What will replace oil?

It is salutary that some discussion is emerging on how Malta and Europe are going to meet the escalating electricity demands of the coming decades. France decided to turn to nuclear energy more than 30 years ago, becoming world leaders in this field. Their nuclear energy company, Areva, not only builds nuclear reactors but also supplies uranium and reprocesses nuclear waste, offering a complete package to its customers, such as Finland. The French are selling this package around the world, even to Middle-eastern oil-producers. Why? Because oil and gas are very finite.

There is now a desperate scramble to find new oil fields, but the biggest ones in Saudi Arabia appear unable to increase production. The Royal Dutch Shell company also admits that its oil and gas production have fallen for the sixth consecutive year. These could be the first signs of difficulties in meeting world oil demand in the foreseeable future. Oil and gas-rich countries are turning to nuclear energy so as to conserve their fossil fuel resources. When oil becomes scarce, one envisages that it would be utilised solely for military purposes and would no longer be freely available for sale. With millions in China and India looking forward to their first car, it is anybody's guess how long a free oil market will last. Estimates of world coal reserves are also uncertain, with some claiming a century more of coal, and more recent predictions that exhaustion of major coal mines is only a few decades away.

Some believe renewable energy will kill two birds with one stone, replacing exhausted fossil fuels and solve global warming. Wind and solar power are only expected to provide a maximum of around 20 per cent of the world's electricity needs. So where is the rest going to come from if humans don't wish to go back to dark cold caves? Nuclear power is the only zero-carbon-emissions generator of the massive quantities of electricity needed by our increasingly populous planet. Today's 439 nuclear plants provide about 16 per cent of electricity worldwide, and another 100 plants are being built or planned - many more will follow as more people understand that there is no credible alternative for nuclear.

Green-do-gooders try and scare people off nuclear energy by quoting the only major meltdown of a nuclear plant, which occurred in a poorly designed Russian one, and claiming nuclear waste will be a toxic hazard for centuries. The French have never had a nuclear accident, their electricity is 80 per cent derived from nuclear, and also supplies most of southern England's electricity.

Furthermore, the French are world leaders in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, which produces even more carbon-emissions-free nuclear energy. They have safely reprocessed more than 23,000 tons of spent fuel, enough to power the entire country for 14 years.

While France has achieved energy independence and nuclear power world supremacy, the rest of the EU has become dependent on potentially unreliable and dangerous gas suppliers. Not so long ago, a several hours-long electricity blackout hit many continental countries because a sudden drop in wind farm electricity generation closed down the EU grid. This should be seen as a foretaste of what lies ahead in EU electricity generation if lessons are not learnt from the French successful model. For us in Malta, facing larger electricity demands (including for water production) and EU edicts for substantial carbon emissions, our apparent impasse may present an opportunity for our little country to press Brussels to help us cable connect to the EU grid and to press EU politicians to take a closer look at the French success story.

Regarding solar electricity generation in Malta, the least our government can do is to encourage us to install solar roof panels by removing import and VAT taxes from these items and reimburse us, for the electricity we put back into the grid, at the same electricity unit cost as our monopoly electricity supplier charges us. If private companies are interested in investing in wind farms in Malta, their proposals should be looked at positively, but I don't believe millions of taxpayers' money should be invested in it.