Hampden Energy Forums Summary Report

Background to Peak Oil and Hampden Energy Forums

Presented to

WDC Visioning Workshop, Hampden Hall, 22.11.06

Dugald sends his apologies and has asked me to give a short account of what our group has been doing on his behalf.

Dugald informed himself about peak oil and felt so concerned about its massive implications and the fact that nobody was prepared even to consider it in planning processes that he got together with a team of local people who were prepared to give it a go. They organised the energy forums, which gave our community a unique opportunity to learn from three extremely knowledgeable people about the constraints which we face in the future – the near future, it would appear.

The first lecture was given by a geologist, Professor Rick Sibson. He outlined the concept of peak oil. The basis for this concept is that oil is a limited resource, and its availability will follow a Bell curve. We are at the peak of this curve now, or will be very soon. Furthermore, all the best and most easily available oil has already been extracted: what is left will be harder to extract and harder to refine.

Add to that the fact that the global demand for oil is increasing – our own demand continues to grow and the demands of countries like India and China are rising dramatically. Instead of a few privileged countries competing for ample quantities of oil, we have many more people competing for limited quantities of oil. There will be an increasing shortfall. The enormity of the impact is hard to imagine, as almost everything we do, use, put together has not only a visible oil component, but also a hidden one. For example, any crop we grow here uses fertilisers, pesticides, steel, plastic, machinery and transport, all of which come from oil. Generally, for every calorie of food we produce, we use 10 calories of oil energy.

The second lecture by Bob Lloyd, Professor of Physics at Otago University, looked at energy alternatives. That is his specialty area. He says there are none that can fill the gap. He pointed out New Zealand’s good fortune in having a lot of renewable energy options, but said that any substitute for fossil fuels is not nearly as energy efficient. In other words, to get 10 barrels of oil we have to use one barrel of oil. At the moment, to get one barrel of biofuel we have to put in .8 of a barrel of energy.

Of the other fossil fuels there is coal. The trouble is, as David Parker, the Minister of Energy and Climate Change pointed out in our fourth forum, coal releases even more carbon into the atmosphere than oil, and that atmospheric carbon is already changing our climate. During the ice ages, the world’s temperatures were a mere five degrees cooler than now. We are already nearly one degree hotter, and temperatures are predicted to rise by about 4-5 degrees by the end of this century (Canterbury University study 2006). Nobody knows what that will do to the earth, because nobody has ever been there but some scientists predict that change greater than 2 degrees will have serious consequences to ecological systems (Jim Hansen NASA 2006).

Our third speaker was Dr Susan Krumdieck of Canterbury University, who is a mechanical engineer with particular interest in energy-efficient communities. She made the point, very relevant this evening, that some paths are pre-ordained and they happen whatever the circumstances e.g. if you’re born a cow you grow, eat and behave like a cow. But we humans are capable of another kind of planning, which is imaginative. In other word, we can comprehend that circumstances might change, and we are capable of planning in order to meet conditions which are different to the familiar ones.

The trouble is, it’s hard to keep the reality of altered scenarios in our heads – we turn on taps, flick on switches and zoom all over the country and the world. That’s our normal, present way of life, and most of us don’t know any other. But our group believes that we are at that peak point where we can no longer assume that the parameters of our familiar world will continue indefinitely. We believe that we have to plan for a world with finite resources of oil, energy, water, phosphates, etc, etc – a world which is hard to imagine as we hurry on as we always have done, but a different world vision which we must face if we and our children are to stand a chance in the future.

The conclusions our group drew from our speakers were basically that

Fossil fuels are finite and will be less available and more expensive
Our community will therefore be more isolated
We must therefore be more self-reliant as a community
We should look to meeting our needs as much as possible from our own resources. This means nurturing, in a sustainable manner, our resources, our skills and knowledge base, our social relationships.

We decided that we must (a) acknowledge the probability of resource constraints, (b) consolidate what we already have that is useful and valuable in our community, and (c) aim towards positioning ourselves better for the future.

The group came up with many wonderful and inspiring suggestions. Four were prioritised for immediate investigation – the establishment of a local market, looking into bulk orders of solar panels, a sign or sculpture to tell people that we are an energy-aware community, and ways of improving our skills and knowledge base through education.

The ripples from our meetings have been amazing. They seem to have struck a chord and there have been inquires from Southland to the middle of the North Island about how to set up similar community groups. In fact, Dugald is in Dunedin at the moment helping them get one under way there.

Here, there are initiatives being taken with bio-fuel; offers have come in to help the people of the community to better insulate their houses at little or no cost. Information about how we might get cheaper, and maybe even locally made, solar panels has emerged. An investor has pledged money for virtually interest-free loans to help people to install solar panels and stormwater collection tanks. And we have the first of what we hope may become regular markets to showcase some of our hidden skills on 17 December. We hope you’ll all come. We have made a start on the road to the future we see, and in doing so we have recovered a sense that we, ordinary people, can make planning choices, and that it need not all be sacrifice – there is a sense of achievement in being more self-sufficient, making do with less and getting to know our community again.

As a way forward we suggest that the meeting may wish to adopt our society’s proposed vision:-

“A more secure, self-reliant and vibrant community, better prepared to sustain the

effects of a decline in fossil fuel availability and climate change and better able to meet

the essential needs of future generations.”