usual would put the planet on track for a 6 degree rise in global temperatures.

The report demonstrates that containing climate change is possible but will require �a profound transformation of the energy sector.�

Keeping Co2 levels in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm), which many experts feel will only give the planet a 50-50 chance of avoiding runaway climate change, will require �a profound transformation of the energy sector� according to the IEA.

�To achieve this scenario, fossil-fuel demand would need to peak by 2020 and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to fall to 26.4 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2030 from 28.8 Gt in 2007� according to the IEA

Two of the main challenges include increased demand from China and India, as well as lack of investment in renewables and efficiencies due to the downturn.

Current oil producers also face losses of many trillions of dollars if global agreement can be reached on aiming for a limit of 450 ppm.

The small rises in supplies of "non-conventional oil", such as the tar sands of Canada, involve extreme climate polluting extraction methods.

Even nuclear, often lauded as carbon neutral, is not. The drilling, blasting, excavating, separating and transporting of uranium is not taken into account by western governments in their own figures.

It has been reported that the Namibian government plans to build a coal fired power plant to provide electricity for its uranium mines, due to increased UK demand. This could produce more than 10 million tonnes of Co2 a year, while also draining resources such as water and producing huge mountains of nuclear waste, waste which remains problematic far into the future.

Coping with nuclear waste for millennia, in a world with no fossil fuels, will be interesting to say the least.

Alarming and all as it was, some of the IEA's thunder was stolen by a whistleblower, as reported in the Guardian on Monday.

This person, described as a senior official with the IEA, claimed that the IEA has been exaggerating the amount of oil left due to US pressure. This then prompted the IEA to publish more details on the figures.

However even the figures themselves are worrying. Fields yet to be developed and even yet to be found make the situation look better than it otherwise is.

What are the implications for Ireland? How ready is Ireland for a oil shortage? See next posting.

Happy Heart Oil: the next generation of organic

As the organic movement matures, the next organic generation emerges to take up the reigns.

Kitty Colchester is Ben and Charlotte's daughter. The Colchesters have a c.200 acre organic holding near Urlingford in Kilkenny called Drumeen farm. They have had this as an organic farm since the mid 1970s.

(photo LtoR Eileen Bentley Bord bia; Kitty Colchester and Minister for Food Trevor Sargent)

A central part of the organic movement since then, their mixed farm has cattle (mostly Angus) sheep, poultry, turkey, honey and forestry. They also grow their own feed, which is where the idea for the Happy Heart Oil came along.

So now, this JFC award winner and Teagasc organic demonstration farm has another feather in its bow.

Daughter Kitty's Happy Heart organic rapeseed oil is divine, really sustainable and perfectly affordable, retailing as it does from between E5.50 and E6 for 500ml. Winner in the sustainability category at the Bord Bia National Organic Awards this year, its easy to see why.

The taste is exceptionally fresh, due to the fact that it is pressed each week on the farm. In fact, all the work is done on the farm.

Ben Colchester had been growing rapeseed and pressing it for the protein feed by product it yields to feed the chickens and turkeys. This created an opportunity for Kitty:

Over to Kitty:

�I'd been in in sales, but after doing aid work in Africa for a year, I didn't want to go back to that � I was more interested in doing something on the farm. The oil was an obvious choice�.

Having done some research into the nutritional benefits of rapeseed oil, Kitty started pressing, labelling and bottling earlier this year. The oil has been a huge hit so far.

�Most oil available in Ireland comes in from southern Europe. Its usually about 3 to 4 months old by the time the customers get it, whereas I press weekly�.

Both the nutrition and the taste of the oil improves because of this.

Three times a year, 300 or so customers come to the farm to collect their large organic food orders: They sell freezer portions, including half and whole beef and lamb animals, butchered to customers' requirements.

For the birds �we do three batches - chicken in June and in September, and then a Christmas Turkey run. We kill about 1500 animals here on our on farm abattoir each time. In June, the oil was also available to the customers, they tried it and they all bought some�.

Since then, the distribution base has expanded. The oil is available from Duncan Healy's Organic Delights stalls at Farmers' Markets on the east coast, at other mostly regional farmers' markets including Clonmel, in some regional box schemes, and in various retail outlets in Dublin, Tipperary, Cork, Wicklow and Offaly.

�The rapeseed is rotated every 3 to 4 yrs; we grew 11 acres, but went up to about 20 acres this year. We get 10-15 tonnes, and a tonne give about 600 bottles. Next year's plan was to double, but that's been delayed by a year.�

Delayed. That's a euphemism.

�We won the award for best sustainable product, sales and feedback were going really well, and then we had a fire. I lost the whole crop.�

Disaster. Despite being encouraged to buy oil in for the year, Kitty decided not to. �No, I want to do something different, something 100% Irish and traceable. Buying in and then changing back to my own oil next year would be too confusing for the customer�.

Luckily, her overheads have been low � she does the pressing, bottling and labelling herself, so the crop loss hasn't been as costly as it might have been. Also, she has enough stock left to keep for the farm sales and to �dribble out over the year�.

In the intermittent period, she will work on branding, labelling and other marketing-related areas.

But watch out for the limited supplies of this year's 2009 vintage: it will be much sought after. And here's to a happy and healthy growing, pressing, and bottling experience for Happy Heart oil from now on.

farming's future sustainability

Here's an interview I did with Richard Douthwaite (right) of FEASTA. It appeared in last week's Farming Examiner as the front page and centre page spread.

Oliver Moore: Can you outline the overall situation with regard to the sustainability of farming, as you see it Richard?

Richard Douthwaite: Modern industrialised farming, particularly tillage, has been described as a way of converting fossil energy into food energy. There�s a lot of energy used in the application of fertilizer, in tractors, in sprays, then in packing and getting the food to the customer. The whole process is not sustainable. In traditional forms of farming, it took 4 units of energy to produce each unit of energy in food. Most of that energy was directly from the sun, and all from renewable sources. Now there are 40 units of energy going into the production of food in the Europe, and perhaps up to 90 in the US. Most of that is from fossil fuels. That can�t continue.

OM: Within this broad picture, what is the key problem?

RD: The problem is that we�re not recycling the nutrients. Quite a lot of the nitrogenous fertilizer breaks down in the soil and becomes nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas (GHG), and one of the main sources of GHGs in farming. A lot of energy is used in the production of those nitrogenous fertilizers and most of it is wasted because the nitrogen is not taken up by the plants. There's more waste when the crops leave the farm because the nutrients they contain aren�t recycled: There�s nitrogen in the proteins that go off, and there�s phospates going off too. They are consumed by whoever eats the food and go into the sewage system, and don�t get back onto the land. As a consequence of this, we need to apply more artificial fertilizers. There is a growing problem with phosphorous. There�s a finite supply: rock phosphate is getting scarcer and scarcer, and that then means that more and more energy is needed to make it available to us and to transport it from places like Morocco.

So we need to think of how fertilizer can be better retained in the soil, so that if you are putting nitrogen on, it stays there. We need to minimise the use of artificial nitrogen, and to start replacing it with organic sources, such as legumes which fix nitrogen. Then, we need to make sure that any that escapes is recycled.

OM: What are the future implications for farming?

RD: Agriculture is likely to become more labour intensive again. The trend towards the larger farms will be reversed as the cost of food and fuel rises in real terms and takes a higher proportion of non-farmers' incomes. Farmers won't just be growing food. They will be producing fuel, chemicals, fibres and building materials as well. A whole new category of multi-purpose crops will emerge.

OM: How do you envision these multi purpose crops being utilized most efficiently?

RD: It may emerge in a way similar to the co-op creamery structure of a century ago, where the co-op would take the milk and the farmer would take back the whey. I envisage a co-op bio-refinery in each community to which farmers would deliver crops like miscanthus, which would be refined to give protein powder, biogas, diesel fuel, plastics like nylon, pesticides and soil improvers. The farmers would take the improvers back to their farms to recycle the nutrients that were in the crop they delivered to the refinery. Because transport will become more expensive, the plants' bulk will be reduced in rural areas and there will be centralised refineries regionally that take the valuable bits and process them further. At the bioenergy show in Tullamore this year, miscanthus was being sold in compressed blocks for people's fires, just like the wood blocks made from compressed sawdust. But 20% of dried grass is plant protein � that�s too valuable to burn. Quite simply, we should be taking out the valuable bits before burning any biomass.

OM: So the biorefineries would produce biofuels like biodiesel?

RD: Yes, but I should emphasise that these would be second-generation biofuels, produced by breaking down the cellulose found in all plants. Feasta is very much against the production of most first-generation biofuels, such as ethanol from maize and wheat and biodiesel from oilseed rape. These make no sense from an energy or a climate point of view. Their production is entirely driven by tax-breaks and the net result has been to increase hunger around the world. The only first generation biofuel that is acceptable is ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil.

OM: If farmers go in this direction in the near future, what�s in it for them?

RD: If farmers can increase the carbon content of their soils, or the semi-permanent biomass that�s growing on them, they need to be rewarded in some way for doing this because they would be helping prevent climate change. Part of their reward would be that they made their soil much better. It is however, very difficult to measure the carbon content of soils to pay farmers a set amount per tonne for the carbon that they have taken in. Feasta is therefore setting up a working party to develop a new concept of best practice - to develop a better understanding of the types of farming that involve sequestering more and more carbon in the soil or in the plants growing on the soil. It needs to become financially beneficial to follow best practice. There could be payments through REPS, or the price of the crops could be subsidised in some sort of way. We�re going to need people in the working party with expertise in this area, and we�re getting very good co-operation from the universities and from Teagasc on this.

OM: Are there any new developments that might help with soil performance and quality?

RD: Feasta has become particularly interested in the inclusion of charcoal in the soil. It has recently been discovered that the pre Columbian Indians put charcoal into the soil because it held the nutrients there. Also, there was an increase in microbial and fungal activity which made the soil more fertile. These soils still exist in the Amazon basin where they are called terra preta, which means dark earth. What happens, it seems, is that the fungi feed on sugars sent down by the plants, and they in turn send up nutrients to the plants. So the plant sequesters carbon too. Terra Preta promises to do three things: 1 sequester more carbon in the soil; 2 hold nutrients there more efficiently; 3 give bigger crops.

OM: Where does Feasta stand on the cows vs cars debate?

RD: We don't think there should be a debate at all. Some civil servants seem to think that because cows' digestive systems give off methane, a GHG, Ireland should reduce its greenhouse emissions by cutting the number of either cars or cows. This is, we think, a total misconception. We've tried to get the IFA to make the case that cows are very different because the methane they release is not adding fossil carbon to the air but it just doesn�t seem to be bothered. It seems to hope that its political muscle will shield its members from any herd-reduction measures the government might introduce. The ICMSA has a very much better attitude.

OM: But isn�t methane a serious GHG?

RD: Methane is a very serious GHG. It�s probably 60 times worse than CO2. Official figures suggest that it is 23 times more, but that�s over a 100 year period. However, all its heating effect is concentrated in the first few years before it is broken down. But - and this is crucial - the carbon in the methane released by cows comes from natural sources. It is not adding continuously to the carbon in the air, because the plants that the cows grazed on picked up the carbon from the air. So the cows are part of the natural carbon cycle. They are not leading to a net increase in the warming effect. If you increase the size of the national herd, you get a once off increase in methane; you don�t get a continuous increase in CO2 levels, as you do if you are burning fossil fuels in a car. So there is no comparison at all between cars and cows.

OM: I presume you are talking about grass-fed animals, where the grass gets its nitrogen from legumes? And surely processing, distribution and so on need to be taken into account before you can presume diary and beef will be acceptable in sustainability terms?

RD: If meat and milk is to be produced anywhere in the world, Ireland should be one of the places producing them because the fossil fuel emissions from producing them here are lower than they would be almost anywhere else. You've also got to consider the carbon emissions if forest is cleared for beef production in places like Brazil. And, because Ireland is close to a lot of people who need meat and milk products, it should not take a lot of energy to get the food to them, although more of it will go by sea in future rather than by truck.

OM: So, in certain relatively easy to attain circumstances, we can keep our beef and dairy industries.

RD: Yes, I think so. But many more cattle will be kept indoors so that the slurry can be turned into biogas. This will be used for heating, for electricity and compressed to run vehicles. Farmers have been very slow to realise that the energy content of a bullock's dung is worth more than its meat.

OM: What's the biggest challenge facing Irish farmers?

RD: They, in common with farmers around the world, have got to find ways of turning their sector from being a source of greenhouse emissions into a sink which removes them. At present, about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture and changes in land use, such as forest clearance. Those emissions not only have to stop but, because the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is already above the safe limit, CO2 needs to be removed from the air quickly, before it has set off a disastrous uncontrollable global warming process. We might have thirty years to do this. There's no high-tech solution. Only the world's farmers can respond in time.

oil and Ireland's coping strategies: that $100 moment

Here's an article I wrote for the 'eye of the storm' op ed in the examiner. I haven't had an op ed before, so was v pleased to write it. It was all very frantic - I had a particular hour to get the article in by, which is unusual for me. And that hour was 2pm the day before the Saturday edition of the paper. It was also slightly outside of my normal remit, but I though I could perhaps start doing some news features for a change.

Don't worry foodies, there's plenty on food in it! I do regret not including the following things, however, so I'm glad to be able to include them now:

best place for info on peak oil is probably: this place! http://www.feasta.org/

John Gormley also obviously introduced the VRT changes and the lightbulb changes
and decoupling in Irish Agriculture has reduced the emissions from agriculture.

So here is the article:

It had to happen. With oil hitting and hovering around $100 dollars the whole world is now talking and thinking about oil. So how dependent are we on it, how much is there really left and what are we doing to adapting to a world with less oil?

It is thought that we are more efficient and less dependent on oil than we were in the bad old days of the 1970s. There are a number of problems with this thesis. Firstly, there is the fact that we are a far more globalised economy than we were back then. Since then, national economies have been deregulated and trade liberalised, so that now, many products are made up from a multitude of interconnected and intercontinental components. And plastic has, of course gone forth and multiplied.

Laptops, disposable containers, toys, toothbrushes, cameras, the list of personalised products goes on. But then, the functioning of many aspects of the economy is dependent too: medicines, food production and transport, are all either quite literally fuelled by or dependent upon oil.

Take food: Fertilizer production and transportation is heavily oil dependent. Prices are rising � Nitrogen (made by oil at present) is up 50%, Phospate (also a finite resource) is up 67% - and the consumer is starting to experience this.

With globalisation has come global sourcing of foods and agri-food inputs; we in Ireland have a very weak food producing infrastructure, once we start to consider foods other than meat and milk. Even these depend on winter feeds which are heavy oil users, both in production and transport.

According to the junior minister with responsibility in the area, Trevor Sargent, there are less than a dozen large scale vegetable producers left in Ireland at present.

Just-in-time deliveries by road mean that supermarkets have jettisoned their storage spaces and instead opted for storing food in refrigerated trucks on the roads. Food processing is ever-increasing too � both involve more oil.

So, seeing as we are so dependent on it, how much oil is left then? That depends upon how you measure it. For example, optimists suggest that there are bound to be reserves. According to the US based Cambridge Energy Research Associates:

�Those who believe a peak is imminent tend to consider only proven remaining reserves of conventional oil, which they currently estimate at about 1.2 trillion barrels�this is a pessimistic estimate because it excludes the enormous contribution likely from probable and possible resources, those yet to be found.�

Then go on: �the global inventory is some 4.8 trillion barrels, of which about 1.08 trillion barrels have been produced, leaving 3.72 trillion conventional and unconventional barrels, an order of magnitude that will allow productive capacity to continue to expand well into this century.�

Pessimists suggest that these reserves, should they be found, will be too difficult and costly to extract. They suggest that this may already be the case for reserves in deep water, the artic, extra heavy, oil shale and enhanced recovery oils. The crux of the matter is whether all the known reserves can be found, processed and delivered to market in time. Proponents of the Peak Oil theory, such as Feasta, suggest that we are already at the peak oil point, where accessible reserves will be smaller than what�s been extracted. They suggest that we need to make plans urgently to deal with energy decent, or powerdown.

So what is Ireland doing about it? Oil consumption per capita has risen 50% over the last 15 years, while our dependence on imported oil and gas stands at 85%. According to an Amarach consulting report from 2006, services and manufacturing will mostly be affected indirectly by peak oil in the short term, whereas residential and agricultural sectors are more vulnerable. They suggest that our mitigation strategies are vital.

The new Energy Minister, Eamon Ryan has begun to put some mitigating factors into place: these include funding for renewables research, the smart electricity metering programme for houses which will be rolled out in April, and improved north south energy co-operation. A National Energy Efficiency Action Plan is being finalised at present, which according to the Minister, �will allow us to save �1.7 billion or 3 million tonnes of oil every year.�

Minister Ryan states that �We are also committed to making energy efficiency savings of 20% by 2020. The public sector will have to make energy savings of 33% by this date.�

Building energy efficiency standards have also been introduced for all new houses by Environment Minister John Gormley.

Some parts of Ireland have taken matters into their own hands, most notably Kinsale and north Tipperary, in particular the town of Cloughjordan.

In Kinsale, students from the 2 year permaculture course in the local college along with their then teacher, Rob Hopkins, designed an energy decent plan, which has received some funding from the local council. The plan goes through all the key aspects of socio-economic and cultural life in Kinsale, and produces a road map for how to reduce energy use.

�We didn�t think it was going to be that big a deal, but the plan has been downloaded over 5000 times around the world� according to Klaus Harvey, who sits on the Steering Committee of Transition Towns Kinsale. This plan has become an intergal part of what has become the known as the transition towns movement. For Kinsale, food, education, housing, economy and livelihoods, health, tourism, transport, waste, energy and marine resources are all examined and mapped out in energy decent terms.

In north Tipperary, very ambitious plans are afoot. A 130 house ecovillage is being constructed at present, adjacent to the local village of Cloughjordan. According to Duncan Martin, of the ecovillage�s energy, waste and water subcommittee, �The houses will be well insulated and designed to make best use of the sun's heat�. There is an ecological charter which sets out the standard which the house must meet.

He goes on: �all our space heating and hot water will come from renewable sources. Additional heating will be provided by a district heating system. This will circulate hot water to every house from a central array of solar panels, backed up by two wood-chip boilers. The woodchip will come from local forestry wastes, so we will be independent of imported fossil fuels�.

And it�s not just the ecovillage itself. �The ecovillage is a partner in a European project called SERVE - Sustainable Energy for the Rural Village Environment. This is providing over �2 million in funding for the area around Cloughjordan to improve energy efficiency in existing houses and expand the use of renewable energy. This will cover such additions as more insulation, double glazing, solar panels, wood pellet boilers and better central heating controls�.

In total, along with the ecovillage itself, 900 houses in north Tipperary villages will benefit from the SERVE project.

Is it all enough? In the final analysis that depends upon whether we resist or embrace change.