Bishop Hill Vehicle movements and energy infrastructure
Aug 12, 2014 Energy: gas Energy: solar Energy: wind I was having an exchange of views with Michael Liebreich on Twitter yesterday. He was getting a bit excited about the number of vehicle movements associated with developing a shale gas pad, saying that the public needed to know that they would be on the receiving end of 60 HGV movements per day. We talked about the duration of these 60 movements per day and I pointed out that the AMEC report on shale had come up with a range of 14-51 movements per day, depending on whether water was tankered in or came straight from the mains.
This seems to have prompted a blog post from David McKay, the former chief scientist at DECC, who set out an analysis of vehicle movements for construction of a shale gas pad, a windfarm and a solar array. He came up with a range of 2900-20,000 movements in total for a 10-well pad, as compared to 7000 for an 8-turbine windfarm. I pointed out to him that his figures had nothing to cover access road construction, and so he redid the figures, coming up with a revised estimate of 7800. One could consider adding more to cover removal of soil for the foundations, but since this might be disposed of onsite, it is arguably valid to leave it out.
So the comparison now looks more reasonable in my opinion. What does need to be emphasised, however, is that the 2900 figure for the shale gas pad is far more plausible than the 20,000 one. Shale gas developments in the UK are going to be close to water mains, almost without exception. It is therefore highly implausible that shale pads are going to need anything like 20,000 HGV movements. Cuadrilla say this:
A high proportion of the vehicle movements associated with onshore natural gas extraction are associated with the transport of water to and from wells. As most of our wells will be supplied by water from the mains, this cuts the number of vehicle movements required. If we started commercial production, much of our water would be recycled, further reducing the numbers of vehicles on the roads.
I conclude that overall windfarms will require a minimum of 2-3 times as many vehicle movements as a typical shale pad.
Reader Comments (41)
Why do wind farms need water?
Best. Reply. Ever.
To put out all those turbine fires cambuslad.
Mailman
Has the calculation been done on an energy recovered basis?
After all those vehicle movements to/from a windmill construction site you end up with a white elephant. A pointless exercise if ever there was one.
Crap comparisons.
The only true comparison is vehicle-movement per MWh delivered.
According to wiki an average well requires between 11,000 and 30,000 cubic metres of water over its lifetime.
A tanker holds 19,000 litres which means it would take about 600 journeys to transport 11,000 cubic metres and 1600 to transport 30,000 cubic metres.
Of course, wiki never exaggerates anything to do with climate and the environment so an alternative is this document produced by the U.S. Department of Energy.
It gives the following figures for water used per well for various shale gas fields:
Barnett Shale: 2.7 million US Gallons = 10220 cubic metres = 538 tankers
Fayetteville Shale: 3.06 million = 610 tankers
Haynesville Shale: 3.7 million = 737 tankers
Marcellus Shale: 3.88 million = 773 tankers
David McKay say he used the Institute of Directors "Getting Shale Gas Working" report for his calculations.
Here is what it says on truck movements:
The energy converter converts 31.6 bcf to 9.26 TWh.
The 2,856 to 7,890 truck movements in the report is considerably less than the 2,900 to 20,000 that David comes up with.
As pointed out above, even one HGV trip to build a wind farm is a waste because they don't produce enough energy to cover their own construction/maintenance and disposal anyway.
Well I guess (unintended pun) you can always torture the figures until they tell you what you want to know as they say.
I thought this piece from The Scotsman last year seemed reasonable, but perhaps that was because it told me what I already suspected and reinforced my own prejudices -
http://www.scotsman.com/news/fracking-is-more-efficient-than-wind-farms-1-3217779
Round here we see a lot of HGV movements this time of year because of the harvest. So what? Exactly, so what. This sort of comparison is scraping the bottom of the barrel of objections. It is fine to debunk the claims, but the real debate is about how we want to get our energy, not how many imaginary exaggerated truckloads of stuff it takes.
That looks like an astonishing number of vehicle trips for the wind-farm. Trucks hauling excavation equipment, steel, concrete, erection equipment and the components? What else?
And of course for the shale-gas project there would be the vehicle movements for the protesters.
Frankly, i'm skeptical that it wouldn't be far fewer for the windmills. It still seems a meaningless comparison due to the great difference in the efficacy of the two types of project.
If they need water, can't they just drill a well?
Re: rhoda
Over 350,000 milk tanker journeys are needed each year, in rural locations, just to get the milk from the farms.
Perhaps they have finally accepted that potential earth tremors due to fracking will be less noticeable than a passing truck on the road?
Steveta_uk has the right approach. It is ludicrous to assume that water processed to potable quality (mains) will be used in industrial qantities like these. You don't truck water into a power station or a refinery or a steel works..
@ steveta_uk & Vernon E
The BBC's infamous 'fracking explanation' graphic, the one that implies contamination-risk to the water table, shows the water table immediately above the fracking zone. Hey presto - the on-site source for the water!!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14432401
It also has to be remembered that a lot of the vehicle movements associated with a wind farm are huge vehicles to transport massive components (towers, nacelles and blades), not to mention a massive crane. The disruption caused by these very slow moving and accompanied vehicles, often requiring removal of street furniture, over very long distances, is enormous.
They are obviously looking for support from NIMBYS.
My local community council objects to every proposed development (because it is run by mostly retired people who have no stake in the local economy, those who do not having the time to waste). Among their various specious objections is always a standard cut-and-paste about increased traffic levels.
Their objections are used or ignored by the council planning department depending on whether council policy is to approve or refuse the development.
Ferguson: You forgot all the vehicle trips needed to haul off the dead birds.
cambuslad wrote: Why do wind farms need water?
Is it water they need or concrete?
We're about to start an extension. One prospective builder showed me a photo of their joiners working on the shuttering for a new wind turbine base.
You wouldn't believe how big is it and how much re-inforced steel was in the hole. They are going to need a _lot_ of concrete.
To put the fires out.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/10971762/Wind-turbine-fires-ten-times-more-common-than-thought-experts-warn.html
http://www.epaw.org/multimedia.php?lang=en&article=a19
http://turbinesonfire.org/
JimB,
The whole thing is confused. If dead birds can be an element of a symbiotic relationship, perhaps the traffic burden of hauling off the cadavers could be ameliorated by feeding them to protesters - sustainable don't you know.
But for that you need protesters.
The challenge is to convince them that the windmills constitute an assault on their chosen pursuit of a medieval life style
Typo - the comparison is with an 87-turbine wind farm (not 8) which McKay calculates will generate the same amount of energy over 25 years as the 10-well shale pad. I'd like to see more detail on this part of the comparison - because alot depends on flow-rates and decline rates and how many wells you can drill off a pad etc. Strikes me that with the Bowland shale being many times thicker than any US shales, the yield from one pad may be substantially higher than the typical US pads McKay uses in his calcs.
Terry
"It could produce 31.6 bcf of gas"
What's the wind equivalent, I wonder..?
Re: Chilli
You can fit 10 wells and 40 laterals on one pad (about 2 hectares or 0.02km2) which could produce 126.2bcf or 37TWh.
See http://www.iod.com/~/media/Documents/PDFs/Influencing/Infrastructure/IoD_Getting_shale_gas_working_MAIN_REPORT.pdf
Re: jamesp
According to David McKay the wind equivalent is 87 turbines with 174 MW capacity occupying 1450 ha
TerryS:
30,000 litre tankers are available for water transport:
http://www.water-direct.co.uk/water-tankers
Knock a third off the number of journey required.
"JimB,
The whole thing is confused. If dead birds can be an element of a symbiotic relationship, perhaps the traffic burden of hauling off the cadavers could be ameliorated by feeding them to protesters - sustainable don't you know."
But the protesters are vegans. Have you ever tried disguising diced birds as beans?
Terry
I was wondering whether McKay was assuming continuous running at nameplate capacity. I wouldn't put it past him.
Because?
“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001 "
Re: jamesp
He assumes 33% of nameplate capacity.
"33% of nameplate capacity"
Fair enough, although that's pretty optimistic, even ignoring breakdowns, fires, etc. Then there's the rather specious comparison between an intermittent source that requires backup and a continuous one that doesn't...
If the wells are as deep as we have been told the drill head will be going through water which could be extracted, stored on site to be used to frack. This water could be of brine like quality so useless for drinking.
TerryS: thanks for the reference to the 2013 IOD report. It explains where a lot of the figures are coming from. Chapter 5, the meat of it, has numerous inconsistencies and is grossly optimistic. It says in essence that 100 ten-well pads will produce 25% of the UK demand and that these will take up 2 HA each for a total of 200 HA - "minor problem" (their words). But it also says that these will "of course be scattered" and since the laterals cover a mile radius, no two pads will be nearer than two miles apart, and will "of course" have to be interconnected. Minor problem? I don't think so. It also refers repeatedly to "twenty years" whereas the data from the US is radically different and refers to wells depleting by 70% in less than two years and a refrack returning them to only about 50% of initial flow. Altogether very dodgy in my view.
if it's briny, might not be suitable for frac fluid either.
A couple of things.
Each lateral in the US produces, on average, over 30 years, 3.2bcf - that includes the high initial yield and the expected drop off in production after a couple of years. Since Bowland shale is 10 times as thick as those in the US it is expected that each of the wells could have more than 4 laterals although the IOD only uses 4. The IOD report also uses a low estimate of 2.4 bcf and a high estimate of 4 bcf for each lateral.
The well pads do not have to be interconnected with each over, just with the UK gas grid which already has over 7500km of pipeline.
A bit of geometry would show you that they do not have to be at least 2 miles apart. Even if they did, that isn't an issue.
Question of the week: Where suitable, why not build fracking pads on wind-farm sites? Burn the gas on site, in a generator, and export the power direct to the (National) Grid!
No, Terry S, you can't put raw gas into the grid - there would be fish and chip shops exploding all over the place like there were in the 60s when we converted to natural gas. The wells have to be inter-connected and gas delivered in trunkline(s) to processing facilities. Perhaps you can clarify the following for me. The IOD report talks interchangeably about wells and laterals. As far as I know there is no technology that enable s a single vertical well to be horizontally diverted to become more than one. What do they mean? .
> The wells have to be inter-connected and gas delivered in trunkline(s) to processing facilities.
And the report deals with having multiple processing facilities so the wells don’t have to all interconnect and then go a single processing facility.
> As far as I know there is no technology that enable s a single vertical well to be horizontally diverted to become more than one. What do they mean?
Multi lateral wells are nothing new. The first was drilled in 1953 in Bashkortostan Russia and ultimately had 9 lateral branches. It isn't new or untried technology. The IOD report has an artists impression of two wells each with 5 lateral branches on page 133.
TerryS: Thanks for the heads up on the laterals drilling. Fascinating and extraordinary technology. T M Husain, C L Yeong et al in Penn State EME 580 (2011) have the whole thing. I still think the IOD report is a gross over-simplification but for this subject to move forward two things have to happen. First, the first well or wells have to be drilled, fracked, tested and evaluated. Secondly, if the testing proves viability, the developers must present a plan detailed at the level of an EIA or planning application and this should be made public. Only then will it be possible to understand all the implications. Thanks again.es