peak oil forecasts

There's a lot of debate about the phenomenon of peak oil production. The February 2007 Hirsch Report [494 KB PDF file] commissioned by the US Department of Energy provides an update of a February 2005 report summarising a range of forecasts, from those who think the peak has passed to those who think it will never happen. The key point made is that regardless of who you choose to believe, peak oil presents a risk management situation of unprecedented proportions. Consider this from the 2005 report, reiterated in the update:

Mitigation will require an intense effort over decades. This inescapable conclusion is based on the time required to replace vast numbers of liquid fuel consuming vehicles and the time required to build a substantial number of substitute fuel production facilities. Our scenarios analysis shows:

• Waiting until world oil production peaks before taking crash program action would leave the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades.
• Initiating a mitigation crash program 10 years before world oil peaking helps considerably but still leaves a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.
• Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking appears to offer the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall for the forecast period.

Update on 10 June 2007: A couple of people have told me - too late - about a screening in Cape Town of the movie The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. Damn. Sounds like there are some useful lessons there. Apparently Cuba's organic revolution was born of the need to make do without oil: farm and transport equipment ground to a halt as the oil taps were shut off. And with the loss of Soviet food subsidies and sugar cane markets, they had to get creative. Fast. I am told the country now has a very low carbon footprint as a result. According to the WWF's The Living Planet Report 2006, Cuba is the only country in the world showing sustainable development.

food labels: environmental impact

Food labeling has increased in complexity as the nature of the ingredients has become more difficult to understand, and many people fear that we are losing control over what we are ingesting. When we could no longer pronounce the names of ingredients, we started insisting that all ingredients should be labeled; when we realized that some food can make us fat, we asked for calorie and protein content; when cereals stopped including anything nutritious, we needed to see added vitamins and minerals; when we were told that some fat was good and some was bad, we asked for labelling of transfats; when we found that a lot of our staples were genetically modified, we wanted to know which ones; as we became more aware of allergies, we asked for labeling of known allergens.

These things are all relatively easy to identify and label - although there is plenty of resistance in some quarters - but when it comes to environmental impact, a minefield has opened up as supermarkets start labeling the carbon impact of foods. If the carbon footprint of a grocery item could be definitively quantified as a broad indicator of potential environmental damage (mainly from energy consumed in its production and transportation) then it would help improve consumers' ability to manage their own carbon footprints. Increased awareness should help weed out high-carbon products and encourage consumption of locally produced goods. I'm just not sure how carbon footprints will be standardised in a way that fairly compares different goods from different countries, and is clear enough for the average consumer to understand.

But it gets even more complicated. Carbon is not the only measure of environmental impact. Another hidden impact is the embodied water in foods. Water is exported and imported in the sense that food grown in one country requires water for its growth, so the producing country is selling virtual water to the importing country. One of the big problems with this is that many food producing countries don't have water to spare, and many food importing countries are saving their own water at the expense of others.

Wikipeida goes into more detail on the impacts of embodied water, particularly as related to global trade, noting also that this issue doesn't apply only to food. Those jeans you're wearing represent 10,850 litres of embodied water. Waterwise estimates that of all the water used by the average Briton, 65% is embedded in food, 30% in industrial goods. Out of 3400 litres used by each person every day, only 150 comes from the tap.

I am in favour of finding some way of identifying the impacts of the way food and other goods are produced and transported, but it's going to take some time to figure out how. Embodied water and carbon are the two most all-encompassing measures of environmental impact, but there are others. And what about labour practices and other social impacts? The list goes on.

shout it from the rooftops

There are many good reasons for developing green roofs:

[An] important environmental benefit of green roof systems is their potential to moderate the urban heat island effect... The climactic benefits of green roof systems are not limited to temperature moderation. Urban plantings have also been shown to improve urban air quality, by trapping and absorbing nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds, and airborne particulate matter.

And another reason, less often mentioned, is the potential for local food production:

The average American meal travels 1500 miles from field to table (Norberg-Hodge et al 2000), using 10 times more energy than the caloric value of the food itself (TFPC 1999). This represents an incredible environmental cost in fossil fuel emissions, pollution associated with extraction, and loss and division of natural habitat by asphalt, to name a few of the more direct costs... Rooftop agriculture is one way in which urban areas could attempt to be more balanced and sustainable in their resource consumption. It is possible to produce a variety of fruit, grain, and vegetable crops on rooftops, either in containers or as field crops (TFPC 1999).

Some roofs growing food across Canada: in Montreal, Toronto, Peterborough, Calgary, and Vancouver.

My previous post on urban farming.

And for all those stormwater managers out there, in 2004 Earth Pledge was commissioned by the New York City Water Board to develop a stormwater simulation model to measure stormwater retention and detention on a specific building or area, specifically to evaluate the impact of green roofs. Micro Model is applied to specific buildings; Macro Model is applied to an area encompassing a network of green roofs. They are now developing Stormwater Model 2.0 based on updated data.

carbon neutral wine

PriceWaterhouseCoopers, accredited to do carbon auditing in South Africa, has developed the FTFA carbon calculator, South Africa's first. This uses "the Global Greenhouse Gas Reporting Protocols which aims to harmonize GHG accounting and reporting standards internationally to ensure that different trading platforms and other climate related initiatives adopt consistent approaches to GHG accounting".

Following a carbon audit, Backsberg will be the first wine estate in South Africa to gain carbon neutral status under the Food and Trees for Africa Carbon Standard specification. FTFA uses carbon audits to determine the necessary sequestration offsets to attain carbon neutrality.

city slicker farms

Urban horticulture: growing local for a whole lotta reasons.

Update on 15 April 2007: On a whole different scale is a grand scheme for vertical skyfarming using converted skyscrapers. And somewhere between this hightech wonderland and good ol' urban allotments lies repurposed shipping containers for modular farming anywhere you care to plonk down a few of these boxes.

food security in South Africa

In an article in this morning's Cape Times, Jeremy Wakeford of UCT's School of Economics points out some of the shortcomings of South Africa's biofuels strategy:

• threats to food security are not only based on diverting agricultural land from other uses to maize production, but also on the fact that maize prices will go up as oil prices go up (oil being an input to maize production) and as demand grows for maize exports
• the energy contained in ethanol from maize is only slightly higher than the energy required to produce the ethanol, so there is no net benefit
• as the cost of producing ethanol goes up, the subsidies for production will need to be maintained (Ethanol Africa has already asked for signficant subsidies from government)
• the benefit of reduced emissions is marginal, given that only a small proportion of fuels will contain ethanol

A quote from Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute:

competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists who want to maintain their mobility and its two billion poorest people who are simply trying to stay alive is emerging as an epic issue.

Agriculture may face declining production anyway because of climate change, so Wakeford suggests that the biofuels strategy needs to be tied to an agricultural strategy that ensures a sustainable approach. He also suggests that biodiesel is a better bet than ethanol, as it can be produced from a wider variety of feedstocks, including waste vegetable oil, non-food crops requiring less water and fossil fuel inputs, and algae. Biodiesel also serves industries other than transport, and thus has wider applications.

Wakeford's full proposal to the biofuels committee investigating a strategy for South Africa.

Update on 5 April 2007: researchers at the University of Rochester are looking at ways to improve the production of ethanol from cellulose waste materials rather than the crop itself.

Update on 8 April 2007: Confirming the notes above, The Economist reports that while ethanol from maize is indeed a zero sum energy game, other sources are somewhat better. Ethanol from sugar cane (as used in Brazil) produces more energy, and cellulosic ethanol (from wood, grasses, shrubs and agricultural wastes) could be even more energy-efficient. Cellulosic ethanol also has greater potential for production without impinging on food production -- but does need more work to bring down production costs.

hmmm...

What can happen with subsidies in US ethanol production.

slowing desertification

The march of the Sahara has been slowed in Niger by a change in government policy, and the response of farmers to this policy. Apparently with no investment money, the desert is being reclaimed as farmers nurture saplings that they once chopped down for fuel, because the farmers now own the trees on their land, giving them an incentive to treat them as a resource more valuable than their use as woodfuel. They now sell fruits, pods, bark and branches at a level that sustains the growing forest, with the additional benefit that the topsoil is not blown away and other crops survive alongside the trees.

It is also reported that the water table is higher now, but it is not clear whether this is simply a result of better rainfall. In some countries, alien trees are being eradicated partly because they are big consumers of groundwater, but that seems not to be a concern in this case. According to a comment on an article on WorldChanging, these trees in Niger are acacias, which are legumes, fixing nitrogen in the soil and improving it.

looming agricultural battle

As a growing number of countries contemplate mandating the use of bioethanol in petroleum (the UK announced in November 2005 that 5% of fuel sold by petrol stations would be from renewable sources by 2010), the conflict between food and non-food agriculture is going to heat up.

Farmers, unsurprisingly, see the trend as a lifeline for farms that are struggling. According to an article in BBC News, the UK's National Farmers' Union also claims that the UK produces 3 million tons of food surplus a year - enough to produce 5% bioethanol for the country. It's not clear from the article where that surplus goes right now, nor how it would be replaced if it were diverted for use as a fuel feedstock.

one potato, two potato

The average American eats nearly 61kg of potatoes a year. Fuel is the main expense in planting and harvesting, and the country's potato heartland, Idaho, is far from the big coastal markets. So fuel prices are a Big Deal for this crop. The American demand for spuds has been going down, causing a decline in production. The resulting rise in prices has partly, but not fully, offset the increased costs of production and transport.

[Source: The Economist, March 25-31 2006, page 51.]

What happens to potatoes in Idaho will have far-reaching impacts. According to the Idaho Potato Commission:

Idaho grows more potatoes than any other U.S. growing region, annually producing about 30 percent of U.S. fall production. The state's production total is 12 billion pounds. Potatoes contribute $2.5 billion or 15 percent of Idaho's gross state product. Potatoes contribute 6.8 percent of southwest Idaho economy, 27.4 percent of south central Idaho's economy, and 32.8 percent of eastern Idaho's economy. SOURCE: University of Idaho