Episode 3 Planet Oil: The Treasure That Conquered the World

Welcome to Planet Oil.

Over the last 150 years,

we've become more and more dependent on this extraordinary resource.

Our use of oil defines us.

It's not just transport.

Oil helps us build and light our cities.

It grows the food we eat.

And it helps make the clothes we wear.

But that comes at a high price.

To satisfy our addiction,

we've exploited fossil fuels on an industrial scale.

As a professor of geoscience, I've taught many students

who went on to earn big money as geologists

in the oil and gas industries.

Like many of my academic colleagues, I now face a dilemma...

..whether the young geologists I'm training

will become earth exploiters...

..or earth stewards.

Today, the spectre of climate change

has forced many geologists, including myself,

to confront the stark realities of one big question facing us all.

And that is, given that there's loads of fossil fuels

still in the ground,

can we really afford to burn what's left?

But just how did we get here?

And is it really possible to kick our addiction?

I grew up in the seventies,

and I remember it as a decade plagued by energy crises.

Back then, climate change wasn't on the radar.

What gripped us was the lack of a reliable oil supply.

Would the lights keep going out?

Would there be enough fuel for our cars?

Come the eighties, when I was a fresh-faced geology student,

all that was about to change.

Rather than a lack of oil,

we were about to confront a world with too much of it.

This is the Statfjord platform,

which sits on one of the largest oilfields in the North Sea.

The Norwegians have drilled it since 1979,

but the huge revenues it produces is shared with the UK.

Wow! So this is North Sea oil, crude.

It's amazing to think that an hour or so ago,

that was 3,000 metres down below us

and had been sitting there very happily for, I don't know,

150 million years, and look at it now.

It's just pure liquid money.

That's amazing!

The discovery of oil from these waters was announced to the press

in 1971 at Aberdeen airport.

The announcement came from this BP representative

who was wearing a tartan shirt, a hard hat,

and holding a bottle of salad cream,

filled with what seemed to be flat Guinness.

And he said, "This is North Sea oil!"

But the thing was, it wasn't any old oil.

The field in question was the fabled Forties Field,

with a whopping 1.8 billion barrels of oil.

It's what's known in the business as an elephant field.

The North Sea oil industry was born.

Britain scrambled to extract the oil.

And within a decade, we were enjoying the benefits.

By 1985, the UK Treasury was earning a staggering

£2.5 million per hour in revenues.

Oil stimulated the economy and helped pull us out of recession.

And in the late eighties, Britain was booming...

..and still new reservoirs of oil were being discovered.

Oil companies poured billions into developing

yet more offshore facilities.

Jim Cook, installation manager of Shell's Shearwater platform,

was there during that North Sea bonanza.

There was a huge sense of adventure, a huge sense of unknown.

When you got on that helicopter, you didn't really know

-what you were going into, and then you arrived.

-Yeah.

And the technology changes

that was going on was extraordinary, wasn't it?

It's huge. When you think back in the early days

when we built some of the really big platforms,

they were built on site.

You know it was not unusual

to have 2,000 guys living over three complex installations

building everything out here.

It was almost a mini Industrial Revolution.

Was there any inkling in your minds and those around you at the time

that it was going to grow this big?

No. It was only supposed to last a few years.

It was the golden years, it was a boom.

But it was more than a boom. For a short time,

the North Sea produced as much oil as Saudi Arabia.

Around the same time, other huge discoveries were made in Alaska...

..and the Gulf of Mexico.

All this new oil meant the world was swimming in it.

But as the world markets were hit by the deluge, prices plummeted.

The world was flooded with oil.

The financial press complained of an oil glut.

In fact, there was so much oil that, at one point,

the price of oil was cheaper than bottled water.

You would think that cheap oil would be good news for all.

While oil helped the UK claw its way out of an economic recession,

for other nations, it would prove to be a disaster.

The Soviet Union was rich in oil,

and the Russians had been selling it to the West for nearly a century.

When prices were high, the hard-dollar earnings from oil

had helped pay for the Soviet nuclear arms programme

and essentials like food and clothing imports.

But when the price of oil dropped in the 1980s,

the whole Soviet economy was threatened.

This mural's a tribute to all those workers

that toiled away in the Soviet oilfields.

You get a sense there of just how much struggle every drop was.

But despite upping production, by 1991,

the Soviet Empire itself was bleeding to death.

And what was helping to kill it was the price of oil.

As the Soviet economy collapsed, rationing was introduced.

Vera Neserova can remember living under the last days of Soviet rule.

Can I ask, at what point did rationing come in,

and were you surprised that it suddenly came in?

Was there any warning?

Was there any indication that something was going to come in?

The person in charge of the Soviet Union at the time

was President Mikhail Gorbachev.

He came to power determined to modernise both the economy

and the political system that suffocated it.

But when the oil prices collapsed, so did his plan.

The economic and political system in the Soviet Union was already broken.

But when the price of oil collapsed,

the great centrally-planned socialist economy

could no longer adequately clothe and feed her people.

Mikhail Gorbachev then took an extraordinary

and unprecedented step.

On Christmas Day, 1991,

he went on TV to declare a state of national emergency.

Six days later,

Mikhail Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The mighty Soviet Empire had just gone bust.

Cheap oil had helped to bring this mighty empire to its knees.

As the Soviet Union crumbled,

it left behind untold riches in land and natural resources...

..all of which was now up for grabs.

One of the empire's most precious resources

were the oil reserves of the Caspian Sea.

I'm in what I guess is best described as the town square,

but the nearest dry land is 50 miles in that direction.

And this place is just weird.

You've got these holiday-style apartment blocks,

you've got football pitches,

telephone exchanges, museums, cafes.

Inside there, you've got a restaurant, a sports centre.

There's a mosque, there's a hospital.

This is Neft Dashlari -

an entire town built on the Caspian Sea.

It was constructed by the Soviets towards the end of the 1940s.

Thousands of workers lived out at sea,

travelling along miles of road

to extract oil from hundreds of wells.

It grew to become one of the largest

offshore oil facilities in the world.

And when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties,

it fell into the hands of a newly-independent Azerbaijan.

With the Soviets gone, everyone asked two questions -

how much oil was left under the Caspian,

and who would get their hands on it?

It's no wonder that in the early nineties,

Western oil companies flocked like vultures to the Caspian region

to court Azerbaijan's new rulers.

This could be the new Persian Gulf - an oily El Dorado.

And the Azeris were ready to make a deal.

In September, 1994, after months of negotiation,

Azerbaijan's President Heydar Aliyev

assembled this group of diplomats and oil executives

in the capital, Baku.

13 oil companies representing eight different nation states

were gathered there to sign what was hailed as

the deal of the century.

What was at stake were billions of barrels of oil.

Caspian oil was being opened up to the world.

It probably doesn't seem like much, does it, but, actually, this is

the most significant expression of that deal of the century?

This pipeline marks a step change in Caspian oil production.

You can actually feel it throbbing.

That throb is the pulse of huge amounts of oil

that's been drawn up from thousands of metres beneath the Caspian Sea,

only to be sent underground again here, heading west.

From here on the Caspian coast,

the new pipeline travelled underground for 500 miles to Supsa,

on the Black Sea.

And from there, oil would be transported to Europe and beyond.

The vast reserves of the Caspian Sea

were being unleashed on a world

that was already flooded with oil.

But that was just the beginning,

because the oil production of the Caspian

had accelerated at a rate that no-one could have imagined.

This is the Sangachal terminal.

Run by BP, it's one of the largest oil and gas terminals in the world.

Caspian oil was so abundant that the foreign oil companies decided

that another bigger pipeline would be needed,

along with this terminal to service it.

The new pipeline would allow the oil companies to transport

more oil out of Azerbaijan than ever before.

So, what's going through here at the moment

is in excess of 700,000 barrels of oil every day of the week.

At any one point in time we've got something like

ten million barrels of crude sitting in this pipeline.

-So, how much would that be worth?

-That's somewhere...

At today's prices, that's in excess of a billion dollars.

All that oil has had an extraordinary effect

on Azerbaijan's capital, Baku.

Often dubbed the Dubai of the Caucasus,

Baku feels like a city in transition.

It's a testament to the transformative power of oil.

Traditional buildings rub shoulders with modern skyscrapers.

Brand stores pop up on streets

clogged with the proud owners of Western cars.

And as the 20th century came to a close,

a similar story was being played out across our planet.

Oil was now being produced in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico,

South America, West Africa, the North Sea,

the Caspian, and the Middle East.

Meanwhile, developing nations looked with envy

at the West's lifestyle, and were demanding the same.

The burgeoning economies of South-East Asia, India and China

were consuming more and more energy in the form of travel,

plastics, clothes, food, electronics and housing.

There might have been loads of oil,

but, globally, we were guzzling it like never before.

As global consumption escalated,

questions were being asked about the coming century.

Could supply possibly continue to match demand?

What next for Planet Oil?

As the 21st century dawned,

the world's stock markets began to wake up to

the unprecedented economic boom of the eighties and nineties.

The scale of the hydrocarbon binge was breathtaking

and some traders and speculators suspected it wasn't sustainable.

Any further increase in demand, or reduction of supply,

could only mean one thing...

..a price rise.

And that would be disastrous for us all.

We'd become so reliant on oil,

it now fuelled the modern global economy.

A hike in oil prices would impact on every aspect of our lives.

Ensuring a steady and secure supply

had become crucial to keeping prices stable.

One way the oil companies found to secure more oil

was by using ships like this.

It's called the Gryphon Alpha.

You can't see them from the air, but beneath the waves,

pipelines from nearby oil platforms snake their way across the seabed

to feed this floating oil and gas facility.

It allows companies to extract oil

without building an expensive pipeline to take the oil ashore.

It can separate oil and gas, store half a million barrels of oil,

and then pump it onto waiting tankers

that ship it to onshore refineries.

The oil that Robert's sampling here

has come off of pipelines about 100 metres below us on the seabed,

coming up here through separators that take off the water and the gas

and then leave the finished product.

This...is Brent crude.

The really important point is that

it's this stuff that sets the global price of crude.

So those commodity brokers

that trade on the exchange floors in New York and London

use Brent crude to set the worldwide oil price.

And during the first decade of the 21st century,

those prices were rising alarmingly.

In the first years of the millennium,

oil prices sat at around 25 per barrel,

thanks, in part, to a plentiful supply.

But as developing nations grew, demand for oil rose.

By 2006, the world was demanding four times as much oil per day

as it had in 2000.

This sharp rise became known as the demand shock.

Many started to voice concerns

that the rate of consumption was becoming unsustainable,

including oilman and President of the United States, George Bush.

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy,

and here we have a serious problem -

America is addicted to oil.

As demand rose, the price of oil rocketed.

By January 2008, the price broke the 100 per barrel barrier.

And it didn't stop there,

climbing to 130 in May,

140 in July,

peaking at a record-breaking 147 per barrel.

To some, this could only mean one thing -

demand had outstripped supply.

Many in the financial markets

assumed we were facing something called peak oil.

To get a sense of just how quickly the world became

gripped by the spectre of peak oil,

you just need to look at

these two front covers of the Economist Magazine.

This one's from 1999, when oil was something like 10 a barrel

and it proclaims that we're "drowning in oil".

And yet, four years later, when demand shock forced up prices,

the same magazine announced that it was all over.

It was at this point that environmentalists and journalists

recalled the predictions

of an American scientist called Marion King Hubbert.

In the mid 1950s,

Hubbert had predicted that US oil would peak in 1970.

The US will hit the peak of oil production

in about 10 or 15 years from that date.

In other words, the production of oil would reach a maximum peak,

and then inevitably decline as reserves ran dry.

The oil companies laughed this off,

but when production did peak, Hubbert was hailed as a prophet.

But he made a second and more disturbing prediction -

that in the early decades of the 21st century,

we would run out of oil all together.

When oil prices spiked in 2008,

some believed the price rise reflected a grim truth -

we had reached peak oil

and that, from now on, our oil reserves were in decline.

It was looking like Hubbert was right.

The threat of a looming energy crisis

had sparked global panic buying.

That demand shock had fuelled the belief that this was

the beginning of the end, that peak prices meant peak oil

and that, from now on, we were running out.

So, have supplies peaked?

Are we really running on empty?

Just months after the sharp price rises of 2008,

oil prices fell just as dramatically as they had rocketed.

But the drop only went so far.

While prices have fluctuated ever since,

they're still higher than the average of 25 per barrel

we enjoyed for much of the 20th century,

and that's because the days of easy oil are over.

The age of discovering vast new viable reserves

like the North Sea has passed.

We're now left with oil that's more difficult and expensive to extract.

That huge price hike in the first decade of the 21st century

had an unexpected benefit -

the profits of the oil companies skyrocketed as well.

And much of that was reinvested in ways to help geologists find

ways to maximise recovery,

or to extend the lives of the existing fields.

The companies were trying to find new ways

to extract the oil that we're so dependent on.

And they continue to do so today.

Just south of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates,

is a huge training facility.

Here, a new generation of oil workers

are trained in using new technology

that's designed to recover as much oil as possible.

The age of what we call easy oil is gone, right?

We were almost in that state maybe 30 or 40 or 50 years ago

when, in Saudi Arabia, you'd be able to drill a well

without really looking too much and you'd get good production from it.

But as oil wells age, right, they fill with water rather than oil,

right, cos you pump water from the side, to push the oil out.

So it gets very complicated.

So, Clive, this looks like something

that's kind of out of a sci-fi movie.

What is this beast?

This is a formation microimager, and it has around 200 buttons

around those pads that you've just seen closing,

and we'll open that in the well,

so it'll give us an image, an electrical map, of the borehole,

which will help geologists to describe the reservoir properly,

and be able to know where to drill the next well, perhaps.

This technology is essentially a science lab on a wire.

It can perform a barrage of tests

that allow geologists to see underground.

So, Clive, is this the well?

Yeah, so what we're seeing here is a graphical representation

of that electrical image I was talking about.

These are your eyes into the ground that you were referring to earlier.

This is the lab, yeah. Lab on a wire, yeah.

This technology is being used every day to help us

extend the lives of the reservoirs, to make sure we get everything

out of the reservoirs that we can do.

Is it things like this that's essentially

kind of, you know, putting paid to the idea of peak oil?

You'll always be able to get more and more through better technology.

If you look at the world oil reservoirs,

some have produced 30, 40, 70%,

some have only produced a few percent.

So there's plenty of oil left in the ground,

you just have to be cleverer in the way you extract it.

While the age of easy oil might be behind us,

new technologies are helping us find and extract

ever more difficult sources.

The prospect of peak oil, it seems, is being pushed back yet again.

But it's not just that we've got smarter at getting oil.

We've also found new ways to exploit fossil fuels.

Titusville is a small town in western Pennsylvania.

It was here, in 1859,

that the world's first commercial drilling for oil began.

Today, yet again,

this region is at the forefront of an energy revolution.

This is shale, a rock that underlies much of the Pennsylvanian region.

It's just mud turned into stone. Sounds kind of boring really,

but it's what's locked in with the mud that makes all the difference.

Heating the liquid solution

allows us to see what's trapped in the rock.

Initially, not much happens.

But after a few minutes,

the heating makes gas trapped in the rock expand,

and it bubbles to the surface.

And energy companies have been racing to extract this gas

in a process called fracking.

Water is pumped under high pressure

to crack the rock and release the gas.

These tiny bubbles might not seem like much,

but shale gas has made the US

a major hydrocarbon-producing nation once again.

Some experts even say that it might

displace Russia and the Middle East

as the world's biggest energy producer...

..Saudi America.

This success isn't just due to shale gas.

Oil sources are also being exploited in new and unconventional ways.

Heavy oil, tar sands, shale oil.

Collectively known as "unconventional oil and gas",

these resources stand in contrast

to the conventional wells we've relied on.

This has led to a period of optimism in the US.

It's business as usual.

With new technology extending the life of conventional wells,

and unconventional resources being extracted,

it seems like the Hydrocarbon Age

will extend well into the 21st century.

So, Steve, how important have the unconventional fossil fuels been?

Unconventionals, today, make up about 7% of the global oil supply

so they're important, but they're not the core of it.

93% of the oil supply is still what was there in 2005, OK?

So, the way to think about unconventionals

is they're the icing on the cake, but not the cake itself.

That cake, today, is smaller than it was in 2005,

so that conventional... If we take out oil sands and shale oils,

the conventional supply is actually smaller than it was in 2005.

So, basically, we've got the conventional,

the traditional oil supplies declining,

the unconventionals are getting bigger,

but they're dwarfed, really, by the conventionals?

Correct, they're still very small,

and we don't know how far they can run.

Is it the case that the unconventionals -

shale oil, shale gas - have kind of masked peak oil,

essentially, masked the decline?

They have masked it in terms of the press

and in terms of the industry...narrative.

The concern is not the volume of oil in the ground.

There's plenty of oil in the ground, lots and lots and lots of oil.

The question is, can we get to it,

and can we do that in an economical way?

MUSIC OVER SPEECH

Since Hubbert raised the spectre of peak oil in the 1950s,

experts like Steve have been debating if he was right,

and when we might run out of oil.

But it seems to me that there's no easy answer

to the issue of peak oil...

..because it's an issue that revolves around

how much oil we consume, how much is left in the ground,

and what price we're willing to pay.

But it's not just about the cost of heating our homes

or filling our cars. There could be much more at stake.

While energy experts argue about

whether Hubbert's peak oil prediction is right or wrong,

the whole debate is fast becoming a bit academic.

That's cos, in the last decade or so, a very different threat

to our energy supplies has come to overshadow the world.

In 1982, the BBC science series Horizon

televised a United Nations sponsored debate on The State Of The Planet.

Expert witnesses from around the world came together

to examine the progress we'd made in protecting the world's environment.

The speakers didn't pull any punches.

They painted a pretty grim picture.

Drought.

Famine.

Pollution.

Breakneck population growth.

Acid rain.

Resource wars, deforestation, species extinction

were paraded as our biggest challenges.

No society today wants to live within

the resources of its own environment.

It wants resources from everywhere else.

And in the process, nobody recognises what is

being done to the environment because it has no interest.

Back in the 1980s, we were just starting to get

a sense of what would become known as global warming,

which is why it gets barely a mention in this debate.

But what I find fascinating about this film is that,

while none of these issues have gone away,

today it's climate change that dominates the environmental agenda.

The answer as to why that is... is contained in this box.

Since the 19th century, we've been on a fossil-fuel binge

and the burning of hydrocarbons like coal, oil and gas

has released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate.

As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere,

it creates this kind of invisible filter

that traps more and more of the Earth's heat down here,

rather than let it escape off into space.

And that produces a net warming effect.

Now, devices like this can actually measure the CO2 levels -

the actual measuring device is in here -

and you can see the numbers on this screen here.

So, let's see what we get.

Levels of carbon dioxide are measured in parts per million.

In the 19th century,

the level sat below 300 parts per million.

In the 1950s, the levels were measured at 315 parts per million,

rising to 350 by the mid-eighties.

Since then, the levels of carbon dioxide have not only risen,

they've accelerated rapidly.

I know what you're thinking,

you're thinking down here at street level,

all this traffic and all these people breathing on it

then this is going to be a really strange measurement,

and, right enough, I mean, these measurements

are pretty consistently over 400 parts per million.

But the thing is, measurements like this get made, you know,

every day, right across the world, and when they get averaged,

to give you the kind of global mean, it turns out that

that number is about 398 parts per million.

The climate has changed many times in our planet's history,

but, this time, much of that change is because of our behaviour.

When we exceed 400 parts per million, we'll mark

the highest levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide in human history.

The concern is that, if levels continue to rise,

we'll raise the global temperature to catastrophic levels.

There might be lots of oil left in the ground,

but the question is, can we really afford to burn it?

Around 80% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels

and yet climate scientists are telling us

that we've got a few decades at most to reduce our dependence on them

and stave off dangerous climate change.

But can we really do that?

How easy is it to set course for a...for a low-carbon future?

Achieving a low-carbon future means changing how we produce energy.

We do have a range of options,

perhaps the most obvious being renewable energy.

All over the world, including the UK, governments are investing in

the "renewable family" - solar, wind, hydroelectric, tidal.

The idea of harnessing the power

in the natural ebbs and flow of our planet is an attractive one,

because it offers us a practically zero-carbon energy

that doesn't rely on a finite resource.

But for renewables to replace hydrocarbons,

we'd need to increase their numbers massively.

Despite years of investment,

the entire renewable family only produces the UK

with about 15% of all the electricity we consume.

For some, renewables are a viable future option,

but is seems unlikely they'll be enough on their own.

In November 2013, a group of the world's top climate scientists

wrote this open letter to international leaders.

They said time is running out.

Renewable energy supplies on their own

won't be enough to head off the extremes of climate change.

For them, in some shape or form,

nuclear had to be part of the energy mix.

Although the nuclear industry has a chequered history

of radiation leaks and accidents like Fukushima,

some climate scientists argue that the threat of global warming

poses a much bigger risk to the planet.

Here in Norway,

research is taking place that might change the image of nuclear power,

because they're trying an alternative to uranium fuel.

Such a beautiful country, isn't it?

From this hilltop you can see the port of Halden

which is a couple of hours' drive south of Oslo,

and then beyond that it's the... it's the fjords.

It just doesn't seem like the kind of place

to be testing a different kind of nuclear fuel.

And yet what you can't see is what lies directly beneath my feet...

..a nuclear reactor.

Deep inside this hollowed-out mountain,

a company called Thor Energy are conducting an experiment.

A conventional nuclear power station is a bit like a giant kettle.

Filled with uranium fuel pellets, fuel rods are placed in water.

It's these pellets generate the heat

that boils the water to create steam.

And it's the steam which turns giant turbines to generate electricity.

The uranium fuel pellets release huge amounts of energy,

but the downside is that waste plutonium is produced,

which is highly radioactive.

The clever thing that Thor Energy are proposing to do

is to use plutonium and mix this with an element called thorium,

to make a new type of fuel pellet.

So, what are the benefits of thorium?

Many benefits of thorium.

For a start, it's four times more plentiful than uranium,

and we've probably got enough thorium on the planet

to last us 10,000 years, which means it's a sustainable fuel.

But on top of that, we can take the existing legacy waste,

and we can use that as fuel.

We can turn a liability, a real liability, into a real asset

by mixing the waste that we've already got,

from the last 50 years of nuclear power,

with the thorium, and then burning that as fuel as well.

So, we're generating less waste, and we're getting rid of existing waste.

This process would not only help get rid of existing nuclear waste,

it would generate a staggering amount of energy.

Each pellet, like that,

is equivalent to about 800 litres of diesel

in terms of the energy that it can generate.

That's a shedload of diesel. And how many of them would there be?

In a full-scale reactor, generating electricity for the grid,

about two million.

I can't even do the maths! That's a lot of equivalent energy.

A lot of equivalent energy.

It's amazing to think that the future, or a future,

one of the energy futures, is something the size of that.

That's right, essentially, it's the energy for a household for a year.

Energy for a household for a year? Wow!

Better not swallow it. I'm going to give it back to you,

What if I drop it! The energy of my house has just gone down that hole!

'What Bob has handed to me seems like a magic bullet.

'But there's a problem.

'The tests at Halden are an attempt to prove

'that thorium can be used on an industrial scale.

'Initial results are positive

'but to clear thorium for use in commercial nuclear reactors

'will take even further tests and analysis.

'That will take time, and investment,

'meaning that thorium could take decades to implement.'

But, in the meantime, our energy demands keep increasing.

Globally, demand for electricity has doubled since 1980,

and it's expected to double again by 2035.

And Dubai is no exception.

In less than a century, a sleepy fishing port has been transformed

into one of the commercial capitals in the Gulf.

That change has gone hand-in-hand

with an insatiable demand for electricity.

During peak times in Dubai,

60% of all electricity is used for air conditioning.

'And, after just a few minutes in the heat,

'you can understand why.'

You don't know how good this feels, so much better.

I mean, basically everywhere inside around here

is air-conditioned down to about 20 degrees.

That's only possible because vast amounts of oil and gas

mean abundant, cheap energy.

So, this is the last place in the world

that you'd expect to learn lessons about what's called the fifth fuel -

energy efficiency.

'Despite sitting on some of the biggest oil reserves in the world,

'the United Arab Emirates is looking at new ways to use less energy.

'At first glance, the parched desert landscape just outside Abu Dhabi

'looks like the craziest place to build any city,

'let alone a sustainable one.

'But the vision here at Masdar City is to pioneer a new approach

'in the way cities are designed and use energy.'

This architecture is just beautiful, isn't it?

-It's very elegant and distinctive.

-Yeah.

So what's the ethos about this place,

and the kind of vision behind the whole thing?

The whole idea is to design

a city, engineer the city,

so that, with very little energy,

you can be comfortable

even in the middle of summer.

And every aspect of how a city is put together,

of how a city is managed, goes towards that goal.

So, why the emphasis on cities, or urban areas?

Well, that's a very good point.

If we are going to be concerned about global warming,

and I think we should be,

cities produce between 70 and 75% of CO2.

So, Masdar City, as part of the Masdar ecosystem of companies,

is particularly concerned about how cities should be designed,

built and operated, to reduce CO2.

'The buildings here are designed to reduce emissions

'by making them more energy efficient in the hot desert climate.

'And the people behind the Masdar project believe this is a principle

'that can be applied to any building, anywhere in the world.'

I'm intrigued by this dominating structure.

-This is the wind tower.

-Wind tower?

In classical Arabian design,

the idea was to catch the breeze higher up which is cooler,

and funnel it down through the structure

so that cooler air was where people were in courtyards and in houses.

And traditionally, you used to cool the air by having damp cloths,

or animal skins with water in them.

Here, we use modern technology where we can cool it

with misting, and it pushes it down.

So, if we go into the middle, it'll get cooler, is that the theory?

-Absolutely.

-Can I try it?

-Yeah.

So, it's evaporative cooling, essentially, the science of it.

That's exactly what it is.

-So...

-So...

-Oh, yeah, yeah. As soon as you get in, you feel it.

-Much better.

'Similar tricks are used to keep the temperature down.

'Narrow lanes and tall buildings ensure shade.

'Windows are designed to break up hot sunlight.

'The work extends to the transport.

'Electric, driverless cars take you from one place to another.

'It's tempting to be sceptical about Masdar City.

'Just how likely is it that we'll see things like this in London,

'Manchester or Glasgow?

'But Masdar City hopes it will inspire others

'to take energy efficiency seriously,

'and to plan homes and cities with this in mind.

'And Masdar's ambitions don't end there.

'The company is also pioneering the use of renewable energy,

'and not just here in Masdar City.'

A couple of hours south of Abu Dhabi, the Masdar Project has built

the biggest solar plant in the Middle East.

In keeping with their green credentials, this solar plant

can provide year-round power to 20,000 homes.

As a geologist, I find it ironic that these solar panels,

all quarter of a million of them, are sitting on top of

the biggest oil and gas reserve on the planet.

And that's the rub, really.

I mean, it's perverse that we're so utterly dependent on those

finite hydrocarbons deep beneath our feet

rather than the kind of limitless, renewable energy up here.

Masdar's vision is of cities that are designed for an environment

and powered by renewables.

Yet, critics would claim all these renewables are all well and good,

but can't satisfy the gluttonous demands of our modern world.

'Nuclear, renewables and energy efficiency

'could all play a role in solving our future energy problems.

'The difficulty we face is that it will take years, possibly decades,

'until these energy sources exist on such a scale

'that they can replace hydrocarbons.'

In other words, it's going to take time.

Time is something climate scientists

are warning us we don't have.

So, how can we reduce our carbon emissions

while we wait for alternative energy sources to be ready?

Over 60 miles off the Aberdeenshire coast,

out in the wilds of the North Sea,

one of the world's biggest energy producers

is working on an innovative solution.

Until 2011, Shell's Goldeneye platform used to suck natural gas

from below the seabed, gas that was used to heat our homes.

Today, Shell is developing one of the world's first

commercial-scale carbon capture and storage projects, CCS.

Iain, we are in a world that's going to need a lot more energy,

and a lot less CO2.

And CCS, Carbon Capture and Storage, is the one technology

that is going to allow us to keep using the power plants,

the heavy industry, without the CO2 emissions going up in the air.

The new project proposes something deceptively simple -

use the pipes that once extracted gas, and reverse the flow.

Carbon dioxide emissions from a power station would be captured,

and existing pipes would transport it along 60 miles of sea floor

to the Goldeneye platform.

There, the gas would travel down five wells,

and start to fill the reservoir that once provided us with natural gas.

So, is the idea that, in the UK, all the power stations would eventually

have this? Are we thinking, a couple of decades down the road?

I think it's probably going to be bigger than that.

This is a technology that's going to be needed to be deployed

across the world.

It's a technology that can be applied in any country

and across a number of industries.

So, I think the vision of local is too small,

I think we need a much bigger vision.

You say CCS is an absolutely critical part

of the low-carbon future?

It's a critical part, it's all part of the mix.

We're going to need almost twice the energy going forward by 2050

that we're using today,

and that means the mix has got to be as broad as possible,

and yet the emissions, the CO2 emissions, need to come down.

So, for the broad mix, CCS is a critical component.

'CCS seems to offer us the chance to keep burning fossil fuels.

'But there are questions over its viability.

'Some fear that the stored carbon dioxide could leak.

'Others point out that implementing this on an industrial scale

'is possibly decades away.

'CCS may be a part of our energy future,

'but only alongside other energy sources.

'And one of those will, undoubtedly, be hydrocarbons

'because we rely on them for far more than energy.'

Hydrocarbons create things we touch every single day.

They've integrated their way into so many different facets of our lives.

Modern life is utterly dependent upon them.

'As one oilman put it,

'"If oil didn't exist, we would have to invent it."'

It seems to me we've reached a critical junction in our story,

and we face a stark choice -

do we continue to feed our addiction,

suck Planet Oil dry,

or do we go hell-for-leather for alternative energy sources,

nuclear, renewables,

and go from our fossil fuel past to a low-carbon future?

In which case, how do we make that shift?

'To make the switch to alternative energy sources will require

'a serious investment and careful planning.

'But according to Professor Mike Bowman,

'no-one has a realistic plan to make this fundamental change.'

We've become, as a globe, as a population, as a race,

so kind of glib about hydrocarbons and taking it for granted,

and actually what we need to do now

is actually be very serious.

We're at a really tough time,

it's almost like a crossroads.

And, actually, we need to be making sure

that we're taking some of the profit from this oil and gas,

and seriously reinvesting it in the future.

So that's having a strategy,

in the short term, realising that hydrocarbons are here,

to shift across to the renewables

in...what kind of time period are we talking about? Decades?

I'm talking about 20, 25 years, I think.

I think we've got to have a strategy now, and I don't see the strategy,

I don't see it in the UK, and I don't see it globally.

I think we've really got to have some energy strategies that have teeth,

and that have real meaning,

and that people understand what's going to happen as a result of it.

But I think we do have an enormous responsibility for our children,

and our children's children.

There have been attempts to come up with a global strategy.

Ever since the Rio summit in 1992,

world leaders have gathered to discuss climate change

and what to do about it.

For over 20 years,

we've had declarations, agreements and treaties.

Despite this,

there's still no legally binding international agreement

to reduce carbon emissions.

For some people, the time for talking is passed.

In September 2014, 40,000 marchers took to the streets of London

to protest against the lack of action.

THEY CHANT

What's brought you out on the street, then?

To make people aware

of the issues associated with burning fossil fuels.

Clearly, that is climate change.

It's really kicking in. We've known about it for 15 years.

But the governments didn't listen to us 15 years ago.

We need a solid international agreement to reduce emissions

otherwise more people are going to die,

and it's going to cause a lot of human suffering.

Climate change is the most important problem we have at the moment.

Everyone talks about the economy and this and that,

but it's our planet, really.

There's a really strong feeling in there

that, in terms of political action, it's been a waste of time, really.

Ever since those world leaders all got together in Rio in 1992,

that nothing's really happened.

And they've got a point.

I mean, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are accelerating,

they're not falling, and last year was another record high.

What they're asking, what they're demanding seems quite simple -

it's a cut in the level of carbon emissions.

'On the same day, similar marches took place all over the world.

'More than half a million people took to the streets

'in over a dozen countries.

'The organisers claim it was the biggest climate march in history.

'The next climate summit is due to take place in Paris in 2015.

'The protesters are demanding that world leaders

'actually reach a deal this time -

'a global agreement to slash carbon dioxide emissions

'in the coming decades.

'Collectively, these demonstrations point to one thing,

'a demand for change.

'They're expressing a fear that the lack of real progress

'is taking us to the point of no return.'

'If our politicians don't recognise the urgency of the situation,

'and can't agree on an energy plan with meaning,

'then it will all be too late.

'Back in the fifties, Marion King Hubbert predicted

'that we'd run out of oil in my lifetime.

'But the likelihood is new technology will help us

'to continue sucking Planet Oil dry, in order to feed our addiction.'

You know, in the story of oil, the question that keeps on coming up is,

"Are we running out?"

But, actually, that's such a non-issue.

The real issue is, how do we avoid burning the stuff we've already got,

the stuff we know about?

In fossil fuel terms, they seem like more of a liability.

They're getting harder and more expensive to get out of the ground.

They're pushing us and our climate into more unpredictable territory.

And with the prospect of a renewable low-carbon future,

it just seems that the writing's on the wall.

You know, I may not outlive the age of Planet Oil,

but I think my kids will.

And, in that sense, it brings a much more interesting question of,

"What will that planet look like?"