UK 'running out of gas'

A report by the Royal Academy of Engineering, submitted to Energy Minister Brian Wilson on Friday, predicts the UK could have to import virtually all the gas it needs as early as 2020 because it will no longer have enough of its own.

It attacks the government's energy policy as "hopelessly unrealistic" and says it places too much emphasis on renewable energy.

Professor Ian Fells, one of the report's authors, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the problem with the government's energy policy was that it was market-led, and there was no long-term planning.

Professor Fells warned: "If you hit a really cold winter or few days, that would stretch our gas supply because we have next to no storage capacity in this country

"Our friends in Germany and France really have quite large storage built in.

"We've got accustomed to just switching on the taps in the North Sea, and it's always provided what we needed.

"That means we've got to build a huge infrastructure to store gas to deal with those difficult times."

He added: "The problem gets much worse with gas if you close down all the nuclear stations, as seems to be the route ahead, you close down the coal-fired stations and then you rely on huge chunks of renewable energy.

"Renewable energy is very important, but it's largely intermittent so that has to be backed up."

Finite resource

Energy Minister Brian Wilson said the report, written as part of a consultation process prior to the publication of a White Paper, raised "important and challenging" issues.

He said: "If things go on as they are at present time, then 70% of energy comes from gas by 2020 and 90% of that gas is imported.

"What's therefore important is that both the infrastructure and the contracts are in place which will sustain that kind of dependence on gas.

"It calls into question whether it was all that clever to go so heavily for gas over the last 20 years when our indigenous resource is so finite."

Mr Wilson added the expected shortage of gas raised other questions.

"Do we allow nuclear electricity, the only major source of non-carbon electricity at the present time, to fade away at exactly the time when we need to have a clean and indigenous component in our energy mix to balance the challenges in gas that Professor Fells refers to?"

And he accepted there were impediments to meeting the target of 10% of energy coming from renewable sources such as wind, hydro and landfill gas by 2010.