Now that the LibLabCon agree on everything, and all are happy to let the bureaucrats in Brussels run our country anyway, Prime Ministers Questions has become a bit of a farce. So here on UKIP Daily we will be holding the real debate – every Wednesday at 12pm.
Today, we tackle a rather contentious subject. Fracking has become an emotive subject, with the Green MP for Brighton even going so far as to be arrested in her protests against exploration for gas in Sussex. UKIP policy is to support calls for fracking, but should it be?
Writing in favour of fracking is Roger ‘Tallbloke’ Tattersall. Roger is UKIP’s Yorks and North Lincs Energy and Climate Change spokesman. His award winning blog, Tallbloke’s Talkshop, contains many energy policy and shalegas relevant articles.
Writing against fracking is Iain McKie, political editor of UKIP Daily. Following his post-graduate research into European Low carbon Energy policy, Iain McKie spent 7 years working as a carbon certificate specialist in the power markets. In addition to trading the credits he also traded power, coal and gas.
For – Roger Tattersall
The big question is: who should we trust for information on fracking?
As a veteran of the climate wars, I’ve watched development of the battle lines in the UK fracking debate with a sense of weary familiarity. The voices of well qualified reason have been drowned out by the efficiently conducted disinformation campaigns of the Green Party. Greenpeace are promoting a paid for anti-shalegas twitter campaign. Frack Off is a noisy pressure group staffed by some of those acquitted last year of the aggravated trespass at a new EON gas turbine energy plant. They tell us fracking will poison our groundwater, cause earthquakes under our homes and fry us all with dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.
David Cameron’s inept and half hearted approach to promoting shalegas, (Mrs Cameron and her windfarm owning father are against), is allowing the fracktivists to steal a march on the battle for public support for a technology enabling the development of a domestic energy source capable of underpinning economic recovery and providing significant new employment in the beleaguered engineering and building trades.
So where can the voices of reason be found? Susan Brantley is distinguished professor of geosciences and director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Pennsylvania State University. She wrote a positive opinion piece in the New York Times last year. Lars Sørum, Director of Shale Gas, at internationally renowned risk management company DNV dispels the three myths in a well considered report. Our membership needs to read these two experts findings, and join in the fray, helping to allay the unfounded fearmonger driven concerns felt by the public.
UKIP has been positive about the development of shale for a long time before the Tory leadership started backing away from it’s vote conservative – go green – turn blue campaign. At the recent N.E. Conference I listened to MEP Roger Helmer give an excellent speech on the fallacies of the mainstream position on climate change. He also told us of his recent visit to a U.S. town where the development of shalegas had turned around an ailing local economy, providing much needed employment and spending power. The inhabitants are not dying of heavy metal poisoning or 100% burns from flaring water faucets. They are delighted with the renaissance their town is enjoying.
In the UK, as a result of the anti-science, anti-prosperity campaign pushed by Big Green, a new super-NIMBYism is taking hold which is BANANAS, (Build-Absolutely-Nothing-Anywhere-Near-Anything). In Sussex, land owners are joining together to bog down progress in a tangle of legal objections utilising Britains arcane and archaic property law. Fracktivists are clogging the internet and village halls with slickly made videos pushing the lies of green-agenda driven misanthropes.
I sincerely hope all UKIP party members and supporters will engage with this issue and help to make a positive difference to drive back misconception and ignorance, and set Britain on the right course. Fuels for energy generation underpin true wealth and prosperity. Domestic sources give us security of supply in an uncertain geopolitical situation. Let’s move forward together.
Against – Iain McKie
Fracking is one of the most hotly debated topics in pubs these days. Lots of experts on the matter in the Dog and Duck.
The pro-fracking arguments roughly follow this line: we have loads of it; it does not poison the aquifer; there is no evidence that it causes earthquakes; the drilling kit is barely visible; the UK should not depend upon foreign fuel supplies; we are facing blackouts; the US have enjoyed gas prices being halved as a result so our power prices should follow suit; it will generate thousands of jobs; raise lots of revenue for a Sovereign Wealth Fund like Norway – presuming that they don’t spend it as soon as they get their hands on it – and the US Environment Protection Agency says it’s all tickety-boo. So we would be mad not to get fracking right now!
Did I miss any arguments? Pretty compelling stuff isn’t it?
However, in the pub, no-one can answer what you are going to do with the stuff once you have it out of the ground. People make the assumption that you can just pump it into a pipe and use it.
This is not quite the case. The gas has to be held under pressure in storage. From storage, the gas is injected into one of the UKs three main gas terminals, and from there to the power stations and the gas mains. So while our frackers have the supply of gas demand sewn up, they have not figured out the demand.
Any increase in gas onto the market will require additional storage and an additional terminal, and I have not seen any proposals how these multi-billion pound projects are going to be paid for.
And our frackers have not figured out how we are going to get the gas from the fracked lands to the storage facilities. Are they proposing to lay new gas lines or are they going to ship it by trucks? Who will pay for the costs involved in either option?
I am not an anti-fracker, I just would like people to explain the whole process rather than just rely upon James Delingpole to give a massively incomplete argument and think that is enough.
To produce 5 MW of power from a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power station costs around £6.5 million, compared with a coal burner which costs around £2.4 million for the same 5 MW. So for the shale revolution to take effect we will need gas prices to drop by two thirds just to compete with coal.
The shale effect has caused the world price of coal to tumble from $125 pmt to $80 pmt now. The world is flush with the black stuff from the US, Columbia, Russia, Ukraine, Mongolia, South Africa, and Indonesia. Not even the Chinese can keep the price from dropping. So, you do not need shale gas in the UK right now to benefit from its effect.
If the UK were smart, we would look to improve the existing coal plants to make coal burn even more attractive. By using the new coal technology like ‘ultra-critical’ we could drop the generating costs for coal by around another quarter.
The Government has to abandon the suicidal Climate Change Act, and tear up the Large Combustion Plant Directive and get to grips with the benefits of coal. By all means have a look at fracking, and once a coherent and a fully costed plan is prepared we can chuck that into the mix.
The sink holes have put a shock wave through the pro fracking idea. It could go seriously wrong.
An insightful comment supporting Iain’s position has been left on a new discussion about Big Oil’s funding of the climate worriers by Berényi Péter, one of the brightest people I know:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/shell-game-oiler-links/comment-page-1/#comment-67641
There are a couple of constitutional misunderstandings that need dealing with which are relevant to the shalegas development issue, so forgive me covering this ground again.
Donna says that: “Unfortunately the people of Britain are not the Crown, nor the sovereign nation.”
Rather than post a long list of law precedent or the entirety of Magna Carta, I’ll quote from the debate on the European Communities Bill 1972:
“Our sovereignty cannot be bartered away by the Solicitor General, or even by the Prime Minister, because it is not theirs to give. I speak not only of the sovereignty of this house, but also of the higher sovereignty of the British people”.
-Mr Alfred Morris MP. Hansard, 17 Feb 1972 Pg. 727-8.-
Notice HRH ERII doesn’t even get a look in there. The crown is a bauble we lend as a stage prop to the house of Hanover on occasions of pomp.
Donna says that: “Iain is right, the land belongs to the landowners”
Iain didn’t say “the land belongs to the landowners” He said:
“The gas that sits there belongs to the landowner who should exercise their right to sell it”
And I pointed out that the “Ownership of oil and gas [NOT all minerals] within the land area of Great Britain was vested in the Crown by the Petroleum (Production) Act 1934”
So, the gas belongs to the British nation, and that’s why Nigel Farage’s vision of Setting up a Sovereign wealth fund for the proceeds from the sale of exploration and extraction licenses to the private sector and the collection of taxation monies from it’s sale is the constitutionally correct thing to do.
How that money should be invested is a matter for political parties with a prospect for forming a government to lay out in manifestos or referendums the electorate can vote on. Personally, I’d like to see the Government take a strong stake in vital utilities such as water supply. We’ll be needing more reservoirs to fulfill the needs of the extra millions we’ve acquired under LibLabCon and I don’t see the current private owners of the water industry getting on with the job.
An important part of Iain’s argument is his presentation of the comparable costs between gas and coal but I’m not sure this reflects the whole story.
‘To produce 5 MW of power from a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine power station costs around £6.5 million, compared with a coal burner which costs around £2.4 million for the same 5 MW. So for the shale revolution to take effect we will need gas prices to drop by two thirds just to compete with coal.’
Much of this costing has to be due to the current and projected price of coal and gas respectively. Everything else about coal fired generating stations has to be more expensive.
Coal has to be delivered (road and rail) and stored on site, probably several days supply and large coal piles need consatant temperature monitoring. Gas arrives in a pipe. Coal has to be atomised (powdered) before burning so the infrastructure needed to get it to the point of combustion is extensive and maintenance heavy. The combustuion process itself is much dirtier than gas which affects the design and subsequent efficiency of the heat exchange process all of which significantly adds to the cost. Coal also contains all sorts of nasties that need to be removed.
The process of generating from coal as opposed to gas is more difficult and consequently more expensive. It also favours larger rather than smaller generating stations for the scale economies which are likely to be less significant with gas.
So that just leaves price which , as we know, fluctuates. A self sufficiency in gas separated from external markets should be able to maintain a more stable price (production + profit) considerably less than wildly fluctuating market prices. Along these lines cheaper and cleaner gas generation has to be the way forward until we develop cost effective and reliable alternatives.
For this we need a stable and reliable supply so fracking is necessary to provide the gas fired part of the generation balance with coal.
Hi David, you are more prone to price spikes (volatility) in the gas market owing to fields/lines tripping. You have much more risk given the low availability of storage and terminals than with coal plants which can stockpile.
Iain, gas storage is an area in which we have much experience so it is far from an insurmountable problem but it is a factor nevertheless. Capacity has greatly reduced over the years but new and significant provision of gas can change this. Coal piles are not without their problems so it’s not necessarily an easier option.
Great debate though. More work to do on it though.
Hi David, my whole argument has been based around the fact that there is no storage, nor have UKIP put together any estimation of how much storage in which place at what cost, nor have they allowed for any additional pipe build or a new terminal. That is why I am opposed to any run for fracking, there are no coherent plans. We have retired coal stations that could be refitted that work at higher efficiencies and much lower cost than gas.
Hi Iain,
As I pointed out earlier, the retired coal stations are being asset stripped. The transformers and generators are being crated and shipped to Germany. This treachery needs to be stopped ASAP.
The waiting list for replacements is six years. We haven’t got that much time before the lights start dimming.
Sorry David I meant to add currently in the UK gas powered stations are running out of the money for many periods of 2014. The coal fired stations enjoy a £8-10 profit per MW/h while gas is -£2 to £0. This includes the ‘greening’ of the power by EUAs.
See the costs that Antony Nailer put up in this article:
http://ukipdaily.com/electricity-generating-costs-facts/#.UvPWefl_uSo
Numbers from a government source…
Interestingly, the government of the day which appropriated all the underground coal gas and oil on behalf of the nation was Ramsay McDonald’s National Government of 1931-35. It consisted of 557 Tories and only a dozen Labour MP’s. By 1934, McDonald (born 1864 and a founder member of the Labour party) was a very ill man. Day to day business was conducted by longserving Tory prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Hardly someone to be described as holding a communist viewpoint.
Such is our heritage, and it seems to me that UKIP’s strength lies in the commonsense pragmatic outlook which appeals to people on all sides of traditional political divides, much as McDonald’s ‘National Government’ concept did to the electorate in 1931. The British people have an innate sense of community and fairness which doesn’t lend itself well to U.S. American style libertarian ideology.
Good Lord a sensible debate about fracking.
Unfortunately in the serious matter of our determining the UK’s energy policy we’re currently having the agenda dictated to us by hair shirted millennialists, who begin by observing that ‘man is to blame’ and use this position to justify any of their subsequent falsehoods.
If we need to frack, then we should frack. What I am totally against is allowing green hysteria to damage the economy.
Roger, the nation owns nothing. Only people own things. The gas that sits there belongs to the landowner who should exercise their right to sell it to a private company that does the work and brings it up. The State should have no hand in it. Extending your argument would mean that all minerals belong to the state, all the fish in the sea, and all the land. Sounds less like a Libertarian viewpoint and more of a Communist one.
Iain,
Not according to the laws I was reading.
Subterranean hydrocarbons belong to the crown, and the crown belongs to us. All of us. We ARE the Sovereign nation.
“Ownership of oil and gas within the land area of Great Britain was vested in the Crown by the Petroleum (Production) Act 1934”
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsuk/planning/legislation/mineralOwnership.html
Unfortunately the people of Britain are not the Crown, nor the sovereign nation. If they were, they’d see a cut of the profits made on extracting minerals, but they don’t. Iain is right, the land belongs to the landowners, and when it comes to mineral rights, as you point out, that landowner is the Crown.
In America, if you buy a plot of land, with or without a house on it, YOU own the mineral rights below it. That’s the system we need to move to here if we want to encourage fracking. I’m sure the people of Balcombe would feel rather differently about the possibilities of shale if they were to be sent a check in the mail every few months.
The fund will take money away from the private sector who innovate, develop and employ reducing the growth potential for everyone. It matters not how the fund is regulated it will do stupendously badly because it has no understanding of risk; it has guarantees of income with no consequence if an investment fails. The State cannot invest better than the private sector. The Norwegian fund is a perfect example of this. Its returns average less than 4% per year.
Iain,
The gas doesn’t belong to the private sector. It belongs to the nation. So creating a Sovereign Wealth Fund isn’t taking money away from anyone, least of all the private sector. It’s not theirs to start with.
Roger, you also make mention of the idea of a Sovereign Fund. This makes clear that UKIP want fracking to generate revenue. This is not libertarianism. Cutting spending and taxes are. Instead of looking around for things to tax UKIP need to be looking at areas to reduce the state. Government should neither be in the business of trying to invest in the markets as this proposed fund would do. They will have no concept of risk and inevitably fail to make any returns.
Iain,
It might not be libertarianism, but then Nigel Farage is no ideologue and it is common sense. You were concerned in your original piece that people would be disenfranchised because they don’t own the rights to gas under their property. The Sovereign Wealth Fund addresses that issue, ensuring revenue from the commonweal accrues to the Sovereign nation. How that Fund would be managed and how its investment plan would be regulated can be wrangled over. Look at Norway’s success and see what we can learn.
Another reason we may need to consider smaller scale gas burning power plants in the not too distant is the lead time for the production of big generator sets and transformers. These are only made in the far east, and given their own pace of energy generation development, the waiting list is currently in excess of six years long. Our inept government is allowing the export of the big ones we have in shut down coal fired plant (thanks E.U.) to Germany. Another was crated last month.
If things get desperate as nuclear goes offline, we may have to consider re-purposing the generator sets currently spending 4/5 of the time sitting idle in wind turbines. That size of generator set lends itself well to small scale gas turbine use.
Hi Brian, these small burners that I described in the STOR are already in the towns and cities – often in hospitals and universities, and are so inefficient that the costs spike to £400+ per MW/h when they are used. The highest that I saw was £1200.
http://nollyprott.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/the-co2-gas-price-scam-plus-fracking/
Hi Roger, we lose all but one nukes in a few years (about 15 – 20% of the grid) and we are (presumably) taking out the windmills (say 8%) so, even if we don’t close the coal plants, and Alex Salmond let’s us keep the occasional bit of hydro we need more power stations. Gas or coal. If the new fleet have any new gas burners and they are fuelled by shale gas then yes you will need additional storage and a new terminal.
New coal burners are quicker to fire up than many CCGTs these days. They are also 10% more efficient. They also have no issues with SO2 that used to upset the Scaninavians a while back now that they have scrubbers attached.
Hi Iian, and thanks for your response. “Gas or coal”
Why not Gas *and* coal? Your opening article ends by saying:
“once a coherent and a fully costed plan is prepared we can chuck that into the mix.”
I agree with that, but perhaps we have a different timescale in mind. I’d like to see development beginning yesterday, with a gently paced growth which can test the regulation waters and safety aspects sooner rather than later. It also gives us the opportunity and time to develop a home grown industry which will swell the coffers of the National Wealth Fund leader Nigel Farage envisages, as well as offering considerable employment opportunities in technical engineering roles.
For me it’s about more than just money. Reinvigorating the UK skills base, and bringing new hope to impoverished northern communities has great value in the longer term not immediately seen on energy balance sheets taken in isolation.
Fully desulphurised coal power plant doesn’t come cheap either, and the line losses moving energy from big power stations remote from urban centres and industry to where it’s needed are considerable, as has been pointed out already.
Hi Colliemum, the problem is that with a micro-generator is the sharp drop off in efficiency. The CCGTs (typically around 400 MW/H) operate at 45%, but a 25 MW/h burner only has 35%. The result is a higher price. The Short Term Operating Reserve uses these types of burners to balance the grid at peak times and cost over £400 per MW/h as opposed to the coal price (base) of £50 per MW/h.
Iain, take a look at this article and the diagram down the page: http://ukipdaily.com/electricity-come-wind-thats-sure/#.UvI8ePl_uSo
Conversion, transmission and distribution losses account for well over 50% of the electricity we generate. “Conversion” includes the combustion efficiency, but as an engineer I can assure you that for every transformer (sub-station) and every mile of grid there is a loss.
While I cannot categorically state the answer, it just would need a qualified electricity transmission engineer to do the sums, comparing a high efficiency large power station, ramping power up to 400KV and pumping it down the “grid”, then back down to 415V (3-phases) with a more local town/city power station with less transformers and shorter distribution lines.
I think that Antony Nailer might just be able to do those sums…
Iain makes some good points, and I agree cheap (for now) foreign coal is an attractive proposition. We would get serious earache from the Scandinavians and Dutch if we ramped up usage however.
I’m a bit nonplussed by his principle objection:
“Any increase in gas onto the market will require additional storage and
an additional terminal, and I have not seen any proposals how these
multi-billion pound projects are going to be paid for.”
Surely what we’re discussing is domestic shalegas production leading to high-cost import reduction. With coal as mainstay, we don’t need to ramp up gas usage for now. So extra storage is not required. Iain is right that we have to get the gas from well-head to storage, but this is not insurmountable, as our cousins across the pond have ably demonstrated.
The additional benefits are that Gas turbines are quicker and more efficient to spin up as backup for the wind turbine fleet we’re stuck with maintaining in the short term.
While the argument for coal power stations (cheaper) seems to be valid, let’s not forget that we’d need to import coal whereas shale gas is our own.
One far more important point is that, given the absence of new gas pipe lines and storage facilities, this would be a great opportunity to build smaller gas power stations close to the ‘fracking grounds’, thus needing shorter gas pipes and smaller storage facilities. Above all, this would allow for many more local power stations – surely a better proposition than having just a few mega stations wih long transmission lines.
“More Power Stations” does that mean more district heating schemes.?
does UKIP have a policy for more diustrict heating schemes.
I`m assuming the whole issue will still be driven by steam, whatever the method used !
Iain makes a lot of very good points, and I agree that we should use coal too as part of the energy mix. However, I was a bit nonplussed by his main objection to shalegas:
“Any increase in gas onto the market will require additional storage and an additional terminal”
As I see it, we can match domestic shale production with an equivalent imported gas reduction. It’s true we have to get gas from well-head to storage, but this is not insurmountable, as our friends across the pond have ably demonstrated. The big bonuses are security of supply and profit for us rather than our competitors.
Another point is that gas turbines are much quicker and more efficient to spin up to act as backup for the crappy wind turbines we are stuck with maintaining for the time being.
I won’t crap on at length right now – let the debate begin!