As the FT notes this morning:
The wedge of land squeezed between the M56 and M62 in north-west England could be Britain's new oil and gas Eldorado.
So says IGas, one of the UK's leading shale explorers, which has vastly increased its estimate of the amount of gas it could be sitting on in the area.
Now I'm not an expert on fracking, and will never claim to be.
But I do know that we're already burning our way to oblivion. And this seems, to me, to simply assist that process.
Can anyone tell me how that's good news for future generations?
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It is good news for the 1% ( or is that 0.1%?) the rest do not really matter
A waggish response would be that fracking (hydraulic fractruring) helps us to burn ourselves to oblivion by chucking even more stored carbon into the atmosphere!
And we get some local environmental degradation into the bargain too.
So it’s all good. /sarcasm
Because burnt shale gas releases less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per unit of energy generated than does coal or oil. You can achieve the same energy output while emitting less CO2.
It’s not as good as nuclear, but it’s better than the other practical alternatives.
And what do you destroy getting it?
And cutting energy consumption is better still
Plus, why not wind and solar and tidal – almost deprived fo funding now?
Very little is destroyed, from what I can tell, though I’ve not done a lot of research into it.
Shale gas seems to suffer from the same problems as nuclear: an awful lot of regulation driving up costs in a manner disproportionate to the perceived risks, never mind the actual ones. A lot of the stuff which has been designated “low-level radioactive waste” requiring special treatment is so low-level that putting it in a landfill in Cornwall would lower the average background radiation there, for example; and the kind of earth tremors that have been associated with fracking are so trivial as to be not worth mentioning – even if the causation were proven, which I understand not to be the case.
Whereas wind, solar and tidal get quite the reverse – an awful lot of government funding and subsidy which makes them profitable for the operator despite the overall cost/benefit to society being rather unfavourable.
Total impact is the important thing, but seems not to be considered much.
I agree that cutting unnecessary consumption is better than generating more energy to allow waste.
Wind – massively inefficient. Hugely unstable as a generating platform.
Solar – the scale would have to be awesome in this country to generate any where near enough power.
Tidal – for it to be truely useful for a country like the UK, the schemes would have to be size of the proposed Severn Barrier.
In terms of ‘cash in’ vs. reliable power out, gas, coal, oil and nuclear are the only real alternatives especially as people in the UK demand ever more power for all manner of items.
Just wrong
As Germany has proven
Germany is a big green experiment. They have invested heavily in its Energiewende project but with total costs estimated to top €1 trillion surely the UK would be better off looking elsewhere for its power supply purely on economic grounds? Unfortunately green power is ideological at the moment, inefficient and uneconomical. Unless of course governments offer grants and assistance to make such schemes viable.
Wind power is able to meet the energy needs of this part of Europe, with gas as backup for when the wind is not blowing. You have to have the gas capacity but it should not be need to be much used. There is lots of research to show this. We just need to get on with it. Molten salt reactors could be a future source of benign nuclear power, but the technology is not there yet.
Pellinor – sure, methane emits less CO2 than coal when burnt. But you have to consider the whole process end to end. Apparently, fracking often leads to a substantial leakage of methane into the atmosphere although this is hard to measure and mostly not reported at all (it’s emphatically not in the operators’ interests to do so). Methane is, of course, a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Also I would be interested to see how much CO2 is co-produced with the methane. I’ve seen no figures on this but would bet there is some.
Yes, but the methane turns into CO2 eventually, gas produces half the CO2 of coal when burnt, and top-end leakage rates of methane are around 6%. So the leakage effectively means that using shale gas reduces CO2 emissions by 47%* rather than 50% compared to coal – which to me still seems quite a decent reduction.
* If 1 unit of gas produces the energy of 1 unit of coal, adding 6% angel’s share to the gas used means you’re burning 106 units of gas to get the energy of 100 units of coal; so by using gas you get that energy by producing the CO2 you’d get from burning 53 units of coal.
@Pellinor – you haven’t considered the potency of Methane as a GHG, and the amount of time it takes to decay into CO2, neither do we know exactly how much methane leakage there is on any given fracking well.
What we do know is that methane is,
102 times as potent a greenhouse gas at moment of release into the atmosphere
72 times as potent after 20 years
25 times as potent after 100 years.
A good article here explains it further > http://www.climatecentral.org/news/limiting-methane-leaks-critical-to-gas-climate-benefits-16020
Ultimately we have to stop using fossil fuels, its as simple as that – that should be at the core of any progressive governments policy as you can simultaneously address a multitude of other problems the country currently faces by attacking this one problem with all the necessary force that the state, private enterprise, universities and the energy industry can muster. Others have said it before but this really could be an Apollo program for the 21st century if only government could show a bit of vision and leadership.
I have considered that it’s more potent, but I’m trading one curve off against another. High GHG potency now is a problem, but it decays as time goes on so the effect in 200 years of releasing methane now is not so much of an issue.
Which to me means that shale gas is probably a better stop-gap than coal to cover the amount of time required to build enough nuclear power stations to meet our energy needs and allow us to decommission all the fossil fuel plants.
@Pellinor – we don’t have 200 years, we’ll be toast by then. Even in 100 years time the escaped methane will still be in the atmosphere acting as a greenhouse gas with 25 times the potency of CO2.
As we don’t know how much methane is released on any given well you don’t even know what you’re ‘trading off’ against.
Not knowing how much methane is released, “we’ll be toast” is rather unwarranted, don’t you think? If it’s 2%, which is within the range suggested by the research, shale gas is no worse than coal immediately and is better in the long run. The 6& I used before was a top end estimate.
But this is why I’d much rather we were using nuclear power. Reliable power, no CO2 problems, and not much in the way of other problems as long as reasonable precautions are taken.
The Tories are hoping that fracking will be the equivalent the 1980s oil boom and will save their political skins from their disastrous economic policies. More evidence of short term thinking…
The most recent Stern report suggests that the world hydrocarbon valuations are nearly 60% over valued on world stock markets.As a consequence we are either heading for a very nasty financial meltdown or the cooking pot which would be the result of an inevitable rise in global temperature of 6 degrees C.I don’t think the 1% would escape either
I agree
I’m very worried about this – seems another short term/money making bit of venture capitalism that will create some jobs for a few years and leave another environmental disaster on our hands and derelict communities. I think the forecast was for about 10(?) years of supply – hardly a sustainable solution. Of course, as you say, Richard, the only feasible answer is less energy consumption which means abandoning conventional growth models and ways of measuring GDP – the moral climate is too antithetical to this at present and will not happen until the neo-lib project to fleece us all hits the fan.
More ways form people to get ‘filthy rich’ as the inestimable Mandelson put it!
According to one report I saw to put one Kg of milk onto a shop shelf it takes 2.3 Kg of carbon emissions. Anyone for tea?
How about tea without milk? It’s much more refreshing.
Agreed
I do
The wedge of land squeezed between the M56 and M62 in north-west England could be Britain’s new oil and gas Eldorado.
Given that the M56 crosses the M62 at right angles, someone at the FT needs geography lessons!
But of course one constituency that borders both motorways is that represented by George Osborne…
Can’t see that on my map. The M56 and M62 run approximately parallel from their respective start points on the M60 Manchester Orbital, as they run either side of the River Mersey. It’s a strange way to describe Merseyside and The Wirral, though.
These may be of interest.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=eroi-charles-hall-will-fossil-fuels-maintain-economic-growth
http://moraymint.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/energy-reality-intrudes/#_ednref1
Moraymint does make some good points. He is far too dismissive of the possibility of harnessing nuclear fusion. Doing so would be a game changer and I think would be the start of a “second industrial revolution”.
Perhaps the companies intent on fracking could be taxed sufficiently to fund the restoration of the environment after the gas source ceases and/or required to fund and a massive investment in carbon capture technology?
Great point on fusion, although apparently the technology has been 30 years away since the 1950s… i.e. there are a lot of technical difficulties involved with making it viable. Having said that, the same was true of fracking until recently… if power companies had put the same amount of money into fusion research, or indeed renewables, as they have done into new techniques for fossil fuel extraction, we’d be home and dry by now. Or to be more exact, home and not halfway to the planet burning up.
Molten salt reactors do work – they were developed for aircraft, I think. The technology needs to be scaled up. Much more realistic than fusion.
Fusion? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s been a few decades away for the last few decades and we haven’t gotten any closer to it.
I found the video on the Moraymint site, interesting – thanks for posting it. The eerie reminder of pres. Carter’s words remind us of how little we’ve done.
Since, despite the spending of tens of billions, no sustained, enclosed nuclear fusion has yet taken place, I doubt that nuclear fusion is going to change any games for the next century at least.
Wind power ?
The problem with wind is the intermittency of it, it may sound nice to say “we have gas generators for the times the wind isn’t blowing”, except that those generators have to be running already, and all the time, just in case.
No carbon capture, that captures CO2 as released, and then stores it, has yet been demonstrated.
Why restore an environment that has hardly been violated ?
Maybe you fail to realise that from one wellhead many boreholes can be sunk ?
Not to worry, when the new anti-lobby bill goes through labours source of funding from the unions will end rather dramatically.
Scottish independence will also do a good job of that, and with both Cameron and Farage slagging the Scots off…….
Please somebody go and look at a map. The M62 doesn’t have a start point at the M60 orbital and a large chunk of that land is known as Warrington.
I think a commercial nuclear fusion is no more than 25 years away. It has been delayed because of the stupid economic and political policies that have been followed for the last thirty years. A generation were sucked into financial engineering instead of real engineering!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/one-giant-leap-for-mankind-13bn-iter-project-makes-breakthrough-in-the-quest-for-nuclear-fusion-a-solution-to-climate-change-and-an-age-of-clean-cheap-energy-8590480.html
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/the-secret-us-russian-nuclear-fusion-project/19039
The potential engineers of tomorrow will solve this, if they get a chance….
http://en.ria.ru/science/20130603/181489613/US-Teen-Builds-Nuclear-Fusion-Reactor-in-Dads-Garage.html
On carbon capture:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
Are the technological challenges really that insurmountable?
After all we are surrounded by nature’s brilliant carbon capture system based on chlorophyll and sunlight!
The problem is not to start nuclear fusion, it is to use less power/energy starting it than it produces when running, and then sustain the reaction for very long periods of time. ITER does neither.
You also need to consider that the major western economies are training less engineers now, and a massive amount of the experienced engineers are fast approaching retirement.
Government energy policy is to approach the problem from another direction. Renewables generation inconsistent and prone to dropping off-the-cliff? … do you devise storage ? No. You devise load-shedding instead, and as an interim you install “smart” meters to vary the price of the energy to match the demand. We are not talking “economy-7” here, we are talking of altering the price several times a day, and matching high demand with high price (which is already done in places in the US, so it does work).
ITER isn’t the only project on the go….
I would recommend that you view documentary “Can we make a Star on Earth?”
Here’s a trailer
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/can-we-make-star-on-earth/
By the end of this documentary, I hope you’ll realise that if we don’t solve the huge technical issues surrounding nuclear fusion, then the human race is in trouble….
We desperately need people with real vision calling the shots, not the clowns that caused the financial crash of 2007/2008, who will destroy our world with derivatives/debt!
Unfortunately, the circus we have is the circus we’ll always have. The clowns are in control, and if not actually the clowns, then certainly the hand-puppets !
While ITER may not be the only play in town, it is the one with the tens of billions of [whatever] being poured into it. Minus the US of A, which dumped its contributions from over 100 million dollars to ten million dollars. Nothing like confidence….mind you, if it ever works (continuously and reliably) they’ll have the knowledge to build their own, and market them. Europe being the economic dead-zone that it is.
I quite like the idea, and it is probably humankinds only hope for the future as far as regards plentiful energy. But that hope is still decades away, and you are not considering the immense engineering problems that will be presented by containing a plasma at 150 million degrees C for long periods of time. That is without considering the problems presented by the high-energy neutrons bombarding the interior components (even with the shielding….440 “blanket” modules at 4 tonnes each). And the sheer strength of the magnetic fields required.
Still, as far as shows go, at least it is well-funded.
Roll-on cold fusion, so much easier !