Food, Fuel and Famine
Comment piece by Mike Malloy
The
full essay is
available for download, 39 pages pdf 240kb
Summation
For thousands of years, humans have dreamed of finding a way to escape
the Rule of Famine. In the second half of the 20th century, they
thought that they had found the secret. Stored solar energy in the form
of petroleum oil was the elixir. For a few generations, the dream
seemed to have come true. Population numbers climbed as never before.
Invention blossomed as humans played with the new toy. The shape of
civilisation and everyday technology changed. Famine seemed to have
lost its grip. However, the real cost of fuel climbed steadily and
remorselessly as population numbers bloomed and oil supplies remained
steady. Predictions of oil depletion increased in volume and number.
The predicted date for final exhaustion dropped from the 2070s to the
2040s. The Age of Oil seemed destined to last less than a century and
to terminate in a painful, monster famine, wiping out billions of
people. A defence screen could be attempted, but success is not
assured. To their lasting shame, politicians simply looked the other
way, and continue to do so. Even basic research has been by-passed.
We now live in the 21st century – crunch time. Generations have now
grown up in a world where powered vehicles are just part of the
environment. The gasoline and diesel that power them are of interest
only when the tank runs down and demands replenishment. Vehicles are of
passing interest, but only as units in traffic congestion and as parts
of a brand and age class. Habituation has consigned both vehicles and
fuel to the back room of consciousness and left no room for the
handling of the run-down and disappearance of oil. That is not
perceived as a disaster. Natural disasters are something to which
humans must adapt. However, they relate to incidents such as plagues,
fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves and floods. They do
not cover man-made disasters. In other words, perception acts against
survival in a world bereft of one of life’s props.
A critical factor in addressing the problem of supplying a substitute
for disappearing oil supplies is scale. NZ uses about 6750 million
litres of petroleum products per annum. That requires a great deal of
replacement. It wipes out most “good ideas” for substitutes. To be
useful, any substitute must fit two limiting factors: available land
and existing knowhow. Of these issues, the most difficult to deal with
is land use.
A first class SOE report on a strategy to introduce a national
programme of high country afforestation for energy purposes in 2007 has
been ignored. Time has gone by with virtually nothing to show for it.
We now have a mere 19 years within which to carry out basic research
and to implement something like the Scion programme. What is now needed
is a crash course of planting trees on a best guess basis to the
maximum extent possible and amend it as research findings come to hand.
Parallel to these steps will be the raising of capital, the design and
location of a processing plant or plants, and the construction of the
plant or plants. When coupled with the need to convince Parliament of
the need and urgency of the work, NZ faces a seemingly impossible task.
The conclusion is stark. No matter how effective intervention may be,
it can only mitigate the disastrous effects of losing cheap oil as the
mainstay of the economies of nation-states. Famine on an unprecedented
scale will return. It will garner an enormous death toll. Its victims
will, as always, be the world’s poor. Where will famine reign supreme?
There are a number of answers. The sizes of domestic food production
and domestic population density will be the first determinants. Also
relevant will be the capacity of leadership to handle public debt. Its
magnitude will attract public scrutiny. Leaders who cannot display
competence in its management under stress will fail to attract new
loans. The cheapness of petroleum oil as a prop for national economies
will never return because energy comes only from the sun, and its earth
store can only be replenished through a very limited number of
resources, including the management of forest leaves. Transport
will necessarily be expensive because fuel will become a
capital-intensive commodity. Only those states displaying marked
efficiency will survive, let alone dominate world
affairs.
To have any hope of surviving the run-down of oil unscathed, NZ should
be in a position to process significant volumes of biomass fuels by
2030. If Hubbert’s (19) prediction of oil run-down are not borne out by
2030, that year still retains its importance. The more NZ is able to
produce DIY fuels by that time, the sooner it will be able to reduce
carbon emissions from oil feedstocks. Nineteen years remains a fixed
time constraint under any scenario. Within that period, an action plan
for a New Zealand DIY scheme to yield transport fuels will need to be
operating. Some of its critical components must be:
- Discussions between the Government and Federated Farmers will be
needed to ensure that landowners are willing to plant EP land in short
term and long term tree species and that Government is willing to fund
such plantings at an agreed level;
- Government should establish a pilot plant capable of processing
wood waste, used tyres and water weed sustainably into methanol for
research and use;
- Nurseries and forestry consultants will need to be briefed and be
able to handle biomass planting at updated Scion levels;
- A co-operative planters’ company needs to be put in place;
- Loggers will require to be briefed in order to be able to handle
harvesting in time;
- Water-based and land-based transport firms need to be briefed in
advance of decisions on processing;
- The economics of land- versus water- based transport for
processing and distribution need to be worked out;
- A site at Gisborne should be designated as the primary site for a
production processing plant capable of converting wood and wastes into
methanol;
- Local bodies will need to be briefed on the location of woodlot
establishments, processing plants and transport traffic;
- Research into the engineering of mining methane hydrates in the
Hikurangi margin for on-shore liquid fuel processing should be carried
out;
- The design of processing plant(s) should be completed and
approved by concerned local bodies;
- A processing company needs to be incorporated (say, Forest Fuels
Limited, or FFL);
- FFL should be structured so that the majority of voting shares
are held by the Grower Co-operative and processing plant(s) are owned
by FFL;
- Extraneous capital for FFL will need to be found and under its
Articles of Association attract dividends at the rate enjoyed by the
holder of voting shares;
- The dominant position of the Grower Co-operative in FFL and the
dividend rights attaching to extraneous shares should be entrenched by
Act of Parliament;
- Processing plant(s) will need to be constructed in time for the
initial takeover of biomass fuels;
- A public relations plan must be implemented to inform the public
of relevant information on changing patterns of transport.
Explosive power represented man’s habit of taking whatever he needed
from his environment. If it was environment friendly, that happened
solely by accident. Electric power from methanol is essentially
environment friendly but capital intensive. Its corollary that
the end price of motive power must increase has its counterpart –
increased wealth in a changed economic structure. The increased costs
of planting trees, managing steep sites, transporting raw materials,
processing raw material and distributing and selling finished methanol
represent:
a) Income in the hands of recipients,
b) New products in the market place,
c) New opportunities to develop the production of
methanol-base products, including new products,
d) Safer motor vehicles through reduced risk of fire;
e) An expanded industrial base for NZ;
f) Potential for new industries in NZ;
g) A sustainable base for the creation of wealth;
h) An expanded tax base for Government.
Methanol is an alcohol. It is poisonous and can lead to blindness and
death if ingested in quantity. For this reason, it is not a drug of
potential addiction. It is worth noting that working with, rather than
against, the environment can lead to increased wealth and no clear risk
of death arising from alcoholic excess.
