Bishop Hill The green blob and shale
Nov 5, 2014 Climate: Parliament Energy: gas The Lords' Economic Affairs Committee report on shale gas was published some months ago, but there was a "motion to take note" of it yesterday. The transcript is here. There is much of interest, not least the fact that nobody now seems to be taking a stand against shale - even Bryony Worthington.
So where do we stand then? Lord Hollick explains:
What, then, stands in the way of rapid development of this promising natural resource? In a word, it is bureaucracy. The regulatory regime is complex, unwieldy and slow with many government agencies sharing responsibility for approving fracking applications. The process is bedevilled by complexity; it lacks transparency, accountability and consistency. Cuadrilla, one of the companies seeking to drill for shale gas, estimated that it could take up to 16 months to navigate the process of obtaining permission to start drilling. We were told that local authorities were not adequately resourced to deal expeditiously with the approval process. Will the Government take steps to ensure that local authorities have the necessary resources?
We recommended that the Government appoint a lead regulator to address these shortcomings. To get an overall grip and provide authoritative leadership of this important opportunity, we also recommended that the Chancellor chairs a sub-committee of the Cabinet to turn the Government’s enthusiasm into action. The Department of Energy and Climate Change’s frankly flaccid, complacent response to our report provides ample evidence of why that leadership is so badly needed.
I would have thought that closing DECC completely might be the way forward.
Reader Comments (28)
This will get the great unwashed in a tizzy.
Yes, the flaccid DECC should be put on a starvation diet and allowed to die. A new Ministry of Power is needed, resourced by a handful of power engineers. We can but dream.
The self-effacing Ministry of Power eh Phillip? One has to say Orwell's Ministries were never that honest!
It's only a joke. I agree at the very least with the complete loss of the CC. Would we be talking a budget of a half or a tenth of before?
The trouble with losing the CC and keeping the E is that the same bureaucrats would be running E as were running ECC. A complete Augean Stable cleaning exercise in a day is needed.
I would like to suggest that the reason everyone in this game is facing in all directions at the same time is that what we are seeing is not a green imposition or attack on capitalism, but a fundamental shift in the way capitalism works. From an abundance model to an austerity / scarcity model.
The fracking will happen, but they had to be seen to be unwilling accomplices, attempting to save the planet by restricting use of fossil fuels.
James Heartfield
In 1997 the Club of Rome collaborated with Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute to launch a new report "Factor Four" that promised to "halve resource use" while doubling wealth. The message was that you could get rich saving the planet. A privileged few did indeed double their wealth; but for the rest it was just a case of halving resources.
Immodestly, Lovins made his own California energy scheme the main example of savings in "Factor Four". His well-paid advice to the State of California was that it was a big mistake to adopt a system that rewarded increased electricity output with increased profits. Such a system would naturally tend to boost output. Instead, rewards for cutting energy use were needed. Rather than getting paid for additional megawatts the utility companies should be rewarded for saving power use: negawatts. The impact of Lovins' model on energy generation in California was decisive. "Around 1980, Pacific Gas and Electricity Company was planning to build some 10-20 power stations", according to Lovins.
But by 1992, PG&E was planning to build no more power stations, and in 1993, it permanently dissolved its engineering and construction division. Instead as its 1992 Annual Report pronounced, it planned to get at least three quarters of its new power needs in the 1990s from more efficient use by its customers.[4]
Of course the PG&E was not getting three quarters of its new power needs from anywhere: it had just reduced its output. But manufacturing energy scarcity did indeed grow somebody's cash wealth: Enron's. With these artificial caps on energy production the generating companies could start to hike up the charges to utility companies, including PG&E, now unable to meet its own customers' demands. Those energy companies were owned by Enron. Chief Executive Kenneth Lay turned Enron from a company that made its money generating power into one that made its money trading finance. Whatever else it was doing, there was no denying that Enron was cutting back its own CO2 emissions and getting rich doing it. One company memo stated that the Kyoto treaty "would do more to promote Enron's business than will almost any other regulatory initiative".[5]
Amory Lovins' negawatt revolution in California was Enron's wet dream. Having shut down its own generation capacity, PG&E was at the mercy of Enron's market manipulation. Buying surplus electricity on the open market PG&E was royally fleeced, losing US$12 billion. Utility bills rose by nine times between May 2000 and May 2001. Enron took advantage of the restricted market and cut electricity to California. They even invented reasons to take power plants offline while California was blacked out. Enron officials joked that they were stealing one million dollars a day from California.[6] The PG&E that Lovins held up as a model went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the State of California.
http://curezone.com/forums/fmp.asp?i=1691985
Phillip: I agree but Hercules isn't always available. Radical but imperfect could be better than nothing.
The Goodies, in one of their books as I recall, had a Minister of Power. he was called Jarvis Pink.
Pink had to resign and call a by-election after he and some of his friends "duffed up" a rival.
Perhaps the 16 months+ route to fracking would be made so much easier if they just used the same process used to get windmills in place. How long would that take I wonder?
Phillip/Richard
Minister for Power at Minister of State level in the Department of Trade & Industry.
That ought to settle the matter.
I'd give it to Matt Ridley (if only to annoy ESmiff — only joking, Smiffy!)
Mike Jackson
I'd be happy to have Lord Ridley if I thought he could change anything.
Naomi Klein has seen the enemy and it's the Greens.
Well, I think there is a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost. Because it has steered us in directions that have yielded very poor results. I think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean Development Mechanism, the European Union’s emissions trading scheme – we now have close to a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it’s disastrous.
Not only are emissions up, but you have no end of scams to point to, which gives fodder to the right. The right took on cap-and-trade by saying it’s going to bankrupt us, it’s handouts to corporations, and, by the way, it’s not going to work. And they were right on all counts . Not in the bankrupting part, but they were right that this was a massive corporate giveaway, and they were right that it wasn’t going to bring us anywhere near what scientists were saying we needed to do lower emissions.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/naomi_klein_big_green_groups_are_crippling_the_environmental_movement_partner/
"In a word, it is bureaucracy."
Wrong in two words its actually Mineral Rights the giant big government Elephant in the room.
Until the UK grants individual Mineral Rights to land owners Shale will never take off or be popular with the public.
Otherwise its drilling rigs behind barbed wire fences with a private army of private security guards watching the activists camped outside the perimeter.
Everyone wants a cut of the profits.The Nimbys will soon forget about the Green Blob they were previously making cups of Tea for in Balcombe and soon be spitting at Greenpeace in the street when they go to cash their Cheques from the drilling companies.
National bureaucracies are the same everywhere:
"The BLM [bureau of land management in USA] receives about 5,000 new drilling permits a year, according to the report, but these approval processes take 7.5 months on average and require input from multiple agencies that may also control lands being drilled on. But under current BLM procedures, there is no limit for how long reviews can go, meaning oil and gas permits can be delayed indefinitely. [...}
" While federal agencies take 228 days on average to approve drilling permits, state governments can take 80 days or less. North Dakota only takes 25 days to approve drilling permits and Texas only takes about five days to do so."
http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/01/blm-has-backlog-of-3500-oil-and-gas-drilling-permits-awaiting-approval/
Parkinsons law again. A member of an utterly useless and anachronistic bureaucratic committee of sleepy old farts and Blairite neer-do-wells whose numbers expanded in tandem with it's increasing obsolescence and which only ever existed in the first place to enrich its members by delaying everything progressive that came it's way is now pointing out the existence of too much bureaucracy in the rest of the state.
jamspid: Just like solar farms then. They operate behind security fences with CCTV cameras. The police insist on it.
I loved the bit about how local councils were clagging the pipes because of "inadequate resources." How long are bureaucracies going to be allowed to get away with this excuse for their stuff-ups? Essentially, they are asking to be rewarded for their failures with more money.
Implicit in this are dodgy assumptions, like (i) that there is not a skerrick of waste, mismanagement or worse in these outfits; and (ii) that they should have any involvement at all.
The only way to sort these problems is to start with a clean sheet of paper and work out what an ideal approval process would look like, starting with the assumption that endless "stakeholder" (i.e. lobbyist) involvement is not integral to the process. If Texas can do it in 5 days, clearly the months or years it takes elsewhere are a function of self-interested obstruction. I don't just mean anti-fossil fuel groups either. All of the bureaucracies with a finger in the pie cling to their roles because they mean resources and influence.
Presumably the shiny new Office for Unconventional Gas and Oil* which was supposed to fulfill this sort of role has been neutered by DECC (in which it sits)?
Scanning the report I see some warm words from Verma about this sub-bureaucracy...
* - https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/office-of-unconventional-gas-and-oil-ougo
UK could build a process modeled on Pennsylvania, who built a process from scratch starting about 2008. Concentrated fully inside the Depaertment of Environmental Protection. Takes two-three months, and is very rigorous with respect to groundwater preservation and frack water/brine disposal. Has only been one significant contamination incident in seven years, from a permitted well that was improperly completed. It was plugged and abandoned, which solved the problem.
Pennsylvania is also a state with population, land use, and ground water more like the UK than, say, North Dakota.
You all just have to muster the political will to do so, rather than futz around like BLM does on US public lands give the Obama biases. Good luck.
jamspid
I can't for the life of me see why the UK should change its property laws just to keep Greenpeace et al happy.
Landowners have control over what happens on their land but not over it or under it — as witness coal mines, oil wells, railway tunnels, sand, gravel, limestone quarries.
Since we all (except those who don't care) know what the footprint of a wellhead is and approximately what the disturbance to the local community is likely to be and over what period of time, there is no reason why the developer cannot agree his contract with the landowner and the local authority grant consent within the current legal time limit subject to the necessary conditions regarding site access, lorry movements, noise and hours of operation.
In fact it would make sense if someone devised a standard set of conditions for exploration, drllling, fracking and recovery (and, if relevant, site restoration) so that with minor variations to take account of local conditions delay can be minimal.
But since there are times when it appears that the British bureaucrat is only capable of orgasm when being as deliberately and obtusely obstructive as possible I suppose that would be asking too much.
jamspid: "Until the UK grants individual Mineral Rights to land owners Shale will never take off or be popular with the public."
I seriously hope you were joking when you said this. If this was to happen, it would be the death knell for every extractive industry in this country; and as far bureaucracy, it would mean industry and planners having to deal with 100's of Mineral Rights owners not a few.
And whilst those new rights owners "might be happy cashing their cheques from the drilling companies" , they won't be so happy when they get stung with clean-up bills from the EA or local authorities, for pollution resulting from historical mining activity under their land, or if the new companies default on their obligations.
The planning system in this country has become a nightmare for developers and private people. The creeping green blob has managed to wangle all sorts of conditions for obtaining a planning permission which in th past could be complied with after permission was granted. Working in conjunction with the Environment Agency and others they have created a process which is the dream of all bureaucrats, namely to create their own justification for existing, more petty regulation and of course more bureaucrats.
The amount of construction schemes amount to Billions of pounds worth of work, these are held up for months and even years at a time.
Thus they actively work against the national interest and hopefully they will be reined in to ensure that the extraction of gas is not held up.
I've a big problem with shale. With falling commodity prices the business model for shale gas extraction fails. No company would dream investing in shale in the present scenario. It's just not cost effective.
Far worse, hold onto your hats because commodity deflation can spell only one thing and it's coming very soon.
Global slump.
Even the Royal Society thinks shale gas exploitation is ok. Look up their report on it. Very reasonable, and apparently science-based rather than political.
As a grizzled veteran of one particular flavour of planning and environmental consents in relation to hydro power I can volunteer that in the UK it can and has been done in 120 days from application to decision (yes or no) .
The bureaucratic obstruction of enhanced gas recovery is near criminal - I cannot emphasise this strongly enough . It is unfortunate that the stance taken by pretty much all the applicants is deferential and they have essentially allowed mendacious actors to pervert process.
The invention of highly arbitrary extra bureaucracy and suffocating and again pretty arbitrary process cannot escape the fact that the actual physical things to be measured are actually relatively quick. The reticence and lack of apparent activity by both The Environment Agency and the demon spawn of DECC is to my mind driven in part by a wish to do their business away from public scrutiny - where it would be seen by even a layman that they are peddling BS big time.
The present situation is just plain wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if they impose a training period for the new staff at the Office for Unconventional Gas and Oil - it's BS and stinky BS to boot!
Yes, a bonfire of regulators.
What idiot added the words climate change to the department of energy?
In the meantime, as Great Britain dicks around, there are 1350 rigs drilling horizontal wells in the United States, the country is approaching energy independence and, despite Obama's best efforts, US industry is witnessing a rebirth on the back of cheap and available energy.
No earthquakes, no buggered up aquifers, plenty of jobs.
Unbelievable.
@Peter Stroud: "What idiot added the words climate change to the department of energy?"
Prudence Broon, when he was Prime Idiot in 2008.
Paul - gas prices in the US remain rather lower (at around $4/MMBTU) than in the UK (over $8/MMBTU), and there is no let-up in drilling (in fact, they've been rather lower than they are now - below 2$/MMBTU). We've just had a report from IGas that says that a chunk of the Bowland shale has geology that is as favourable as the most profitable US shale formation. I think your pessimism is entirely misplaced.