By Paul Homewood
TCW reviews Jordan Peterson’s article in the Telegraph this week:
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Excellent piece by Peterson, who commands respect. But like the excellent Bjorn Lomberg, he is WAY too kind to the venal, mendacious barstewards who promote their GangGreen cult and long to destroy us all.
In the world in which we live getting ostracized is very easy to achieve by calling things as they are. Getting your voice heard requires some diplomacy even if it means holding your nose.
The problem of calling things as they are was epitomised for me when I ventured to comment on an article published on The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/how-likely-would-britains-40-c-heatwave-have-been-without-climate-change-187368#comment_2858610. Having noted that just 9 developing countries already emit the quantity of GHGs that the IPCC says must be the global total by 2030 if humanity is to get to net-zero by 2050 and having commented that ‘ unless these countries completely reverse their climate and energy policies and do so now … net-zero cannot be achieved’, I said ‘That’s climate reality, not climate denial’.
The response?
‘Duh, Robin – Climate reality is indeed climate denial.’
Robin: Reality vs Denial: I figure it worth asking activists two questions:
1. What is the ambient global temperature you would want to achieve?
2. Have you got at least 30 years left to live?
If the answer to #2 is ‘no’, then the follow-on would be along the lines of: ‘In that case, given that climate is at least the aggregate of 30 years’ weather how will you ever know that your activism achieved your goals as defined in #1?’
“…’Duh, Robin…’…”
I think that person was actually agreeing with you, but suggesting you are a little naive about the workings of the mind of the human herd-animal. He probably meant that, your using the phrase ‘Climate reality’ has, as far as the fanatics are concerned, given away the awful knowledge that you are not one of the enlightened.
As a sometime student of linguistics, I actually disapprove of a phrase in which the word ‘climate’ is constrained to be a grammatical adjective by being stuck thoughtlessly in front of another, already vague, abstract noun.
In what sense can the noun ‘climate’ “qualify or limit” the idea of ‘reality,’ or the idea of ‘denial,’ for that matter?
Better English would use prepositions; thus, ‘realistic thinking ABOUT climate’* and ‘denial that the apparent consensus view OF climate is correct.’
* Or for some purposes, ‘taking into consideration some real but ignored data ABOUT climate.’
So true. A great person to listen too
Paul
Your drawing this to our attention is very much appreciated.
It’s well worth reading and circulating; but only to those people you know who have a brain and not just ‘beliefs’
Indeed so. Very pleased to see that Kathryn Porter seems to have achieved a media breakthrough with several interviews ranging from Newsnight and Farage through various bits of BBC radio and al Jazeera. She has clip links at her latest blog. I’ve not watched the Newsnight as I am not entitled to use iplayer.
Also very pleased to see that Sir John Redwood has taken notice of the many bits of briefing he has had at his blog by several of us, and now has a fairly firm grasp if the supply issues, as several of his recent blogs and tweets make clear. Hopefully he will be influential after the leadership change.
The other person talking about globalist doomsters is Neil Oliver, on GB News and on youtube. He is well worth listening to, so I think his career at the BBC is over.
Here’s the link.
https://www.gbnews.uk/gb-views/it-is-hard-to-tell-yourself-youve-been-taken-for-a-fool-but-open-your-eyes-says-neil-oliver/352031
His previous piece was equally worth a read. He doesn’t pull punches and doesn’t follow the gceenblob narrative so Phillip is probably right about his career with the BBC. It’s a pity because he is an excellent presenter.
Off topic but see also The New York Times today for its long illustrated report on the Mexican Govt’s. decision to rely on fossil fuels in future and to promote PEMEX much to the fury of Biden.
“…Mexican…”
Living in Oaxaca – to take one big city, pretty much at random – is 70% cheaper than living in London.
However the country is sleep-walking back to entrenched, ruthless, Left wing dominance. So basically going to hell in a handcart.
Sigh!
It is clear that the two candidates for PM haven’t a clue what to do about future energy security but it is also clear from their promises (north sea, fracking – neither of which are viable) that Nett Zero has gone out of the window, so we are free to optimise our use of oil and gas for many years to come. I have been banging on for a couple of years now about the urgent need to adopt the Ireland Alternative Fuel Obligation whereby gas turbine generators (upon whom we will rely for mid-term future in the UK) are obliged to hold specified amounts of liiquid fuels in reserve.
I offer a couple of quotations from dawn.com/news/967202/naphtha-based-power-generation
“In India there are 27 naphtha fired and dual fuel power plants providing more than 11,299 MW in operation”
“Thus using naphtha could significantly reduce power generation costs and tariffs”
Why are the Irish and the Indians so clever and we are so stupid? By the way, the current wholesale cost of naphtha at ~%600 per ton is the lowest its ever been – we could forward buy for years.
It’s a very good point you make. Most of the country’s Open Cycle Gas Turbines actually do run on diesel (the “Gas” part is actually almost a misnomer) such as this one. http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=981
Virtually every CCGT could run on such fuel rather than the heavy bunker oil that the old Oil Fired plants with conventional solely steam generation used to use. Given that diesel has come down hugely in price and is readily storable in quantity you would think it would be prudent to be stockpiling for at least a few units but that would require a bit of thinking!
Prior to the miner’s strike I was involved (as an independent “consultant” ) in a government “survey” of generating facilities, down to even local factory back up generators, across the country. It was never openly mentioned but everyone knew it was to secure electricity supplies in the event of a strike.
Coal fired plants can also burn heavy oil (known as “overburning”) and it was also held on site to be used as lighting up fuel. Mrs T had the foresight to instruct all the coal fired units to increase oil stocks and even build additional storage facilities. I later was involved in the “destruction mode” running of Littlebrook D again to overcome coal shortages.
My point is that with a bit of foresight your suggestion could well obviate power cuts if gas supplies get really tight much in the same way as coal did during the miner’ strike.
An interesting article about those times and how we used to overcome problems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150401144846/https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/01/us-britain-electricity-oil-kemp-idUSKBN0MR2B520150401
Back in Mrs Thatcher’s day this country was generally run by competent people. These days we have an army of incompetents at the top – look at the water industry where none of the CEOs have had any water supply experience in their lives. Actually, the Mail had an unintended hilarious piece celebrating the fact that half of the water CEOs are women. Dr North pointed out just how much money these ‘successful’ females have cost their current or previous companies. And in another piece on the water supply disaster, the child-journalist makes no mention that the government has set out the path that lets them fail. Mind you, the Morons of Parliament would have no idea that government failure is behind this as they cackle away and come up with stupid suggestions like a national water grid. Really? Like nobody has thought of that before. Or that it was shown as flawed by the ICE in 2012.
Ratcliffe-On-Soar had a huge stockpile of coal at the start of the miners strike, built up over years. I used drive past it on a regular basis at that time. I knew that Scargill would have a struggle if all other coal fired power stations were stocked to a similar level. But that confrontation had been planned for years. Had Scargill built up funds to support his strikers it might have lasted longer but the result would have been the same.
I went past last month, there was still a pile of coal possibly enough to last till closure in 2024
Surprised at some of the comments made regarding the use of oil rather than gas I did some very basic research. Most of the gas power stations in the UK are of the ccgt type. They run off gas. OCGT power stations, of which there are far less, can run off a variety of fuels including gas, which because of its lower emmissions is favoured. There appear to be very few oil fired power stations!
I’d be interested to see your evidence that fracking is “not viable”.
There is more than enough evidence in the public domain that confirms that most shale oil and gas is not profitable. It is a bit like the climate change argument. Spout the claims enough and some will believe. Look aat the sums invested in US shale and the profits that have been made an returned to investos and the situation is a little different. The numbers do not add up and many of the wells, if you can clal them that, are never going to reach payout. Intill recently more than $1 trillion had been investeed and returns( with dubious accounting methods) were circa $700 billion. No banks will loan money to shale projects, investors having listened to the BS have lost their shirts, and even the bond markets are a no go. So the shale co’s are running down their stock of DUC’s and drilling well below replacement rate for new wells. Meanwhile costs have skyrocketed( steel, sand, chemicals) and salt water disposal is emerging as a major cost. Worse still all the prime sites have been drilled. Do you wish me to go on.
Shale is all about a large number of wells. We would never tolerate all the wells required, and moreover therre is not gas and oil gathering system in place to move the produced oil and gas. Poland was supposed to be a play but it too has failed miserable. Ratcliffe is a canny investor but he knows very little about oil and gas. FYI I started my career 44 years ago drilling oil wells, before moving onto refining and petchems. Naphtha is not an option for power generation. Most of the naphtha that is left over after gasoline production is used for petchems.
He asked for evidence. Your assertions, Carnot, are not evidence.
Stopping it because it “is not profitable” is perhaps the most bizarre excuse ever proffered.
Odd that those who know a lot about fracking disagree with you.
My point exactly, Phoenix. If Cuadrilla and Ineos are prepared to put their money where their mouth is I for one would be reluctant to argue!
No, no, Mike! They won’t make a profit, so we must stop them !!!
Time was when naphtha used to burned off in great pits at refineries. Then we discovered how to reform it into gasoline, and to use it for petrochemicals which became premium uses. Its use to make gas and to fuel power stations was largely eliminated many years ago, but perhaps in parts of India there is still limited gasoline use: the volumes are small at just 11GW out of about 400GW of Indian capacity. Prices were of course much lower in the past any time we had genuinely low oil prices.
Forward markets in volume for naphtha do not exist. Feasible solutions call for more gas, coal and nuclear, both in production and as capacity.
It doesn’t….: What on earth are you talking about? Naphtha (aka light straight run natural gasoline) is the lowest value product from crude oil. It can’t be “reformed” to make gasoline nor can it be isomerised to raise the octane value. It certainly isn’t used to make petrochemicals (unless you can quote me otherwise). In the UK its heyday was in the 1960s before North Sea gas came ashore when it was the feedstock fot the ICI steam reforming process to make town gas which we relied on for nearly ten years. What do you mean “it can’t be forward bought”? Its time for a reality check. We are not going to have access to plentiful gas ever again. The North Sea is mature and any new finds will be deeper and more expensive to produce. Fracking is a figment of imagination. Cuadrilla’s tests demonstrated that our shale is of very low permeability (like many others – google shale gas in Poland for example). We have to use available gas for domestic use and not for power generation.
Vernon
Evidently you know nothing about refining. Almost every refinery has a reformer plant that takes naphtha as its feedstock and reforms it over a platinum based catalyst into gasoline components, and also produces hydrogen as a byproduct that is then used by hydrotreaters to desulphurise various product streams. Chemical plants use naphtha as a feedstock for steam cracking to make ethylene and propylene and many other side products, including hydrogen again. The lowest value streams in refineries are the heavy residues, which tend to contain high percentages of environmentally sensitive potential contaminants that are difficult to remove.
In my past I did an “oil boiling course”, operating just about every refinery process in existence on lab scale, and combining and testing the streams into salable specification products across the barrel, alongside a whole bunch of supporting chemistry and engineering. .
It doesn’t add up. There are clearly wide differences in understanding beteeween us on this subject that seem to come down to the meaning of “naphtha”. I can now see that in general it encompasses a boiling range up to 200 deg C. So on that basis, of course, you are right. It contains the feeds for all work-up processes. The naphtha that I grew up with was the light naphtha used for town gas production by the ICI steam reforming process – low value, low MW material, in surplus, and unsuitable for any octane improving process. That is the material that I and, I believe the posted articles, are referring to but it is certainly imprecise. Even so it is posted on the oil product wholesale prices as just “naphtha” at $600 per ton. I rest my case.
Ray: The “gas” in gas turbine refers to what drives the turbine rotor (i.e. versus water) not to the fuel. As these machines were developed as aero engines the fuel of choice was/is ATK (aviation turbo kerosene).
Gas turbines have been optimised to run on methane for a long time. There are design differences according to fuel and according to duty cycle:jet engines have to produce a peak power for takeoff whereas cruise is at lower output.
It does..So all those that run on dual fuel are fools are they?
They are not fools. All I am saying is that they may need specially adapted models to try to get the best out of different fuels, with specific injectors, so you can’t just hook up a kerosene tank to a turbine designed to run on methane. Also, the turbine can really only get optimised for a particular fuel, so it will be less efficient with the alternative. Usually the dual fuel capability is there either to provide a fuel switching option to provide some economic protection against a particular fuel becoming expensive or simply as a backup against late delivery of the main fuel.
To expand a little on the technicalities, aviation gas turbines can modulate rotational speed to modulate power output. Gas turbines directly coupled to synchronous generators must operate at fixed rotational speed.
This is significant. Key parameters of the turbine combustion system include firing temperature (for longevity of the hot gas path) and control of NOx emissions (to within operating permits).
Dual fuelling a gas turbine-driven power generator is very clearly possible, but two fuels is a complication for constrained combustion conditions for fixed rotational speed and NOx management.
Dual fuelling therefore involves compromises which impact reliability, maintenance, plus efficiency and power output (degradation). In other words … not cheap!
The above question touches upon something I have raised here before. Comparing GB with the dual fuel condition in Irish Trading Code gives another example of a serious market failure.
The GB codes don’t have a dual fuelling condition, and the free market outcome is private developers do not see the market value to adopt dual fuel designs. The costs are avoided because the value (of additional security of supply) is not visible to developers, and therefore not investable.
Calls to follow the example of the Irish Trading Code is an acceptance that free market private decisions are failing to produce the correct outcomes: they are missing something that consumers value.
If we turn to regulations such as following the approach of the Irish Trading Code, we are substituting centralised decision making to dictate outcomes that the free market would not.
As we can all see today, security of supply is not just an inconsequential triviality, Outcomes have significant value to consumers, and free market principles are not sophisticated enough to deliver the goods.
It doesn’t…. You make gas turbines sound like finely tuned Formula 1 engines. They aren’t. Gas turbines are the moxst robust, versatile machines ever. I have been associarted with them as drivers for pumps at remote, dessert, unattended crude oil pumping stations where they are totally dependable over long periods.
Yes Vernon, gas turbines used in the power industry can be fairly compared to finely tined F1 engines. I have seen examples of catastrophic failures because the latest designs pushed the boundaries just a little bit too far.
OEMs push boundaries for higher efficiency/output (the two are different sides of the same coin), and there is always some pressure for flexible operation to be as responsive as possible to demand for power or demand for associated (ancillary) services.
The limited number of suppliers of gas turbines to the power generation sector can be viewed as a measure if the technological barriers to entry in this field. The barriers are the technological/materials specialism needed to be part of the game.
I know nothing about gas turbines in the circumstances you describe, but acknowledge it is possible to design gas turbines to different parameters. Going for reliability (robustness) will probably mean compromising on other measures.
The simple fact of the matter is that the best new entry into the power generation merit order comes from lowest marginal cost (output/efficiency), and the most robust/reliable designs would simply find themselves disadvantaged in the merit order from the outset. It doesn’t make money to try to buck the rule that the best new entrant has lowest cost.
If dual fuelling was a “free option” (ability to choose fuels at no additional cost), developers in the GB power market would definitely select dual fuelling. Who wouldn’t take something for nothing? With the added bonus that it increases overall opportunity to earn money – that would be a slam dunk.
But that’s not what happens. We don’t see it. In the specific case of gas turbines supplied to take part in the economic contest of power generation, dual fuelling is not chosen because it certainly isn’t a free option.
To get dual fuelling, you are forced to turn to some form of intervention by a central planning authority (e.g. the Government). The choices are: make it mandatory (puts everybody in the same boat, but could hurt new entry); or pay a specific reward for it (a subsidy, not coming from the operation of the market).
Jordan: Siemen’s publicity literature would seem to contradict your argument. They claim that alternative fueliling is compatible with their machines and switching is easy.
Yes, Siemens will say that. They want to sell more stuff, including replacement parts (extra servicing costs). As there are regions (like Ireland) where dual fuelling is mandatory, we’d expect Siemens to promote their products.
As I said above, the GB experience shows the costs of dual fuelling are enough to deter free market private decisions to select this as a technology choice for new entry. As that’s the case, and (as you fairly say) there are genuine public interest reasons to prefer dual fuelling, there is a market failure on this point. We have a market which will not deliver value to customers.
To “fix” this failure, we are forced to intervene with some form of centralised diktat. These may be the three main choices:
* Do nothing, and let the market fail in its own good time. Taken alongside numerous other failures and interventions, GB electricity supply is truly in dire straits right now and this is not a politically sustainable position.
* Or your suggestion and follow the Irish Single Electricity Market by making dual fuelling mandatory. Forcing private investors to do something they don’t want to do is a pathway to failure. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the Irish Single Electricity Market is truly in dire straits right now and it’s not politically sustainable.
* Or we can subsidise dual fuelling. This is an acknowledgement that the market has failed and an attempt to patch-up the failure. The previous comment still applies – there have been numerous interventions and supply is in dire straits.
For a market to operate in anything resembling private sector provision, market entry and exit has to be the result of private decisions of investors.
This isn’t happening in GB electricity supply.
The dual fuelling market failure, and “fixes” mentioned above sit among many failures and interventions. These are an indication that that there is no market. So why pretend?
I’ll make that my last comment for this thread. I appreciated the discussion Vernon.
Can I thank you both for such a fascinating conversation. Not only does this website allow people to comment on areas of their concern, but it also educates in areas which were unknown to us previously.
Thanks also to Paul for creating such a great forum.
Yes Vernon I do know these sort of things you know. Would you like me to write in the form of a technical manual or in a manner others may understand?
Sorry Ray but you still have me confused. There are (at the last count) 32 gas turbine generators tn the UK and they all run on gas. Why bring fuel oil into the discussion? Fuel oil (along with crude) is not suitable because these machines do not like vanadium.
Well worth watching the video. Very hard to find any flaw in his arguments.
There are a number of consultants that I have crossed swords with in my career. McKinsey is my pet hate but Delloitte, EY, the defunct Arthur Anderson, BCG and others have all crossed my path at some time. Their ability to worm their way into corporate HQ’s and influence strategy has no limits. One over arching feature of these idiots is their Groupthink mentality and toal lack of emotional intelligence, and there ability to repeat a story enough times to make is “fact”. But, hey, they went to business school , got their shiney MBA ( taught by idiots who have never had a proper job) and still know SFA about the real world.
Seconded!
A Consultant, a man who will steal your watch to tell you the time and afterwards sell it back to you.
No. These days they’ll rent it back to you at a fee which includes ever increasing costs for service & repairs which you never knew it needed!!
OT but interesting
Commonly used engineering wake models vastly underpredict energy losses due to external wakes, the US-based technical services provider ArcVera Renewables has found in a new study.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2022/08/18/long-range-wake-losses-offshore-much-greater-than-expected-new-study-shows/
If any of you are interested here is a report by EY (equally as inept as Delloite) on Oil and Gas Reserve and ESG.
https://www.ey.com/en_us/oil-gas/how-oil-and-gas-can-leverage-its-past-for-its-future
There is a link, if you have the stomach, to download the full 25Mb report. Guess what, they can advise you on ESG for a fee. I would rather sucks farts out of bus seats.