Think it's Time to Start Drilling

Yes. This whole climate hoax needs to be put to bed.

Bit of a waste of time if wars are being waged. The huge environmental damage caused surely negates anything we can do as a populace.

I am very concerned about climate change and environmental issues generally, but I’ve been listening to some interviews with Kathryn Porter (energy consultant) which have been quite eye opening. I would recommend having a listen to hear her views on this subject.

No, we need to move forward not back.

Good luck selling any O+G licences that have a clause in them saying 'you must only sell in the UK, and at a price to be determined by the UK government'.

The only way that could be done is by setting up a state-owned O+G company, as Norway and KSA have done.

Fundamentally increasing drilling in the north sea won't bring down oil or energy prices.

If a politician claims that it will then that shows him to be an unscrupulous liar, or a fool

The UK is 30 years too late to establish a Norwegian like policy it would have to start a long time ago as the production levels are in decline so it would quickly become obsolete.

The windfall tax is hammering UK operations though and the supply chain as a result. Its well catalogued.

Energy policy unfortunately becomes political football rather then what's needed which is balance and investment.

@randomchap It's really not that simple.
I am sure it isn't but if we had better politicians in charge we could get something done instead they shrug and say 'it's too difficult'.

It's really not that simple

But it could for us if we put that clause in our contracts.
The British oil fields are very highly taxed already. So we don't give it away.
Norway manages things better.

What happens when there is no sun or wind ?

Do we all just walk home and shiver in the dark for a couple of days ?

Wind and solar are to some degree complimentary (which is why we should be installing a lot more solar) but can't be relied on for all our electricity generation.

Basically at the moment gas is the swing producer in our electricity generation profile which makes up for the shortfall for when there is no wind.

We are reaching the limits now that when wind is producing at maximum capacity we cannot reduce the gas much more (it goes down to close to zero). What that means is as we add more and more wind, we are going to increasingly get situations where we are paying producers to produce electricity we can't use, but we still have to have enough gas generation capacity to generate a significant proportion of our electricity use when wind and solar generation drops to zero.

So the answer to this ? Storage maybe. But storage is horribly expensive. Add storage into the cost of wind/solar generation it starts to look a lot less attractive. But it is essential to do this if you are going to compare different sources both in terms of cost per MW generation and quality of supply.

And this is part of the problem with costing energy from various sources, because it is so much of a political football, proponents are happy to forget or leave out secondary costs such as this. For example nuclear costs rarely seem to factor in the waste processing costs and the dismantling, not that they could really be known, because after 50 years we still haven't figured out what to do with our first lots of nuclear waste yet in terms of long term storage, and Sellafield cleanup costs are looking in the region of tens of billions.

Electricity is linked to the price of gas

https://lumifyenergy.com/blog/why-is-the-cost-of-electricity-fixed-to-the-price-of-gas/

Drilling in the North Sea won't reduce the price of oil. It will just mean oil companies get richer as they will sell the oil at the worldwide market price.

If you want to bring down your electricity bill, we need to build powerstations which generate electricity far cheaper than oil or gas burning ones do. The cheapest form of power generation you can build today is an offshore wind followed by onshore wind and solar generation. Build more of those and the price should reduce.

A lot. Those figures don't look unreasonable.

But whether anyone likes it or not oil is a finite resource. A lot of North Sea oil fields are played out. Yes you can get more oil out via various EOR techniques but at the end of the day the currently exploited fields are in decline and are not going to go on forever, so at some point we are going to have to transition to some sort of renewable/nuclear power whether we like it or not.

I am not arguing that we should stop installing renewables or exploiting oil, but there should be a more gradual transition than what is proposed currently. Using EOR on current fields, and exploiting the best of the untapped field resources we have is to me the best way of managing the transition to renewables while keeping the prices down to something more acceptable to the public and business. At the same time yes we should be investing in wind and nuclear to slowly build up the renewable capability (we are doing OK with wind at the moment, but solar and nuclear could do with more of a boost).

Peoples brains seem to short circuit at these sorts of proposals though. Either they are climate zealots who won't be satisfied until we end all fossil fuels and drive ourselves into the poorhouse while screwing up our energy resiliance, or die hards who believe fossil fuels are the only alternative and would rather keep drilling, ignoring the fact that at some point in the future the resources are going to run out (not to mention severely affecting the planet).

Unfortunately short term populist politics doesn't do balance. It pandas to whatever the public wants at this point in time and ignores the long term consequences in terms of resiliance and cost in energy policy. All parties on the political spectrum are equally guilty of this - energy policy has become a short term political football rather than sensible long term planning. And it has that great characteristic of having long term consequences through lack of action now. So governments can ignore proper planning in the short term while being confident they aren't going to be around to reap the consequences.

Truly a crisis of (short term) democracy.

"We" don't own any oil. Unless you are speaking on behalf of Shell or BP. North sea oil is extracted by private companies who sell on the international markets - they certainly aren't going to give you a discount because you happen to be British.

Gosh, I remember the Government and others telling Scottish voters that there was very nothing left. One of the reasons that Scotland could not be independent during the referendum!
Amazing it must have regenerated🤣

How many billions do you think creating off shore wind farms will cost? The government can’t just print money, can it? Plus it would take decades to put in place. Great for long term planning but bugger all use to us today, this year, next year, is it?

Google AI is not necessarily accurate but it suggests we’d need £50-80bn to build sufficient wind turbines to proved 50% of the UK power needs, and a further £60bn to update the UK connected infrastructure over 5 years to access the power produced. So in excess of £100bn, whilst we are scrabbling around of the government’s sofas for money to fund SEN, the NHS and upgrade our defence system given there is a war lurking in the background of all this debate.

The rigs are already in place in the NorthSea. They just need the licences that allow them to start the drills up again to be granted.

China is still building coal plants though - the pragmatic approach of realising that it has to wind down fossil fuels sustainably rather than just stopping them altogether while simultaneoulsy ramping up renewables.

There is plenty of room to generate all of the UKs electricity from offshore wind, even assuming a 30% capacity factor.

What it would do though is generate horrible baseload problem. When the wind blows we would produce massive amounts of electricity we couldn't use, and when it doesn't we wouldn't have any.

Mitigating these effects with storage is hugely expensive, which is why all the storage projects are a drop in the ocean compared with dealing with the actual problem.

This kind of thinking is why China is (quite rightly) going to win the race for the future. Insane to carry on drilling when the cost of renewables is already lower, and has the bonus of true energy independence, clean air, etc etc.

(irony alert 👉) Hell yeah, let's invade Norway while we're at it, and have theirs too! 🤦

Invest in renewables. Curse the fact that we scrapped our nuclear power.

This ^ accessing the oil is the tricky, expensive and time consuming bit. As I understand it (DH works in this area), the volume of oil has never been in question but whether it is economically viable is another. Don't believe the Trump-ian, Farage et al rhetoric. They don't know what they are talking about.

(Also, we are a windy, wet island we should be able to increase our use of renewable quite easily!).

No. Now is the time to invest in the huge reserves of wind and water power we have. Madness not to.

If the ‘renewables available now’ were sufficient and cheap to roll out, we wouldn't be so sensitive to global oil prices, would we? We’re a small island, with an expanding population, so there is a limit to how many wind and solar farms we can accommodate, as well as how readily we can build them given the costs [billions] involved, lack of trained UK staff to design and build them, and the reliance on importing essential components.

We need to both drill and work towards a hybrid energy model. But it will take decades to get there in this economic climate. All too little too late.