Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Peak oil does not point to tunnels
"If you can’t do it without fossil fuels, by definition, it ain’t sustainable."



Last week, Brisbane City Council’s civic cabinet considered a discussion paper, “Future Energy and Peak Oil” . By all accounts the pollies listened attentively and nodded politely. At the time, Hurricane Katrina was busily blowing oil prices out beyond $70 per barrel and bowser prices were at a potentially politically prickly, $1.29 per litre.

The Lord Mayor and the Labor Council majority are all committed to some degree to expanding the road capacity available to the private motor vehicle through the city centre. The Mayor hopes to spend $4.7bn over the next 25 years on building five tunnels beneath the CBD as part of the TransApex scheme . The Labor group would settle for rolling out just the first two tunnels: the North South Bypass Tunnel (NSBT) and the Airport Link (AL); the former due for commencement next year.

The peak oil discussion paper presented the - always conflicting - evidence of when the peak will occur (there is no ‘if’). It also looked at the outlook for global demand and how these two factors would affect the oil price. It then considered potential mitigation scenarios and how rising oil prices will impact on council’s operational costs in the short to medium term and on policy in the long term.

Alas, the Lord Mayor will never be diverted from his tunnel building cause. Apparently afterwards he labelled the authors of the report ‘zealots’.

But can the Mayor afford to be so bullish about oil prices into the future? With his entire political career staked on delivering ever more road space for oil-guzzling motor cars, I guess he has to be, whatever evidence presented. The mental gymnastics required for doublethink are prerequisite to such can-do thinking.

The peak oil report alluded to the concept of path dependency: the outcomes which today’s decisions on long term (50 years+) transport infrastructure and land use tie us into. It noted that “The strategic challenge posed by peak oil is to consider which investments may represent forgone opportunity and which, in contrast, present opportunities to capitalise on multiple opportunities and deliver associated benefits.” (p. 17)

In other words (!), we should consider the risks associated with peak oil - such as how sustainable the tunnels will be, when we are paying $3 per litre for unleaded - and look at how money might be better spent before we blithely set out on 25-year program of digging.

But Brisbane’s tunnels have a further complicating dimension to the aforementioned decision making paradigm.

If it will relieve congestion at all (and it is many people’s assertion, including my own, that it will not), the NSBT and AL will only work if all five tunnels of the TransApex scheme are eventually built. The NSBT draft Environmental Impact Statement 2005 spelled this out: leave the job half-done and you are left with bottlenecks on roads around each tunnel entrance.

(Or, as the report put it: the benefits will accrue only when the full scheme is rolled out.)

So the commencement of the NSBT and AL locks Brisbane into rolling out a specified program of infrastructure, stretching out 25 years. The issues associated with building a tunnel for cars in 25 years time are unforseen and cannot be realistically assessed, but yet we are effectively making a decision today that they must be built. All this, based on the Lord Mayor gaining 42% of the popular vote in one election in 2004; hardly a mandate for the next 25 years.

Decision making on a program of multiple implementation of infrastructure projects over the long term needs bail out points, where a strategic/political change in direction is a realistic option that costs much less than $4.7bn and forgone opportunities. The current TransApex scheme fails here. And it is not just the direct costs either. Being locked into this 25-year path to the future has boundless implications for the liveability, health and future of Brisbane.

And the Lord Mayor thought he was just a building a tunnel to fix a congestion problem…..

There is now an anti-tunnel e-petition available on the Queensland Parliament website. I would strongly encourage all Brisbane residents to read it and sign it.

Posted by Living with Matilda at 6:30 PM

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