ECC committee on shale gas

The House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has issued its report on shale gas, concluding that exploration should be encouraged.

...if companies can demonstrate that they can meet the required standards the Government should encourage exploratory shale gas operations to proceed in order to improve current estimates, providing that public concern over environmental impacts is recognised and taken into account.

However, they also conclude that various market-fixing mechanisms should be put in place to ensure that gas is not too successful and note that regulation should be so tight as to prevent any nasty shale gas revolution taking place here (or words to that effect).

Click to read more ...

On birds and fracking

At the end of last year, the great hope of the UK shale industry Cuadrilla Resources was in hot water after apparently allowing drilling operations to continue beyond a deadline put in place to protect wintering birds. The wish to protect the local birdlife seems to have been a contributory factor in the the company's decisions to postpone futher drilling into 2014.

I was therefore rather intrigued by a photo of the Cuadrilla site in question sent to me by a reader (click for larger):

Click to read more ...

UK takes the German path

The government has just released its provisional figures for 2012 greenhouse gas emissions, and it's not good news. Emission are up sharply, taking them back to the levels prevalent in 2009, when the Climate Change Act had just been put in place.

Click to read more ...

Diary dates

A couple of diary dates for readers in London:

On 5 April there's the Polis Journalism conference, which looks at trust in the media. The first session in particular looks to be of interest:

0915 Trust and the BBC

Chair: Steve Hewlett

Speaker TBC

Details here.

Meanwhile, on 9 April there's a debate on fracking.

In December 2012 the UK government gave the green light to start exploratory hydraulic fracturing for shale gas in the UK. Politically at least, it looks like we have moved beyond the “do we / don’t we” stage of the debate.

Fracking has become an emotive issue in the UK. Public concern about hydraulic fracturing and its effect on our energy, environment and geological processes often plays out in a highly contentious way. How much impact does the science behind the process of shale gas extraction have on the public and media debates? How much of what has been reported in the media follows experiences from the United States?

To explore the issues we are delighted to welcome from the US, leading expert and author of the first peer reviewed study into the impacts, Professor Robert B. Jackson – Nicholas Chair of Global Environmental Change, Duke University. 

Attracting an audience from across the scientific, geological, energy and media communities, Prospect  will seek to contribute to improving the quality of the debate about this topic in the UK.

Details here.

DECC's agenda

The FT's energy blogger, Nick Butler, notes some worrying behaviour.

The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change is about to publish forecasts suggesting that gas prices could rise by up to 70 per cent over the next five years. This is scaremongering nonsense, and shows just how out of touch the Department is with the realities of the international energy market. Officials appear not to have consulted the industry or the traders. In reality the odds are that prices are just as likely to fall as to rise...

When civil servants are spreading misleading information to benefit a political agenda you know that there's a problem.

Bringing politicians to Booker

Christopher Booker is in fine form this morning, describing in horrific detail the steady progress of the UK's energy system towards disaster. Perhaps mercifully, he does not move on to consider what this will mean for the economy as a whole and for individuals.

[It] is all insane in so many ways that one scarcely knows where to begin, except to point out that, even if our rulers somehow managed to subsidise firms into spending £100 billion on all those wind farms they dream of, they will still need enough new gas-fired power stations to provide back-up for all the times when the wind isn’t blowing, at the very time when the carbon tax will soon make it uneconomical for anyone to build them.

Update on Mar 24, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Interestingly, a leader in the Telegraph calls for the government to repeal the Climate Change Act. One can't help but be reminded about Winston Churchill's quote about being able to trust Americans to do the right thing once they've tried all the other options.

Nice to hear, but ten years ago would have been better.

Update on Mar 24, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The Mail is headlining on the excess deaths from the current cold weather.

Freezing Britain's unusually harsh winter could have cost thousands of pensioners their lives.

This month is on track to be the coldest March for 50 years – and as the bitter Arctic conditions caused blackouts and traffic chaos yesterday, experts warned of an 'horrendous' death toll among the elderly.

About 2,000 extra deaths were registered in just the first two weeks of March compared with the average for the same period over the past five years.

Bishop Hill, Guardian blogger?

I have been invited to comment on science policy aspects of the budget for the Guardian's Political Science blog; my thoughts can be seen here.

My big oil funders will never forgive me.

Budget moments

A few interesting moments from the budget:

• a new shale gas field allowance, presumably removing the supertax
• new planning guidance for shale
• shale is "part of the future"
• reform of universities (whatever that means)
• New CCS projects
• some industries to be exempted from the Climate Change Levy
• no fuel duty increase in September

UK's "fuel low" indicator just came on

Bloomberg has just reported that the UK's low fuel indicator just switched on:

U.K. stores of natural gas, pushed to record lows by a dearth of tanker imports, will be exhausted in about two weeks unless temperatures rise, reducing demand for the heating fuel.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows inventories at Rough, the U.K.’s largest gas-storage facility, are at the lowest level on record for the time of year. There were 6,490 gigawatt-hours of gas in storage yesterday, which will be depleted in 15 days if the average rate of withdrawal over the past two weeks continues, according to National Grid Plc (NG/) data.

See the chart here.

The benefits of shale

There is lots of huffing and puffing over the nationalities of the owners of the companies who own onshore gas rights in the UK. The Mail is one of the media outlets reporting the story:

Most of the companies licensed to drill for the fuel using the controversial technique known as fracking are not UK-owned, it can be revealed.

The biggest is IGas, which controls a sixth of the exploration rights issued so far. Last month, its largest shareholder was bought by the Chinese government.

Johnny Foreigner investing in the UK! How ghastly! Barry Gardiner MP, a prominent voice in energy and climate policy, is one of those who seems to be struggling with this idea:

It is never the case that the benefits are going to end up back in the domestic country unless there is a state monopoly. But the concern is that the ultimate beneficiaries will end up being elsewhere.

This is the perennial problem with politicians seeing the only benefit of an economic activity as the bottom line profits. These are, of course, only one rather minor benefit. The big benefits are the lower gas prices enjoyed by consumers, the wages that flow to the employees, the cheques sent suppliers of drilling equipment and to hotels and restaurants and snackbars near the wells and so on. Perhaps even the tax revenues that get sucked up by the state.

It's amazing that one has to explain this to someone charged with representing the public in Westminster.

Dave Summers on everything

BH reader Dave Summers, a Professor emeritus of mining engineering, is interviewed by CNBC on just about everything to do with energy and climate. There's caution on shale, pessimism on the economy and a healthy dose of scepticism on climate:

As long as journalists are advocates rather than reporters the true story will not emerge. The lack of journalistic challenge in the mainstream media to the deliberate deception employed in hiding the decline in temperature prediction accuracy with the tree rings which dropped just as temperatures were rising, thus invalidating the "hockey stick," was an early indication that media manipulation was going to be a critical factor in this debate.

How long must global temperatures remain relatively stable before someone brings this up as a front page story? The amount of money involved with those who espouse anthropogenic causes of climate change dwarfs the funding that has gone to those who raise questions when so many papers so this "may" happen, and that "might" occur. And those who pay the bills . . .

Shameless

Get a load of this nonsense from a week or so ago: campaigners against fuel poverty trying to prevent the one thing that might bring energy prices down - concentrating on gas.

"Renewable energy would be cheaper but they're refusing to make that transition because their profits depend on gas."...

Elizabeth Ziga, from Fuel Poverty Action, said: "While we freeze in our homes and millions of us choose between heating and eating, the Government is snugly in bed with the big six energy companies.

"Hand in hand, they're plotting to increase our dependence on dirty and expensive gas power, which will mean even higher fuel bills as well as rising food prices due to climate change.

It's a bit of an indictment of the education of these kids that they can't work out that if renewables genuinely were cheaper they would not require a subsidies, feed-in-tariffs and renewables obligations. I really isn't rocket science.

Wait a minute. It turns out that Fuel Poverty Action is a project of the Climate Justice Collective. They are campaigning against the results of their own policy demands.

OK, uneducatable then.

A change in the shale story

PriceWaterhouseCoopers have issued a report on the impact of shale gas on the economy, which seems to take a rather different view to previous pontifications on this subject. According to BBC Business, PWC reckon that shale will add a trillion dollars to world GDP, with conventional producers like Russia being big losers. In a second story, on the Scotland pages, it is revealed that the report's authors expect oil and gas prices to be significantly depressed by a surge in shale production.

I'm sure Mr Cameron will see this as an opportunity to apply further taxes.

Update on Feb 14, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Correction: the report concerns only shale oil.

Bloomberg's baloney

Last week Bloomberg New Energy Finance had one of those silly "wind cheaper than everything else" articles that appear from time to time.

Unsubsidised renewable energy is now cheaper than electricity from new-build coal- and gas-fired power stations in Australia, according to new analysis from research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

This new ranking of Australia’s energy resources is the product of BNEF’s Sydney analysis team, which comprehensively modelled the cost of generating electricity in Australia from different sources. The study shows that electricity can be supplied from a new wind farm at a cost of AUD 80/MWh (USD 83), compared to AUD 143/MWh from a new coal plant or AUD 116/MWh from a new baseload gas plant, including the cost of emissions under the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme. However even without a carbon price (the most efficient way to reduce economy-wide emissions) wind energy is 14% cheaper than new coal and 18% cheaper than new gas.

We now know from bitter experience that claims of this kind are usually feature one of a handful of magic ingredients that give the answer required:

• use of levelised costs
• heroic assumptions about gas and coal prices

Climate Spectator - a site that I believe is an upholder of the IPCC consensus - has rather taken the Bloomberg article apart showing that the second bullet is the favoured option:

In terms of wind being cheaper than combined cycle natural gas, the key assumption behind that conclusion is that new gas contract prices will rise from the $4 per GJ that most power plant are paying today, to $12 per GJ for new plant.

Bloomberg's baloney is so bad that even their allies are appalled.

Shale - more than we thought

The Times seems to have got sight of the British Geological Survey's new estimates of Britain's shale gas resource. The  previous figure of 1000 tcf, widely pooh-poohed by greens, has been upped to between 1300 and 1500 tcf. Current demand is about 3tcf per annum.

It's only fair to note that not all of this will be extractable and the Times suggests a figure of 20% might apply with current fracking technology. That would be around one hundred years' supply.

I recall Roger Harrabin's tweet back in October:

RHarrabin Belatedly, via @zacgoldsmith, the relatively meagre reality of UK shale gas deposits. http://t.co/RUUJj0rN

The flow of good news continues unabated. Read the whole thing here.