Energy U Turn?

Maybe in the short term, but we are now likely to move more rapidly to an energy mix that does not rely on oil and gas.

I always said it was not a good idea to rely on energy from an unreliable supplier...

At present, natural gas is selling for about a dozen times the historical average price. Actual prices vary by the hour but have been about 500 pence a therm recently. The historical price is about 40 pence a therm.

Oil is also expensive and close to the record set some years ago. Oil also varies continually but Brent crude is about $130 currently as compared to the all time record of $140 set years ago.

This seems a very odd time to be suggesting that we become MORE reliant on these fuels. Increasing oil and gas production in the North sea will increase security of supply but do little to moderate the price. Oil and gas prices are set by the balance between supply and demand, and our existing or proposed domestic production has very little influence on prices.

Electricity from wind farms is a lot cheaper than that from gas, and is produced within our territory rather than being imported. We should therefore be using wind power, and solar to the greatest possible extent whenever the wind blows or the sun shines. Expensive natural gas will be unavoidable at times of dark and calm weather. But surely we should not be burning hugely expensive gas in windy weather.

Electricity from burning gas is currently costing at least 40 pence a unit, several times the cost of from new wind farms. 

I think some folk have not realized that we have already extracted most of the easy oil and gas from the north sea - and while doing so spent it on our transition from being a more or less a manufacturing economy to one based on human factors and financial services and so forth.
That may not have been the brightest idea, but while injecting sea water, lateral drilling and a very big bag of clever tricks,  will keep production up a bit longer and allow us to sweep out from the hard to extract areas we ignored the first time round, there is no magic tap under the north sea that will ever restore us to 1980s and 1990s  levels of fuel independence. We may also soon find out if UK fracking for gas is actually as easy as some folk seem to think it is. Geology says it isn't.. So while we may as well squeeze the north sea as much as we can right now, we should also be using all the renewables we can get, and building some new nuclear, and urgently getting our act together, while also buying up thicker underwear and tinned food just in case.

Mike.

PS http://euanmearns.com/uk-north-sea-oil-production-decline/

A slightly dated article from a well respected author on the topic. Since then the trend continues with odd rallies from new technology coming on-line.

Agree that the easy/cheap oil and gas is largely gone. We can not realistically eliminate gas for some years, but should reduce gas consumption by greater use of renewables whenever possible.

And yes I have long underwear, thick wool blankets, canned food, candles, batteries, several tons of logs, a ton of anthracite, a few propane cylinders, 100 litres of paraffin, 30 litres of petrol and other supplies.

If the price gets high enough, it becomes worthwhile to extract the difficult stuff below the North Sea.

I feel really guilty 'cos I live in a 120 year old poorly-insulated house, and even more so 'cos I have had a coal fire going today on account of the fresh easterly wind. On the plus side, it must be better to heat one room than the whole house.

The biggest problem is that it takes decades to turn the ship around.

If the price gets high enough, it becomes worthwhile to extract the difficult stuff below the North Sea.

and indeed we are doing just that. There are some really clever steerable drill techniques to connect small pockets, injections  of water and other agents and just going in stuff that was previously too deep. Above $100 or so/barrel it is worth it. But there is no denying that it is running out and one day, and quite soon, no amount of cleverness will help.

(and even a simple oil rig on land is quite complex.

http://theoildrum.com/node/5776

fracking for gas  - how it is horizontal drilling done?

http://theoildrum.com/node/3808

i suggest to ignore the chatter in the comments  below the main articles

)

But reading the ill informed readers' comments is the entertaining bit. It makes my day. Annnnnnnnnnnnnd, one comment every so often hits the nail on the head.

Z.