It is good to see hard data ... it makes a change from all the wiffle-waffle one sees on many Peak Oil sites.

It would be interesting to see a projection over the next years, based on the hard data from today and the past.

Do you know of any integrated models/projections which use this and other "real" data to plot the UK energy situation for several years into the future?

The model should include probable changes in the future such as the purchase of new nuclear plant, the phasing out / extending of current nuclear plant, the availability of natural gas from Norway, Russia etc, the true availability of LNG from Algeria & Qatar etc.

Ideally we should also use known errors in past released data to influence the probable accuracy of current data ... I'm sure that there is a standard statistical method for doing this sort of twiddling!

The model should also include the financials so that we can see what state our economy might be in N years time.

Surely such a model MUST exist somewhere? It seems crazy that we should have to make our own attempts to model this data if a well thought out model already exists.

What caught my eye was the 4.5% increase in domestic final consumption.  Seems those rapidly rising utility bills are not having the effect economists would like us to believe in....

Overall, we seem to be sleepwalking towards what surely must be some kind of major crisis, which could be precipitated by a cold winter this year.

On the media - there was a piece on Newsnight yesterday, by their science correspondant, on 'Tony Blair's conversion to Nuclear power'.  This was so devoid of objective analysis on eg. future fuel supplies and costs, that it was completely laughable.  Maybe an approach that would get attention would be thorough the tabloids ?  How about 'French Nuke rip-off !' as an opener. :)

My understanding is that gas electric generators are basically big jet engines coupled with a steam turbine running on the waste heat from the natural gas turbine.

Was the ability to run coal already in place it must have been otherwise the quick switch is impossible. Next if this is true how much other latent coal fired electric generation is possible ?

Yikes!

After reading the link and your comments:  I  hope your leaders come up with a short-term emergency plan combined with a long-term strategy pretty quickly, for all your sakes.  If I was a Brit--I would be furious that things got this far out of control.  Good luck, do all the Peakoil Outreach you can, while you can.

Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ USA  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

DJ Iranian Analyst Says Global Oil Output Limit Reached -ABC

  CANBERRA (Dow Jones)--The limit of global oil production has been reached and there isn't enough to go around, analyst and former National Iranian Oil Co. executive Ali Samsam Bakhtiari said Monday.

  Giant fields in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are struggling to meet production targets, while massive output declines from the North Sea and Mexico will have a major economic impact, he said in a speech to the Financial Services Institute in Sydney.

  For the first time in 150 years, the world is entering an era in which it can't have all the oil that it wants, he said in a report on Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

  There are five years left to plan priorities for the use of crude oil, he said. "Some countries don't even know what is happening," he said. "Some huge companies don't even know what is happening and they are going to be ambushed and trapped and they are going to panic." "The worst thing you can do is to panic when the prices are going to go sky-high," he said.

  -By Ray Brindal, Dow Jones Newswires; 612-6208-0902; ray.brindal@dowjones.com

  -Edited by Ryan Woo

Iceland looked at and rejected a 2,000 MW DC link to Scotland years ago.  EDF is building a new 1,600 MW nuke as close as possible to England.

Iceland could supply Scotland from the north, and France could supply England from the south.

How much electricity does the UK need ?  Will the price be whatever LNG costs ?  Or French nuke power ? Does the internal transmission grid of Great Britain allow large transfers of power between England & Scotland ?

By Wing-Gar Cheng
     July 11 (Bloomberg) -- Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe's
second-biggest oil company, and Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry Group agreed to study the feasibility of spending as much as $6 billion on a China plant to turn coal into fuels and chemicals.
     Shell and Shenhua Ningxia, a unit of Shenhua Group
Corp., China's biggest coal producer, will study the technical and commercial viability of building a 70,000 barrels-a-day plant in northern China's Ningxia province, the companies said in a statement today.
     Record oil costs are spurring China to build plants that can turn some of its coal reserves, the world's third-largest, into auto fuels and raw materials for making plastics. Sasol Ltd., the world's biggest producer of motor fuel from coal, said last month there is potential to build at least 12 coal-to-fuel plants in China.
     ``We believe this technology is important to China,'' Lim Haw Kuang, chairman of Shell companies in China, said. The plant will contribute toward ``finding sustainable energy solutions'' for Ningxia and China, he said. Preliminary cost estimates for such plants run at between $5 billion and $6 billion, he said.
     The venture with Shell is one of two that China's government has approved for Shenhua Ningxia. Each of the two plants would be capable of turning 3.2 million metric tons a year of coal into fuels such as gasoline and diesel, Yan Guohui, the company's general manager for coal-to-liquids projects, said yesterday.

                        `Economic Sense'

     ``We want to better utilize our coal resources to sell
higher-priced products,'' Yan told reporters at the Ningdong coal mining center. ``It makes better economic sense now to sell fuels
instead of just raw coal.''
     Construction of the two projects may start at the end of 2008, Yan said. The National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planner, has approved the projects, she said.
Ningxia, China's sixth-largest coal production base, has proved coal reserves of about 31 billion tons. Potential reserves may total 202.5 billion tons.
     Credit Suisse Group, Switzerland's second-biggest bank, last week raised its Asian coal price forecasts because of increased demand from projects that will turn the commodity into
liquid fuels.
     Coal prices in 2010 may average $45 a ton, compared with an earlier forecast of $39, Credit Suisse's Hong Kong-based analyst Trina Chen and Shanghai-based Mick Mi wrote in a report on July
6.

                            Record Oil

     Crude oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange have risen 22 percent in the past year and reached $75.78 a barrel on July 7, the highest since New York trading began in 1983. Coal liquefaction plants are viable as long as oil trades at $30 a barrel, Credit Suisse said.
     Shenhua Ningxia is building a separate coal-to-chemicals plant at Ningdong, in the province's east, Yan said. The plant, designed to turn 250,000 tons a year of coal into methanol, should be completed at the end of 2006 to start producing methanol early in 2007, she said. The plant cost 1 billion yuan ($125 million).
     The company plans to spend 10 billion yuan on a plant that will turn coal into polypropylene at Ningdong, which is scheduled to start operating in the first half of 2009, General Manager Wang Jian said today. Polypropylene is a chemical raw material.
     Shenhua Group, China's largest coal producer, owns a
majority stake in Shenhua Ningxia, and Ningxia Coal Industry Group the rest. Shenhua Group is the parent of Hong Kong-listed China Shenhua Energy Co.

                          Sasol Accord

     Sasol and Shenhua Ningxia last month signed an initial
agreement for an 80,000 barrels a day coal-to-fuels plant in Ningxia.
     Xstrata Plc, the world's biggest exporter of coal used in power plants, said July 9 it agreed with most of its Japanese customers on a price for thermal coal sold under contract in 2007-07 that is near last year's record level.
     Xstrata agreed with Japanese power utilities on a price of $52.50 per metric ton for thermal coal supplied in the year started April 1. That compares with last year's average of between $52 and $54 a ton, which was a rise of about 20 percent from the previous year.
     Shenhua Group is the parent of Hong Kong-listed China
Shenhua Energy Co.
     The U.S. has the world's largest coal reserves at 246.6 billion metric tons, according to BP's Statistical Review of World Energy. Russia's reserves of 157 billion tons are the second-largest, followed by China with 114.5 billion tons.

--Editor: Viljoen.