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Description:
Peak oil expert sees little future for aviation.
Report on speech by Richard Gilbert, March 2006.
(This is a slightly amended version of a report first published by Citizens At City Hall, www.hamiltoncatch.org )

Peak oil expert Richard Gilbert says Hamilton should start preparing now for energy prices that will exceed $4 a litre for gasoline within twelve years. In a public lecture on Thursday evening, Gilbert advocated that Hamilton again become known as the electric city as the centrepiece of its economic development plans.
The highly-regarded sustainability consultant has been hired by city council to advise them about the expected global peak in oil production and its implications for the proposed aerotropolis. City staff have delayed the release of his report, but Gilbert was not willing to say what’s in it.

“That report, as I understand it, will be out sometime in April and everyone will be able to see it, I hope,” he told about 140 people at the annual general meeting of Environment Hamilton.
But he left little doubt his analysis of the future of air travel. “I don’t have much hope for aviation in an energy-constrained future,” he said, while making a detailed argument for an alternative response to the city’s “dire need of an economic development strategy.”

He noted that the city faces an economic challenge because “32% of the Hamilton workforce is leaving Hamilton everyday and going and working somewhere else.” The local outflow of commuters has dramatically increased since the mid-1980s, according to Gilbert, in contrast to neighbouring areas such as Halton and Peel.
“Embracing the electric city vision could be a plausible job-rich economic strategy for a community that chooses to face the frightening energy realities of the 21st century,” Gilbert advised the audience. He urged the city to “situate itself ahead of this wave of energy restraint … rather that be drowned by it when it happens” by putting energy first in all its plans for economic growth, social development and transportation.

Gilbert sees electricity generated from renewable sources as the most reliable energy supply when oil and natural gas prices skyrocket, and pointed to the Hamilton of the 1890s as an inspiration for its future. “[The city] was one of the first communities in the world to have electric street lighting, one of the first communities in the world where the buildings, the businesses, the factories and even some of the homes, were lit by electricity,” recalled Gilbert. “At one point, people would come from Toronto, or Guelph or Cambridge to see the lights of Hamilton”
He spent much of his lecture outlining the rapidly developing energy crisis that is now being confirmed by the US army, the Economist magazine, and Exxon Mobil as the inevitable consequence of a global peak in oil extraction that occurred over 40 years ago. “We’re using four times as much as we discover [and] there seems very little prospect of turning that around,” he declared.

He also argued that alternatives such as hydrogen, ethanol and natural gas offer little hope of replacing oil. Gas is also running out in Canada and intercontinental transport can be very dangerous. Production of ethanol from corn or waste plant material is expanding, but Gilbert noted that a recent state-of-the-art facility in the US uses 100,000 tonnes of coal a year.

“The energy value of that coal is more than half of the energy value you get out of the ethanol”, he argued, and that doesn’t include the energy used in fertilizing, harvesting and transporting the corn or waste wood to the plant. “And we’ll be wanting that waste agricultural product to keep the land going because there won’t be any fertilizers, or fertilizers will be much more expensive” in a oil-short planet.

On hydrogen, he noted limitations in the current technology, but said the fundamental problem was energy leakage in the multiple stages between original production and actual use. “If you have an electricity source such as a wind turbine and you then use that to make hydrogen … and you then use the hydrogen to make electricity again in the fuel cell in the car, you have a loss of between 75-80% of that energy.”

Noting that Europeans already pay two to three times as much for fuel as North Americans, Gilbert postulated that we probably won’t start really dealing with our oil dependence until prices hit at least $4 a litre, but he thinks that will happen in Hamilton quite soon.
“There’s a real chance here – not a certainty, nothing is certain in the future – but there’s a real chance here, a more than even chance, that by 2018 we will have prices that are four times current prices or higher in current dollars.”

His solutions are wide ranging – energy conservation in buildings; wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity; deep-water cooling for air conditioning like that now being used by Toronto; and a return of trolleys or streetcars running on hydro power.

“Half the transit in Canada’s major cities is done by grid-connected mode,” he noted, “whether it’s the Metro in Montreal, or the trolley buses in Vancouver or the Sky-train, or the trolley buses in Edmonton, or light rail in Calgary.”
Gilbert also suggested that garbage incineration could be a source of energy but with “two very, very important conditions”. One was air pollution rules that would mean the facility released cleaner air than what existed in the local atmosphere at least 50% of the year – something that he said the technology exists to do.

The other condition would forbid bringing waste to the facility by road. “I would have every bit of waste going to the plant, except waste from Hamilton itself, going by water or by rail”.