Beelbeebub

I remember when diesels were slow, noisy and heavy.

That graph is by the oil industry. It's including absolutely everything they suspect might be out there. It includes unknown discoveries ie fields we don't even know exist yet and even unknown improvements to extraction technology to get more oil than we think we can at the moment. And even then, after all that optimism, production still falls 50%. The question of whether or not the costs of extracting that last little bit of oil are worth it or not is seperate from the question of what good that little extra bit will do.

This is the point ☝️ Some politicans are selling the idea that the UK could be Saudi Arabia or texas if only thr "woke" politicans would get out of the way and allow the oil companies to drill, lower our bills and increace our energy security (out of the goodness of their hearts). It's bollocks. Our high energy prices and energy insecurity would not be made better by all the drilling in the world and the very things that will help are opposed by the same politicans.

Could you dm some details?

They are included in the Westfield report which has a wildly optimistic "no constraints case" case. And even that case has production falling by 50% from today's figure by 2035. For reference their low case (2.5bn) is less than the NSTA central estimate which is about 3.5bn. So their high case is maybe 1bn (4.5bn) more than the current official estimates.

I know, people still think the answer to our problems is simply to grant more oil licences. It doesn't matter how often they are shown, by figures from the oil industry itself, that it would make no difference they just keep on about drilling for oil. 😁

It's not £5bn tho. That's the revenue from current operations. The revenue we forego from not drilling the new sites isikely to be less than 10% of that... So less than £500m. In the context of government spending that's a rounding error. But again, and I don't know how many times this needs saying, drilling for more oil will not improve our energy security - the amount of oil availible is just too small to matter.

That's an interesting idea, though is there any evidence? I understand the theory but wouldn't the input (output?) of heat energy to the air mass be vansihngly small small vs the input from solar radiation and other energy use? By definition, if it measurably increaced the heat in the local atmosphere would t that start to rise and draw cooler air from surrounding land mass into the city?

On coal, this has been covered, but even if we went" all in" on coal - and that would require massive investment in building and reopening coal plants and mines - we would still need to electrify heating and transport (unless you want coal fires in houses and coal powered cars) and after all that we would still have less than 50 years of coal left. On fraking - again it's been covered but fracking is massively bad for the landscape. Go onto Google. Maps and look up "wickett, Texas" then zoom out amd look at the grid of fracking sites. Then zoom out again. The US can extract oil via fracking because it is prepared to turn an area the size of England into an industrial zone. There is also the matter that the test sites seem to show the potential in the UK is much lower than initially assumed.

Not really. In pure revenue terms it's abiut £5bn a year. To be fair, I'm not sure if that includes the windfall tax which might add another £2.5bn a year. Note there are also costs to the taxpayer on costs associated with decommissioning. These are dependent a fair bit on how you view them (is a tax break on decommissioning costs a cost to the tax payer?) but also run to the billions. None - or as near as practical to none. Firstly the current model is the oil/gas extracted is sold on the international market to the highest bidder. So cost wise, uk consumers will have to pay the market price. We see this now where very little our oil comes from the gulf but the people who did source from there (China etc) are now buying from the same people we buy from (USA etc) so our price goes up. The price of petrol and diesel in Texas, which produces vastly more oil than it consumes, has risen. Secondly, because of a mismatch entween the oil we extract and the oil our refineries can accept we.tend to send out oil aboard to where it can be refined and either buy the resulting refined product back or we import oil suitible for our refineries and then sell the resulting products to the highest bidder who may be a UK consumer or not. So even in terms of "can we physically get hold of the substance we need" more production will not help us. However, if a significant portion of our current demand for oil (cars etc) and gas (home heating) were to convert to electricity and we increace our non fossil fuel generation capacity (ie solar, wind, nuclear) - then we could be more energy secure.

The graph is relevent because it makes the argument that more drilling will have any benefit beyond higher profits for oil companies irrelevent. We are already on course to extract the vast majority of our remaining* reserves. Extracting that little bit more won't make us richer (unless you own an oil company) or more secure. The only thing that will make us more secure are the policies that reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, the majority of those policies come under the "Net Zero" umbrella. *as reserves are calculated on the basis of economic viability the volume will fluctuate with World price. If the world price dipped to $10 a barrel the uk's reserves would be zero. Likewise if it shot up to $200 our reserves will seem to increace.

UK loosens Russian oil sanctions as fuel prices rise https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy42x3g7r89o We are having to take action against our national security interests (buying diesel from an actively hostile foreign power that has invaded a European country and deployed chemical and radiological weapons on UK soil twice) because our transport network is critically dependent on a fuel we cannot produce enough of ourselves.... This action would be less neccesary if we had higher EV adoption rates. It's too late for this crisis, but we need to be ready for the next one. Again the NZ policy of strongly encouraging EV adoption - a policy that political parties with strong links to Russia have explicitly said they would reverse - is vital from a national security perspective regardless of any environmental concerns.

If only there was a mass produced technology that could efficiently use electricity to heat and cool a space...

No. That's my point - there really isn't much extra oil/gas left to get out. To a fair degree the argument whether or not to extract the last few % of the Uk's oil and gas is moot from a energy security standpoint. It will make no difference to our energy security if we continue on the projected path (green) or issue new licences (red and orange) What will make a huge difference to our energy security will be how much energy we can produce and use in the UK. So to that end we need to Reduce demand (insulation and public transport) electrifiy heating (heat pumps) Electrify transport (EVs) Increace local electricity production (winds, solar, nuclear, storage etc) All of those are "Net Zero" policies.

Indeed, mad. Still males makes me laugh. We will continue to consume fossil fuels for a while yet. The point is not that we shouldn't produce it in this country it's that we can't. Again, looking at the graphs in the previous post, our production is falling and the difference between our current course and drilling like lunatics is basically sod all.