Will removing cost make things cheaper?

The Today programme decided that it would invite two anti-capitalist greens on to discuss shale gas. I suppose we should at least be grateful that they picked two greens who had some minor disagreement, with Bryony Worthington wanting a domestic shale gas industry to develop and Friends of the Earth boss Craig Bennett adopting a zero-tolerance approach to any future development (audio posted below). Roger Harrabin's website report on the item also has a quote from Matt Ridley.

Worthington's view is that it's a waste to compress gas in Qatar, ship it thousands of miles and then decompress it again in the UK.

The important thing is to minimize the carbon emissions from gas. That means if we can get our own fracked gas, it's better to use that than importing gas that's been compressed at great energy cost somewhere else.

No doubt we should rest assured that removing this "great energy cost" from the equation will have no impact on gas prices in the UK.

Worthington Bennett fracking

Greenpeace's failed predictions

Whilst offshore wind is expected to get cheaper as the industry grows, the cost of gas is set to increase due to a combination of rising fuel and carbon prices. Our bills are likely to go up in all future energy scenarios, but the government's own advisers say the best way to limit that rise is through increased renewable energy.

Greenpeace spokesman, September 2013

The gas price has fallen – which makes subsidising nuclear (and offshore wind) much more expensive. Cheaper options for cutting emissions – like onshore wind and efficiency measures have, for various reasons, been parked.

Greenpeace spokesman, August 2015

Which is about as convincing a demonstration as you could wish for of the foolishness of listening to environmentalists.

Hat tip Ben Pile

Guardian retreats, Telegraph implodes

Adam Vaughan in the Guardian is looking at fracking and rather surprisingly seems to have shifted away from his earlier position. Who can forget his trying to compare the risks to thalidomide and asbestos. He almost seems to be edging towards a position of plausible deniability:

Ultimately, it may just be too early to say if fracking is bad – and what’s bad for one country might not be for another.

Meanwhile the Telegraph has  stepped back boldly in the opposite direction, with an article from commodities editor Andrew Critchlow that has apparently been penned from a position of almost total ignorance about the whole subject (read it and you'll see what I mean).

Click to read more ...

Fracking planning

I haven't a lot of time to write this morning, but here is a thread to discuss the government's announcement that it is going to try to expedite the planning process for shale gas developments.

Social licences

A few weeks ago I chanced across an oil company executive who was expounding earnestly on his company's "social licence to operate". I raised an eyebrow at the time because it struck me as a case of big oil adopting the language of the environmentalists.

Interestingly though, it turns out that the whole concept of a social licence was introduced by a mining company executive:

[Jim] Cooney was racking his brain for a concept to describe why projects from Peru to Angola were getting delayed and shut down by protests. The companies lacked “social license,” he told the audience.

Click to read more ...

Media balance

Talking of crazy, the new SNP newspaper The National has an article about the proposed coal gasification project mooted for the Firth of Forth.

It features quotes from two green anti-capitalist groups who are opposed to the project, a local councillor who is very much against it and an MSP who hates it with a vengeance.

And they wonder why nobody reads newspapers any more.

A new green disinformation campaign

Cluff Resources' underground coal gasification project looks at the moment as if it might have escaped Holyrood's moratorium on fracking projects, and greens have therefore launched a concerted campaign to address this regrettable loophole. The latest development is that Frack Off have obtained a letter written in January by Cluff Resources to Scottish ministers. This is breathtakingly dull stuff. The company introduces themselves, explains how much they are planning on investing and the inquire whether they were covered by the moratorium.

In other words it's a complete non-story. Nevertheless it has been hyped up by the greens, who have characterised it as "holding the country to ransom", and this ridiculous claim has inevitably been given maximum publicity by the BBC's David Miller here. He also follows the corporation's normal policy of getting comments from two separate anti-capitalist environmentalist groups (in this case WWF and FoE) to liven things up, although in fairness they do seem to have tried and failed to get a response from Cluff, whose PR team seems to exhibit the same ineptitude as Cuadrilla's.

Click to read more ...

SNP "not against" shale

The Herald (£) is reporting that Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe has had private assurances from the SNP that they are not against shale gas development, confirming the view I had formed that the Scottish moratorium was simply a way to kick the issue into the long grass until after the election.

In some ways though the SNP have painted themselves into a bit of a corner. "More evidence is needed" they said before the election. This means that some kind of a fig leaf is going to have to be formulated to allow them to argue that the aforementioned evidence has been obtained. I wonder what it will be?

Shale gas coolness

While looking for something else I came across this (promotional?) video for a new drilling rig for shale gas operations, which claims huge efficiency gains because it can partially assemble itself and also walk from one well to the next.

Which I thought was pretty cool.

Public views of shale gas

James Wilsdon points us to a fascinating paper published by some of his colleagues at SPRU. Laurence Williams et al have conducted a series of focus groups with members of the public in Lancashire to see what they make of fracking. The views exhibited are something to behold.

Participants came from one of a restricted number of groups:

• allotment holders
• ex-miners
• wildlife trust employees
• mothers of young children
• industrial history society members
• parents of university students

Click to read more ...

Does Labour hate the North?

I missed this news a couple of days back, but it's quite an interesting as a demonstration of the results of the Climate Change Act and the duplicity of the political classes:

Yorkshire’s coal mine to close

More than 400 people are expected to lose their jobs due to the closure of the Hatfield Colliery in South Yorkshire.

It is closing 14 months earlier than scheduled.

According to trade union Prospect, 420 “high-skilled” jobs and further jobs in the supply chain will be lost.

Click to read more ...

The compliant media and the scary stories

The BBC and every other environmental pressure group in the country is reporting the release under FOI of a draft Defra report on the impacts of unconventional oil and gas with considerable excitement. The main theme is encapsulated in the headline: "Fracking 'could lower house prices' says draft official report".

Here, for comparison, is an FT report from 2013 about the effects of the Bakken shale revolution in North Dakota.

City-data.com, which analyses house sales, says the average house or condominium in Williston in 2009 cost $101,906. By 2011, the average was $122,000 – still below the norm for North Dakota. “But since then prices have doubled or in some cases tripled,” says estate agent Arlene Hickel, of Bekk’s Realty in Williston.

A study of home prices in Pennsylvania also found an overall positive effect, with only homes with a private groundwater supply negatively affected (in the UK this would be pretty much nobody). And even here it is worth noting the part that fear plays in this effect. There is no real evidence that shale gas actually affects ground water - there are only environmentalists' scare stories compliantly repeated by a compliant media. When The Economist, once considered a serious publication, puts a "flaming faucet" at the top of a story about shale, you realise that something has gone badly awry.

Update on Jul 2, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Here is the unredacted report. The section on house prices bears reading. You will get a rather different impression to the one you get from the BBC.

Quiet satisfaction abounds

Lancashire county councillors have decided to reject Cuadrilla's Little Plumpton shale well planning application, throwing out the advice of their own planning officials. A second Cuadrilla application in the area fell at the first hurdle and never reached the councillors.

I assume there is scope for the government to step in and overrule, but I don't suppose that David Cameron has the parliamentary support to do anything like that, even if he had the gumption.

There will be quiet satisfaction in many places around the world tonight: at the BBC, in Saudi Arabia and in the corridors of the Kremlin.

Update on Jun 29, 2015 by Bishop Hill

This from the FT is good:

[The council] defied its legal advice to refuse Cuadrilla’s application, saying the large drilling rig would alter the rural landscape.

It almost beggars belief. Is this the councillors trying to come up with an excuse to appease their electorates - misinformed as they are by the green fraternity - but one so risible that it would be thrown out in an instant on appeal?

Picking losers

Nicola Sturgeon is apparently to demand that the UK government provide incentives for North Sea oil and gas exploration. Given that the North Sea cannot compete in the face of the glut of energy from the Middle East and the unconventionals, this would appear to seem to be more a futile gesture than an idea that might have some practical effect.

And while the sentiment of the proposal is sound enough, you have to wonder about the decision of the Holyrood administration to back yesterday's fossil fuel industry, while putting stumbling blocks in the way of tomorrow's. I'm thinking of course of the moratorium on unconventional oil and gas development north of the border.

Put alongside her all-out support for renewables, it's hard to avoid the impression that Ms Sturgeon loves a loser.

The state of independence

The Independent is nothing if not independent. Their article on shale gas today is a case in point. It seems that the government is going remove the requirement for public consultation ahead of exploration drilling. A fairly unexceptionable proposal you might have thought, but not for the Indy, which ploughs its very own furrow, steering well clear of the real world. So we have the usual litany of innuendo from the usual dismal suspects - Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and our old friend Robert Gross from Imperial - as well as the casual repetition of long-since-debunked green propaganda: earthquakes and water contamination and the like. 

You would have thought in the very week that the US EPA announced that it had been unable to identify any inherent risks from unconventional oil and gas drilling the Indy might have been a little more cautious. But no, they have always been Independent and independent they will remain.

Independent of science, independent of reason, independent of integrity.