Ben Marlow Finally Wakes Up To The Net Zero Disaster
By Paul Homewood
From the Telegraph:
The clue is in the name: a new “climate change compatibility checkpoint” that all new applications to explore for fossil fuels in the North Sea will be subjected to before approval is, or isn’t, granted. How precisely this will “open the door” to a flurry of new fields being developed, as Hands protests, is anyone’s guess.
If the government doesn’t want further development in the North Sea then it should have the courage to say so, instead of introducing yet more hurdles that will either discourage investment, or worse, simply prevent it because they are impossible to clear.
But the very notion that net-zero-obsessed ministers are about to pave the way for a new era of exploration in the region is in itself laughable. Recent evidence alone would tell you that is emphatically not the case.
Ben Marlow is livid about new climate rules for North Sea oil. But it is a pity that he and the rest of the Telegraph business staff were not banging the drum long ago, before, for instance, Net Zero was waved through. Or back when the Coalition and Labour governments were busy kowtowing to the Committee on Climate Change.
Ever since Net Zero was passed, something like this was inevitable. It is too late now to be crying about spilt milk.
For that matter, he might like to have a few words with some of his colleagues, who have colluded in the same agenda. Of course, we don’t have to mention Ambrose Evans Pritchard, whose every utterance on global warming has been anti-fossil fuels.
Nearer home though, Marlow might like to chat to Jeremy Warner. long time king pin in the Telegraph business pages. Four years ago, for example, he was writing about the demise of fossil fuels and Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement:
Yet for those interested in the economics of energy, there is a much more significant question to answer than Trump’s designs on the Paris accord: whether climate change is a hoax or not, does it any longer matter? Put more succinctly, is it actually necessary to have binding national targets for carbon emissions in order to move to a low-carbon economy?
If not, then Paris will eventually be seen as of little importance, a well-intentioned, but largely pointless talk-fest of backslapping mutual governmental congratulation barely deserving of a footnote in the history books.
We may not be there quite yet, but we are close. Green technologies are reaching a tipping point of take-up, cost and efficiency which make their eventual wholesale adoption virtually inevitable, regardless of anything that might be done to reinvigorate fossil fuel industries in the meantime.
It is the economics which will in future drive the transition to a low emissions environment, not government intervention and carbon taxes. Never mind electric cars and LED light bulbs, peering into the future, we can already see a world of virtually cost free energy, of smart phones powered by radiant light alone, and of office blocks and houses that derive all their energy from the sun, the wind, and their own waste.
In terms of cost, longevity, and efficiency, all these technologies are showing almost exponential rates of improvement. Ironically, much of the cutting-edge research and development, from Elon Musk’s Tesla to thin-film solar cells and the latest in long-life battery storage, takes place in America.
Is the new administration seriously proposing to give up the country’s world leading position in clean energy for the essentially already obsolete technology of the internal combustion engine and the coal fired power plant? Of course not.
In a report last week, BP estimated that there is today twice as much technically recoverable oil available as the world will need between now and 2050, making it highly likely that some oil reserves will never be extracted at all.
This is quite an admission, for it implies that the oil industry has only got so much time left, and should be making hay while it still can. If demand is about to peak permanently, it makes sense to pump as much of the stuff now, regardless of the resulting glut and depressed price. The idea that underpins OPEC – that a barrel of oil is worth more left in the ground than extracted – is turned on its head.
Analysis by Carbon Tracker and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London published last week makes particularly grim reading for die-hard petrol-heads; the falling costs of electric vehicle and solar technology, it suggests, will halt growth in oil and coal far sooner than fossil fuel companies are willing to admit – so quickly, in fact, that it will render many of the targets for emission reductions agreed in Paris pretty much superfluous to requirements. They’ll be superseded of their own accord.
The writers may be guilty of a certain amount of wishful thinking. When it comes to energy, all assertions need to be treated sceptically, for invariably they are instructed by vested interest. But the direction of travel is clear. Historic experience of new technologies, moreover, is that the speed of adoption nearly always greatly exceeds expectations, driving a virtuous circle of cost reduction and consequent take-up.
Two days later he wrote:
Oil companies should be slashing their investment to virtually zero and handing the cash back to shareholders – either that or using their superior credit ratings to invest in renewables.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/02/04/end-road-approaching-big-oil-investors-think/
Who needs “energy independence”, when you can have free, green energy!
The failure of the Telegraph and the rest of the press to challenge the Climate Change Act and Net Zero is one of the reasons why we are in this mess now.
Marlow and Warner should be apologising to the British public for getting it so wrong for so long.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Energy will do for Boris! But who on Earth is fit to take over from him? Aaaargh!
Steve Baker. He’s now a memeber of GWPF and becoming more sceptical by the day. I think he’s biding his time on debating climate crap – probably waiting for blackouts to set the agenda. He’s doing a good job on fighting the Chinese Flu lockdown fascists.
At least he’s crying over spilt milk. Now the challenge is not to spill any more.
Too little, far too late. We are all doomed, thanks to 20 years of politicians being taken in by the green nonsense and ignoring engineering advice. Prof David MacKay was saying that renewables were a waste of time and money when he was chief scientific adviser, but he was ignored.
Net zero pollitical policy chaos would be a better description, disasters can be mitigated.
Much appreciated, Paul. One can only hope that the power ‘crises’ becomes more acute and this article becomes one of many. It shows how trivial are the issues about Christmas parties/gatherings at No 10 and in the depts. of state last year. Contrived independent power deficiency is another open goal for the Labour Party to miss if they are not awake.
Milliband and Labour generally as culpable as the Cons.
JF
‘Green technologies are reaching a tipping point of take-up, cost and efficiency which make their eventual wholesale adoption virtually inevitable, regardless of anything that might be done to reinvigorate fossil fuel industries in the meantime.’
Gotta love it. What could reinvigorate fossil fuel industries more than green technologies reaching a tipping point of take-up?
Two simple moves to protect dwindling sources of gas for domestic users. Firstly switch a CCGTs to dual fuel (naphtha). Secondly go back to the 1960s/1970s when all domestic gas was produvced by steam/naphtha reformers. Anything else will take yonks.
There could well be sense in this in that we can at least store large amounts of oil to cope with low wind days. Overall efficiencies are better on oil (if you allow for the gas compression costs). Some of the forecasters believe that oil prices will fall as the “Renewables” take over, I’m not convinced; but the energy market has always been volatile.
However, we don’t need to synthesise gas again, just frack and store………
Unfortunately, the eco-nuts still run the Westminster asylum.
” Some of the forecasters believe that oil prices will fall as the “Renewables” take over, I’m not convinced; ”
Neither am I. Precisely how does the magic energy industry supply material feed stock to the chemical industry?
And just in case anyone wants to “Oh but” me with the chemical industry could switch to biological sources of material.
OK so let’s then raise the level of the primary material feed stock to the biosphere
In other words more atmospheric CO2 please.
Eco-nuts! I see what you did there. I thought ‘echo-nutnuts’ which was possibly a bit obvious.
JF
How easy is it to switch CCGTs to run on naphtha?
Any examples? To my layman’s brain, there’s a host of parameters that would change: temperatures; air flow; combustion characteristics; etc..
All the early gas turbines were designed to burn oil fuels (think of aero-engines), and heavy-duty units can even burn heavy fuel oil. Gas is a better fuel from the viewpoint of corrosion, but most oil fuels can be burned in any gas turbine.
Gas has to be compressed to over 20 Bar before it can be burned in gas turbines which is a serious power loss. This is where gas engines gain at the small end of power raising, as they can aspirate the gas.
In Ireland, the Trading Code insists that any gas fired power station has dual fuel capability, and sets out minimum stock holding conditions. Ireland has a sense of limited gas supply routes, andneed for the extra measures to secure electricity supply.
The UK power codes do not have the same requirement. Common practice is not to install dual fuel capable CCGT power stations. Investors then avoid the more complicated design of the hot gas path, the costs of holding fuel stocks (money tied up in stock and the additional costs of permits for fuel holdings). Dual fuel CCGTs need additional measures for NOx control, and the ability to switch to oil will be heavily constrained by limitations set out in operating permits.
Power plant operators don’t like dual fuel operation in CCGTs. A period of oil burning contaminates the hot gas path components, resulting in lower efficiency, and more maintenance (extra costs and lower availability).
Let’s face it, security of energy supply is difficult and expensive. It always involves some measure of “redundancy”/reserve and additional cost. As a general rule, engineering designs prefer specialist operation – things like dual fuel combustion (and CHP for that matter) go against the grain by asking for “generalist” operation. They never perform as well as a specialist design.
The market mechanism is not sophisticated enough to value continuity of power supply. The Irish Trading Code is a demonstration that regulation is required to address this market failure in an electricity market.
A much better approach is to maintain diversity of fuel supply by holding a mixture of coal and gas fired power stations. Each can be designed to specialise for their fuel type, and the UK would then have the benefit of diversity of primary energy supply to secure power supplies.
Instead of this sensible measure, the UK had decided to rid itself of coal fired power (at least on our own soil), and we are already paying the price. At the time of writing, the clean Spark Spread is over £200/MWh, and the clean Dark Spread is over £400/MWh. The prompt energy market is screaming for coal fired power stations that don’t exist.
To reply to some of the above, naphtha (light straight-run gasoline) is in surplus and the price is comptitive (BTU based) with courrent LNG prices. The “ease” of dual fuel is probably a function of the make/model of the Turbine. Wartsila, for example, say its very easy and immediate. Dung (and others) please stop banging on about shale gas. As I keep posting, Cuadrilla amply demonstrated that our shales are not permeable enough to deliver viable gas.
But let me go back to my old points before Cuadrilla tested their well. Decent shale (Marcellus in the US for example) has a per well delivery of around 600 MCFD. To deliver ten percent of our usage, about what Morecombe Bay produced, 275,000 MCFD, would need about 50 wells. Can you imagine all the well heads and interconnecting gathjering pipes snaking over the Lancashire countryside?
“Can you imagine all the well heads and interconnecting gathjering pipes snaking over the Lancashire countryside?”
Vernon,
I think that you will find that there plenty of underground pipes (water and gas) and overhead cables (power and telephones) strung across the Lancashire countryside already.
Shale gas is a misnomer, yes the gas comes from the shale but the fracking is focused on the tight limestones within the shale. The real focus of Bowland Shale exploration should be offshore in Quadrant 110 (Liverpool Bay) and also further west in Quadrant 109.
SOLUTIONS . . . .
Scrubbers and Electrostatic precipitators remove 95 % of the foul effluent from coal fired power Plants. $800 million to $1.2 billion for each 450 MW coal fired plant that will produce Electricity dependably and will last at least 50 years. Page 6 & 7
https://www.academia.edu/45570971/The_Environmentalist_and_The_Neanderthal
Wind turbines cost an average of $1.3 million per MW to build . . . plus infrastructure . . .
https://weatherguardwind.com/how-much-does-wind-turbine-cost-worth-it/
So – to build a 450 MW of wind turbines it will cost $1.3 X 450MW = $585,000,000
OH times 2 because wind turbines only last 20 – 25 years or almost 1.2 billion plus all the infrastructure and environmental damage building them.
OH and that is . . . When The Wind is Blowing . . .
FACT . . .
Wind Turbines are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1,688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1,300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel (14.5 % Global CO2 is from concrete and steel), 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium- Boron, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.
There may be a place for these technologies, but first we must look beyond the myth of Zero Emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing and operating them become public. Once it becomes Clear that 28 % of the Electricity is lost as HEAT between production of Electricity and having a fully charged battery . . . For that Electric Car.
I am trying to do my part with these comments. Bringing ‘The Embedded Costs’ of Going Green to light, but those who never ask . . . will never know. Then there are the ‘Greenies’ who do not want to Know ?
https://www.academia.edu/52039545/All_Electricity_Poisons_Planet_Earth
I recently saw a comment to the effect that ammonia (NH3) is a green fuel.
Maybe the government should start issuing licences to explore and drill for this unrealised natural resource that will so clearly solve the carbon crisis.
‘…..virtually cost free energy’.
Oh dear. That hasn’t aged well.
“Electricity will be too cheap to meter.”
Heard by Gamecock in 1958, of the coming wave of nuclear power plants.
Me too. It’s the oldest lie in the snake oil salesman’s book.
I have a different take. It could have happened, but government killed it.
Gamecock
In any business plan for large scale infrastructure there are two financial issues CAPEX and OPEX. You must recover your CAPEX outlay from revenue. If there is no revenue stream (free electricity) then the CAPEX will never be recovered. Then there is the supposedly zero cost of OPEX which means that people running the infrastructure are working for free.
Good points, Philip. Having run a large cost accounting system for 19 years, I should have known better.
I heard it as a child. I never updated my thinking about it to the adult level.
This guy really seems to think that Moore’s law for computing will equally apply for energy. Fool!
I must have written at least twenty letters to the Telegraph based on Lindzen’s and Happer’s facts yet not one was published. It has since been suggested that the editor, Chis Evans, told the letters editor not to allow any letters that questioned the Climate Change Committee. I don’t know how true that is but perhaps you have pointed to some reasons in this article.
Dont waste time writing letters that will get ignored,simply post post them on the comments section on the DT site.