More Kahya

I'm somewhat intrigued by Damian Kahya's article on shale gas - the one I mentioned briefly yesterday. According to a tweet from Kahya it's unclear if Poyry were discussing the effect of Lancashire shale or European shale on prices. I don't know about you, but I found the text fairly clear - they were discussing the effects of Lancashire shale. Don't get me wrong, I don't think shale exploitation will cause a price collapse as it did in the USA, but an increase in supply will presumably have some effect.

On the same subject, here are some other things that Kahya had to say about shale prices.

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No objection

In an interesting article in the Independent yesterday, it was revealed that Balcombe Parish Council didn't object to Cuadrilla's application for planning permission to drill for oil.

The two-week protest against potential fracking in Balcombe took a dramatic twist today as it emerged that the local parish council had lodged "no objection" to the planning application, without consulting the West Sussex village - a decision the council chair said she was now "gutted" about.

Alison Stevenson, a member of the parish council when the matter was dismissed without discussion in 2010 and now its chair, said no-one at the meeting had any reason to suspect an application by Cuadrilla, the fracking company chaired by former BP chief executive Lord Browne, would have any repercussions for the village.

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Environmentalist journalist

Louise Gray has adopted the role of recruiting sergeant for the Balcombe protest camp, offering up helpful advice on what aspirant participants should bring along:

At the moment there are around 40 protesters on the site, but this is expected to swell as word spreads about the camp. Groups involved include Frack Off, backed by Lush, UKUncut and the Occupy movement.

The ‘climate camp’ or ‘peace camp’ will include compost lavatories, a ‘kid’s space, communal kitchen and possibly solar and wind power. Larger tents will host workshops on direct action.

It is expected the camp will ‘occupy’ a field by the site. Campers are advised to bring a tent, a sleeping bag, warm clothes, toothbrush/paste, loo roll, sunblock, waterproofs, a torch, and “a desire to change the world”.

I think this probably kills off any suggestion that Gray is a reputable truth-seeking journalist.

Update on Aug 7, 2013 by Bishop Hill

There are some more, rather intriguing details on Louise Gray and the demonstrators here.

The full horror of shale gas extraction

The Mail was briefly leading on shale again this morning although the story has been shunted down since. The only new development is that someone has taken a photo of the Balcombe site from the air. The Mail captions the photo "concrete carbuncle", but to me it's astonishing just how small the site is and how little concrete is involved.

Obviously, once the drilling is complete, the full horror of a shale gas well will be revealed...

From here.

Postscript: I wonder who wrote the Mail article?

Public opinion on shale and energy

Yougov has published a poll of UK public opinion for the Sunday Times, which this time round includes a number of questions about shale gas exploitation and energy policy in general. These are the questions and main responses. The segmented responses can be seen in the original document here.

I'm not sure that it tells us very much, except that the public are a bit mixed up on these questions.

Shale gas is natural gas trapped under sedimentary rock, which is extracted using a method known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking". There are large reserves of shale gas in parts of England. Some people think that using shale gas could be a solution to Britain's energy needs. Other people think that fracking is a dangerous technique that risks contaminating ground water and causing minor earthquakes. From what you have seen or heard about the issue, do you think Britain should or should not start extracting shale gas?

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The politicians are nervous

In a sign that politicians in the leafy Weald are getting nervous about exploitation of the shale deposits under their constituencies, former planning minister Nick Herbert has spoken out about his concerns.

"People don’t know – people are worried about the implications and they don’t have enough information to judge how damaging it will be.”

Mr Herbert said ministers had a duty to explain what the effects would be on local communities which are inadvertently sitting on large deposits of shale gas.

He added: “It is the fear of the unknown that is exacerbating local concerns. People understand the national arguments about the need for secure and cheap energy but they just don’t know how much this is going to damage the local environment.

The headline on the article says that Herbert describes fracking as the biggest threat to the countryside, although these words do not appear in the article itself. Most of his worries seem to be more about fear of the unknown than a settled perception of a threat. If he really said that fracking is the biggest threat facing the countryside then he is of course talking nonsense, given that there are several oil wells in the region already and that almost nobody is aware of them.

That said, while the media are hyping the impact of the small band of protestors at Balcombe, Herbert and his colleagues in the House of Commons will remain nervous and will feel duty bound to give voice to their constituents' concerns. Perhaps somebody should send him Matt Ridley's report on shale gas.

Balcombe heats up

With test drilling now under way in Balcombe, the war of words is heating up. As one would expect, the Luddites at the Guardian are stirring any pot they can find, and Damian Carrington's story focuses on allegations that Cuadrilla trespassed on private land while undertaking geophysical surveys. Mountains and molehills are words that spring to mind, and one is left with the overwhelming impression that there is another side to the story too.

Meanwhile, Twitter also remains dominated by greens, with barely a squawk from anyone in favour, but at least Cuadrilla have now made themselves heard - CEO Francis Egan is interviewed in the Mail on Sunday (scroll down here) and does a pretty good job of relaying the facts.

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Cuadrilla's PR fail

As expected, the greens are trying to use physical coercion to prevent Cuadrilla going ahead with their test drilling at Balcombe. Over the weekend Sussex police reported that a number of people had been charged, most of them subsequently charged with one offence or another.

Ezra Lynch, 31, a circus employee; Samantha Duncan, 29, of Beaconsfield Villas, Brighton, and Marcin Swiercz, 35, a handyman from London, have been charged They will appear before Crawley Magistrates on 14 August along with Mark Mansbridge, 51, a voluntary charity worker, of Paddock Road, Lewes; Nancy Walker, 25, of Over Street, Brighton; Richard Millar, 29, of Upper Gloucester Road, Brighton; Frances Crack, 31, a teacher, of Taffs Well, Cardiff, and Justin Preece, of Pontypridd, Mid Glamorgan.

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Energy impact

I'm grateful to reader Mark for the image here (click for full size). It shows an area near Barenburg, Saxony in which there are both wind turbines and gas wells. Mark explains the importance:

I think it rather illustrates the point we have been making the last few years. There are 11 gas wells in the photo, but they are extremely difficult to spot due to their small size relative to the wind turbines (they can be located by the things that look like mobile phone masts).  In fact the gas is from sandstone, rather than shale rock, but I understand that they were hydrofractured in the 1970s to improve recovery (like the Wytch Farm wells in Poole Harbour).

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Quote of the day

For [Caroline Lucas] to suggest that [shale] it will be extractable only in the States is really to express the belief that God is an American.

Peter Lilley, speaking at the Westminster Hall debate on shale. The transcript is here, and is well worth a read, particularly for Lilley's contributions.

Shale "a game changer": official

Interfax Natural Gas Daily says that a report prepared for DECC in the wake of the British Geological Survey estimate of shale gas resources in the UK will find that it and similar resources around Europe prove exploitable then gas prices could fall by 28%.

Following the release of a study by the British Geological Survey that shows there could be 40 trillion cubic metres of shale gas resources in England alone, the impact of these reserves on the UK’s gas prices has been a hot topic.

If the UK and continental Europe combine to produce around 100 billion cubic metres per year of unconventional reserves between 2020 and 2030, Navigant expects “a combination of local gas and readily available LNG puts sufficient pressure on oil price-indexed gas supplies that gas prices fall towards the long-run marginal cost, getting to 50 pence per therm [p/th] by 2030”.

Under this ‘low price scenario’, Navigant believes continued cost efficiencies could even “move prices downwards to somewhere between 35 p/th and 50 p/th”. The fall would mean prices have the potential to halve from 2012’s average trade price of 69 p/th, making the UK’s shale resources an undoubted ‘game-changer’.

David Kennedy of the Committee on Climate Change has of course declared that shale is not a game changer. But given his remarks on climate sensitivity I know who I am going to believe.

Fracking with Marmite

Nick Grealy has a must-read story about a well near Bournemouth that was fracked in 1987. There were no earthquakes involved and the water supply was not contaminated either.

Which is just as well, because the fracking fluid consisted largely of water and Marmite.

It woz the Sun wot'll win it

The super soaraway Sun has come out in favour of shale gas - big time:

In years to come, yesterday’s announcement of the mind-boggling amounts of shale gas beneath our feet may be seen as a game-changer for Britain.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important it could prove for us over the next century.

Just one site has an estimated 1,300 trillion cubic feet of the stuff. That could theoretically supply us for 433 years. Even if we can only extract ten per cent it’ll last half a century.

It would be the biggest site in Europe. Alone it would make the UK a world leader in shale production.

Experts believe there will be other sites too — and far greater reserves off our coasts.

Depending on how much we can extract, shale is potentially bigger for us than North Sea oil.

After the shale rush

The story about the mind-boggling extent of the Bowland Shale rumbles on. BBC Newsnight headlined on the subject, also looking at the news that an assessment of the risk of the lights going out has concluded that things are worse than we thought. I'm not entirely convinced by the words of reassurance on the latter subject, although others beg to differ.

MPs who had read the newspapers yesterday were pressing the government to hold a debate on the subject, with Caroline Lucas of the Greens and MPs from the Bowland area leading the way. Reading between the lines of the government responses, they are not going to get it.

Outgassing

It looks as though we are going to finally get a look at the British Geological Survey's report on shale gas resources later today. The media seem to have got their hands on a press release and there are some big numbers being touted around:

UK shale gas resources may be far greater than previously thought, a report for the government says.

The British Geological Survey was asked to estimate how much gas is trapped in rocks beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire.

It said there could be 1,300 trillion cubic feet at one site alone, but it is unclear how much could be extracted.

With UK demand at slightly less than 3 tcf per annum, that looks like very good news, but of course the figure of 1300tcf (assuming the reports are correct) is not what will ultimately be extractable. There's an interesting exchange of views about these figures on Twitter, with Greenpeace's Damian Kahya (an ex-BBC journo) saying that we should be using a figure of 4% and the BBC saying 10%. Nick Grealy notes that the average in the USA is 18%, and one has to recognise that this incorporates all the older wells, in which relatively primitive fraccing approaches were used. Cuadrilla have said that 15-20% will ultimately prove to be a conservative estimate, as the technology improves, and numbers as high as 40% have been mooted by industry insiders.

I'm not sure this will even make a difference though. If there really is 1300tcf at one site alone, the amount of gas in place in the whole country must be so huge as to make the recoverable percentage somewhat irrelevant.

[Updated - the 40% figure covers good parts of the shale - the bits you decide to exploit. Some parts of the shale will be so unsuitable for exploitation they will not be touched at all.]

Update on Jun 27, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The BGS report is here. Interestingly, it covers the Bowland Hodder region only, rather than the UK as a whole. So the 1300tcf figure is only part of what's out there.