Moore's law for the oil industry

Oilprice.com has an interesting and extremely optimistic take on the future of the unconventional oil and gas industry. The pace of technological advances in hydraulic fracturing technology is, it seems, absolutely breathtaking, with people are even invoking Moore's Law:

In the case of the Eagle Ford region, one of the most prolific in North America, rigs are producing at a rate 18 times more efficiently than they were in 2008, and 65 percent more efficiently than they were in 2013.

Technology is whitewashing old school rules. In many ways, Moore's Law has finally arrived in the oil patch.

If this is right then the oil price is not going to shift upwards any time soon. Good news for consumers, but if your livelihood is based on oil production in the North Sea it may be time to think about moving on.

FoE in support for fracking shock

Updated on Mar 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

After years of campaigning against fracking, Friends of the Earth Scotland have made an extraordinary u-turn and are now vigorously campaigning in favour of the controversial* technique.

This shock news comes to us via the Scottish Government who have announced a £250,000 fund to accelerate development of geothermal energy in Scotland. The press release includes a statement from the minister involved Friends of the Earth's Richard Dixon:

Heating is our biggest source of climate emissions and geothermal energy can play a major part in replacing fossil-fuelled heating. We already know that there is potential to deploy geothermal energy on a very wide scale in Scotland This new funding is very welcome and will help good proposals get moving and attract further investment. Different techniques will have different impacts but geothermal energy is clearly worth serious investigation, and it is great that the Scottish Government is taking the lead in making this happen.

Click to read more ...

The BBC's misinformation box

According to BBC News, the head of the engineering firm Weir Group has said that the nascent shale gas industry is on the back foot because of all the disinformation that is being put out:

Spin is "beating science" in the debate over fracking in Scotland, the head of the Weir Group has claimed.

Keith Cochrane, chief executive of the engineering firm, said that he feared Scotland would be left behind in the global market place.

You can see his point, particularly as the BBC has provided a perfect example of the spin Mr Cochrane was talking about, accompanying the story with a box that is indistinguishable from the worst kind of environmentalist disinformation. Has anyone else noticed that this same set of half-truths accompanies almost every BBC news story on unconventional oil and gas?

I have pointed this out to more than one senior journalist at the BBC and while they didn't dispute that it is misleading they don't seem to feel they have any responsibility to see it corrected because they were not personally responsible for authoring it. 

Your taxes at work.

New Yorkers want to secede to ensure their homes are destroyed by earthquakes and their drinking water poisoned

“I HONESTLY thought it was a joke,” says Sandy Pinney. She means the threat that Windsor, her hometown, along with 14 other towns along New York’s border with Pennsylvania, may secede and join Pennsylvania. But it is deadly serious.

The towns are in New York’s Southern Tier. They sit on top of the Marcellus Shale, which is full of natural gas. New Yorkers, unlike their Pennsylvanian neighbours, are not allowed to tap the gas because of a state ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) announced by Andrew Cuomo, the governor, on December 17th.

It's remarkable that these people in New York State can look at their near-neighbours' homes being destroyed by earthquakes, their drinking water poisoned, their livestock killed, their domestic appliances turned into flamethrowers and they actually want to share in the carnage! And they are saying that if their political leaders prevent it then they are willing to jump ship and transfer their allegiance to Pennsylvania in order to ensure that they jolly well can have their lives ruined.

Some people eh?

Different worldviews

Russia threatened yesterday to disrupt gas supplies to Europe within days, opening a new front in the showdown over Ukraine. President Putin demanded immediate advance payments from Kiev to keep the gas taps on in the depths of winter. Cutting off gas would be likely to hit transit flows to Europe. His ultimatum came on the day that the EU announced ambitious plans for an “energy union” to end Russia’s energy stranglehold over the continent.

The Times, today (£)

Lancashire county councillors have rejected plans for fracking company Cuadrilla to carry out seismic and pressure monitoring at a county site.

Planning officers, the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency recommended approval.

But the development control committee turned down the application which had received more than 300 objections.

The BBC, today

Magic wands and the greens

I think it was Bryony Worthington who once asked a bunch of environmentalists what they would happen if a fairy could wave a magic wand and do away with the warming effects of carbon dioxide. Would they be happy for mankind to continue to burn fossil fuels?

The answer of course was "no".

Interesting then to read the news that Roman Abramovich has made a major investment in a company that claims to be able to fracture rocks without any fluids at all.

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has invested $15 million in Houston-based Propell Technologies Group, Inc. (OTC:PROP) and its new fracking technology from wholly owned subsidiary Novas Energy. Significantly, this new enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technology enables ‘clean’ hydraulic micro/nano fracturing of oil reservoirs—that is, without water, without polluting chemicals and without earthquakes.

According to Propell, the Plasma Pulse patented downhole tool creates a controlled plasma arc within a vertical well, generating a tremendous amount of heat for a fraction of a second. The subsequent high-speed hydraulic impulse wave emitted is strong enough to remove any clogged sedimentation from the perforation zone without damaging steel. The series of impulse waves/vibrations also penetrate deep into the reservoir causing nano fractures in the matrix which increase reservoir permeability for up to a year per treatment.

It sounds like the shale gas industry's very own magic wand. You can almost sense the dismay among the green fraternity.

Worst fracking paper ever?

Richard Black's Energy and Climate Change Information Unit has published what must surely rank as one of the most outrageously misleading contributions to the unconventional gas debate since Frackland.

The image explaining the unconventional drilling process is simply jaw-dropping, with readers invited to believe that aquifers are just a few feet below the surface and that shale seams are just a few feet below that.

Click to read more ...

Official report of the Scotland fracking conference

The Scotsman has published its official version of events at the shale gas conference earlier this week. It can be downloaded here. All the slides can be seen here, for a few days at least.

A puppet show?

Richard Dixon of Friends of the Earth is heavily referenced in this article from Sputnik News, poo-poohing the idea that INEOS are serious about closing Grangemouth if shale gas development in the UK doesn't go ahead.

The arguments are typically Dixonian, and I don't intend to spend any time on them, but I was interested in Sputnik itself, an organisation I'd never come across. Its Wikipedia page says it "replaces the RIA Novosti news agency and the Voice of Russia international radio broadcaster". It also quotes a Russian human rights activist as saying it is "a tool of Russian state propaganda distribution abroad".

Which is interesting when one recalls the words of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former secretary general of NATO, who said that Russia was working with environmental groups to maintain Western Europe's energy dependence.

The Scotsman conference

I spent yesterday at the Scotsman conference on unconventional oil and gas. This was very much an industry affair, with nobody on hand to put the green point of view. To my mind this was a missed opportunity, since it's rare that environmentalists appear before an audience that has the knowledge to answer back. Having said that, in the audience we did have Maria Montinaro, the Falkirk Community Councillor who has been highly visible in the campaign against Dart Energy and she was given plenty of opportunity to ask questions.

The speakers were pretty high profile, including Chris Masters, who had led the Scottish Government's expert panel on unconventional oil and gas, Gary Haywood, a high heidyin at INEOS, Ken Cronin of the Onshore Operators Group and Gordon Hughes.

Click to read more ...

The sheep in Wales

With the Scottish Government having made its absurd - if understandable - decision to put a moratorium on shale gas developments, lawmakers in Cardiff have noted the benefits to their own careers and have followed suit.

The Welsh parliament has voted against the use of shale gas fracking in Wales, just one week after Scotland passed a fracking moratorium, highlighting growing discontent with the British government's push to tap shale gas resources.

A proposal against shale gas fracking was voted through in the Welsh Assembly late on Wednesday, effectively making it impossible for shale gas developments to receive planning permits in Wales.

As ever with the public sector, you see that decisions are made for the benefit of the staff rather than those they allegedly work for. There are 100,000 unemployed people in Wales.

SNP accused of fabrication

The news that the Scottish government has kicked the shale gas question into the long grass until well after the general election has elicited a pretty forthright response from one of the experts involved in the official review of unconventional oil and gas north of the border.

SNP ministers are deliberately misleading the Scottish public by pretending their fracking ban is about health and environmental concerns instead of political posturing, an expert they asked to research the controversial practice has said.

In a damning intervention, Professor Paul Younger, Rankine Chair of Engineering at the University of Glasgow, said the Scottish Government’s justifications for unveiling an indefinite moratorium on fracking were “all made up” and “completely feigned”.

Read the whole thing.

Update on Feb 2, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Prof Younger has apparently posted the following in the comments to the Telegraph article:

Just for the record, re the following reported comment of Stewart Maxwell MSP: "... Mr Maxwell insisted the panel’s report did not provide all the evidence required but could not specify what was missing ... He claimed it did not address the public health impact but the interviewer pointed out this was tackled in the document. Pressed on his error, he then claimed that many experts disagreed with its findings ...".

The final line shows that, not abashed by having failed to read the report himself before the interview (otherwise he would have known its contents), Stewart Maxwell has now made up a story about disagreements from "many experts" disagreeing with our report's findings. Let me categorically state: no such disagreements from any scientist or engineer has been brought to the attention of the former members of the expert panel by the Scottish Government, and none have been directed to me, either publicly or privately. The "many experts" are therefore a complete fabrication on the part of Stewart Maxwell MSP. Shameful.

On choosing experts

Anthony Reuben, BBC News's statistics expert (allegedly) has an article up wondering whether shale gas extraction is economic at the current low gas prices. It's an interesting question, but rather academic because until some more exploration has been done we simply have no idea what the cost is going to be.

Nevertheless, Reuben has rounded up some views on the matter.

From Greenpeace.

And a professor of carbon capture and storage.

And a company that advises businesses on cutting their energy bills.

You have to laugh, don't you?

Green thugs on the rampage

Guido Fawkes is reporting that anti-fracking campaigners have vandalised the constituency office of Conservative MP Charlotte Leslie in Bristol.

Ecofascism indeed.

Diary dates, shale edition

The University of Nottingham is running a free online course on unconventional oil and gas starting next week.

Shale gas is seen by many as a cheap, clean and plentiful source of energy; a low-carbon ‘game changer’ helping us meet the world’s rapidly growing demands for energy and offering greater energy security. Its rapid rise has not been without controversy, however. Earth tremors, surface and groundwater contamination, and the effects of fracking on human and animal health are all high profile concerns.

During this four-week course, we’ll study the politics, economics, and science of shale gas. We’ll examine how shale gas was formed, and how we extract it through hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’. We will look at the impact of shale gas on energy markets and energy security.

We then move on to the environmental politics of shale. What are the local effects in terms of water contamination, seismic activity, and air pollution? What are the global effects? Does shale gas offer a ‘bridge’ to a low-carbon future, or would we be walking the plank?

Finally we look at the question of what the public thinks, an area where the University of Nottingham has particular expertise, having run a public opinion survey on shale gas since 2012. Why are the US and UK experiences so different? What do the public think of allowing unconventional gas to be developed?

At the end of the course you will have improved you understanding of the costs and benefits of shale gas, and you will have made your contribution to the public debate on this important topic.

And you can get a certificate! Details here.