Beelbeebub

Indeed. The point being the logical trap of "BP is not investing on X, therefore X cannot be a good investment".

They are also selling their North Sea operation..... Renewables are making money. People are happy to build them on the promise of selling the electricity at about 9p/kWh for the next 20 years. In contrast people want over 10p for a gas plant (and that's excluding any carbon costs, it's closer to 16p with carbon costs) Nuclear builders want similar sums too. For context the octopus agile average export rate (which is just above the wholesale rate) is currently 17p and got as low as 13p this week. You are absolutely right about oil companies worrying about the bottom line but are drawing the wrong conclusion. They can make more money over the next few quarters by using existing infrastructure to sell oil and gas at ever increasing prices than they can investing money in long term assets that drive the profit of your existing assets down. And the management only care about the next 4 quarters. Anything beyond that is a problem for future them. Kodak invented the digital camera but decided it was more profitable to focus on selling film than to invest in a camera that didn't need film. And it worked. For a while.

Explain to naïve old me exactly how my data is inaccurate. Provide sources (ex-brother-in-laws don't count) showing the larger reserves. Explain how the government can make the oil industry under project production but can't stop them lobbying for more licences? Explain how the government can influence Norway to not only under project future production (they are also predicting decline albeit at a lower rate) but also to reduce current production to show that decline. Is it via the same mechanism the suppress the car that runs on water?

"Loads" is doing a lot of work there.... The largest onshore oil has 480 million barrels of oil..... sounds alot until you realise the UK consumes about 1.4 million barrels a day. So all that oil wouldn't last us until this time next year. And 1,420 million cubic meters of gas sounds alot until you factor the UK uses around 142 million cubic meters *a day* in the summer So all that gas wouldn't even last us to the end of this month. Again we are simply discussing the difference between a two declines, one slightly shallower that the other.

Lots of "my ex next door neighbour's sister once dated an oil rig worker in the 90's and she said there was loads of oil under Glastonbury tor" I'm going to use the projection done by the oil industry on the basis that A) they know more about the potential for pip and gas extraction around the UK than anyone on this forum B) they have no vested interest in minimising potential - which is a common retort to using the NSTA figures "ah but Ed Milliband told them to lie, there is actually loads of oil left". these is the oil and gas industry low and high projections The low one is approximately (but not exactly) the NSTA "current course". So by 2035 we will produce at best, half the oil and gas we do now (ie 25% of current consumption). On current trends maybe 13% of current demand. So all the arguing is arguing over the rate of decline - steep or steeper. There is no "up" scenario. There is no going back to the late 90's when we had a surplus and became a (small) exporter The only way the UK can become less dependent on imported oil and gas is for the UK to become less dependent on oil and gas

Chesterton's Fence is very much a thing and the likes of trump, RTKjr and Hegseth have absolutely no idea what the parable means.

I'm actually not surprised. The stuff that makes a country run happens pretty invisibly most of the time. Roads get repaired, bridges inspected, food hygiene is checked, school busses organised, flu clinics set up, bins collected, planning decided etc and nobody really noticed *until* something goes wrong. Then we notice and moan about how shit it is. The civil service is like plumbing - we only think about it when it goes wrong and what is there is a confusing jumble but replacing it is a ton of cost, disruption and work and often creates entirely new problems.

The speed and simplicity of the Brexit process was legendary ...

I don't think people quite understand how vital the civil service (and to be clear there are huge areas that need improvement) is to a smoothly running country - and yes the UK is a smoothly running country on comparison to alot of countries. The US has recently gone on a civil service slashing spree. Lots of parks and environment people fired. Cutting monitoring of diseases and food standards. Huge cuts of "dei" at the pentagon. They now have raging wildfires, explosive diarrhea and salmonella outbreaks and their sailors are jumping off ships because conditions are so bad

The greens have quite an extensive program of nationalising big utilities and taxing oil companies ....

I'm really not Those graphs are from the North Sea transition authority and the absolute difference between net zero projection and "drill baby drill" is bugger all. Every single projection has long term decline. Even the most wildly optimistic oil industry projection has decline to 25% of current production over a decade. This is a good example of reading the statistics you want to see... Industry uses 10% of gas demand. On current track the UK will produce enough gas to supply only industry in a decade. If we go wild and do absolutely everything the oil industry can think of we could supply industry and others. If we go big on renewables for the grid (net zero) then the "transformation" chunk will shrink massively And if we go big on heat pumps (net zero) then the domestic but will also shrink dramatically.

"UK plc" doesn't really exist so we would need to set up a nationalised oil company with storage etc and some legal framework to define who they can and cannot sell to. Which is fine, but we'd have to do it - with all the attendant faff (parliament, setting up the structure, hiring peeps etc. And the resource is dwindling. By 2030 it will be half what it is now. And who thinks we can set up this national company by then? The time to do it would have been around 1980. just to reiterate - THERE IS NO OIL AND GAS BONANZA JUST WAITING FOR US TO CLAIM IT. Nobody, not even the oil industry thinks there is. The only people who say there is are Trump, Farage, Badenoch and their circle.

Curtailment payments also happen for gas power stations. The grid buys firm future generation. If the grid can't use it, it's not the generators fault. Likewise there are penalties for not delivering that firm generation. Imagine booking caterers for a big event and then telling them, when they turn up ready, because not as many people came or the car park is full. You'd quickly find caterers would build the cost of cancellation into their quotes and you'd never know how much it cost to do the catering because it would be muddled up with the cost of you canceling them. The grid is building out new capacity especially at the known bottlenecks. I think by 2030 alot of the current curtailment costs will fall away (though total curtailment may rise simply because of the higher renewables overalls)

I'm not certain the geophysics works like that. Some fields are interconnected across national boundaries but I don't think all are and even those that are connected aren't strongly coupled. It's not a big cave of gas or oil, more like a giant sponge where the gas and oil moves slowly - which is why we need multiple wells in one field. So if the UK doesn't extract from them nobody else can either. "Reserved for UK use only" is easy to say but hard to implement. There are no private "UK" only oil companies. They are all multinational. So you'd need to set up one specially. Then what is "uk use only" - selling to a UK refinery (assuming one is set up for the oil). What if that refinery sells abroad? What if the UK wholesaler the refinery sells to wants to sell abroad? How far down the chain do we go?

Sorry, fat thumbs.