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Entries in Energy: gas (322)

Wednesday
Apr242019

Making the poor cold, and miserable

I have an article up at Think Scotland, on the subject of induced energy poverty

WE HAVE JUST learned something of the human cost of the government’s increasingly absurd energy policies. It’s not a pretty story. Buried in depths of a rather obscure statistical report, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has given details of how much energy households use for heating and lighting compared to the amount that they actually need.

Astonishingly, 69 per cent of households consume less energy than they need, with an average underspend of 10 per cent. This may overstate the case somewhat, but it’s clear that there is a real problem for those in fuel poverty, who underspend by 20 per cent. It’s particularly acute for households with children.

Click to read more ...

Monday
May232016

Yorkshire goes unconventional

Well this was enough to lull me from my blogging stupor:

Fracking given green light in North Yorkshire

Protesters booed and jeered as councillors gave the go-ahead for the first fracking operation in the UK for five years.

The problem the greens are going to have now is that when the sky doesn't actually fall in, they are going to be left looking pretty dishonest. 

Again.

Thursday
Apr282016

Diary dates: Dundee edition

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE

Art exhibition poses questions on the issue of fracking

Photo opportunity: 5:15pm Thursday April 21st. Centrespace Gallery, Dundee Contemporary Arts.

University of Dundee’s Centrespace Gallery will be home to a new contemporary art exhibition, honing in on the contested operation of fracking.

‘When The Future Was About Fracking’ opens tomorrow and is an immersive installation by Paris-based artists’ group HeHe. It depicts a doomed landscape after extensive hydraulic fracking. They will use the space to display leaky hissing ghostly wellheads. This will also mark HeHe’s first ever exhibition in Scotland.

The exhibition has been curated by internationally renowned Rob La Frenais, in collaboration with Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone, College of Art and Design andthe University of St Andrews research fellow Mette High.

Organiser Mette High said, “I am an anthropologist who does oil field research. I wanted to bring some of the concerns from the US oil fields right here, to Dundee and to Scotland. Art is an amazing medium for getting people to reflect and I was inspired by that potential.

“I really hope lots of people will pop by the Centrespace Gallery. It is an ambitious, provocative installation that does not seek to tell people what they should think. It has been crucial for both the artists and myself that this installation lets people make up their own minds. It isn’t our job to tell people what they should think, but it is our job to create environments in which such reflection can happen.”

The exhibition runs until May 18th and is open Monday to Saturday 12-4pm.

There will also be a preview evening will be held on Thursday, 21th April from 5.30-7.30pm when curator Rob La Frenais will give a tour at 6pm.

The installation has been funded by Creative Scotland and the British Academy.

More information here.

Thursday
Mar242016

The silence of the wells

Readers will recall my amusement at the antics of the anti-fracking fraternity at the Cuadrilla shale gas inquiry in Lancashire, who had found a tame noise consultant who was willing to testify that the sounds emitted by a shale gas operation, which were expected to reach the levels of the dawn chorus at times, would be wholly unacceptable.

Given that Cuadrilla have already drilled and fracked a well at Preese Hall in Lancashire, this begged the question of how residents in that area had coped. Backing Fracking, the pro-shale group, has gently inquired of Lancashire County Council to see what complaints had been received by council noise abatement officers and they have now had a response.

Press release: for immediate release

Legal officer confirms that earlier drilling and fracking on the Fylde didn’t result in a single nuisance complaint. 

A request for information made to Fylde Borough Council has revealed that during the construction, drilling and fracking carried out previously by Cuadrilla Resources at sites in Weeton, Singleton and Westby, the local council didn’t receive a single complaint about noise nuisance from nearby residents.

When asked for clarification, and whether or not the council had received any complaints about other sources of potential nuisance such as odour, dust, traffic or light pollution, Fylde Borough Council’s legal officer replied saying that the responsible environmental health officer had received no complaints at all.

The request for information was made by campaigners at Backing Fracking, who support shale gas exploration in Lancashire and elsewhere in the UK, after hearing testimony from local opponents at the recent six-week long public inquiry in Blackpool saying that noise had been a problem before and would be again.

The inquiry was established to consider Cuadrilla’s appeals against the refusal of planning permission for two temporary shale gas sites at Preston New Road and Roseacre Wood, and heard from a number of local people expressing views both for and against fracking.

Chris Evans, from Backing Fracking, says the lack of complaints is a real eye opener.

“The fact that the council didn’t receive a single public complaint about noise or other potential sources of nuisance when Cuadrilla was operating at its earlier three sites on the Fylde, just goes to show how unobtrusive and tolerable those activities must have been at the time.

“I think what’s happening now is that some opponents are unfairly using the threat of noise and sleep disturbance to influence residents into objecting to shale gas exploration. Without any current frame of reference, those residents are understandably going to be worried about what it will be like, but all they need to do is look to past experience which tells us it wasn’t as bad as it is now being claimed.”

The group also obtained copies of the planning permissions relating to Cuadrilla’s earlier sites, and found that they each imposed a planning condition limiting night time noise to a maximum of 42 decibels. During the public inquiry, representatives for Lancashire County Council and local opponents argued that 42 dB limit was insufficient to provide protection from noise nuisance.

“Faced with this evidence of a previous precedent, you have to ask why it is that Lancashire County Council and others would now try to argue that 42 dB is too high a limit, especially in light of the fact that nearby residents were undisturbed by it. What’s different now that wasn’t a problem back then in virtually identical rural settings?

“The fact that there were no complaints to Fylde Borough Council in the past means it really does look like the opponents are deliberately scaremongering in order to stop shale gas at any cost, which would not only mean we could lose out on the potential economic benefits but would lock us into coal and higher CO2 gas imports for longer,” concludes Chris. 

Thursday
Mar102016

Barefaced

Professor Catherine Mitchell is one of the those public funded political activists who masquerades as an academic researcher. She has come to the attention of this blog from time to time over the years.

Today's Telegraph carries a letter from the good professor, responding to a Rupert Darwall article about the UK's energy crisis. Here it is:

SIR – Rupert Darwall’s polemic on our energy crunch makes three major mistakes.

First, Britain is not going to see a US-style “shale revolution”; the economics don’t stack up, and British people don’t want fracking.

Secondly, wind and solar do not impose significant “hidden” costs on consumers. The Committee on Climate Change, which advises the Government, calculates the cost at about £10 per year per household.

Thirdly, Mr Darwall assumes that climate change is not a serious issue. It is serious, so a fossil-fuels-as-usual electricity system will not do.

Renewable energy can deliver the market-based electricity system that Mr Darwall wants, but getting there entails some years of transitional support. Renewables will not need the endless subsidies associated with nuclear power and fossil fuels.

Catherine Mitchell
Professor of Energy Policy, University of Exeter
Penryn, Cornwall

Of course, the Committee on Climate Change's estimate on the cost of renewables policies are based on a comparison of renewables against a theoretical world in which fossil fuel prices start high and then get even higher. It's hard to imagine that a "Professor of Energy Policy" is unaware of this.

File under "barefaced".

 

Tuesday
Mar082016

Facebook: the greens' pet censor

Phelim McAleer - the man behind the Fracknation documentary film - has been covering an important US court case in which residents of Dimock Pennsylvania are seeking compensation from a shale gas driller, who they say has contaminated their water supply and poisoned their children.

It's hard to imagine that the case is not going to be thrown out as a complete fabrication - the judge has already expressed concern over the veracity of the claims. When you read that the plaintiffs reacted to their children coming down with neurological, gastrointestinal, and dermatological conditions by not taking their children to a doctor, the house of cards starts to collapse before your very eyes.

Expect a determined silence on the subject from the BBC.

In fact, you should probably expect a determined silence everywhere, because it seems that Facebook has started to remove posts about the case from McAleer's page at the behest of green activists.

Friday
Feb262016

High tide for the shale gas scare?

The Herald (£) is reporting that the Scottish LibDems have seen the writing on the wall and are about to reverse their policy on shale gas developments.

The party today reversed its policy on the issue, having voted in 2013 to back a temporary fracking ban. The decision was taken in light of a 2014 report on the topic, commissioned by the Scottish Government, which concluded that fracking could be carried out safely if robust regulation is in place.

You wonder what they have been thinking about for the last two years.

Given just how wedded the LibDems have been to the green yoke, this looks like a pretty significant development to me. It may have come too late for the guys at Dart, whose jobs were sacrificed to electoral expediency. It's probably also too late too allow Scotland to become the UK centre for shale gas expertise - it looks as though that will be in England. But the tide may be turning.

Thursday
Feb252016

Tabloid academics

Don't you just love it when a bunch of academics goes the full Sunday Sport? You know, putting together an article that makes up in headlines what it lacks in intellectual rigour.

There was a case in point yesterday, when the ReFine group of researchers at Newcastle University published a paper on the traffic impacts of shale gas developments. They did lots of fancy-dan computer modelling and concluded that it was all going to be awful.

As ever the devil is in the detail. One of the main contributory factors to the impact is said to be the lorries that are going to deliver water to the drilling sites. The authors note darkly that as the number of wells that can be drilled from a pad increases, the number of deliveries is only going to increase.

There is just one slight problem with this argument. In the USA, water does indeed tend to be delivered by lorry -the country is large and sparsely populated and there is often no alternative to road transport. The UK on the other hand is densely populated. Water mains are everywhere. 

When you think about it for more than a second then, it's hard to credit the idea that rapacious capitalists would anything other than choose cheap and convenient mains water over expensive road deliveries. Cuadrilla's Preese Hall frack was done with mains water and that is the plan for their two new Lancashire sites too. 

Even more remarkably, the authors of the paper knew all this:

It cannot be ruled out that water transportation to the well pad during exploration, development or after production has commenced could be via pipeline, as was the case for the UK's first fracked shale exploration well at Preese Hall, Lancashire (Mair, 2012).

But they decided that they would go ahead and do a paper based on the assumption that road transport would be used.

Go figure. 

I'm sure they could have got more press coverage if they assumed that bottled water was delivered in transit vans towed by articulated lorries. You can't rule that out either.

Tuesday
Feb232016

The unbearable dawn chorus

Much fun is being had at the Lancashire shale gas inquiry, which has been considering noise pollution. Cuadrilla have proposed that night-time noise should be limited to 42dB, which is described on this website as being akin to 

  • a library
  • birdsong.

As one might expect, this is not accepted by the council, although interestingly they seem to be playing fast and loose with the numbers. The council claims to be using WHO guidance on nighttime noise, and says that these specify a level of 30dB. However, the introduction of the WHO Night Noise Guidelines for Europe says this:

Considering the scientific evidence on the thresholds of night noise exposure indicated by Lnight,outside as defined in the Environmental Noise Directive (2002/49/EC), an Lnight,outside of 40 dB should be the target of the night noise guideline (NNG) to protect the public, including the most vulnerable groups such as children, the chronically ill and the elderly. Lnight,outside value of 55 dB is recommended as an interim target for the countries where the NNG cannot be achieved in the short term for various reasons, and where policy-makers choose to adopt a stepwise approach.

No doubt, if 30dB is the required noise level, people in rural Lancashire will be campaigning to slaughter the local songbird population.

Thursday
Feb182016

Ditching precaution in favour of innovation

A couple of days ago, I explained my surprise at the level of animosity displayed towards renewables by callers to Radio Scotland. Today I'm starting to wonder if this might be the first signs of a trend. Could we even have passed the high tide of greenery? I mean, when the politicians start coming round, it's hard not to think so.

OK it's French politicians rather than UK ones, but this does look like a big, big U-turn:

The once-ruling, right-wing party Les Republicains introduced the anti-fracking bill on the floor of the French parliament back in 2011, citing the “extremely harmful impact” of the hydraulic fracturing technique on the environment. But times and politics change and the party, which is now in opposition, has made a complete reversal on the issue. So much so that these days, it publicly and vocally embraces shale gas opportunities.

On February 14, Luc Chatel, stated that “Les Republicains must be the party that chooses the innovation principle over the precautionary principle – the party of shale gas, GMOs, biotechnologies. It’s my firm conviction." It's a strong statement from the leader of a party that could win the next presidential election in 2017.

Thursday
Feb112016

Greens: shale gas is not a tourist draw

For those with nothing better to do, the livestream of the Cuadrilla public inquiry can be seen here. For everyone else who wants to see what Friends of the Earth are getting up to, there are daily summaries at Drill or Drop, a green tinged website that tries hard to present a balanced view of the shale gas story.

Although FoE haven't tried their "sand is a carcinogen" line yet, they do seem to have come up with some fairly wild claims. Like this for example:

[FoE barrister Ms Dehon] put it to [Cuadrilla planning witness Mr Smith] that if Roseacre Wood and Preston New Road operated together they would generate waste fluid that would amount to 65% of the UK waste treatment capacity.

They have also knocked the exploration operation for only creating 22 jobs and...wait for it...not being a tourist draw.

[Robin Green, the barrister for Roseacre Awareness Group] said: “As a tourism draw, fracking is unlikely to be up there as a draw”

For those who are interested, here are the tourism data for Pennsylvania.

Tuesday
Feb092016

Shale fights back?

Do I detect a new, more aggressive approach toward the greens from the shale gas industry? An article in the Times today (£) implies that Cuadrilla were behind a complaint to the Charities Commission about the way in which Friends of the Earth (the charity) seemed to be engaged in campaigning activity:

The charity said: “Cuadrilla seem to be trying to silence their opposition. They should stop changing the subject from the real issues at stake and join us in engaging in democratic debate on fracking and climate change. Our campaign against fracking will continue.”

And this morning, Greenpeace - which also seems quite happy for its charitable arm to get involved in political campaigning and media stunts - has launched an occupation of Parliament Square, with a mockup of a shale drilling rig, complete with flaring. Which prompted a rather-more-cutting-than-usual response from the Onshore Operators' Group

You have to say that it's about time the shale gas industry stopped lying back and hoping that the greens were going to adopt a more honest approach.

It's not what they do.

Friday
Feb052016

Now what were those arguments against shale gas again?

Next week, the long-awaited public inquiry into Cuadrilla's planned shale gas developments in Lancashire kicks off. Witnesses from Cuadrilla will face off with representatives of green groups and protestors. Weeks of fun will ensue.

Readers at BH will no doubt be looking forwards to Friends of the Earth trying to convince m'learned friends that builder's sand is a dangerous carcinogen.

Thursday
Feb042016

A clean bill of health for shale?

Environmentalists like to claim that unconventional gas developments are going to cause us all to die of cancer or asthma. It's fair to say that few of these claims are quite as bonkers as Friends of the Earth saying that the sand used in fracks is a dangerous carcinogen. However, while the other claims are not quite that absurd, they are not exactly grounded in good science.

A paper published today in a journal called Science of the Total Environment describes a review of the evidence for actual health impacts from unconventional gas and conclude there is little evidence of adverse health effects that you would want to describe as "firm". Of the 1000 articles the authors reviewed, fewer than 100 were considered worthy of further attention based on the quality of evidence presented. Only 7 could be considered "highly relevant". Health impacts were mostly "inferred rather than evidenced".

So you can understand why they would conclude:

Current scientific evidence for [unconventional natural gas development] that demonstrates associations between adverse health outcomes directly with environmental health hazards resulting from UNGD activities generally lacks methodological rigour. 

But I think you could guess that anyway.

 

 

Monday
Feb012016

Cue violence

The Telegraph is reporting that the cabinet are going to take planning decisions over shale gas developments out of the hands of councils. If correct, it means that planning officers will now be left to their own devices.

I think this probably means that the greens will resort to violence of one kind or another. 

In some ways it could be David Cameron's miners strike moment: the time when he is handed the opportunity to face down an anti-democratic and thuggish minority. I'm not sure DC is any kind of an iron lady though. A jelly gentleman or something like that.