Scotland

Background

Scotland's fossil fuels

For the last 150 years Scotland's geography has been shaped by coal. There are several fields, all in the Scottish Midland Valley, and all giving rise to mining and heavy industry. Coal fires used to be in every house; coal fed the factory boilers, the railways and the steelworks. Later it was the fuel for thermal power stations producing electricity. No surprise then that the lowlands between Glasgow in the west and Edinburgh and Dundee in the east have 90% of Scotland's population and industry.

From about 1950 onwards Scottish coal has been suffering from lots of problems, especially people’s preference for oil. Coalmining stopped completely in 1985.

Fortunately, Scotland had vast supplies of oil, which it didn't know about until the 1960s.

In the 1960s, oil and gas were discovered in the North Sea. There was massive investment in new technology. The rigs and platforms were on an epic scale. No-one had drilled so far beneath the sea before. But depth wasn't the only challenge. The North Sea has some of the worst weather in the world. Loading tanker ships in seas like this risks lives, and pollution disaster.

So pipelines were laid from the production platforms to take the oil and gas ashore, hundreds of kilometres along the seabed. The gas fields were mostly to the south; the oil, further north. The nearest land to many of the new oilfields was Shetland, a group of islands far to the north of the Scottish mainland. Pipelines were built to the sheltered bay at Sullom Voe, the site of a vast new terminal.

Thousands of people, from engineers to cleaners, arrived on the island to work on the construction. It was a boom time for Shetland's economy. But many of them left when the terminal was completed. By 1985, three-quarters of Britain's oil was coming through Sullom Voe.

But there's not much to see. When it comes ashore, the oil's in a soup of seawater, sand and valuable gas. At the terminal these are separated out, and the oil's stored in massive tanks. Three of these would supply the whole of Britain for a day. There were thousands of jobs building the terminal. But only 300 are left to run it.

The oil isn't useful until it's been processed. At Sullom Voe it's transferred into tankers, and sent to refineries, hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. This crude oil might end up as fuel for a car, or a power station. It is most precious as raw material for chemicals and plastics. But one day the oil will run out.

Life in Shetland

North of the Scottish mainland are two groups of islands - the Orkney Isles, and, further north still, the Shetland Isles. From London, Shetland is as far away as the South of France, and it's well over 500 km north of Edinburgh.

So what's life like on Shetland? You certainly need a lot of energy. Locals say it's very cold here in the winter. So you need to keep a good fire on. It can be really windy and the days are very short in winter. It can be dismal from half past 3, 4 o'clock. Summer months are good, though. You can still be out doing things 11 o'clock at night. This far north, it hardly gets dark at all in the midsummer evenings. And there's a good social life.

Shetland's main town is Lerwick. The shops are here, and the ferry terminal for mainland Scotland. That's ten hours away, too far for the National Grid. So what do they do for energy?

Twenty-three thousand people live on Shetland, and they can't burn their own crude oil. They have to buy it back as expensive diesel, to power their own electricity grid. Also, a relatively small island, they have no protection from the wind, and at 60° North they are bang in the way of strong westerlies for much of the year. Gusts of near hurricane force are quite common. Few trees can survive with so little shelter.

Alternatives to wasting fossil fuels

a) Peat

Many parts of Britain have peat supplies, and it's important to Shetlanders. Peat is compacted, decaying plant material. If you dry it out, it burns, and this used to be the main fuel for cooking and heating. A lot of families still use it, to save electricity.

Each family owns a 'peat bank' from which they cut pieces to burn on the fire; it's cheaper than oil, because you don't have to pay anything for it apart from the rights to cut peat at the bank. And just a little bit of work in the summer. But digging it up to burn destroys an important habitat. And peat can take thousands of years to develop. It's almost a fossil fuel itself, not a long-term energy solution.

b) Wind

A better alternative is probably wind power. The wind is less hard work, and it seems to blow most of the time. You can have simple systems such as installing a simple wind turbine to heat your water system.

Locals say it's really good and it changes your idea of wind: you're glad when it's a windy day, whereas before you weren't glad. It's especially satisfying if you are interested in some kind of alternative technology to produce the power rather than using the grid, which is supplied by fossil fuels like oil. You get a warm house but we also know that you're not contributing to any pollution of the environment.

In the north of the Shetlands, in Fair Isle, people have to be even more self-sufficient. The peat on Fair Isle was all dug out years ago, so for a long time they relied on imported diesel, and driftwood. But the answer was all around them - the wind. Fair Isles’ two turbines are far more sophisticated than the small ones used by individual homes. The electricity they supply powers machinery, lights, even computers. Enough for all seventy islanders.

c) Hydroelectricity

Hydroelectric power suits highland landscapes. Natural lochs can be dammed, and water piped down steep hills to power generators. There is an impact on the environment, but no air pollution, and the water's renewed every time it rains.

d) Methane gas

But once what energy resources are there in towns? Rubbish might seem like a problem, not a resource. Just getting rid of it uses energy, and a whole city's rubbish is rather disgusting. Outside Glasgow is one of the largest landfill sites in Europe. Waste has to go somewhere, and often it's just buried in the ground. But that isn't the end of the story. It starts to rot.

Waste brought into a site is compacted into layers over a time, profucing degradable material that is like your food waste or your kitchen waste, and which decomposes a bit like grass cuttings in a big heap in the garden. And what it produces is methane, a gas which can be collected. If you don't collect that methane there could be a possibility that it could seep out from the site. So, in Glasgow, tubes have been sunk down into the waste to draw out the methane gas, and pipe it to burn in a generating station. This already produces far more electricity than needed to power the site. So the rest can be sold on, to the National Grid. The methane will ooze out for decades. And as the rubbish piles up, more will be generated. It's not completely clean electricity - but the fumes from this power station cause much less damage than the methane would.

d) Energy conservation

As well as looking for better ways to make energy, it can help some problems if you conserve what you have. For example, on a housing complex called Easterhouse, residents reckoned their flats were wasting energy but were still so cold and damp that their health suffered. When they first moved into their houses it was quite a shock. Families were forced to use the most expensive heating like electric fires. But they could only use it for a couple of hours at night to heat up the bedroom, before the children went to bed. Most families were absolutely horrified that they were paying up to a third of their income on fuel bills. And it was estimated in this community alone families were paying ten million pounds a year heating the sky above Easterhouse.

So the tenants got together with engineers and architects, to redesign the flats. They came up with insulation and solar heating. When they started talking about how they wanted these solar houses, people laughed and said 'Solar housing in the West of Scotland, are you crazy?'

But solar panels trap daylight, even on dull days, and can warm the air going into stairwells. Now the flats lose less heat. Before when families heated their flat and they opened their front door, they lost that heat because of the draft. Each open balcony or verandah was glassed in to trap even more light and heat, just like a greenhouse. And at the back of each flat, they built a new utility room to help with the damp. People can do their washing in that area so that it reduces the condensation inside the flat. Also it makes the flat a lot bigger and gives people a lot more space. However, there was only money for thirty-six flats in the pilot project, and no more have been converted.The rest of the estate is still pouring money into the sky.