Given the world-changing nature of the content, I was amazed to see the Times of London story about the Foresight report reprinted in the Dompost and given a masthead banner ad. I suspect that most people are happier reading a newspaper story about a government report than the government report itself…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2017210,00.html
the Dompost article had the same headline as this one: “Golden age of travel runs out of gas”
http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/commentary/commentaryother.asp?file=januarycommentary852006.xml

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Wonderful image BJ …

eredwen

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LOL

Well done BJ ….

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Its the energy density thing that keeps us looking at some form of hydrocarbon fuel. Even if we make it by combining the carbon with the hydrogen ourselves. That energy density makes the transport systems we have possible at all, if the fuel tank has to be 3-4 x as large for similar range we have a real problem designing a car, some trouble with a truck, and a train can manage it pretty easily. Airplanes are really REALLY hard, and LTA is comparatively easy. Ships are OK, just needing volume doesn’t really hurt much, like trains… but 3-4x assumes we are using H2 liquid. NOT the easiest, safest or most tractable substance on the planet. Compared to LNG it is an absolute nightmare. Which is why I think the hydrocarbon fuels aren’t going away. They’ll come from other sources no doubt, and in smaller more expensive quantities, but we’ll still have some.

The important thing will be to make them far less necessary for the maintenance of civilization as we know it. Electrified rail and wind turbines do that in spades.

OT alert—

Most of this is on the net, it is not original with me.

—————————

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads, and initially the engines and running stock came from England.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did “they” use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing..

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot which was specified to accomodate the rear ends of two war horses… And bureaucracies live forever.

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most complex transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.

respectfully
BJ

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Good post BJ.

The key point from these posts is that our “hyper mobility” is enabled by our cheap oil. When cheap oil becomes expensive, not-always-available oil, the picture changes. Nothing else can match is energy density, and incredible ease of handling. And because our whole society, physical infrastructure and economic gameplan is built around the continued supply of relatively cheap oil, the game will change big time. The upheavals NZ society went through in the 1980′s are nothing compared to the changes that oil depletion will inflict.

Tochigi,
An interesting document. However, it looks like it was put together in a hurry (I wonder why?). The table on page 10 has much of the text cut off. Trying to search on the keyword “oil” locks up Acrobat (eh?), their “Drivers for change” on page 83 makes no mention of future fossil fuel supplies (and this when Britain is just crossing that exporter/importer threshold).

And for the folks that believe that if you (or the markets) just imagine that the oil must exist, then market forces will deliver, take a read of the “Hirsch” report. (Wiki is a good place to start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report or you can google.)

Written by those well known “pinkos” at the US Dept of Energy, how’s this for the highlights:
In the section called “Wildcards,� they give away the game. Those cards are so wild, the only way to keep up hope is to paint some fanatasy scenarios.

First clutch at the straw …”Huge new reserves of natural gas are discovered…” (yeah right – ask the geologists).

Try this as a scenario “World economic and population growth slows and future demand is much less than anticipated…” But our economic and monetary systems demand constant economic growth so what needs to flex. Our pension plans at 5% p.a. compounding growth ? or much more.

The next joke … “Middle East oil reserves are much higher than publicly stated…” Sure the data on ME reserves is inaccurate, but ask Matt Simmons in which direction (i.e overstated).

And this is a classic grasping at straws: “Some kind of scientific breakthrough comes into commercial use, mitigating oil demand well before oil production peaks…”
Could we have a clue please ?

If this wasn’t so serious I’d be rolling on the floor laughing – but this is deadly serious. Peak Oil on it’s own can be overcome, whether our econmic system will manage the transition is the big question.

And just to wrap up my post – take a look at Don Lancasters “Some Energy Fundamentals” at http://www.tinaja.com/glib/energfun.pdf

On page 2 there’s a table showing energy density of various energy carriers.
Petrol at 9 kWh per litre (or 13.5 kWh per kg)
cf
Lithium Batteries at 0.25 kWh/l or 0.35 kWh/kg
cf
Hydrogen (liquid) 2.6 kWh/l or 39 kWh/kg

Plus loads of other useful background for those of us whose understanding of thermodynamics and energy science is getting rusty.

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libertyscott – others…

In the former USSR the cities are, by and large, laid out with rail transport in mind. Vast numbers of citizens of that country think of taking the train FIRST when it comes time to go anywhere, and that is part of what makes rail work.

The other part of it is that the state pays into the system. Good transport is not FREE and it isn’t necessarily right to simply have a “user pays” system for every bit of infrastructure in a country. That’s the libertarian solution but it makes large infrastructure very difficult to build and maintain.

NZ Rail is a strange beast. It wants some very close attention and it NEEDS to be brought into the 21st century quite urgently, with electrification of vast stretches of the system being a part of our solution to our transport needs for this century.

The economic forces of the past century are dissipating and the new reality of not having diesel or petrol to burn at a price that allows us to transport ourselves OR our goods is forming. That means we need alternatives, and rail DOES work, economically, in the new era. There’s only one problem… it takes a lot of time, effort and money to put in and expand the rail infrastructure. We can start now and meet the demands of coming decades or we can wait for the “market” to provide its belated incentives (the market is efficient with respect to steady state environments… it lags the real world significantly).

Greens are, by their nature, futurists to a varying but significant extent. We see what’s coming and anticipate it if we can. NZ rail is fundamental to our future. We have to adapt our cities and our thinking to incorporate electrified rail, preferentially in loop structures, for our urban transport, and determine how far it can take long haul freight as well. What are the technical obstacles to electrifying the entire line from Wellington to Palmerston-North? From Dunedin to Christchurch and Christchurch to Picton (or another ferry terminus). Auckland to Hamilton? The less reliance we have on the diesels, the better off we will be in the long run, and unlike trucks, trains can be electrified fairly easily.

Which begs the question, could inner city truck transport take advantage of the existing tram power lines? Electrically driving even some of the way would greatly reduce the impact of the thousands of local deliveries being made every day. How much extra electricity would be required, could the overhead lines carry the load? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but it seems a waste to have those wires overhead and see the black death spewing from a truck beneath them.

There is scope for developing new modes of transport as well… we are not married to rail and road and ship and plane alone. There are other vehicle types which are quite efficient and accessible to NZ ingenuity.

… but we will be travelling less, and somewhat more slowly in the future… because it will be too expensive to do anything else. Society can be restructured around this reality, but it will help a lot if the rail can be restored and rebuilt before it becomes impossible to do so.

respectfully
BJ

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uk-kiwi and fastbike: you’ve both nailed it – thanks.

everyone here should take a good look at this:

foresight.gov.uk: Intelligent Infrastucture: The Scenarios (pdf)

amazing!
the four scenarioseach include a timeline form 2005 to 2055.
the least optimistic one includes:
2011 Peak Oil

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Thank you uk-kiwi, you bet me to it . (I guess from the posting times that LibertScott is o/s too.)

Liberty, you’re looking backwards. We need to look forwards.
Behind us is Cheap oil, Ahead of us are higher prices and unreliable supplies. There is nothing in the technology pipeline that can replace our current squandering of oil, much less address burgeoning demand.

We must adapt, or face the consequences.

Idealology has nothing to do with it. This is pragmatism, pure and simple. Look at Roscoe Bartlett and Matt Simmons in the US? Why has the IEA just puiblished “Saving Oil in a hurry”? – doesn’t the whole idea of this run counter to our current paradigm of unending growth ?

The way we have allowed our larger cities to sprawl (plus the “lifestyling” of adjacent productive land), the patterns of economic activity that have become common: all of these rely on cheap oil. Without cheap oil they will change. Many will disappear. We can act rationally, anticipate these changes, and avoid having all our eggs in one basket.
Or we can take a neo-religious laissez faire approach and get caught out by impending global events.

Simple really.

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LibertyScott-

Your study only holds true for diesel electric locos on long trips, and doesn’t take into account the vast subsidy of road transportation in the form of road building and maintenance. In the case of local electric rail services you must also take into account the vastly lowered road congestion from removing thousands of cars from the road and the lower number of deaths from air pollution.

In Auckland, most of the tracks are already there- all that is required is the will of politicians to commit to an electric system rather than some half-assed compromise. Plus the low marginal cost of the electricity to run urban rail- I would imagine this would be far cheaper than diesel if prices increase much further, given that buses get only around 5 miles per gallon.

Your modelling of trucks/buses vs rail goes right out the window if oil prices go up by another 7 times in the next 6 years (remember $10 a barrel oil in 1999?)

The reality is that oil is about to get scarce and expensive as the global bidding war kicks off. Even if there is another Saudi Arabia out there with gigabarrels of untapped oil (and there isn’t) it would simply be swallowed up by the BRIC nations in a flash.

The upshot of that is that there will be less travel for everyone, in absolute terms. Society will be radically restructured, and realistically we can do little more than just re-arranging the deckchairs. Maybe a tax on big engines is one idea, but as other people have pointed out the fuel tax does this more effectively.

There must NO backdown on fuel taxes, no matter how much the AA whines. People must realise that the age of cheap motoring is all but over, and that fuel has been very, very underpriced for its energy content. There must be investigation into alternative fuels, alternative transportation and a move away from our petro-intensive lifestyle.

As for your comments about the history of rail in NZ, it was systematically asset-stripped and destroyed by after it was sold by National and needs rebuilding on Health and Safety grounds alone. I have seen the state of some of the lesser used lines and it is APPALLING and quite dangerous.

Economic efficiency is not always the only grounds for something existing- a national strategic outlook is equally valuable. What happens if the Middle East blows up and we have no oil for months? At least we would have a few more transport options with a decent rail network.

Either way, this WILL be forced upon us ready or not in the years to come. I think a little hedging of bets, within reasonable cost, is perfectly sensible from a strategic point of view…

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The efficiency of trains in New Zealand has NOT changed significantly since 1979 fastbike – there have been no new diesel locomotives bought in NZ since then. By trains I mean all seats filled – you need 3 to four full bus loads before a train starts to make sense economically and environmentally, don’t forget that rail technology is designed for very large volumes of goods or people, and such volumes are hard to find, in sufficient frequency in most cases.

Well road users are only subsidised in financial costs by ratepayers – don’t forget that nobody pays for externalities for any activities anywhere. Homes and businesses don’t pay to pollute the atmosphere or create noise or the rest, so until all that has been quantified it is wrong to say road users are subsidised beyond the cost of local road maintenance.

Trucks actually pay proportionately far far more per vehicle kilometre for road use than cars do, they pay about 40% of the cost of land transport funding yet are responsible for less than that, since most new construction is in response to car traffic and trucks are directly responsible for around 40% of the cost of road maintenance (Source: MoT Cost Allocation Model Review 2000/2001). Environmental externalities of rail are tiny, because rail is largely insignificant, though the environmental externalities of rail by noise are more significant than road freight outside urban areas.

Fastbike you are completely deluded in thinking that taking money from other productive uses (general public, other industries) and pouring it into rail will deliver anything. Rail in NZ has had an absolute fortune poured into it in the last 25 years. Around $2 billion of taxpayers money down the drain, it was bailed out in 1982, 1990 and sold in 1993 and then when it was about to be scaled back to its efficient core, Labour stepped in to bail it out once more. By contrast, road transport contributes around $400 million in surplus income to the Crown every year.

SH1 Christchurch-Dunedin has hardly had billions spent on it, millions yes, but it is a very profitable highway. Most of it costs very little to maintain because it is flat on solid ground and is rarely washed out – the money spent on improvements came from the users, unlike money you want to spend on rail.

I am completely in support of dealing with emissions from motor vehicles that are harmful to health, but rail is a side issue – it has a future continuing to haul bulk freight and containers, and commuters in Wellington and a few tourist trips, but besides that New Zealand simply doesn’t have the topography, distances or density of traffic to make rail do more.

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The stats and policy arguments are fun, guys, but what we’re really talking about is a Kiwi addiction to using and owning an identity-defining vehicle; we talk about SUV-drivers, hippies with Kombie vans, boy-racers, etc;

Some of my male friends have reported to me that when meeting an attractive female for the first time socially, one of the first topics covered is “what kind of car do you drive?” (usually after the equally shallow “So, what do you do?”)
This indicates that our societal materialism has hit an all-time saturation point where the average male will go hungry rather than selling his gas-guzzling but really stonkin’ set of wheels.

The average female is too busy shoppiing for food, etc, by the way, to have time to get all angsty about her vehicle.
I allow that some above average females have the time to fuss about what kind of car they drive, and some of us don’t own a vehicle at all, just to forstall the howls of outrage…

Taxing fuel more, adding riders to the registration papers, none of these things are going to address the real problem of private transport addiction. If gambling addiction programs can be funded by Lotto, how about we get Shell, BP, Caltex, Challenge, Gulf and so on to chip in for harm reduction programme development, so that the people who make the profits share in the responsibility for the down-stream effects of their product.

OK, my first radically socially engineering idea for 2006, but it had to come up sometime, eh?

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The guys over at TheOilDrum.com have some interesting analysis that proves that (in America at least) the petrol price/demand relationship is very inelastic. That is, it takes very large increases in petrol prices to make any impact on demand.

Given that fact, and also that the government petrol tax take will probably double in the next couple of years, I’d like to know how we can get the government to channel more of this money into more sustainable and efficient energy use.

These new funds could be used to cushion our fall from our cheap-energy perch.

Let’s hope they are used wisely.

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Oh, that would be studies from the same bloated Railways Dept that free marketers scorn? And the 1970′s is as recent as we can get ?

What trains are we talking about: steam (only just retired in early 70s), diesel electric, or AC propulsion?. As with cars and buses the efficiency of trains has changed significantly since then.
Are you talking about trains with only one person, or trains that are more reasonably loaded? Are you including trams in your definition of trains?
Anectdotal evidence is not helping to give us a clear picture.

The MOT study cited has some interesting points:
1. All road users are subsidised – despite bleating to the contrary from AA and RTF. (and that excludes significant costs for Climate Change, Noise, Water and Air pollution). 2. Trucks pay proportionately less than other road users yet cause more damage.
3. Environmental externalities of rail are less than those of road, yet have not been included.

The root of our problem is the way we have allowed our societies to become dependent on a finite resource – in the full knowledge that it is finite – and now are having “head” problems coming to grips with the decades of poor planning and infrastructure investment decisions.

The rail system in this country is backwards beyond belief- most developing countries have a better rail system than NZ.
Thus using the figures in the MOT report to pretend that rail is “out”, because it is down, is arse-about-face. Instead, do the modelling, what does rail look like with 10+ years of solid investment behind it, including building our economic activity around the rail infrastructure. Once cheap oil has gone, they’ll be the only economic activities still profitable. (Look at the current kerfuffle over “fuel surcharges” – NZ will be able to power electric trains by using our supply more efficiently).

Your example of Auckland is just proof that we’ve got decades of poor decision making to remediate, and not must time left to do it.

Another example, I’m in Chch and the highway between here and Dunedin has had $billions of “improvements” made in the last 30 years. The railway – none – just the minimal maintenance to prevent trains falling off too often. Imagine if a fraction of that roading money had been spent on electrification, realignment etc. Then rail would be competititive with road.

Currently it’s a competition with one competitor having an arm tied behind their back, and one eye blindfolded.

The government has made a start by buying back the railtrack – however the access terms are scandalous (70 year exclusive deal for Toll).

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fastbike – reports from the 1970s, commissioned by the Railways Department on fuel consumption (using trains not far different from today but buses that are far less efficient than current ones) made the case that buses, in most NZ cases, were more fuel efficient than trains for passenger trips.

On large vehicle fuel consumption, it is well accepted that the optimum speed for fuel efficiency for most vehicles is in the 65-80km/h range, and consumption goes up exponentially, per kilometre, when you go below 50 km/h.

The MOT Surface Transport Costs and Charges study is here:

http://www.transport.govt.nz/business/land/land-transport/surface-transport-costs-and-charges.php

You can see for yourselves that the marginal environmental costs of a car carrying 1.4 people or more, peak and off peak, in Auckland are less than that of a bus, although a train is less again, partly because there is far more unused capacity on rail than bus. Unfortunately, the train only meets 20% of its costs from users, so other resource costs are enormous compared to buses and cars.

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libertyscott wrote:
“Setting aside whether it is the government’s business whether people use more or less of any commodity”

Too right. How dare those bossy boots dictate how we should spend our money!

No, it won’t be the government deciding on how much petroleum you can use, it will be geology. AFAIK, you can’t vote geology out of office, either.

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tochigi

“they should put up the petrol tax 1 cent per litre every month for the next three years.”

The UK tried this – but were forced (by the AA, trucking lobby etc) to scrap it. Their fuel excise escalator increased above the CPI rate.

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Liberty,

Any peer reviewed studies to back up your assertions ?

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Setting aside whether it is the government’s business whether people use more or less of any commodity – registration is a shockingly poor tool that does not take into account a vast range of variables.

For example, a large vehicle travelling at 70km/h consistently can use LESS fuel than a small vehicle travelling consistently in very congested stop-start traffic. The large vehicle can travel further in less time and with less fuel than the small one in the city. It is also far more efficient for a family to have one large car that can take 5 people than two smaller cars. The most significant move to reduce fuel consumption, congestion, pollution and encourage public transport is congestion charging – that targets the most wasteful vehicle use of all – vehicles travelling at walking pace or less.

and please stop thinking trains are fuel efficient. Studies going back decades demonstrate that except in rare circumstances, trains in New Zealand are more wasteful than buses. A train needs to carry on AVERAGE three-four full bus loads to match bus fuel consumption – this happens only at peak times in Wellington and Auckland. Off peak trains are extremely wasteful. On top of that, a car with three or more people is more fuel efficient per kilometre than the average laden bus. The Surface Transport Costs and Charges study commissioned by the government explains a lot more.

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um oliver….’stats stats and dam lies’..eh..?

i was just recalling totally subjective experiences..from an action-packed year spent riding the cycleway-free streets of auckland…

and how is it out there in the outland..?…do they give you cycleways out there..?

and hey..just getting all subjective again…i’m betting you’d be safer on a motorbike than a bicycle around these parts…
(though lame-arse car drivers are the main peril for both..)

and don’t forget..we in ak have rush hour all day…

(sigh!..the sacrifices we aucklanders make to subsidise your idyllic rural outlanders’ existances.eh..?..)

(especially those ‘over the drain’….what do they call it..?..oh..that’s right..’the mainland’….tee-hee..the pretensions of small-town new zealand/ers..eh..?)

phil(whoar.co.nz)

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Phil wrote: “i would submit cycling (the greenest of all) is the more perilous of the two…”

It’s not, by a long shot. Motorcycling is 20 to 30 times more likely to kill you, per hour, than cycling. While some of that may be down to a more gung-ho attitude among motorcyclists, I doubt that all of it is. I seriously doubt that you can show that cycling is _more_ dangerous than motorcycling.

See here:
http://www.bicyclinglife.com/SafetySkills/SafetyQuiz.htm
http://www.bicyclinglife.com/SafetySkills/answer1.htm

Declaring my bias and experience: I’m a long term commuting cyclist, in Dunedin and Lower Hutt.

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