Energy dependency is a problem for us all, not just Ukraine

The news from Ukraine these days just seems to get worse and worse for the country. Military planes are being shot from the sky by rebels, the eastern half of the country is still trying to secede (despite Russia not being quite so vocally supportive anymore), and the Crimean region seems to have been irreversibly lost to Putin at this point. Now, to top it all off, the Russian energy company Gazprom has turned off Ukraine’s gas supply, claiming that the country has not yet paid what it owes. The only vaguely positive spin on this is that at least it didn’t happen in the middle of the winter.

Now of course this decision by Gazprom is political rather than financial. There has just been a new Ukrainian president elected, in an election that Russia essentially considers void because it doesn’t accept the recent revolution that kicked Yanukovych out of the country. And Russia has a desire to keep flexing its newfound muscle on the international stage, showing the world that it is once again a power that should not be messed with. After all, if countries were cut off for not immediately paying their debts, almost nowhere in the world would have any energy right now.

And that’s part of the problem. As we’ve discussed in previous blogs, our global energy system is no longer working well. It’s based around widespread use of fossil fuels that are increasingly scarce and increasingly controlled by only a few countries around the world. If access to those fuels dries up, countries suddenly find themselves in a whole lot of trouble, often unable to provide even basic services to their people.

It is this energy system that is allowing Russia to bully Ukraine right now. It is also this energy system that led to the US decision to invade Iraq, in an attempt to rewrite the oil-rich Middle East region in their own image, and to gain control of enough fuel supplies to keep their unsustainable economy running for a long time. It is this energy system that allows the OPEC cartel to control prices for ordinary consumers around the world. And it is this energy system that causes us to continually dig for more and more fossil fuels in less and less conventional places – under the Arctic, in the tar sands, in Alaska, and so on.

Almost all countries in the world are far too dependent on oil and gas for their energy needs, and this leaves them far too dependent on one or two key suppliers. This fact is starkly illustrated by the fact that the Gazprom shutdown of Ukraine’s energy supply is worrying the EU, who are concerned that even their superpower bloc may not get access to enough fuel for this year unless the flow from Russia gets turned back on promptly. Instead of self-sufficiency and sustainability, which are the goals that all countries should be striving after, we have dependence on dirty fuels.

Many people make a lot of money from this system; the people who suffer the most from it are those who are already poor. They pay high prices at the gas pumps, or to heat their homes in the west. And in the developing world they suffer from the early effects of climate change, killing their crops, flooding their villages, destroying their livelihoods.

What the Ukraine incident shows is the need for greater self-sufficiency in energy sources for all countries, and the need to focus on alternative energy technologies. Rather than being reliant on Russian gas, Ukraine – and the rest of us – should be focusing on cleaner, greener, renewable technologies that are much more easily accessible throughout the world. In designing a new world energy system over the next few decades, these need to be priorities for the international community.

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Capturing the future for fossil fuels

A few years ago, one of the big new hopes for the extractive and fossil fuel industries was the technology of carbon capture and storage (CCS). The aim is very simple, and encapsulated fairly well in the name – to capture the carbon that is released from otherwise polluting power plants, and to store it in porous rocks underground. Despite generating quite a buzz during the Copenhagen climate change conference back in 2009, things have been quiet for CCS for a few years – originally because the world was still trying to commit itself to renewable energy rather than fossil fuels, and more recently because we’ve become obsessed with new and more difficult to extract forms of those same fossil fuels, such as tar sands and fracked natural gas. However, things may be getting back on track for CCS – a recent report in The Guardian suggested that the British CCS industry alone could be worth £35 billion by 2030. Extrapolate that too much bigger countries like the US and China, and countries with similar or growing levels of emissions like Germany, Japan, Canada, and Australia, and the amount of money at stake could be utterly astronomical.

Initially, CCS actually sounds like a pretty decent idea. If we have the technology to capture our emissions and store them somewhere safe, away from the earth’s atmosphere where they are causing so much damage, why shouldn’t we do it? After all, we can’t switch immediately from fossil fuels to a completely renewable energy economy, so we’ll have to do something to cope in the meantime, right? Unfortunately, there’s a couple of sets of problems with this – practical problems, and theoretical problems. On the practical side of things is the fact that CCS doesn’t actually get rid of the emissions, it just buries them – out of sight, out of mind. An unforeseen leakage, a natural disaster like an earthquake, the ground being dug up for some reason – any of these things could easily see the carbon released back into the atmosphere, completely negating any benefits that CCS might have temporarily provided.

But perhaps more important are the theoretical problems, the ways in which CCS provides us with the wrong mindset to approach the problems of the coming century. Essentially, CCS is not just a way of dealing with the inevitable problems of fossil fuels while we switch over to a renewable economy. CCS is a crutch on which to prop up the existing fossil fuel system in order to avoid switching to renewable energy. Once the carbon is buried in the ground, politicians will claim the problem is solved, and there’s no need to do anything to help develop new, efficient, or renewable technologies – a position which, of course, helps their friends and funders in the fossil fuel industry.

The fossil fuel industry will continue to be privileged, and the other issues around fuel extraction will be ignored. The destruction that comes to communities where fracking is taking place; the impact of tar sands developments on Canadian First Nations; the upcoming problem of peak oil; the continued wars in the Middle East in the name of resource grabbing – all of these things will be pushed to the side and ignored in the name of continued profit if CCS allows us to make oil, gas, and coal seem ‘green’. This would be a terrible shame – fossil fuels are perhaps the most destructive substance on earth today, and it’s absolutely vital that the kind of work we do at NRGLab to develop efficiencies and alternatives isn’t ignored in favour of keeping the existing, damaging economic status quo.

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