CanalWays

I wonder if the problem of water supply will solve itself in a few years time. Global warming will raise sea levels by several metres. The low lying parts of Britain will become uninhabitable. People will have to move to higher ground. Where it rains.

And by the way, another negative aspect of canal transport (well, actually positive IMHO) is the speed (max 4 m.p.h.) a boat can travel. So with the EU Working Hours Directive, you're looking at approaching a week to get from London to Birmingham.

Edited by author 09-11-2006 10:35 PM
VERNE: some comments on your analysis of oil reserves:

"The amount of oil we have in reserve ie found so far is about 1 trillion barrels. The amount of oil we have in the world ie not found yet is estimated to be 3 trilion barrels."

Using this argument, I am actually the richest man in the world, I just haven't found my money yet - maybe it is down the back of the couch. How one can reliably estimate the amount of a resource 'not found yet' is beyond me.

 "They just found a huge oil field in the Mexican Gulf by the way. estimated to be around 500,000 million barrels, and this is not part of the reserve yet."

Found by whom? estimated by whom? God forbid an oil company should 'over-estimate' their finds or reserves to maintain investor interest and therefore stock and dividend prices.

 "The oil shortage scares are started and run by oil industry executives to make themselves rich. It is to put up the price of oil to make money, you know that old capatilistic enterprise."

This sounds reasonable until you note that iit is mostly the oil industry saying that there is plenty of oil left - not saying that it is running out. The last thing the oil companies want is for the world economy to transition away from the oil standard before they are ready.

Your article is very thought provoking. Regarding using "green electricity" for a pumped storage hydro electric scheme -yes it is the best use for "windpower electricity". Unfortunately however "green electricity" is subsidised and hugely expensive in relation to conventional generation which makes pumped storage hydro electricity a non starter at present

your idea seem good however i think you could well come up against British Waterways who for years have neglect many of Britain's canals and it only been through the efforts of hard working volunteers with the preservation society's who actually got many canals restored. Are you aware their is a hydro power staion in Argyle up in the hills that does in fact do many of your sugestions
http://www.visitcruachan.co.uk/

To be honest Guy, whilst it sounds like a great idea it's going to suffer the fate of all grand projets proposed in Britain - short-termism, NIMBYism and most importantly the price of land. Only a few years ago a consortium called Central Railway proposed a privately financed new railway line from Liverpool to the Channel Tunnel. However, because this was to pass through some of the wealthiest and most conservative parts of England (Buckinghamshire and Surrey) there was huge localised opposition to it, and the government never gave the firm its backing and the scheme is now dead in the water.

Big civil engineering projects need very long term financial commitment to make any money at all. With the present attitude of Government (with a five year horizon, max) and the City (who are only interested in quarterly results and dividends) nothing like this can ever happen. The Manchester Ship Canal was a huge undertaking - it took 7 years to build, and didn't make a profit for many years after that. Nobody would have financed it today, but it was a commercial success for many years (and the company that owns it today still makes a profit, although mostly from property development).

Looking at the amount of oil we have in reserve, how much we think there is left and then assuming that the rate we use it at will remain Constant it truly idiotic.

The use of oil which has got us (the world economy) this far is relatively low compared to the amount of oil used today and in the future. With India, and China (about 42% of the worlds population) expecting their own populations to attain the same level of lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to, we will see the price of oil only go up further, and countries which plan for these high prices/supply problems will find that their economies will prosper better.

Yes there is a lot of oil left, but we’re using it more than ever before, and there are more of us using it.

Oil companies do benefit from higher oil prices, but the main fluctuations in price are caused by supply and demand issues.

Edited by author 09-11-2006 11:16 AM
@Verne:

The whole "peak oil" issue isn't about reserves. It's about *accessibility*.

It's not the availability of oil that sets the price, but the costs of _extracting_ it that make it expensive. If an oil field is hard to get at, the costs of the oil produced by that field will go up. The more infrastructure you have to build to produce something, the more that something costs. This is basic economics.

It's no good telling us there's three trillion barrels of oil under the ground! It's no use to us there. If that oil is at the bottom of something like the Marianas Trench, we won't be able to get at it without spending ludicrous amounts of money on the problem. This doesn't mean it won't happen, but it _does_ mean that that oil will be very expensive to extract and therefore buy.

The "peak oil" argument isn't telling us we're running out of oil as such. It's telling us that we're running out of _cheap_ oil. It tells us that there will be a point when extracting the remaining oil reserves becomes so difficult, so expensive, that it will simply be impossible to keep up with demand.

We spend billions of dollars building and towing spectacularly expensive drilling rigs out in the middle of dangerous, storm-wracked oceans; we then use them to drill down through the sea bed for crude oil; pump it out of the ground into a passing oil tanker or expensive pipeline; transport that crude hundreds -- often even _thousands_ -- of miles to a refinery; convert that crude oil into fuel; transport it many more hundreds of miles...

...all so we can pour it into our cars and set it on fire!

And we call ourselves "Wise Man".


No matter how you slice it and dice it, we WILL reach a point when it becomes too expensive to extract crude oil for it to be worthwhile. Maybe not tomorrow; maybe not next week, but possibly within our own lifetimes and most probably during our children's.

Crude oil is a finite resource. Nobody is making any more of it and when the steel straws we're sucking it out of the ground with start making gurgling noises, it's time to start worrying. In future, pushing new straws through the Earth's surface is going to get a hell of a lot more expensive.

The UK's North Sea reserves are now almost dry. That took just 30 years: well within my own lifetime. Today, that same field would last only half as long, so the return on investment would be a lot less.

The straws are gurgling. Start worrying.

For someone who insists that our government uses more 'joined-up thinking', there's a shocking lack of it here in this forum...

Canals are not quick, but they are flat, offer a very smooth ride and reliable. You can't really have a multi-barge-train pile-up at 4mph and water doesn't suffer from 'liquid fatigue'. This makes them very predictable and low-maintenance. That's the key. Trains are about moving bulk loads at speed, but they're inflexible and the infrastructure is old and needs frequent maintenance. (The HSE also means that the old, BR practice of maintaining one track while keeping the other open to traffic is no longer allowed. Hence all the blockades in recent years.)

Trains suck at moving freight unless it's in trainload quantities. Road haulage provides the ultimate flexibility, but doesn't scale well due to the smaller loads each truck can carry. They really shouldn't be travelling up and down motorways: they're much better used for the last mile of the delivery process.

Trains of barges make much more sense than a ludicrously expensive widening of the existing waterways. Take some ideas from the railways by recycling the multiple-unit concept (i.e. a small engine on _each_ barge in the train), use automated controls, so trains can even be uncoupled, shunted and reformed _on the move_. And then... build trolley wires above the canals! One for each direction. Electric motors will be more efficient, quieter, cleaner and electricity can, as you folks have already pointed out, be generated from many, much cleaner, sources.

Some towns may need a bypass canal built so that long trains can use that and only individual barges intended for that town need use the old locks. This saves expensive widening of locks, while the bypass canal need not be built on the 150ft 'guage' suggested elsewhere, but can retain the existing size. Computer control and GPS can be used to reduce the need for manpower and keep running costs low.

Fully automated railways already exist, such as the Docklands Light Railway, and have done for years. Semi-automatic systems, which only have a human driver as backup, may be the more palatable option for laypeople however. Some of London Underground's tube lines, such as the Victoria, Jubilee and Central Lines, use the 1960s-era Automatic Train Operation: the driver checks the doors, then pushes some buttons to close them and start the train. The train then drives _itself_ to the next station. (This system was originally pioneered on the Victoria Line, but is being slowly rolled out across the network.)

There is ongoing research into computer-controlled road trains that allow individual cars to peel off and join other trains at junctions. This same technology could also be applied to barge trains, so a barge heading for another destination would simply pull out of the train when it reached the appropriate junction, preferably attaching itself to another train going in the right direction.

In effect, the barge trains will be moving warehouses and there's no reason why computers couldn't use this aspect to integrate barge trains with existing, "Just In Time" business practices. Some trains could even become mobile factories, picking raw materials at point A, processing them on the move and delivering final product at point B. Again, this can already be seen to a smaller extent in the concrete mixing trucks we see on the roads, as well as the old "Travelling Post Office" trains (some of which are now back in use! They're just operated by another company.) This is a logistics problem and one that can be resolved by the application of computer processing power. This option didn't exist 300 years ago, so it would be idiotic to ignore its possibilities now.

Barge trains on existing infrastructure would be relatively cheap to implement. Reliability and predictability -- the most important element -- would make them valuable. Unlike road and rail, barges would be unlikely to be vying for space with passengers or other, conflicting modes of transport.

For many companies, it's more important to have a constant, steady _stream_ of materials than it is to have that material delivered very, very quickly. The textile industry doesn't care how long the wool you deliver spends en-route to the factory, just as long as wool arrives every day. If a business is more interested in 'flows' than in specific items _within_ those flows, it may be a good candidate for barge train delivery.

Merely saying "Hey! Let's build lots of new, 150ft.-wide canals!" is not joined-up thinking: it's just plain bonkers. Railways replaced canals for a reason and that reason still stands if you insist on simply reusing 300-year-old technology without adapting it to modern needs.

* Water distribution:

Distributing water via open waterways would lose a lot of water due to evaporation in the summer, so this might not be as efficient as many seem to believe. I'd want to see hard figures on this before trying it. It's all very well claiming that some small towns already use this technique, but it needs to be scaled up for major conurbations like London and Birmingham to make the investment viable.

Barges would also become less efficient if they have to fight a current. They'd gain some efficiency if they're moving with the current, but navigation gets trickier, so you'd lose some energy in maintaining your heading. I suspect, after crunching the numbers, we'll find that we can either have an efficient, modern barge-based distribution system, or a water distribution system, but not both.

* Energy

Pumping water up and down hills and mountains is a valid technique and it isn't reliant on having canals all over the place, so this should be considered separately. And there's no reason why the reservoirs _have_ to be built above ground. This would probably require building smaller plants, but more of them (and using hills, not just mountains.) Even the Romans built underground systems, so this need not always have the environmental impact that something like the Kielder Dam caused. Using wind power to boost the electricity is a no-brainer, but we really should get into the habit of closing our energy systems as much as possible, so that _anything_ that generates energy can be harnessed.

One obvious "quick win" is eliminating the ludicrous profusion of AC-DC transformer bricks lying about a modern house. If our governments would stop fannying about and _require_ that all new housing should be fitted with standardised low-power DC ring mains too, all that waste heat from all those transformers and PSUs could be eliminated (as well as all the energy expended on making them, packaging them and distributing them), reducing our energy footprint by a substantial margin.

Sorry but your an idiot. The amount of oil we have in reserve ie found so far is about 1 trillion barrels. The amount of oil we have in the world ie not found yet is estimated to be 3 trilion barrels. And this is by very conservative scientists who dont work for the oil industry by the way. So far the world has used about 800,000 million barrels since we first started using oil. This leaves a huge reserve of known and found oil and a huge reserve of oil yet to be found. They just found a huge oil field in the Mexican Gulf by the way. estimated to be around 500,000 million barrels, and this is not part of the reserve yet. So in essence if you think we are about to run out of oil, dont hold your breath. The oil shortage scares are started and run by oil industry executives to make themselves rich. It is to put up the price of oil to make money, you know that old capatilistic enterprise. Man we are no where near running out of this black gold. Anyway your article was very funny indeed. Reminds me of the old strategy games like age of empires. Regards Verne.

Edited by author 09-11-2006 10:11 AM
Well, what a refreshing change!
Can I offer the following thoughts:

Labour to construct the canals: We're looking at a lot of low-grade workforce, plus heavy plant in capable hands, but Navvies will do.

Our society also has a problem with low-grade delinquents and the jails are full.

There are still plenty of people occasionally harrumphing about bringing back conscription as a vehicle by which a little discipline might be instilled.

Why not pring back conscription? Not into the army - there's a limited amount to be gained teaching people how to kill other people or how to maintain the equipment to do it. Call it the Land Army, call it the UK Infrastructure Development Reserve or whatever. It's a resource for all those jobs you need just to throw people at.

Goods to be shifted: I quite agree that there's a problem with having to invest in more stock, simply to fill up the supply chain, then have the stock sit on a canal boat for days or possibly a couple of weeks whilst it wends its way. Fortunately, there's also cargoes that could be shifted an no-one would worry about stock in transit, for instance waste to waste-to power plants and landfill terminals. Could we even see landfill fuelled land reclamation in some coastal/estuary waters?

Then there's the goods where sheer bulk would make distributed storage attractive and again, take large trucks off the highway.

Here's a challenge: Can anyone have a look at the current economic map and suggest real routes and the prospective cargoes that could be carried? Even if there's no canal currently in existence!.

Make new canals big enough to take a barge capable of carrying one or two standard 40 foor ISO containers, with space to pass a similar sized vessel moored at the side.

Modern shipping is almost exclusively managed using containers out of sheer necessity for dock speed. The same system could be used with one or more single-container sized barges on each lock segment; these would only travel along single segments, running back and forth. A relatively cheap and simple crane with a decent counterweight should be able to shift the loads over the lock-points either onto another barge in the next sgement or onto a roadside delivery point.
Barges such as these really could be fully automated, as their job would be about as simple as it is possible become; also the water/speed issue of the lock gates is bypassed. By bypassing the need to expand any existing waterways it would be much easier to get trialling done.

However, the main reason for using road transport remains untouched by any of this discussion - convenience. A lorry can take on a load from one point or fifty, and deliver it to one point or fifty more. Rail and water transport lose that delivery edge; they can be faster or cheaper for the segment that they transport the load, but they still end with a requirement for point-to-point shipping which has now become greatly reduced in efficiency; the shipper still needs to maintain road transport but one which now does very little for its investment cost. A road distribution network tied directly to the water/rail network as a single company might be a start at helping with this end of things, but keeping the convenience would be a major issue to any business acceptance, assuming that the overall speed/cost ratios could be shown to be advantageous.

Why not use the existing railroad system to begin with? At night when passenger traffic is scarce, trains carrying all sorts of goods could use the tracks. It was once so in most of Europe, but unfortunately most of that traffic is now moved to trucks. I say the entire EU should put a major tax on transport by truck if it's not inside the same city (or county or whatever that might be appropiate). That would move goods back to ships and trains. That would be good for the environment and for the traffic situation all around Europe.

Firstly, I found the article thought provoking but alas, this sounds like an idealistic proposal rather than a particle way forward.

I live near the Rochdale Canal and walk it's tow paths on a regular basis, often I've pondered whether it would be feasible to return the canal to a working state.
The problem is moving barges up and down canals is slow business, especially when you hit a series of locks which maybe only 100's yards apart. To move cargo interrupted, the canals would have to perfectly level for very long distances.
The trouble is, in these times, all goods (including building materials) are required yesterday. Goods have to be delivered in hours, employing the fastest transport methods available. Having them held-up in transport is not desirable from a economic point of view as goods need to be delivered and then paid for as quickly as possible. It's what keeps the world ticking over and prevents us sliding into recession. Really, I think you are challenging the concepts of modern economics and globalisation here.

As for the idea of supplying water to inner cities via the canal, also not realistic. Canals have a number of lakes & reservoirs along their length to top-up and regulate their levels. So if you are going to have to build new reservoirs anyway, why not just use them to supply the cities directly?
Besides, we all know the problem with water shortages in the south east of England is really a management issue with the utilities companies. (Prioritising infrastructure maintenance?)

The idea for wind generation peaked my interest. Pumping water when the wind is up, then switching to hydro generation when the wind dies down? I think some university physics student (if there is any left!) should do the maths for this. I'd love to know what the efficiency ratings what be. I would expect very energy lossy, but then again, it's “free” energy I suppose.

I'm afraid this proposal is a non-starter.
In the UK, we seem to be digging up our remaining green areas in our never ending quest to build more housing, mainly since the nearly 2 million economic migrants turned up on our shores in the last few years. Do you really expect there to be any land left for building canals?
Besides, this is yesteryears technology and it didn't work then, hence the invention of the railways, then trucks and the modern road network.
But saying that, they brought the trams back! Never understood that. People will happily use the trams but not buses. Yet isn't a tram a bus on rails?

If they are going slow enough, then even a fairly low spec computer could use AI techniques to plot its way down a canal... nice flat surface with banks that rise about the surface... the only thing you'd really need to watch out for is stuff like vandals throwing stuff in the canal, exceptionally low periods and silt causing grounding and other unforseen events. I suppose the other problem would be people hijacking cargo if its unmanned.

Flib

Do barges really need crew?

Given the speeds involved and the lack of traffic, couldn't they be piloted with GPS and some clever programming? I reckon human crew should be the exception.

As for burning heavy oils, why not use electric motors, battery powered, and have battery exchange points every 20 or 30 miles.

If you want to make the whole venture properly enrgy efficient, take another lesson from the early canal days and uses horses and buttys (a towed narrowboat with no living quarters). during the industrial revolution these proved remarkably efficent and sustainable