[Closed] UK running out of fossil fuel

There'll be plenty of hot air coming out of our politicians, we just need to harvest the energy.

There is loads of coal under the Valleys its only being dug out in a few places (opencast) and no actual mining on any meaningful scale.

Good job its not true then...I work in the UK oil and gas sector, and those figures and just b******s
well the oil and gas ones are...

A report by the Global Sustainability Institute

So we can assume they'll be pushing a 'green'/sustainable agenda.

Surprised Scotland seems so confident in leaving the rest of the UK if it's true.

There should be a "Europe-wide drive" towards wind, tidal, solar and other sources of renewable power

Not to turn this into another Scotland thread but Scotland is leading the way in this sort of stuff and has huge potential to do even more. Never mind the fact the oil won't run out in 5 years. If it was as little as that the oil companies wouldn't still be investing, but they are.

Just need a few of these pointing eastwards

[img] [/img]

what might have happened in 5 years is our economy turns back into one like the ireland boom bust model where our only industry is building..........and we have legislated out and protested out all of our extraction techniques and areas......

I assume it's based on consumption vs production. The oracle (wikipedia) states that the quantity of oil the UK uses is 1,608,000 bbls/day. We certain don't get that out of the North Sea.

The oil industry will be surprised.

I suspect there's some unstated subtext here, like, "if all imports stopped tomorrow and we had to start burning north sea oil in order to keep the lights on" or something, but even then we don't have the capacity to extract all these resources in 5 years even if we wanted to. So there might be a grain of truth in it but no real world application.

Only five years of oil left, I didn't realise. Surprised Scotland seems so confident in leaving the rest of the UK if it's true.

Well since Scotland has a population approximatly 1/10th that of the UK, simple arithmatic would suggest that we would have around 50 year of oil rather than 5. Seems like an excellent idea to me.

Which fossil fuel us that then as there's still millions of tonnes of coal seems in the NE.

"Researchers" say. Oh **** off. BBC article - PROPER citations required.

So just grabbing some figures off the net

UK Oil use 1,608,000 bbls/day

North Sea production 800,000 bbls/day

Saying that if BP were forced into producing a bit more effectively, and not generally farting around and not getting stuff done quickly and effectively, then you could probably bump up that North Sea figure.

Yeah I think that has been generalised in some way, things are certainly on the slow down, but many big current developments will only just be coming online in 5 years time.

'Journalists', scaremongering?
Nooooo, never 😯

We will still be producing oil from under the north sea in 30 years time.
The only difference is there will be less of it, and it'll cost more/take longer to get out.

That article is a nonsense.

Well since Scotland has a population approximatly 1/10th that of the UK, simple arithmatic would suggest that we would have around 50 year of oil rather than 5. Seems like an excellent idea to me.

Don't they need to sell quite a bit of it to finance themselves?

Anyway, glad it's all BS.

all the UK fossils fuels are Scottish?

itsa good way to strike fear into the ignorant on the fencers regarding the independance vote though.....

even the most ignorant person knows that scotlands heavily dependant on oil - cast doubt in their minds about it and they will vote conservatively......

The same report states that Kuwait has over 700 years of oil left.

Saying that if BP were forced into producing a bit more effectively, and not generally farting around and not getting stuff done quickly and effectively, then you could probably bump up that North Sea figure.

The report itself is a pretty interesting one:

However, it's important to understand some things. All they've done is take a country's total reserves and divide it by that country's total usage. So it's how long the North Sea oil would last if we could get every last drop out now, and use it all without importing any oil.

What this doesn't mean is that North Sea oil is going to run out in 5 years.

I think you will find that is BP working safely as they do not want another accident.

If you believe that you'll believe anything. More like poor project control, lack of decision making, and picking sub contractors based on cost not quality.

The report itself is a pretty interesting one:

pfft, you weren't expecting anyone to read the underlying information before voicing an opinion, were you?

The BBC obviously didn't 😀

An interesting article about it:

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/05/why-the-uk-will-not-run-out-of-oil-coal-or-gas-in-five-years/