Think it's Time to Start Drilling

Australia is one of the leading adopters of solar power, it has over 40GW of installed power. It has the highest uptake of domestic and commercial rooftop solar of pretty much any country in ther world. The pavillion at the Adelaide Showground is literally classed as a power station due to the 1GW of panels on the roof.

As far as the UK is concerned, it's a cloudy overcast day here and we are still producing 5% of our load from solar, and 50% overall from renewables (mostly wind).

It's always interesting to keep an eye on the UK's power generation, and an eye opener for those who have been led to believe that renewables do not contribute significantly to the UK power supply using this dashboard: https://grid.iamkate.com/

Yes, Australia is doing very well out of shipping millions of tons of coal to China for their power stations.

The Scottish gov was going to ban coal use for homes but then couldn’t because of the handful of people not on mains gas who relied on it for heating - I mean why would you effing bother - but people fall for this environmental bs.

Yep - my siblings in Oz wet themselves laughing at the UK going green - how much sun do they have and solar is really not even considered as viable!!

The U.K. going green isn’t going to change anything.
Have you visited spacious countries like the US or Australia. Everyone needs a car as everything is so spaced out- cycling to bus stops is not an option .Distances are huge. You barely get buses even in cities.
While we destroy our economy they aren’t going to change for decades. Why would they, they have cheap oil and gas. We might heat our little homes with air source heat pumps - but that will hardly work where winter temps are -16C.
We are being sold a pup and all the subsidies going to Chinese wind turbine builders aren’t going to our nhs or welfare payments

Nuclear power plants are the answer - people don’t want to hear that though!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining

Interesting article on Uranium mining, where it comes from and whether we would be able to get enough Uranium to fuel these monster plants into the future.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_mix_in_France.svg#/media/File:Energy_mix_in_France.svg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_mix_of_UK.svg#/media/File:Energy_mix_of_UK.svg

France Land Area : About 630,000 km2

England and Wales Land Area (as Scotland will probably not let us build any plants) : About 150,000 km2.

France gets about 30% of its power from 18 plants, so the guess that we would need 32 3.2GW HPCs to fully decarbonise doesn't look too far out (we could probably mitigate this with some renewables with a consequent effect on the baseload capability).

The two countries populations/power requirements are comparable. So we would need to build the same number of plants in 1/4 of the space. Nuclear plants of course have to go where there is significant water supply. In this country that means the coast. I could do a map with 32 red dots on it showing what the UK would look like with this number of plants, but I guess you would get the picture.

Building 32 plants. At the moment it is taking us about 10 years per plant. Even if we could double that to 5 years per plant it is still going to take 150 years to build them all.

These plants create a lot of waste. Yes the high level waste is a relatively small component of that, but the medium and low level waste also needs to be handled very carefully and stored somewhere.

Geological depositories are expensive and risky. See this and the mess that was created :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

The TLDR is that converting to nuclear from fossil fuels is either going to take a long time or be hugely expensive. Probably both. The faster we try to do it, the even more expensive it is going to get.

It's a huge problem if we intend to decarbonise, which is made even worse by the rate at which we are a) not building plants and b) not building enough of any infrastructure to replace fossil fuels, or c) ramping down fossil fuels in a more sustainable way than currently.

That is what I meant: "no new licences", not that old licences were rescinded. Drilling under old licences can continue, as can types of contiguous drilling. Sorry if unclear. The point stands that failing to develop gas on climate grounds, in favour of new wind+storage, is a very expensive way to reach net zero. Because much more for the environment could be done for the same cost with a different policy, environmentalists who care about outcomes should support a change of policy.

Ahhh another one suckered in by the media line!

There definitely is drilling on the go. What the govt has said is no new licence blocks rounds. Licence block rounds were for the exploration and potential development (not a given it actually would be developed). Anything which was included in previous licence rounds or already a operator licence is fair game though and can be applied to be developed if seismic data shows its viable. That is not the same as no new drilling at all.

This isn’t how it works. The govt grants licences, it doesn’t sell fields. The mineral rights belong to the crown.

New unexplored gas fields haven’t been licenced to anyone, because this govt isn’t issuing new-gas licences.

If you think it’s important to reduce foreign involvement in our gas production, they could be licenced to UK firms.

True.

New gas takes about 4-7 years. New offshore wind about 10-15 years.

Even if you wanted 100% wind (I don’t), there’s a time lag where we will be reliant on gas because of those long lead times. Why prefer foreign gas over domestic in that period?

It also takes years to get one on the go. And millions.
there’s also different types of oil. So ours isn’t suitable for some stuff

We sold our fields off. It’s not ours anymore

The commercial demand is there. The reason there is no new drilling is becuase this government isn’t issuing new licences.

We need serious investment into solar panels for all buildings that are suitable. Air pumps for others suitable. So homes are not reliant on oil and gas providers. Electric cars should be cheaper too.

Not nearly enough. The entire infrastructure of the grid needs to change, and we already pay the highest energy bills. Remember Spains blackout last year and the instability of the German grid.

i wonder if those saying “just drill” are actually too young to remember thatcher.
its the only thing I can think of, as the reason to they don’t know that she sold it off.

We have the most expensive industrial energy in the OECD.

If that’s doing pretty well, what would doing badly look like?

We already do pretty well with renewables, if you weren’t aware

@LoftyPlumLion
Yes, replying to you becuase you said it “made no sense” to try to do the best we can towards these two goals, separately if needed. Then you changed to say it was a “pointless statement”.

But if we agree on those goals then I think I have a chance of persuading you that it’s not pointless at all to think about these two things separately. And that doing so gets us better results on both.

That’s because the UK is a very expensive place to decarbonise (becuase we are an expensive country and are already quite carbon efficient).

If we spent the money we currently spend on UK wind+storage transition on the most efficient decarbonisation projects we can find, wherever they are globally, we would remove far more carbon.

Why wouldn’t that be preferable?

O&G in the UK is taxed hugely both at production and at sale. That is carried by consumers. But because energy is such an important input into virtually all economic activity, those high costs do a huge amount of damage, eg via CoL.

Split these two problems out and both can be solved better.

Are you replying to the right person? Not sure anything I’ve said disagrees with any of that.

with any tax and spend policy decision however there are always winners and losers. I am comfortable that the oil companies are the losers (and yes that includes investors and pension funds)

France generates 2/3rd of its total electricity with 18 nuclear power plants. It’s doable. And their total electricity use is 30% more than ours because they are more electrified.

Most O&G usage in the UK isn’t for electricity (as you say). We will continue to electrify, but not overnight. We should have started with nuclear decades ago (or not stopped), but the second-best time to start is now.

Nuclear has the lowest carbon footprint of any known energy source.

3% of nuclear waste is of the lasts-for-centuries variety, the volume is small, and there is scientific consensus on the solution (very deep burial). There are suitable UK sites (Cumbria). It’s a local planning system problem, essentially.

Nuclear isn’t problem-free, obviously, but the alternatives are significantly worse. At least if you think the priority should be cheap, low-carbon energy.

What I’d like to persuade you of is this:

1. carbon reduction matters, a lot. We are on an unsustainable path becuase of tipping-point effects. Therefore, when setting carbon policies we should try to maximise the amount of carbon reduction, within the constraints of the budget that our political system allows us.

2. that prosperity matters, a lot. Caring about cost-of-living is not some grubby selfish thing. Reducing costs for people allows them to live better lives, and reducing costs for business helps our economy create jobs, which for most people is a core part of what they value and how they make their living. Therefore we should try to maximise prosperity, within the limits that the sustainability of our planet sets.

If I can persuade you of both of the above, then the question just becomes a data one: which policies achieves these best.

Are you with me so far?

Appreciate the insight in these posts

no i'll change my position, the words good and cost effective are doing so much heavy lifting it is just a pointless statement