Why we need "Net zero"

[saveasteading]

13 hours ago, Mattg4321 said:

Let them try and extract it if they want. 

Do you know if they "want"?

Do you know where it would be processed and into what products?

 

It is my impression that they don't "want", and that the product would go to South America to make fertiliser.

 

But I'm here to learn.

[Roger440]

2 hours ago, JohnMo said:

I have just signed up for a virtual power plant scheme - doing my bit and getting paid for it.  For those not aware when grid is in short supply they pull on your battery and 100/1000s of others. Taking a few kWh and pay me £1 per kWh. Expect to receive £10 a month minimum - but will see how it goes. If anyone wants a referral and get £25 credit to there account send me a message.

First ive heard of it.

 

£1 a kWh? Why isnt everone with batteries doing it?

[SteamyTea]

40 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

£1 a kWh? Why isnt everone with batteries doing it?

The price would drop to 3p/kWh if they did.

[JohnMo]

57 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

First ive heard of it.

 

£1 a kWh? Why isnt everone with batteries doing it?

I only stumbled across it at the weekend, think the schemes have been running a year or so.

 

18 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

The price would drop to 3p/kWh if they did.

Not convinced by that statement, but the £1 per kWh is in addition to the normal export rate you get from the utility company. So my real rate is £1.12 per kWh.  If they lowered the pay out much, the advantages start to disappear and people drop out of the scheme. 

[Mattg4321]

3 hours ago, saveasteading said:

Do you know if they "want"?

Do you know where it would be processed and into what products?

 

It is my impression that they don't "want", and that the product would go to South America to make fertiliser.

 

But I'm here to learn.

If the oil producers/exploration companies are not interested then fair enough. In that case though, why bother banning it

[Mattg4321]

3 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

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. 

There’s no benefit to the treasury then?
 

And no potential to increase our energy security. 

[saveasteading]

47 minutes ago, Mattg4321 said:

why bother banning it

I don't think it is banned so much as it is no longer within the energy strategy.

 

And with refineries bring closed and dismantled... by the oil companies... it seems terminal.

[Mattg4321]

13 minutes ago, saveasteading said:

I don't think it is banned so much as it is no longer within the energy strategy.

 

And with refineries bring closed and dismantled... by the oil companies... it seems terminal.

 

No longer within the energy strategy is another way of saying banned. It's banned in corporate speak. Why say one word when you can say 10.

 

Here's an excerpt from Labour's 2024 manifesto

 

"We will not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis. In addition, we will not grant new coal licences and will ban fracking for good."

 

It's banned. By the government who think they know best. Ideology before reality always.

 

If you try to issue new licenses and nobody wants them, then fair enough. But banning is different.

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, Mattg4321 said:

There’s no benefit to the treasury then?

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. 

 

1 hour ago, Mattg4321 said:

And no potential to increase our energy security. 

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. 

[Gone West]

3 hours ago, JohnMo said:

I only stumbled across it at the weekend, think the schemes have been running a year or so.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/london-pioneers-first-virtual-power-station

 

Looks like it started around six years ago.

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, Mattg4321 said:

We will not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis. In addition, we will not grant new coal licences and will ban fracking for good."

 

It's banned. By the government who think they know best. Ideology before reality always.

 

If you try to issue new licenses and nobody wants them, then fair enough. But banning is different.

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. 

[JohnMo]

This thread hasn't been making much sense the wording proven reserves. It has defined meaning which doesn't include a whole bunch of oil and gas we know is in the ground.

 

What isn't included 

 

Proved Undeveloped (PUD)

If the well was drilled to test the reservoir (an appraisal well) and then capped, but bringing it to full production requires a significant capital investment—such as building a new platform, installing subsea pipelines, or drilling additional production wells—it can still be called a Proved Undeveloped reserve. However, it can only be called a proven reserve if the company has a formally approved, commercially viable Field Development Plan (FDP) and a firm commitment to fund and produce it within a reasonable timeframe (typically 5 years).

 

So there are plenty of wells that fit category. The wells may be sour or heavy oil, so at the time not developed further due to low oil price, technology etc. I was involved with development of a reservoir 20 years ago, the oil is still in the ground, the production path was not implemented at that point. So is classed as proved undeveloped - it had a 10 year design life with initial flow of 40k barrels a day. I know of quite a few similar - none are included in the graphs that keep being presented on this thread.

[Mattg4321]

What's the point in continuing this discussion when you've got people looking at £5-10 BILLION and saying nah not worth it!

 

Don't think there is much, so I'm out.

[Roger440]

2 hours ago, Mattg4321 said:

What's the point in continuing this discussion when you've got people looking at £5-10 BILLION and saying nah not worth it!

 

Don't think there is much, so I'm out.

 

Reasoning with people wedded to an ideology is indeed pointless.

[Beelbeebub]

2 hours ago, Mattg4321 said:

What's the point in continuing this discussion when you've got people looking at £5-10 BILLION and saying nah not worth it!

 

Don't think there is much, so I'm out.

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. 

[Beelbeebub]

7 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

 

Reasoning with people wedded to an ideology is indeed pointless.

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. 

 

😁 

[Beelbeebub]

2 hours ago, JohnMo said:

This thread hasn't been making much sense the wording proven reserves. It has defined meaning which doesn't include a whole bunch of oil and gas we know is in the ground.

 

What isn't included 

 

Proved Undeveloped (PUD)

If the well was drilled to test the reservoir (an appraisal well) and then capped, but bringing it to full production requires a significant capital investment—such as building a new platform, installing subsea pipelines, or drilling additional production wells—it can still be called a Proved Undeveloped reserve. However, it can only be called a proven reserve if the company has a formally approved, commercially viable Field Development Plan (FDP) and a firm commitment to fund and produce it within a reasonable timeframe (typically 5 years).

 

So there are plenty of wells that fit category. The wells may be sour or heavy oil, so at the time not developed further due to low oil price, technology etc. I was involved with development of a reservoir 20 years ago, the oil is still in the ground, the production path was not implemented at that point. So is classed as proved undeveloped - it had a 10 year design life with initial flow of 40k barrels a day. I know of quite a few similar - none are included in the graphs that keep being presented on this thread.

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. 

 

[JohnMo]

But we have also had a decade not even looking for it, because what's the point. They just get push back fron further developments. So it's all a wasted discussion 

[saveasteading]

2 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

it's all a wasted discussion

It's not. If nothing else I'm learning that lots of intelligent people listen to and are swayed by the implistic publicity that we can drill and solve everything.

[Beelbeebub]

22 hours ago, JohnMo said:

I only stumbled across it at the weekend, think the schemes have been running a year or so.

 

Not convinced by that statement, but the £1 per kWh is in addition to the normal export rate you get from the utility company. So my real rate is £1.12 per kWh.  If they lowered the pay out much, the advantages start to disappear and people drop out of the scheme. 

Could you dm some details? 

[Beelbeebub]

4 hours ago, saveasteading said:

It's not. If nothing else I'm learning that lots of intelligent people listen to and are swayed by the implistic publicity that we can drill and solve everything.

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. 

[Beelbeebub]

4 hours ago, JohnMo said:

But we have also had a decade not even looking for it, because what's the point. They just get push back fron further developments. So it's all a wasted discussion 

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. 

[SteamyTea]

One of the things I learnt, when doing my teacher training, is about breaking down the student's 'mental models'.

This is an interesting area and crops up in everyday life all the time.

Just yesterday, I was having a coffee with Simone and we got talking about cars. Her husband likes to renovate and show old Fords. The conversation moved onto EVs. She stated that they take hours to recharge, catch fire and the batteries only last a few years.  Asking where she got this information from, her reply was "my mechanic".

There is no way she will be convinced otherwise as all she has ever known is a petrol engines car.

 

This is, in part, why we have legislation to force change. Now there is always a risk that bad legislation gets passed, setting off a chain of unexpected consequences i.e. CFC, leaded fuels, the right to bear arms, and there will always be cheaters, but generally, legislation is well thought through and enforced.

 

The term 'Net Zero's has been, what we now call, weaponised. This is just (expletive deleted)ing bonkers.

All that is happening is that we are transitioning our energy sources to a more controllable systems.