Scotland inches towards a shale industry

A couple of news snippets from north of the border this morning suggest that Scotland is inching its way towards exploiting its shale gas assets. First up is petrochemicals giant Ineos, best known as operator of the Grangemouth refinery, which has announced that it is going to get into the shale gas industry itself, saying that it is likely to apply for exploration licences in the near future.

Ineos, which has a registered office in Hampshire but its headquarters in Switzerland, needs gas as fuel for its chemical production plants at Grangemouth and Runcorn in Cheshire, and Crotty expressed frustration at the slow place of UK shale development. He feels the industry is held back by a lack of clear communication and leadership.

I've heard the performance of the management of UK unconventionals criticised before. I certainly think they could deal with their green tormentors in a much more robust fashion. But I think it's a bit unfair to say that this is what is holding the industry back. Surely it's the regulatory and political environment that is the problem.

At the same time, the Scottish Government has released the results of an inquiry into the safety of unconventional gas extraction north of the border and has, like everyone else who has looked at such questions, concluded that it should be fine.

Which industries will Davey close first?

Sometimes it's hard to find words to express how one feels about the energy policy of the United Kingdom. Having hosed down the green crony capitalists with public money to enable them to rape the countryside by covering it in windmills, Mr Davey and his colleagues are developing a sort of Gosplan for the UK. This will enable them to work out which industries will be allowed to wither and die because they can't afford their power bills and which ones be hosed down with public money to keep them afloat. This being the era of "eyecatching initiatives", a public consultation is being held.

DECC said: “We welcome views from all interested stakeholders on the proposed eligibility criteria so that these schemes target the support where it is needed most, helping to secure and maintain critical industrial investment in the UK.”

Ed Davey: closing down the UK a little bit every day.

Coral atolls are safe

Mark Lynas famously makes much of his living advising the government of the Maldives on climate change. The chief alleged threat to these low-lying atolls is of course that they are going to be swamped by rising seas.

Unfortunately for Lynas, a news article (£) in Science magazine suggests that his position is based on a misconception about how atolls work.

In 1999, the World Bank asked [University of Auckland geomorphologist Paul Kench] to evaluate the economic costs of sea-level rise and climate change to Pacific island nations. Kench, who had been studying how atoll islands evolve over time, says he had assumed that a rising ocean would engulf the islands, which consist of sand perched on reefs. “That’s what everyone thought, and nobody questioned it,” he says. But when he scoured the literature, he could not  find a single study to support that scenario. So Kench teamed up with Peter Cowell, a geomorphologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, to model what might happen. They found that during episodes of high seas—at high tide during El Niño events, which raise sea level in the Central Pacific, for example—storm waves would wash over higher and higher sections of atoll islands. But instead of eroding land, the waves would raise island elevation by depositing sand produced from broken coral, coralline algae, mollusks, and foraminifera. Kench notes that reefs can grow 10 to 15 mill imeters a year—faster than the sea-level rise expected to occur later this century. “As long as the reef is healthy and generates an abundant supply of sand, there’s no reason a reef island can’t grow and keep up,” he argues.

This isn't new of course. Kench's work is years old and was mentioned in de Lange and Carter's report on sea-level rise for GWPF. But it's interesting to see Sciencemag allowing such heresy on its pages.

Smythe busted

I was away from my desk yesterday, and in my absence we had a hugely amusing story from the Times about Professor David Smythe, who readers may recall has been a prominent critic of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas and who was an expert witness for objectors to the the Airth coalbed methane planning inquiry.

Eyebrows have already been raised about Prof Smythe's alleged expertise, since he hadn't published anything in the field since 1998 and has been living in comfortable retirement in the South of France for many years. James Verdon had noted that he seemed unaware of recent developments in drilling technology. However, it seems that both the Geological Society and Glasgow University are seeking to distance themselves from him, the former demanding that he not describe himself as a chartered geologist and the latter saying that he should not suggest that his views are representatives of scientists actually working at the university.

The story was broken behind the Times paywall and was picked up by James Verdon and a number of MSM outlets (for example here). The quote from Glasgow University's Professor Paul Younger is particularly strong:

He has published nothing on [shale gas] in any proper scientific forum - no doubt because he knows he would never get past peer review with his pseudo-scientific scaremongering. He falsely claims to be a chartered geologist. That’s fraudulent. It’s wilful untruth. I am concerned about the damage to the reputation of the university by someone who never fails to use his university affiliation.

I wonder how this news will affect the ongoing inquiry at Airth.