Gasping For Gas  

The Independent reports on fuel shortages afflicting the UK.

Britain is in the grip of a fresh oil crisis, with supplies to hospitals, petrol stations and households all under threat, according to independent wholesalers and retailers.

NHS Trusts on interruptible gas contracts have begun frantically shopping around for oil supplies to heat hospitals, while petrol stations in the South-east are said to be begging independent wholesalers for fresh stocks.

Some heating oil distributors are reported to be refusing to supply business or domestic customers because they do not know when they will be able to get new stocks, and householders who rely on oil to heat their homes are facing delays in getting supplies just as the country braces itself for a cold snap.

The Association of UK Oil Independents (AUKOI), which represents the country's largest privately owned distributors and importers and all of the major supermarket chains apart from Asda, fears that once the extent of the problem emerges it will trigger panic buying, making the crisis still worse. There were reports last night of petrol stations in north-west London running out of supplies, with motorists having to drive miles to fill up.

The looming crisis has been caused by a combination of factors such as bad weather, Hurricane Katrina, the Buncefield oil depot fire and fears that the dispute between Russia and Ukraine over gas supplies would cause a run on oil. But it has been exacerbated by the sharp rise in gas prices, which has prompted some gas-fired power stations to switch to gasoil and kerosene. This has reduced the amount of refining capacity available to produce petrol and diesel and also threatens to squeeze supplies of home heating oil which many householders in rural areas rely upon.

I'm not sure what the real / official story is about the fuel depot that went up (presumably the original reports of some sort of accident occurring still hold), but Monkeygrinder has some speculation inspired by John Robb's blog that this could be an example of actual - and if so, very effective - sabotage by terrorists.

Back to my UK theme, Rigzone has a report that Great Britain will be import half of its natural gas supplies by 2010.

Britain, once an energy exporter, will import about half of its gas needs by 2010, according to a BBC report on Wednesday.

By 2020, existing North Sea gas fields will be supplying only 10 percent of the gas needed in Britain, the report said. The existing pipeline to Belgium, which has been used to export gas to continental Europe, is being upgraded to be able to deliver 15 percent of the UK's peak gas demand by the end of this year. A new interconnector to be built between Holland and Bacton will supply a further 10 percent.

The biggest pipeline of all is due to be completed later this year. The Langeled pipe will link Britain directly to a huge gas field off the coast of Norway, which will be capable of supplying 16 percent of the UK's peak demand when it is fully operational.

A small amount of gas is also imported as liquefied natural gas (LNG) via a terminal on the Isle of Grain, in Medway, Kent, which was opened last year. At the same time, new import terminals for LNG are being built at Milford Haven in Wales.

TreeHugger notes that Norway's supplies from the North Sea are depleting just as fast as Britain's (luckily for them they have a much smaller population so they are still raking in, and investing, the export dollars - and they also have the Barents sea to turn to as well, along with, reportedly, 3000 million tons of offshore coal).

As one of the major non-OPEC producers of oil and an important source of oil and natural gas to Europe, Norway's production decline is a big deal. Lets hope that this will encourage policy makers to invest in clean technologies and not to try to drill their way out of it - at best it will push back the problem a few years and make global warming and pollution worse, at worse it will be a waste of time and resources that could better be used making the transition to a post-fossil fuel world smoother.

The Russian-Ukrainian gas imbroglio seems to have been sorted out with some sort of bizarre compromise solution reported that reeked of the Germans agreeing to pay part of the difference of opinion between the two to keep Ukraine's gas flowing. The Herald's report here focussed on "Putins power play". While the Russian's are no doubt firing a warning shot about future energy negotiations with the Europeans, to a certain extent its hard to be too critical of the pricing they offered the Ukraine - as a client state of Russia they got a discount rate - now they aren't a client any more they get the privilege of paying full market rate like everyone else - everything has a price - even freedom.

European leaders lined up to condemn the move, which was unacceptable because it "mixed foreign policy with gas supplies policy", said the Polish Deputy Prime Minister, Ludwik Dorn.

An Oxford University energy analyst, Jonathan Stern, sees the dispute as essentially economic and Russia's behaviour as more consistent than punitive. As Professor Stern explains it, Russia has offered cut-price gas to former Soviet republics such as Belarus and Ukraine in exchange for them giving Russia ownership of the pipelines that run through their countries - which Russia believes will guarantee it security of supply. Belarus accepted, and gets cheap gas. Ukraine has not.

On Wednesday Russia and Ukraine reached a complex agreement that uses intermediaries and gas from Turkmenistan to ensure Russia gets market price while Ukraine pays only $US95 per 1000 cubic metres. But Eberhard Schneider, a Russia specialist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, presumes that with important Ukrainian elections due in March, Mr Putin wanted to send Ukrainians a message that the Yushchenko Government was "unfit to run the country" because it could not secure a good deal on gas.

He believes the move will be counterproductive in Europe. Britain has for some time considered reinvesting in nuclear power in part to avoid being reliant on Russian gas. And the European Union plans to establish a European energy agency to help countries such as Lithuania, which takes all its gas from Russia, and Hungary, which takes 80 per cent, to have greater certainty of supply.

The Financial Review had one brief report this weekend on an announcement by French President Jacques Chirac that he plans to cut oil consumption in France, in particular the train system will not use any oil in 20 years time - instead being (nuclear) powered by electricity. I wonder if uranium suppliers like Canada and Australia will eventually start acting like the Russians ? Well - thats pretty far-fetched of course, but our imperial influencers in Washington might like to get some leverage using the assets of their client states perhaps, one day - especially if occasionally recalcitrant allies like the French and Japanese become extremely nuclear dependent in the coming years.

It seems Mr Putin is also starting his own propaganda campaign to improve Russia's image in the world. He's not the only one doing this of course - I wonder how much news we read is actually genuine analysis reflecting the views of the author after he has studied real events, and how much might be better thought of as "paid content" ?

Of course, propaganda is used by everyone to some extent or another, and I thought this quote from Bruce's interview that I linked to yesterday was apt. Its probably important for all bloggers to try and make sure that they aren't just inadvertently parroting someone else's propaganda line, no matter who they are...

"Which way does the surveillance backlash go, Bruce? More state power, or less, and with what results?"

The hot-button here is always domestic spying for political advantage. Nixon could have used all the Cuban refugees he wanted to spy on Cubans inside the USA; but when he let them loose on the Democrats, it meant his head. It took a while, but the state can't stand internal spying on the state.

Obviously it takes some state-power to run an outfit like ECHELON, and In-Q-Tel is busily spreading the grant money for tomorrow's Total Information Awareness system right now. But I suspect that the "backlash" goes someplace pretty strange.

I'm thinking the future of surveillance belongs to partisan blogger-mobs howling for blood. You can see a guy like Josh Marshall trying to start his own private-investigation agency over at TALKING POINTS MEMO... He's nickel-and-diming it, but what if he had a few million? A cat like Abramoff has had the run of K Street for years now. Nobody brought it up, nobody said a thing...

If I were a spook from an unfriendly power and I wanted to destabilize the American political system, I'd be feeding the American poli-bloggers big chunks of fresh meat. It wouldn't matter if it came from right or left. Just as long as it was shocking, and not the sort of thing the mainstream media saw fit to touch. Blowjobs. Gay White House reporters. That sort of thing.

There's a major-league video sex scandal in Indian politics right now. It's got rather little to do with India per se and everything to do with how easy it is for political operatives to videotape moral panics and distribute them.

It is proving enough to wreck the major opposition party in the biggest democracy in the world. Pakistani intelligence couldn't have done a neater job, and, you know, maybe they did.

Moving on from the topic of propaganda to the related one of big brother style surveillence, there has been a lot of commentary about Bush's admission that US intelligence services monitor the communications of US citizens in violation of a law that was put in place in the aftermath of the Church hearings in the 1970s (sparking a rash of calls for his impeachment and prompting Dick Cheney to defend this practice, along with torture, as being necessary and that the administration can do whatever it feels like when there is a war, without end, against a bunch of guys with bad haircuts who hide in caves and now reportedly use carrier pigeons to communicate to get around all the electronic eavesdropping).

Senator Church must have been a busy man because The Control Of Oil also referred quite a few times to some of his hearings on the oil industry in the 1970's as well.

Of course, I've long been of the belief that all communication is probably monitored and stored away for later reference (and has been for many years) and that all sorts of other useful data will be vacuumed up from financial institutions, phone companies, toll road operators and the like and cross referenced against it over time - eventually various government agencies will have a fairly comprehensive picture of the movements, financial transactions and communications of pretty much every individual. As Bruce Schneier has frequently pointed out, this isn't a good thing, but it may be that the "Transparent Society" is the best we can hope for.

Of course, even amateurs can play this game on a smaller scale, as this tale of a bored programmers hunt for subversive book readers demonstrates.

Elsewhere, John Pilger is lamenting the death of freedom with some observations on the seemingly over-the-top laws suppressing legitimate dissent in the UK.

On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of parliament. The high court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was an exception.

Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before. "That's typical of the public," he said. A man in a pinstriped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. "I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq," he said to Brian, who cautioned him: "You'll spend the night in the cells, mate." We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.

As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.

Freedom is dying.

Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an "offensive" T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the "purpose" of searching him was "terrorism" and the "grounds for intervention" were "carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info" (sic).

He is awaiting trial.

For X-Files fans here are a few more "anti gravity" links (spurred by this article in New Scientist) - while I still think the whole idea is probably nuts there certainly seems to be a committed core in the conspiracy theory world that believe passionately in this stuff - I even saw one theorist claim recently that the US will win an upcoming war against China because of this power (how it handles nuclear weapons and why a war with China would be necessary in a "free energy" world weren't explained unfortunately).