Source: BBC Radio 4 PM
URL: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/storage/IanFellsToday240513.mp3
Date: 24/05/2013
Event: Ian Fells: without gas or electricity "you quickly spiral down into anarchy"
Credit: BBC Radio 4, also thanks to Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) for the audio link
People:
Eddie Mair: We know it was a long cold winter, and we know gas supplies were under pressure, but it's only now, thanks to a story in the Financial Times, that we have a clearer idea of the effect. The paper quotes a senior energy official as saying Britain came within six hours of running out of natural gas, in March. Professor Ian Fells is an expert on all this.
Ian Fells: We've had a Labour government, we now have a Coalition, we've had a Conservative government. They all see things in the short term - you know, about two years or the time to the next election, is as far as they seem to be able to think. And what we're talking about, in energy terms, is: you have to take a long view.
Eddie Mair: Let me ask you about the story in the FT, which says that back in March, the UK was six hours away from running out of natural gas. And that sounds pretty serious - that sounds like we're four hours away from Bruce Willis coming in.
Ian Fells [laughs]: And I've no reason to disbelieve that figure, because I know that about 18 months ago we were within about three minutes of having to cut off electricity -
Eddie Mair: Oh, good grief. Right, can you talk us through, then, with all your scenario expertise: if we reach the moment when the six hours counts down to zero - who's first to be cut off?
Ian Fells: Well, our gas supplies come from a variety of sources, and they come - and not all that much, actually, through Europe, from Russia. A lot from Norway. We ship in liquefied natural gas in large natural-gas tankers. The government feels, because we have this multiplicity of supplies, it's always going to be okay. But if they're very tight - for example, the supply, the pipeline from Norway broke down - so what do you do? Well, you have to cut off gas supplies to various users, and the easiest thing to do is to cut it off to large users. You can't cut gas supplies off to domestic users - of which there are millions - because starting the supply up again is quite an extraordinarily dangerous and difficult thing to do.
So what do you do? You cut it off to large factories using large quantities of gas, or you cut it off to gas-fired power stations. Cutting it off to gas-fired power stations - essentially, that means, it impacts on the electricity supply. So if you start cutting gas supplies off to power stations, that means then you start to get rolling blackouts of electricity. When we were having electricity blackouts, a year or two ago, it was pretty obvious, up here on Tyneside, that they were going to keep the electricity supply flowing into the city. And it was the smaller towns out in the country that got blacked out. That of course was denied, but it was fairly obvious that that was what was happening.
So you keep the supplies going. And it's worth contemplating - if you cut off gas or, consequentially, electricity, to a large city, then you quickly spiral down into anarchy, before you know where you are. I mean, one quite interesting thing is that if you cut off the electricity supplies to supermarkets, because this research has always been done, what happens is - and I think it's terrible - people steal everything off the shelves in about five minutes. And the other thing is, of course, that the city stops. They run entirely on their computer system, and as soon as the supply to the computer system goes, then they can't do any work. And so the whole financial market goes into chaos. I know it sounds terrible, doesn't it.
Eddie Mair: Does, a bit.
Ian Fells: That's actually what happens.
Eddie Mair: Professor Ian Fells.