The UK should be immune from a global fuel crisis, with our abundant natural resources
Mike Rutherford thinks the UK should be tapping into its own resources to protect its citizens from massive fuel hikes
There hasn’t been a mere oil crisis this month. What we’ve witnessed is an oil, natural gas, humanitarian, environmental and financial catastrophe of biblical proportions.
Innocent civilians – many of them children – at the brutally bloody sharp end of the cruel, absurdly costly war in and around Iran are, of course, the people we should be most concerned about.
But from the relative safety of your car seat, armchair or aircraft pew, I’d urge you to do what I’ve done in recent days – take a long, hard look at the fuels we use daily, before thinking deeply about why, when, how, and at what cost, we use them.
Reliability of energy supplies is another problem. Destructive military actions by Russia, America and Iran in recent years and weeks bring a very different, far darker level of uncertainty and unreliability. We all know that the world’s motorists are dependent on oil tankers from the Middle East and elsewhere for the petrol and diesel in the fuel tanks of their vehicles. But who knew that so many of those ships were so utterly dependent on safe passage through the Straits of Hormuz? You know, the dangerous choke point that’s forced hundreds of them to give it a miss before dropping anchor for fear of being blown out of the water by an Iran in retaliation mode.
When I drove an electric vehicle across Britain last week, what was feeding local power stations to provide me with the electricity I needed via public chargers? Possibly wood chippings, certainly a good chunk from natural gas, although renewables tend to make the biggest contribution to UK energy generation, says the National Grid. But biomass and gas do contribute to the power needed to help run our vehicles, homes, businesses, industries and the like.
What we’re witnessing here is the madness of war combined with the often insane, always high-cost, tired old practice of shipping fuels millions of polluting miles across the globe to satisfy the energy needs (or maybe not) of individual countries.
In Britain we don’t have to play this game. We can – and should – meet at least half of our own requirements from the North Sea. Up to 7.5 billion barrels of oil and gas can still be produced from UK waters – more than twice as much as the unfathomably biased, anti-drilling UK Government estimates. If we drill and source locally, the production processes will be faster, greener, more reliable and secure. Also, we’ll enjoy around £165 billion in added economic value, reckons Offshore Energies UK. What’s not to like?
Never again can we, the British Isles, be left largely and hopelessly at the mercy of foreign oil and gas suppliers, or have to put up with such desperately low supplies of usable fuel.
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