Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Britain has formally lifted a moratorium on fracking for shale gas that had been in place since 2019, saying strengthening the country’s energy supply was an “absolute priority”.
“In light of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and weaponisation of energy, strengthening our energy security is an absolute priority,” he said.
Fracking, a process which blasts water, sand and chemicals underground at high pressure to release shale oil and gas, was banned after the industry regulator said it was not possible to predict the magnitude of earthquakes it might trigger.
Under the rules, fracking operations were paused every time the practice caused a 0.5 magnitude earthquake or higher, a level scientists said would need to be increased if Britain is to develop a fracking industry.
A review of acceptable levels of seismic activity said on Thursday that limited exploration to date meant that the understanding of the risks was incomplete.
The government said that ending the ban would allow drilling to restart and more data to be gathered, building research on how shale gas can be safely extracted where there was local support.
In a statement, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) confirmed support for a new oil and gas licensing round next month for 100 new licences.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Username on Friday September 23 2022, @01:40PM (12 children)
When is an invasion legal?
Why not nuke plants? They don't cause earthquakes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday September 23 2022, @02:14PM (5 children)
> Why not nuke plants?
1. They lose votes
2. They take 10 years to build
I understand UK is seriously looking at two new nuke plants - Hinkley C (under construction) and Sizewell C (not approved yet). Hinkley C will provide about 3 GW (compared to UK national grid which is about 60 GW). Some noise about Small Modular Reactors and other candidate sites.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kazzie on Friday September 23 2022, @05:56PM (2 children)
Sizewell C was mentioned as being pushed ahead in today's "mini-budget" by the UK Chancellor. No mention of any beyond those two at the moment.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday September 23 2022, @08:08PM (1 child)
There were a load of others but they got cancelled a few years ago. I think they were going to build a new one at or near the Sellafield site, and one on Anglesey, near Wylfa but they got cancelled due to lack of funding (ie typical UK government shortsightedness). There have also been musings on a Bradwell B in Essex. I think they were proposing a Chinese design, which was essentially a design bought from the French. We used to know how to design nuclear reactors in the UK, but like everything else here it was allowed to wither and die for short-term economic reasons.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by kazzie on Saturday September 24 2022, @10:18AM
Wylfa is back on the will-it-won't-it list, and I know that local firms and colleges are keeping their ears to the ground. But having been through the hoops once with Hitachi/Horizon agreeing to build there before pulling out again, there's a healthy dose of cynicism involved among local folk.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday September 24 2022, @04:21PM (1 child)
No not likely.
The lifetime peak around the turn of the century was only 63 IIRC and its been in steep decline since then.
I was reading stuff like during the peak of the covid lockdowns, demand was down around 15 GW in spring 2020.
Interesting to consider everything in .eu land is nearby so UK has (had?) like 8 GW of theoretical max intertie capacity with the mainland. The point of this is the direction of electricity and ALSO the flow of money can literally depend on one generating plant being up or down in one country. Kind of a delicate grid. Another interesting aspect IIRC reading a financial report about having to invent some new transmission line structure to push the power out of Hinkley C. You can't just build it and use it next door like a desalination plant, you have to build new transmission lines to handle the extra GW and that takes a long time.
The UK is not my primary investment location so I'm only tangentially interested in it, but IIRC the general flow of power was "about ten GW flow from N to S" so most of the consumption of electricity is around London and south coast and most of the production is up north by Scotland.
The thing about endless whining in the press about Hinkley C cost overruns is its always complaining from 2015 when compared to Natgas prices in 2005. Then fall 2022 comes along and Hinkley C is looking pretty cheap LOL, heck they should have doubled it in size. That's the eternal story of nuclear, why, this future investment will be more expensive than the distant past so its a bad idea. Not so!
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 25 2022, @06:17PM
Thanks for the correction - my number came from wikipedia. Here is another source
https://grid.iamkate.com/ [iamkate.com]
which calls it at about 30 GW with a low of 29 GW in the pandemic.
(I don't know anything, I'm just calling on the gods of the internet to provide me with a glimpse of their omniscience)
(Score: 4, Funny) by istartedi on Friday September 23 2022, @08:21PM
1. An invasion is legal when I say it is.
2. I don't know what you've got against plants, but just because they can't take revenge upon us by causing earthquakes is no excuse to nuke them.
(Misinterpreted in jest)
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday September 23 2022, @08:50PM (3 children)
But as the Fukushima plant demonstrated, earthquakes do bad things to nuke plants. And as Zaporizhzhia plant has demonstrated, invasions + nuke plants can equal trouble. Now, you might think "who would ever invade Britain?", but then you remember that you can never tell what those Norwegians are up to.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by drussell on Friday September 23 2022, @10:37PM (1 child)
It isn't so much the Norwegians I would be worried about when there are people openly advocating for a nuclear obliteration strike to wipe the UK off the map the other day on Russian state TV, trying to pretend that they're being invaded by NATO nazis or some-such nonsense. Turn the British Isles into a "martian desert," he said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S5N5g7rqz4&t=124s [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by drussell on Saturday September 24 2022, @03:39PM
How on earth is that considered -Trolling?
I'm not stating a personal opinion here, (and I personally don't think it is actually very likely that Putin would truly dare to nuke the UK, even with a "small" tactical nuke, as the likely response would be to simply use conventional weapons to rapidly obliterate the entirety of Russia's military, including all known nuclear weapons and launch sites.) I'm simply informing those that have not been informed of the FACT of the total lunacy of the content of the current Russian state media propaganda. It is simply a fact that some of these people are publicly calling for a preemptive obliteration strike on the UK just because they're supporting Ukraine militarily instead of allowing Russia to just roll into and annex Ukraine "back" into the Russian Federation / Nouveau-USSR. To them, Ukraine as an independent country doesn't actually exist, it is just a rogue break-away section of "Mother Russia" needing to be brought back into the fold after a temporary absence.
They're literally saying that the "West," that NATO, and specifically the UK and the US are the ones that have invaded Russia! It's absolutely absurd insanity, yet millions and millions of Russian citizens do believe this nonsense! It's scary shit!
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Saturday September 24 2022, @04:08PM
You seen London lately? The invasion already happened.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2022, @10:37PM
Whenever the Americans do it and the baldheads go along
Not enough profit. It's difficult to arbitrarily raise prices when energy is plentiful
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 23 2022, @01:56PM (5 children)
This is the way forward, people. Destroy the biosphere, because energy is expensive. We need to put a few frackers into gibbets, is what I think. If we're going to frack the earth, we might as well strip mine for those expensive, hard to find battery components.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Friday September 23 2022, @02:08PM (3 children)
Don't you worry, we have "undeveloped" countries for strip mining efforts.
Also, spin quote of the day: I mean, sure we could just not screw up the environment in the first place. That would leave all that money in the ground, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_mining#Environmental_impact [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 23 2022, @02:17PM (2 children)
I think the proper translation for that spin quote is something like, "Let's wreck the environment for profit, then we can rebuild the environment for more profit!"
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2022, @07:23PM
Well we have do to something to create jaaaarbs for the fucking poor bastards. Someone should just kill them and save us all the effort!
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 26 2022, @09:19PM
Ah, yeah, I wasn't meaning to provide a translation. I was just doing more commenting before the odd quote.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Friday September 23 2022, @07:01PM
Fracking isn't the end of the world.
Are there places its not great for reasons? Yes. Are there places it makes zero difference? Yes.
Out here in Colorado, almost every single well is fracked. It is loud, so they put up large walls. It does release methane, so we have little methane meter carts all around to monitor. Does it leak benzene? It can, so those carts monitor for that too. Has it affected ground water here? No.
What most of us think of when we hear its terrible are the stories from PA where the layers of this shale are closer to the surface and penetrate deeper. You have wells in those areas that were dug hundreds of years ago, not lined. The ground composition is different there, and those rocks are more permeable all the way to the surface. Your fracking can cause issues in places like that.
I don't know Englands geology very well, so would have no idea whether or not any of these conditions are the same, similar or different there.
What I would say after many years of working with and also fighting against our local drillers is that not every situation is the same. Transparency and cooperation are great, but you got to keep an eye on them. Be informed. Saying no to fracking, just because of the word 'fracking', isn't reasonable though.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2022, @03:11PM (2 children)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-62999762 [bbc.co.uk]
https://archive.ph/e2a8Z [archive.ph] (Archived copy of BBC link)
To paraphrase an old song.
'Let Englishmen frack English shales...'
(Score: 4, Interesting) by kazzie on Friday September 23 2022, @05:52PM
Similarly, Wales is also keeping it's ban on fracking in place.
I'm not too sure on the current position in Northern Ireland. A quick search suggests it's not currently banned, but the lack of a functioning administration there might hold up approval of any new sites.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 23 2022, @08:44PM
As I'm sure many wags have pointed out before me, the "United Kingdom" is hardly united, and barely a kingdom (and there's been a push in recent weeks to make "kingdom" a complete misnomer).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2022, @07:29PM (2 children)
UK is an emerging market economy now. Emerging from the top side.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Friday September 23 2022, @08:10PM (1 child)
Yes, today our Chancellor announced a new budget to torpedo our economy and accelerate the movement of wealth from the poor to the rich. His political cronies have carefully moved their investments out of the UK in recent years. The plan is to short UK plc and then buy up a load of assets for a song in the resulting fire sale.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2022, @11:23PM
Parasites and leeches, or "job creators" as
wethey call themselves.(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday September 23 2022, @10:03PM
Early 2020 when covid-19 broke out the rig count toppled to a record low and some 100k oil industry jobs basically went out the door. Due to the poor handling of the pandemic, the rise back has been fairly gradual and only just now barely got back to the pre-pandemic 700s: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/crude-oil-rigs [tradingeconomics.com] (enable js and click the 5y and 10y) https://www.brinknews.com/quick-take/us-active-oil-rig-count-collapses-from-covid-19/ [brinknews.com]
So, basically, while the Russian sanctions are part of the problem, it's unlikely the Brits would have bothered if the US wasn't still recovering and unable to meet the new demand.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Touché) by SomeGuy on Friday September 23 2022, @11:59PM (1 child)
Reportedly, frelling is also permitted now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2022, @01:22PM
I believe you're thinking of frottaging.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday September 24 2022, @04:07PM
I invest financially in energy and have always found it an interesting hobby.
There are several "propaganda level" problems with the article.
The first is if you research the history of frac in UK, it is (or it was) a rich industrialized nation so they got started a long time ago with frac not long after the USA back in the 60s. Even the wikipedia article about frac in UK admits they have frac'd like 200 wells in the UK. Well, UK is pretty small and there's less than 200 gas sites producing right now in the UK, admittedly some multi well sites. They only drill like "a hundred" wells a year in the UK, its kind of a dead market, its roughly one 200th the size of the USA drilling market. Anyway WRT barn door analogies this is like the government permitting the barn door to reopen after the horses already ran off decades ago. Its like the government making a big propaganda push to permit harvesting cypress trees for merchant sailboats like they had in 1492, WTF is the point other than a glorious anti-Putin soundbite? We're talking about a market so small, that they could probably put every tremor and well completion as a national news story. Its much-a-do-about-nothing.
Higher prices will make sites that were never financially viable in 1975 get frac'd in 2020+ but there are practical recovery limits. There's just not many good targets in the UK that haven't already been exploited.
Think about this ... you look at a nearly empty old field like the Permian in the USA that's been in production, I believe, for a hair over one century now. So, over its entire lifetime its produced 100+ TCF of natgas, and even the most optimistic total bullshite blowing sunshine up investors asses estimates assuming some kind of utopia of unlimited unconstrained frac after the fall of the government might produce about "ten or so TCF" of remaining natgas, so its WAY over 90% emptied out in any practical sense in 2022. Now natgas averages $5/thousand CF delivered, so that 10 TCF sitting around is worth maybe $5B? But how much will you have to spend in 2022 as an extra cost to frac that $5B of natgas, maybe $6B? Even if its only an extra $1B it just might be easier to produce a newer less emptied out field at a higher profit rate. This is what I mean about the big picture if a tired field like the Permian in the USA is "almost empty" its doesn't really matter environmentally or whatever if we produce the last three percent of the field because we aready drilled out and burned or whatever the easiest to reach 97% of the field or leave the last 3% in the ground and it's not going to have much "greater economic effect" on the country one way or another. But... its $5B worth of gas sitting there, and that's 5B reasons for someone to push really hard to drill/frac it out regardless of any side issues. Plenty of "Transactional" people want to provide oil field services to the guys doing the work, its not just production companies or frac companies. And the point of this paragraph is the entire country of the UK is like the Permian. The tank's ALREADY almost empty. Heroic measures might get that last percent or two out of the tank, it aint gonna change much of anything in the long run, although being a very valuable commodity that last couple drops will make someone really rich.
Even North sea peaked a LONG time ago, so onshore in the UK is essentially dead regardless what they "permit" or "deny" there isn't much left.
I think non-business people underestimate how much business people like money. And how smart they are. All the easy pumping and easy frac and high profits are firmly in the rearview mirror, in our g-g-grandparents generation up to as recently as our parents generation in some offshore fields. This is arguing is only over who gets rich off the last drops in the empty tank. The tank is still empty and shaking out the last drops a little faster just means it'll be totally empty a little sooner.