Despite decades of endless shrieking over emissions, Just Stop Oil protests blocking peak-hour traffic to the fury of commuters, children crying over supposedly lost futures and major energy companies being publicly scorned, fossil-fuel production is powering ahead.

After the hiatus of the Covid years of 2021 and 2022 all of the major sectors – coal, gas and oil – recovered strongly in 2023 and have shown no signs of looking back. Oil production in particular has reached new highs with producers in the US easily defying the best efforts of the Biden administration to hamper the industry to push production far past that of Saudi Arabia.

The one industry analysts expect to slow down in any way is that of coal. London-based consultancy GlobalData estimated that a touch over 8.9 million tonnes of coal were produced worldwide in 2023, representing an annual growth rate of 1.9 per cent, after the sector’s dramatic recovery in 2022. The consultancy expects that modest annual increase to gradually fade to zero by 2030, with one factor being increasing competition from renewables although other sources point to gas taking over sections of the energy market from coal.

Analysts certainly expect the global gas market to power ahead this year. In 2023 global gas demand increased 0.5 per cent, but this year the International Energy Agency expects the market to grow by 2.5 per cent to 100 billion cubic metres.

IEA figures also indicate that the demand for oil increased by about 2.3 per cent to 101.7 million barrels per day in 2023, with a further comparatively modest increase of perhaps one per cent expected this year. (Opec forecasts for this year growth are double that of the IEA, while the US Energy Information Agency expects more than one per cent).

Whatever the overall growth rate the US is a stand-out success story with the IEA announcing in March that in the last few months of 2023, US monthly national production was the highest ever recorded for any nation.

The US Federal government has tried to hold the industry back, but commentators point out that very little of the oil production is on federal land. As far as America is concerned, the Paris treaty is only a presidential agreement rather than a binding treaty as such, meaning that the states are not bound by it. Oil and mineral rights are also held by landowners, rather than by the government which is the case in Australia, and the landowners are usually only too happy to get rich by selling.

With the Biden administration reduced to delaying tactics such as blocking permits for new pipelines and the industry busy innovating to increase the productivity of wells, production has grown so much that if the state of Texas was a separate country then it would be the world’s fourth-largest oil producer.

Commentators have also pointed gleefully to the Obama-era repeal of a law that prevented the export of oil. Most of the oil produced from fracking is ‘lighter’ than the oil from conventional wells – it is less dense with fewer of the heavier hydrocarbons and less sulphur than regular crude. This makes it more valuable but it was not easy to refine all the industry’s growing production in American refineries geared to the heavier crude. The change in the law meant that the locally produced oil could be sent to overseas refineries.

There is considerable commentary on why fossil fuel production is expanding. Gas production last year was hampered by Russian attempts to use gas exports as a weapon in its fight against Ukraine while this year’s winter is expected to be colder. China, which digs up half the world’s production of coal, wants to reduce its dependence on imported coal. Demand is increasing in China, the rest of Asia and India, while falling off in Europe, and so on.

In other words the very active climate movement has done little more than merely change demand patterns and perhaps reduce the overall rate of growth in fossil fuel consumption by making advanced nations, such as the UK and Germany, poorer. Covid shutdowns did far more to reduce demand.

As for the local numbers, according to GlobalEconomy.com, Australia is on track to consume about 1.1 million barrels of oil per day this year, as opposed to 998,000 in 2007 – a comparatively modest average annual increase but not the complete reversal that the die-hard greens have been hoping for.

Nor are any of the feeble government electrification policies likely to reverse that trend. Along with a vehicle emissions standard designed to encourage sales of electric and hybrid vehicles, the government has made various announcements about funding for charging stations. In March the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena) declared that it would tip $4.8 million into a Europcar Mobility Group project to install 256 chargers across at least 41 sites around Australia, including metropolitan hubs and regional locations – a pitifully small number, especially considering the horror stories now circulating about the difficulties of finding chargers in the US and Europe and how they are often out of action for one reason or another.

There are small numbers of electric buses on Australian roads already and the New South Wales government, to take one state, has announced that 1,200 will be in service by 2028, as a partial replacement for the 8,000-or-so diesel- and gas-powered buses. To date the small number of e-buses in service do not seem to have caused any problems, unlike America where many state counties have bought e-buses with great fanfare only to find that the repairs are ruinous and the buses rarely run. One complicating factor not present in Australia is the freezing winters of the northern US states. E-vehicles and freezing weather do not go well together.

In any case, all these policies relate to passenger cars and buses which, if US figures are any guide, account for just half of Australia’s total oil consumption. The other half is consumed by freight transport and to date attempts to electrify freight transport have met with very little success. Oil consumption, in turn, represents around half of the national total energy use.

All this means that decades of endless shrieking about emissions have done little more than reduce the rate of growth in the use of fossil fuels, if that, and net zero remains an impossible dream.

The protesters of Just Stop Oil should just stop. Apart from annoying commuters their actions are futile.

Get 10 issues for just $10

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for the next 10 magazine issues, plus full online access, for just $10.

SUBSCRIBE 10 issues for $10 REGISTER 3 articles a month

Already a subscriber? Log in