Mothballed plant

Robert Wilson (no relation to the paleoclimatologist of the same name I assume) has examined the amount of mothballed capacity in the UK energy market, and concludes that there is 4GW or so, enough to raise the safety margin from 5% of demand to 10%.

There is a potential problem, however, in that, operators don't actually want to unmothball their gas-fired plant at the moment. With renewables so grossly inefficient, the playing field has been tipped so far against the fossil fuel operators that nobody is going to risk a sou in the UK market. The hope seems to be that gas operators will be made eligible for a bung too and will be encouraged to play ball again. The government and their environmentalist advisers in DECC are presumably only too aware that this is going to mean that they will be handing out subsidies to both renewables firms and to fossil fuel generators. Selling this to the public as part of a sane energy policy is going to be a struggle, I think.

And whether it will be enough to actually get anyone to play along remains to be seen. Investors in new capacity have already largely been scared off, refusing to believe that the government will be able to get taxpayers to agree to vast subsidies and guaranteed profits gifted to politically connected energy businesses, while at the same time getting them to swallow sustained long-term rises in energy prices. Will operators of mothballed plant see the situation differently? It's possible - the capital costs are sunk after all - so if they are thrown some cash to reopen perhaps they will go for it. But then again, for the cost of unmothballing to be incurred, the generators are going to need some guarantee that they will get a return. That depends on the taxpayer swallowing the costs and the slap in the face of the new subsidy regime.

It's a mad, bad, crazy system. Who'd want to risk their money in it?

Yamal no more

Steve McIntyre has released a sudden flurry of blog posts on the subject of the Briffa et al 2013 paper. Today's offering contains the eye-opening news that CRU have finally backtracked from the Yamal hockey stick of "most important tree in the world" fame. The new version of the series is no longer hockey stick shaped and the modern portions resemble closely the versions of Yamal posted at Climate Audit as long ago as 2009, for which McIntyre was resoundingly condemned by mainstream climatologists.

Update on Jun 30, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Rob Wilson sends this sensitivity analysis for the D'Arrigo et al 2006 paper, so that people can see the effect of excluding Yamal. Rob writes:

Below compared are mean NH composites (z=scores w.r.t. 1750-1950). Show[n] for period with at least 2 chronologies per continent (American and Eurasia).

Red line is DWJ06 without Wrangells or Yamal - little change.

Green line is an extended version of the Wilson et al. 07 study. Completely independent data-set to DWJ06

D'Arrigo et al was discussed in the Hockey Stick Illusion, where I noted that it includes some other dubious series, including Tornetrask. So while a lack of sensitivity to Yamal is interesting, I'm not sure I'm convinced yet. It would be interesting to know which series are driving the hockey stick shape, or whether it's a function of the methodology or something.

Sans raison - Josh 228

Andrew Simms hilariously titled article is here. It is so funny I have just repeated it. He seems to be worried that we might have too much prosperity, be able to keep the lights on for longer and generally ignore mad renewable schemes like Wind turbines for many many years. This sounds like great news to me. 

Cartoons by Josh

Fracking with Marmite

Nick Grealy has a must-read story about a well near Bournemouth that was fracked in 1987. There were no earthquakes involved and the water supply was not contaminated either.

Which is just as well, because the fracking fluid consisted largely of water and Marmite.

It woz the Sun wot'll win it

The super soaraway Sun has come out in favour of shale gas - big time:

In years to come, yesterday’s announcement of the mind-boggling amounts of shale gas beneath our feet may be seen as a game-changer for Britain.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important it could prove for us over the next century.

Just one site has an estimated 1,300 trillion cubic feet of the stuff. That could theoretically supply us for 433 years. Even if we can only extract ten per cent it’ll last half a century.

It would be the biggest site in Europe. Alone it would make the UK a world leader in shale production.

Experts believe there will be other sites too — and far greater reserves off our coasts.

Depending on how much we can extract, shale is potentially bigger for us than North Sea oil.

Greenpeace's desperate smear

It's an article of faith among the green fraternity that the correct response to anyone who questions the climate change orthodoxy is the argumentum ad hominem. Or to be more precise to issue a barrage of ad hominems. Or to be even more precise issue a barrage consisting of any old logical fallacy so long as the truth and facts of the issue at hand are avoided. These accusations can be anything from "this bad person has right-wing political opinions" to "this bad person once said something that turned out to be incorrect" to "this evil spawn of Satan once spoke at an oil company-funded seminar".

There is a good example at Greenpeace's blog today, where David Rose is taken to task because, in a sidebar article making the point that in the 1970s we were all told that we were facing an imminent ice age, he used a graphic of a Time magazine cover that subsequently turned out to a spoof. The blog post's author, Graham Thompson, pretends that this is tantamount to drowning puppies, but even a cursory examination of the details suggests that handwaving and shouting and smearing are all he has got: what Rose said about the 1970s is indisputably true.

No Arctic thaw this year?

Harold Ambler notes the Danish Met Office's record of temperatures above 80°N. These have been running at well below the long-term average for a couple of months now, and are only just now reaching 0°C. In normal circumstances, temperatures have all but stopped rising by this time of year so, give or take a tenth of a degree or so, we may well get no melting at all this year.

Where's Lewis Pugh when you need him?

After the shale rush

The story about the mind-boggling extent of the Bowland Shale rumbles on. BBC Newsnight headlined on the subject, also looking at the news that an assessment of the risk of the lights going out has concluded that things are worse than we thought. I'm not entirely convinced by the words of reassurance on the latter subject, although others beg to differ.

MPs who had read the newspapers yesterday were pressing the government to hold a debate on the subject, with Caroline Lucas of the Greens and MPs from the Bowland area leading the way. Reading between the lines of the government responses, they are not going to get it.

Outgassing

It looks as though we are going to finally get a look at the British Geological Survey's report on shale gas resources later today. The media seem to have got their hands on a press release and there are some big numbers being touted around:

UK shale gas resources may be far greater than previously thought, a report for the government says.

The British Geological Survey was asked to estimate how much gas is trapped in rocks beneath Lancashire and Yorkshire.

It said there could be 1,300 trillion cubic feet at one site alone, but it is unclear how much could be extracted.

With UK demand at slightly less than 3 tcf per annum, that looks like very good news, but of course the figure of 1300tcf (assuming the reports are correct) is not what will ultimately be extractable. There's an interesting exchange of views about these figures on Twitter, with Greenpeace's Damian Kahya (an ex-BBC journo) saying that we should be using a figure of 4% and the BBC saying 10%. Nick Grealy notes that the average in the USA is 18%, and one has to recognise that this incorporates all the older wells, in which relatively primitive fraccing approaches were used. Cuadrilla have said that 15-20% will ultimately prove to be a conservative estimate, as the technology improves, and numbers as high as 40% have been mooted by industry insiders.

I'm not sure this will even make a difference though. If there really is 1300tcf at one site alone, the amount of gas in place in the whole country must be so huge as to make the recoverable percentage somewhat irrelevant.

[Updated - the 40% figure covers good parts of the shale - the bits you decide to exploit. Some parts of the shale will be so unsuitable for exploitation they will not be touched at all.]

Update on Jun 27, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The BGS report is here. Interestingly, it covers the Bowland Hodder region only, rather than the UK as a whole. So the 1300tcf figure is only part of what's out there.

Renewables industry moves to amend Energy Bill

Lord Oxburgh, chairman of Falck Renewables, has moved an amendment to the Energy Bill that would require the country to adopt a 2030 decarbonisation target.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is as good a summary of the corrupt state of the nation as you could possibly want.

[Update: It seems that Lord O is no longer a director of Falck. He remains a director of another green energy company 2OC, is an advisor to a green investment fund, and is chairman of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association.]

Flatten the Earth Society

Environmentalists' efforts to seek out a neo-medieval future for society continue apace, with public-funded civil servants at the forefront. The Tyndall Centre - a kind of Opus Dei for the green movement - have announced a conference to brainstorm just how this future could be brought into being. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's being held at The Royal Society.

The Climate Change Context

With large-scale impacts of climate change becoming discernable from the background of natural variability, so concern is rising over the global community’s failure to control emissions. The International Energy Agency (IEA) captures this pivotal moment in history, when noting that "The current state of affairs is unacceptable … energy-related CO₂ emissions are at historic highs”[i] and emission trends are “perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius, which would have devastating consequences for the planet”[ii]. In similar vein PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC)[iii], the UK Government chief scientist[iv] and a growing body of academics and researchers are allying current emission trends with 4°C to 6°C futures.

Why Radical Mitigation (i.e. emission reductions)?

Today, in 2013, we face an unavoidably radical future. We either continue with rising emissions and reap the radical repercussions of severe climate change, or we acknowledge that we have a choice and pursue radical emission reductions: No longer is there a non-radical option. Moreover, low-carbon supply technologies cannot deliver the necessary rate of emission reductions – they need to be complemented with rapid, deep and early reductions in energy consumption – the rationale for this conference.

Details here.

Obama's climate diversion

So President Obama has thrown some crumbs to his supporters in the NGOs by giving a speech on climate (coverage here, for example). I'm not sure there's much to genuinely quicken the pulse here. The general theme seems to be some more fixing of markets to favour his supporters in the renewables industry and some more regulations to tie up the fossil fuel bogeyman.

It's just that it's only coal he intends to tie up in red tape; several commentators are noting that he almost seems to be smooching up to the fracking industry. So one could almost see this as "going with the flow" rather than an attempt to change anything.

Meanwhile, there are no carbon taxes or emissions pricing mechanisms on offer and none of the more suicidal actions longed for by environmentalists and other eccentrics. It seems like something of a damp squib, given the excited trailing of the speech beforehand.

And in fact, the sudden interest in climate is odd in itself. So late in his tenure, it's hard to see him as being able to achieve anything very much. Anyone would think he was trying to divert attention from his problems on the civil liberties front.

Questions, questions

This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.

The recent Bishop Hill post “Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable” was the topic of a post at Watts Up With That, “Uh oh, the Met Office has set the cat amongst the pigeons”.  In the latter post, Lord Donoughue left a comment, saying in particular that if anyone would like to suggest further Parliamentary Questions for him to table, he would welcome such.  Afterwards, Martin A set up a Bishop Hill Discussion entitled “Questions to suggest to Lord Donoughue”.

There have been many really good suggestions, for which Lord Donoughue is highly grateful.  Thus far, eight of the suggested Parliamentary Questions have been tabled.  The eight Questions are listed below.  A couple issues should be noted.  First, there were more than eight good suggestions for Questions; there are limits, though, on how many Questions can be tabled.  Second, there are strict rules on the wording of Parliamentary Questions; the wordings below were obtained after discussions between Lord Donoughue and the officials at the Lords Table.

Click to read more ...

Shale and water

There is another shale-gas-in-water story doing the rounds. Robert Jackson, a researcher from Duke University in North Carolina, says that he has found higher concentrations of alkanes in water samples near shale wells than in equivalent sites that have not been subject to hydraulic fracturing.

Interestingly the study appears to have been conducted in Pennsylvania, where in towns like the now notorious Dimock, water supplies have long been contaminated by gas naturally leaking from the ground. In fact, according to the Supplementary Information (Fig S1) several of the sampling sites came from around Dimock itself. I don't quite follow why, if you were trying to learn something about the effects of hydraulic fracturing on groundwater, you would choose to study somewhere where the water was already contaminated. Would it not make more sense to go to, say, the Bakken or Utica shales?

I'm not the only one thinking along these lines. The Telegraph, discussing the same story, notes that no methane contamination has been found elsewhere:

Studies in different shale formations have also shown no signs of escaped gas, suggesting that leakages could only be a problem in certain areas.

A paper worthy of closer examination I would say.

The low-down on windfarms

The Scottish Wild Land Group has published a special edition of its members magazine devoted to the desecration of the landscape by windfarms. This has been made available to everybody here.

It features articles by Pat Swords, Helen McDade from the John Muir Trust, and John Constable from the Renewable Energy Foundation, among many others.