Don’t They Know We Will Still Need Oil & Gas?

Don’t They Know We Will Still Need Oil & Gas?

JANUARY 30, 2022

tags: gasoil

By Paul Homewood

It is abundantly clear that all our major parties are now opposed to further development of North Sea oil and gas reserves.

Ed Miliband, for instance, had this to say about the proposed Cambo field last month:

“It makes no environmental sense and now Shell are accepting it doesn’t make economic sense,” he said.

“Ploughing on with business as usual on fossil fuels will kill off our chances of keeping 1.5 degrees alive and carries huge risks for investors as it is simply an unsustainable choice.

“Shell have woken up to the fact that Cambo is the wrong choice. It’s long past time for the Government to do so.”

 

Lib Dim leader, Ed Davey went one step further last year, effectively declaring war on Big Oil:

Under the plan outlined to the Guardian by the Lib Dem leader, Ed Davey, another immediate policy would be to stop new bonds being issued in London to finance oil, coal or gas exploration.

Fossil fuel firms already listed in the UK would then have two years to produce a coherent plan about how they would reach net zero emissions by 2045, or risk being struck off the LSE.

In the longer term, pension funds would have to disinvest from fossil fuels by 2035, with all companies with fossil fuel assets removed from the exchange by 2045.

https://www.libdemvoice.org/liblink-ed-davey-says-private-capital-must-switch-from-dirty-to-clean-68490.html

Both parties have of course called for a windfall tax on North Sea oil, which would effectively kill the entire sector stone dead anyway.

Meanwhile regulators have killed off the massive new Jackdaw gas field on spurious environmental grounds, and new North Sea projects will only be approved if ministers judge them to be compatible with the drive to net zero.

Yet none of these politicians seem to appreciate that the UK will carry on needing gas and oil, and lots of it too, for decades to come. 

Take natural gas, for example:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/digest-of-uk-energy-statistics-dukes-2020

Total gas consumption, net of energy industry use, was 810 TWh in 2019, more than double total electricity generation. 

Gas used in the power sector was 297 TWh, which in turn generated 132 TWh of electricity.

According to the Committee on Climate Change’s Sixth Carbon Budget, we will still need 50 TWh of dispatchable generation by 2035, rising to 60 TWh in 2040:

https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/sixth-carbon-budget/

This will either have to come from gas with carbon storage, or hydrogen made from gas. (The CCC acknowledge that electrolysis will remain a tiny source of hydrogen for many years to come).

So we will therefore still need a lot of gas for power generation, one way or another. And because both CCS and hydrogen production are energy inefficient, even more gas.

A rough calculation would suggest we would require 180  TWh of gas to produce 60 TWh of electricity, via CCS or hydrogen. That is 60% of current consumption.

It is hard to see much of a decline in gas consumption in the other sectors. Even if new gas boilers are banned in 2035, as mooted, it is unlikely many householders will have already converted to heat pumps beforehand.

Equally industrial users of gas will be loathe to spend billions switching to electricity, and a hydrogen network simply won’t exist in any scale by then.

My guess is that natural gas consumption will still be around 700 TWh by 2035, only 14% lower than currently.

At the moment, we produce about half the gas we use, and import the rest.

North Sea Oil

Now let’s move on to oil.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/digest-of-uk-energy-statistics-dukes-2020 

 

Surface transport accounts for most of the UK’s oil consumption, 37 Mtoe or 57%.

According to the CCC, the ban on new petrol/diesel cars from 2030 will reduce numbers of these on the road from the current 34 million to around 14 million in 2035. This is on the extremely optimistic assumption that there will already be 12 million EVs on the road in 2030, up from the current hundred thousand or so.

But taking the CCC’s projections at face value, we could estimate that oil consumption will decline from 37 million tonnes to approximately 17 Mtoe. This assumes that HGVs will still largely be dependent on diesel.

Oil used for aviation fuels may decline slightly, as biofuels start to play a bigger part, but given this is essentially an international issue, it would be risky to assume any significant drop in demand for oil. 

As for the other sectors, it is difficult to see any substantial cuts in oil consumption.

If we add this lot up, oil consumption in 2035 will still probably be around two thirds of today’s.

Worse still, it is not only the UK, where oil and gas exploration is being actively discouraged. We see the same thing happening in the USA and across Europe. And all in the wishful thinking that we will be able to run our economies largely on renewable energy in a few years time.

Instead we will end up facing acute shortages of oil and gas, which will make the current energy crisis seem like a picnic in the park.

That would trigger another Great Depression.

 

 

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Comment by Thinklike A. Mountain on February 2, 2022 at 1:01pm

Interesting. Let's see how this pans out.

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Comment by Willem Post on January 31, 2022 at 9:40pm

In other words, the UK will need the same quantities of natural gas, to use them in inefficient, politically approved methods

That is a step backward to achieve what? Reduce global warming by 0.001 degree C?

I am sure that will be a big help.

Deranged RE folks, who have near-zero, hands-on experience, with real-world energy systems, would have succeeded to tie the economy in knots, living standards would plunge

Nothing would properly function, everyone would be pissed, if RE folks would have their way.

Let us hope, it would not get that bad, because 50-mile-long truck convoys, and other rebellion in the streets would stop their madness.

Comment by Lynn Oleum on January 31, 2022 at 7:51pm

I don't know about UK, but J. Craig Venter (the first guy to sequence the human genome) calculated that to provide only American motor fuels (including aviation and shipping), not counting electricity and domestic, commercial and industrial process heat, would require 300% of currently-harvested American cropland. What would we eat?

If it really is necessary to eliminate net emissions of CO2, the only way to do it is using nuclear power. That handles electrification of stationary users such as homes, businesses, industries, and rail transport. Some road travel, maybe a significant amount, could be electrified, provided sufficient reserves of cobalt can be found (lithium isn't the bottleneck). But we will need liquid hydrocarbon fuels indefinitely. We've known how to make them from CO2 and hydrogen since 1925, when the Fischer-Tropsch process was invented. CO2 can be extracted from seawater using the Bipolar Membrane Electrodialysis Method developed by PARC. Hydrogen can be separated from water by electrolysis, but a more efficient way is the Copper-Chlorine process, which needs heat at almost precisely the core temperature of a nuclear reactor. This would be net negative for CO2 to the atmosphere because some of the CO2 resulting from burning those hydrocarbons would be trapped in soils and plants, and the rest would be in equilibrium with the oceans.

See http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Nuclear.html

Comment by Penny Gray on January 31, 2022 at 7:27pm

You can't fix stupid.

Comment by Paul Ackerman on January 31, 2022 at 6:43pm

Here you see the insidiousness of the Klaus Schwab design of the Great Reset-- utilize governments to pressure financial industry insiders to refuse financing to "fossil fuel" businesses. Control by financial blackmail....put the industries out of business.

The stunningly stupid part of this is ,as the writer opines, where do these morons think the energy is going to come from to power their private jets,yachts and multiple houses...let alone the heat for the government buildings to keep all the corrupted bureaucrats warm in the winter and cool in the summer?

 

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Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT

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(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/

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Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law

Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future

"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."

https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/

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