“Only So Much Oil in the Ground”, so sang the band, Tower of Power, in the titular track on their album “Urban Renewal”, which was released in 1975. Following closely on the heels of the first of the oil shocks in 1973, its lyrics sounded a strident warning about the limits of natural resources. Fifty years later, with well in excess of half of the oil and gas ever produced having been exhumed and burned, and as viewed on an unpredictably flexing global geopolitical stage, it appears apposite to observe the way different countries are currently shifting their sources of imported oil and gas. Hence, an effective competition is underway for whatever remains, and by all trying to grab the same fossil resources, the exercise is akin to moving around the proverbial deckchairs on the Titanic, until it collides with an inevitable iceberg of depletion and begins to sink. The course of techno-industrial civilization needs to be changed, while there is still some leeway left to do so.
The energy infrastructure in the North Sea is complex and vulnerable. The effect of a major undersea disruptive event – of either human or natural cause – could be catastrophic. In any case, the reserves of oil and gas are limited, with about a decade’s worth each of proven oil left for Norway and the UK, and enough gas for 14 years and 5 years, respectively.
[The above resource lifetimes are estimated on the basis of the reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio, which is the ratio of the size of the reserve base to the annual rate of production: thus, for example, a 100,000 tonne reserve produced from at 1,000 tonnes per year should last for 100 years. This is, of course, a naive piece of arithmetic, since no material can be produced at a constant rate, right up to the bitter end, and instead, a production peak is to be expected, as the quality of particular deposits/ores declines, and the energy input, per tonne of a material recovered, increases relentlessly – eventually to the point that further extraction from a particular source is no longer worthwhile. The concept of the “burn-off time” has been introduced, which has the same formal definition as the R/P ratio; however, it has been emphasised that, while this is applicable in a stagnant economy (constant production rate), in a growing economy it overestimates the production lifetime].
Since Russian gas supplies have been attenuated as a result of the Ukraine conflict, Germany, along with Italy, is now importing more gas from Norway. In consequence of such increased demand, Norway has ramped up its gas production, the majority of which goes for export, to a record 124 billion cubic metres in 2024, a strategy which must use up its reserves even faster. In contrast, Norwegian oil production was down in 2024 over 2023, mainly because few fields came onstream and most of those already in production are in their decline phase.
The Troll Field holds 40% of Norway’s gas, and accounts for 32.5% of its gas production. Its reserve is reckoned at 606 bcm, down from an original 1436.6 bcm, and which at a sustained 42.5 pa, as was produced in 2024, amounts to 14 years worth. Since Troll is the current cornerstone of Europe’s gas supply, meeting 11% of total consumption, this is significant.
[Norwegian gas production in 2035 had been estimated in 2017 at 90 bcm, but this depended on 30 bcm coming from undiscovered fields].
The situation will be worsened by the rapidly declining Energy Return on Investment (EROI) for gas and oil liquids which will result in “energy cannibalism”, with less net energy being available for society, as more is consumed by the production of harder to get, diminishing resources.
An inexorable decline in North Sea production has also been highlighted by the collapse of the Dutch gas fields, and in trying to secure future gas supplies, it is likely that Europe overall will deepen its dependence on liquefied natural gas (LNG), including from Russia. The prospect of fracking as a means for securing gas supplies in Germany, banned since 2017, remains very uncertain and would not happen soon enough to help with the current energy crisis, even if qualms over environmental impacts could be abated.
Despite claims that granting licenses for oil and gas extraction by the UK government will increase our energy security, most of the North Sea oil is not available for use in the UK because it is extracted by private companies, who sell it on the open international market, rather than necessarily to the UK. For this reason – and because the UK lacks facilities to refine some kinds of oil – around 80% of the oil produced in the North Sea is exported. In contrast, most of the gas is pumped directly into the UK network, although some of this is piped to Europe, in part to fill gas storage reservoirs. Of the gas used in the UK, 46% is imported, 90% by pipeline from Norway, along with LNG, increasingly from the US and less from Qatar
Business leaders have urged “full-throated support” from both Westminster and Holyrood governments for oil and gas from the North Sea, a sentiment accorded with by newly elected second-time president Donald Trump, who also says that he will push shale producers in the US to ramp up output even if it means they “drill themselves out of business”, i.e. no holds barred, “drill, baby, drill”, having signed an order directing withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, also for the second time.
However, whether or not this production bonanza will actually materialise is a moot point, and depends on financial aspects being favourable. Meanwhile, shale gas plays may have begun to decline, even as the U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas and its greatest LNG exporter.
The word Dunkelflaute is one of those uniquely German appellations, translating to (something like) “dark wind lull” or “dark doldrums, and describes a period when there is little to no wind or sunlight, thus limiting the amount of energy that might be generated from renewable sources. At such times, in the UK, 70% of our electricity may be generated using gas, with just 7% from wind plus solar combined:
Overall, gas provides around 37% of the UK’s primary energy, about the same as oil, with almost half of each being imported. Clearly, in addition to climate change issues, we have to find alternative energy sources, and get away from our acute dependence on dwindling oil and gas supplies. As Fatih Birol neatly summed up the situation:
“One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day. The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money and we should take this issue very seriously.”
So, what about renewables? We have already mentioned dunkelfluate, but to cope with the variability of wind and solar at a full scale, in the absence of fossil fuel backup, will surely need considerable storage capacity, and materials to build this. According to a recent study, based on battery storage, the requirements depend markedly on the time length factored in for the buffer, and so the demands increase from 6 hours onward to 12 weeks. However, even at 6 hrs, a massive necessary production expansion is indicated for Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt, Graphite, over 2019 levels. The rare earth elements show a similar huge production increase to be necessary. It appears that there is insufficient Lithium and Cobalt (based on 2022 reserves) to build a completely Fossil Fuel free, renewable energy system. If the price of these went up, more would become available (pass from resources to reserves), but still the mining and production would need to expand appreciably. Progressing onward to 48 hours + storage, having enough copper begins to become a potential problem, but the main issue seems to be over Ni, Li, Co, Graphite, which are all used in Lithium ion batteries, with huge production increases necessary for all of them.
Other kinds of batteries, e.g. sodium, or those based on other earth abundant elements, might offset this, but mining/production increases would have to happen there too. The study is based on a full replacement of FF by RE by 2050. To bring this forward to an earlier date (e.g. 2030), the mining/production increases for materials to build the new RE system would be greater still, and any new battery technologies brought to reality and at massive scale very fast indeed. Of course, other (non-battery) storage devices are possible and might offset demand for some materials.
However, without the expansion of such energy sources (including with sufficient buffer capacity), it is difficult to see how “Peak Oil Demand” can be achieved, i.e. using less oil and gas by choosing alternatives, rather than by their depletion (“peak oil”).
A critical component strategy for creating a viable future energy system and addressing climate change, must surely be energy demand reduction (minimisation), e.g. through relocalisation, retrofitting buildings, local food growing, and reducing waste, to curb the size of resource [very much plural] demands, get us below overshoot and avoid collapse (if we can). Human behavioural change is a necessary and major driver of these changes.
Even apart from climate change/emissions considerations, it would make sense to save oil and gas for those specific future uses (including as manufacturing feedstocks) where substitution will prove difficult or impossible. On the immediate human timescale we have but a one off bestowal of them. Currently, fossil fuels are needed to install renewable energy capture devices, and even if the new energy system grows large enough to feed back sufficient energy for its own fabrication and maintenance, oil, gas and coal will still be needed for mining and processing raw materials for some time to come. Nonetheless, falling EROI for oil liquids may well set a limit to a rapid and global low-carbon energy transition.
Meanwhile, the hourglass drains, while transient resources ebb away.
