Trouble in Eden

In a shock announcement, the Eden Project has revealed that it is going to start hydraulically fracturing rocks beneath its site in a bid to extract geothermal energy. They are keen to emphasise the differences between what they are going to be doing and shale gas operations but a glance suggests these are largely distinctions without a difference.

Fracking the rock to create a geothermal heat exchanger is not the same as fracking for shale gas. We will not be releasing fossil fuels for burning. Geothermal developments are much deeper and in granite so there is much less chance of surface damage or contamination to the water table. We have no plans to use proppants or associated viscous chemical fluids to keep the circulation open. France encourages geothermal development but has a moratorium on fracking for gas.

The bit about the developments being "much deeper" than shale is not true. The image on the Eden project puts the depth at something like 4 or 5 km, which is pretty much the same depth at which the Bowland shale sites will be operating. Non-use of proppants - i.e. sand - seems to me to be a diversion rather than a meaningful distinction.

I also wonder if the planners are going to be presented with a dilemma over the noise levels:

Rigs are hired from the oil industry, so drilling will take place 24 hours a day to minimise the cost. It will take around 20 weeks per well. The rig will be one specifically for use in a populated area and heavily soundproofed, producing up to 45dBA at 200m. During operation, the generator will make a constant noise: a maximum of 30dBA at a distance of 200m. But because buildings are low, the noise can be tempered by landscaping.

Readers will recall that similar noise levels were deemed entirely unacceptable for shale gas operations.

Quote of the day, waste of money edition

It is important to recall that well over $1,700,000,000,000 ($1.7 trillion) has been spent on installing wind and solar devices in recent years with the sole objective of reducing global CO2 emissions. It transpires that since 1995 low carbon energy sources (nuclear, hydro and other renewables) share of global energy consumption has not changed at all.

Euan Mearns, whose latest post on the subject is a must-read.

Ripoff tide

I was surprised to hear a couple of people speaking up in favour of wind and tidal power at the Tartan Heart Festival last weekend. I had assumed that everyone had now worked out that they were a long way from being commercially viable. Perhaps this is because of the insistence of some in the renewables sector that power from the oceans could make people lots of money. Our old friends at Bloomberg New Energy Finance were one such company, talking up prospects for the sector and explaining how the arrival of big engineering companies was changing everything.

However something else has been stirring, and that has been the interest of the engineering and industrial majors. In the last three years, Siemens, Rolls-Royce, Andritz and French naval defence company DCNS have bought minority or controlling takes in the tidal device makers Marine Current Turbines, Tidal Generation, Hammerfest Strom and OpenHydro respectively – while ABB and Alstom have done similar with wave energy specialists Aquamarine Power and AWS Ocean Energy.

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Read all about it

There are a great collection of stories in the Mail on Sunday this morning, with a story and leader on the idiocy of smart meters and a story on Antarctic Sea ice from David Rose. The latter is accompanied by a comment piece by someone called "Andrew Mountford". I think they got it right in the print edition.

Fracking off target

Updated on Jun 26, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Earlier today I came across a tweet from Frack Off, referring to a new site they had occupied at Davyhulme, just 1 km or so away from the Barton Moss site.

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Interconnecting confusion

In a new report published today, the think tank Policy Exchange examines the case for building a whole lot more interconnectors so that we can import electricity from overseas, in particular availing ourselves of hydro power from Scandinavia and geothermal from Iceland. The existence of a big pipe between the UK and Norway would also allow us to store energy generated in windfarms here in pumped hydro stations up there.

According to the authors, interconnectors are super-duper and will give us access to much cheaper power prices from these overseas markets. But the idea that we can interconnect our way out of trouble all starts to fall down when you read the chapter on barriers to building new interconnections. Given the opportunities for arbitrage, people should be building interconnectors on their own initiative - the profits available should be enormous. Unfortunately this doesn't happen. Reading between the lines the reason is that nobody in the investment community is going to place a massive bet on a UK electricity market which is built on a premise of fleecing the consumer for the forseeable future - they simply do not believe that politicians are going to be able to sustain such a policy. So in order to get investment politicians have to guarantee returns, an approach that is common in Europe.

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Today does sensible

The Today programme looked at energy security today, with particular reference to Europe's relations with Russia. But in addition to this current preoccupation there was also some clear-eyed consideration of the effect of renewables on the grid and the relationship between environmental concerns and the need to keep the lights on.

It's twenty years too late, of course, but I suppose we should be grateful.

Audio below.

Energy security Today

Friends of the Earth want Scotland covered in "high risk" boreholes

Rob Edwards of the (Glasgow) Herald is taking a pop at unconventional gas once again, this time revealing that the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has declared that there is a "high risk" of aquifer contamination from deep boreholes.

The story is based on an internal SEPA document obtained under freedom of information legislation - by whom we are not told, but one assumes that, as is normal for Rob Edwards articles, the ultimate source is Friends of the Earth.

The key words "high risk" do indeed appear in the text - indeed they are in the very first sentence, but there is actually rather less here than meets the eye, as the paper concludes that the answer is to shift holes in the ground that are more than 200 metres deep to a different regulatory regime. This hardly appears to represent what you would do when facing impending armageddon.

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Green fracking dilemma

Prominent green groups in Scotland have (inadvertently) called for fracking to take place north of the border as soon as possible.

Well, kind of.

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Speccy on AR5

The Spectator has a leader article on the Fifth Assessment Report today, and pretty much nails it:

Next week, those who made dire predictions of ruinous climate change face their own inconvenient truth.  The summary of the fifth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be published, showing that global temperatures are refusing to follow the path which was predicted for them by almost all climatic models. Since its first report in 1990, the IPCC has been predicting that global temperatures would be rising at an average of 0.2° Celsius per decade. Now, the IPCC acknowledges that there has been no statistically significant rise at all over the past 16 years.

And the outlook seems to be upbeat too:

As things have worked out, carbon emissions in the rich world have been falling anyway — not due to green taxes but to better technology, like fracking. Global warming is still a monumental challenge, but one that does not necessarily have to be met by taxing the poor off the roads and out of the sky. Sanity is returning to the environmental debate. Let us hope that, before too long, it also returns to British energy policy.

Europe's top energy policy shambles

Liberum Capital are trying to identify Europe's most disastrous energy policy moves of recent years. There are lots to choose from (but you knew that). Here's one of the suggestions:

Retail Market Review (UK) - in response to some (relatively) minor miss-selling incidents, Ofgem effectively banned door step selling by energy supply companies. Unfortunately, door step selling was by far the most effective way to get householders to switch. Since Ofgem’s intervention, churn rates for the big six energy suppliers have collapsed from mid-teen percent to mid-single digit. This has saved the supply companies many £10m’s in costs and is a key reason why supply margins have risen in the past 18 months. It also probably means that around 2m households that would have switched to more suitable tariffs are now sitting on the wrong tariff. So to stop active miss selling to a few thousand consumers, Ofgem have caused the passive miss-selling to millions.

Read the whole thing. It's just great.

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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Green no deal

The government have discovered that merely putting the official stamp on a loan scheme for energy-saving measures in homes is not actually sufficient to make people sign up.

Just two households have installed energy-saving measures under the Government’s six-month-old ‘green’ scheme, it was claimed yesterday.

Critics say the £3billion scheme will fail to meet ministers’ predictions that 10,000 homes will take up the offer by next year.

The Green Deal, launched by Chris Huhne, offers homeowners loans for works such as cavity wall insulation and energy-efficient boilers, in the hope of reducing their energy bill.

When you think about it, the official stamp seems to be making most sane people run a mile in the opposite direction.

Energy Bill second reading

The second reading of the Energy Bill takes place in the House of Lords today at 3pm. From the Parliament website we learn that:

If the bill is read a second time, Baroness Verma to move that the bill be committed to a Grand Committee.

The video should be available here.

The future of UK energy - diesel

This story comes from the BBC:

Two diesel power stations planned in Plymouth will compensate for fluctuations in supplies from green energy, say developers.

Green Frog Power got planning permission last year and Fulcrum Power has made an application for a similar power station.

The Devon-based Regen centre for green energy questioned the use of diesel generators.

Both firms said their power stations supported renewable energy.

I'm speechless. Again.

(H/T Keith)