Another Smart Meter thread.

Different local conditions in those regional energy markets, which without LNG as a transhipment method would be totally disconnected as it's impractical and/or uneconomic to run pipelines between them.

In parts of the USA, the Arabian Gulf and some South East Asian oilfields, the combination of geographic restrictions pushing up the cost of production and lack of local demand driving down the sale price in local markets makes it uneconomic to "produce" the gas which comes up with oil, so it just gets flared, unless a specific formation or well is extremely productive with sufficient demonstrated reserves to meet the payback on buying infrastructure even with that low sale price.

Elsewhere in the world, gas is so valuable that we will explore for reserves and drill wells specifically to produce gas on its own, because the demand supports those costs, and the geography supports efficient transport to gas terminals and into distribution networks via pipeline.

Connecting one of the former areas to one of the latter areas can be extremely profitable for the LNG operator, who can take most of the difference between the prices in the low and high cost regions as gross profit, by paying the producers only the minimum amount needed to make it worthwhile not to flare, whilst charging the full market rate at the destination.

There are other issues at play, but in the main LNG is the technology which has made gas production worthwhile in a number of regions where it previously wasn't.

Yeah, but LNG is a 'fossil fuel' - isn't it?

And?

Samsaranda asked me a fairly straightforward question about why things are they way they are with the energy markets are, and I answered him.

The fact that LNG is a fossil fuel seems to matter greatly to you, but it's pretty much irrelevant to the overall story.

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At the present time, the world is effectively locked in to using fossil fuels as part of the "Energy Mix" for a variety of technical and structural reasons.

In that context, anything which reduces the carbon intensity of energy in that overarching "Energy Mix" will be a positive from the perspective of reducing the overall greenhouse gas production.

I explained earlier in the thread how LNG is often sourced from gas which would otherwise be flared as a by-product of oil production (which we're locked into due to demand for petrochemicals and transport fuels).

The net result of that, is that gas which would have been burned as an inconvenience is used as a useful fuel, and the equivalent amount of gas does not need to be produced and then used elsewhere in the world, resulting in less carbon entering the atmosphere overall.

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My day job is very much concerned with reducing the carbon intensity of manufactured goods and improving the environmental performance of large process plants across the chemical, petrochemical and heavy manufacturing sectors; I have had a long involvement with Oil & Gas having worked on the E&P side early in my career and had various "Supermajors" as clients over the years...

In spite of this I have no problem with admitting the need to decarbonise the economy, and the urgency of the climate problems we're facing, nor do any of the people I worked with in the (UK) Oil industry.

At this point it's merely a question of timing when companies like Shell & BP will choose to make green energy their core business activity and wind down the petroleum side, they see the writing on the wall, but don't want to leave money on the table by going too early (like Orstead, formerly DONG Energy did), whilst balancing the risk of complete ruin if they go too late and are locked out of the new markets.

I actually couldn't care less that LNG is a fossill fuel, but with all the hysteria surrounding the use of fossil fuels, I thought I'd point out the hypocrisy. Does it matter to you that coal & oil are fossil fuels? I see that you mention this gas is normally flared, so how does that fit in with big business keeping emissions down?

The truth is that much of this gas is fracked, not flared, in the USA and it's only commercially viable to sell now that Russian gas has been removed from the loop, thus leaving much of Europe energy scarce.

The point is that if one really believes the terror stories that we're destroying the planet in that '1 minute to midnight' kind of way, then all fossil fuel use should be ended now. The fact that 'Carbon Credits' are traded by corporations and the wealthy should tell you all you need to know with regard to how seriously they take this 'crisis'.

Maybe you can give an example of genuinely clean/green technology that doesn't start & end its story 'at the tailpipe', but rather starts at the beginning and concludes at the recycling centre.

Not the way I remember it .... ex KGB, old guard and a serious future problem.

At least on this side of the pond.

But to make geothermal work they have to hydraulically fracture the rocks to let the hot water percolate. I'll go and wash my mouth out

Using terms like hysteria and hypocrisy show that Martin has already made up his mind so there's little point in explaining why he's wrong.

The human mind has two different ways of making sense of the world. One side is emotional and facts don't matter to it much: gut feel provides quick answers, no matter if they're wrong! The other is rational, which is hard work because we have to collect, filter and assess facts and evidence.

Rational thought doesn't lead to quick or comfortable answers, because the real world is complicated and nasty. Rational thought expects to get stuff wrong, and works painfully to correct mistakes. Unlike emotional thinking, rational thinkers know they might be wrong.

Emotional analysis is useful because it's quick. Attacked by a bear, it's necessary to decide what to do about it in a flash, and not to dither on ethical considerations. But provided there's time to think, rational analysis gets much better answers, perhaps deciding the best way to deal with bears is to build a fence, bury waste food, and make spears.

In other posts Martin has said he doesn't trust Authorities or the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. I conclude his view is emotional because that position requires him to ignore a great deal of evidence. Martin requires us to believe he's as likely to get the right answer as experts. Sorry Martin, but I have no faith in that.

It's hard to counter emotional beliefs. Patiently putting a lot of effort into explaining where the logic went wrong only results in the painful discovery that emotional thinkers don't care about logic. Mere facts are water off a duck's back when beliefs are emotional.

One way is to counter emotional positions is by fielding equally emotional alternatives, in hope the recipient will realise emotional thinking must be supported by more than imagination. In that vein, I assure Martin the world is being manipulated by a secret conspiracy of Women's Book Clubs. The International Sisterhood's goal is to emasculate men with woke. By banning fossil fuels males will have to stay at home and have their spirits crushed. Males who don't toe the line will be made into Beef Burgers immediately, and all males by age 40. Electric cars are just a way of fooling us into thinking escape is possible, but look out - they only travel 20 miles before the battery goes flat.

My challenge to Martin is to prove the WBC conspiracy doesn't exist. Nothing he says will convince me, because I know in my heart that it's all true...

Dave

That's a helluva imagination you got there Dave, but again, no hard facts, just another wall of made up waffle.

Martin.

What worries me is that THEY are probably having same level of discussion as this ^^^

THEY being the people who have the power, but perhaps not the wit, to determine what will be done.

As I have mentioned twice already, the voice of well-informed reason seems to be incomprehensible to them.

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MichaelG.

I couldn't agree more.

This is getting abusive, time for everyone to calm down.

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I don't know why you're challenging myself and SOD to give examples of "waste valorisation" in particular, but in no particular order:

• RenewELP Wilton International, Redcar: Hydrothermal decomposition of post-consumer plastics which are unsuitable for mechanical recycling, to produce a naptha-like hydrocarbon blend which is then fed to another plant on the Wilton complex to replace "Fossil" petrochemicals.
• Recycling Technologies, Swindon: Similar premis to RenewELP (plastics waste to useful chemicals) but a different technology, have been focused on minturising the process into modular containers, so it can be installed at any site which needs the chemical feedstocks it produces, to recycle local plastic waste there.
• OCO Technologies, Leeds, Brandon, & Avonmouth: First commercial implementation of a technology using carbon dioxide from flue-gas to treat incinerator bottom ash and hazardous wastes from metal refining to produce a synthetic limestone material and insulated building blocks
• Carbon8, Projects Worldwide: Technology licencing company behind the technology used by OCO Technologies, run by the two University of Greenwich Professors who developed the technology, when I was last chatting to them they had been working on making the technology applicable to waste from Cement Kilns and Oil Refineries, to open up additional places where they can set up self-contained carbon capture units to reduce or eliminate emissions, whilst making useful products. I believe they've run successful trial plants with several steel mills in Germany and three cement kilns over two different continents.
• Croda, Ditton: Croda generally is ahead of the curve on "green" products because their original and core business is based on oleochemicals (plant and animal derived hydrocarbon chemistry). Specifically at Ditton, they have closed down an older plant which processed fishmeal at high temperatures to produce oils which were then used in high pressure reactions with hazardous chemicals, and pioneered new bioreactor technology to allow them to scale up to producing the same products as the old plant at near enough room temperature, by bacterial fermentation of flour milling waste followed by purification using a closed loop so even waste-water production is minimised.

I could go on but I would be starting to get into projects which aren't fully in the public domain, or where I've signed NDA's but it's been some time so I'm not clear what the exact line between "Stuff we've used in PR so it's fine to repeat" and "Commercially Confidential or Material Non-Public Information" is with it.

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You've made a very sensible insightful point and a very silly one side by side here...

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The first part of that paragraph is the bit i find silly, (and I think you know that you're using a reductio ad absurdum fallacy to imply we should simply do nothing), because:

"The point is that if one really believes the terror stories that we're destroying the planet in that '1 minute to midnight' kind of way, then all fossil fuel use should be ended now."

With all the specific language around climate removed can be paraphrased to:

"If one believes that there is a pending crisis which will put the future of humanity at risk in the next 50 years if we don't start to make meaningful changes towards averting it now... Then one should immediately flip a switch which will bring civilisation crashing down around us, but also stop the other crisis from happening 50 years hence"

We have to have a managed transition, to avoid social impacts of a similar order of magnitude to those threatened by global warming in the future, right now; that's not hypocrisy, just common sense.

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However, I do agree (and a lot of green lobbyists and serious thinkers on decarbonisation would as well) that carbon credits are liable to exploitation and manipulation like any other tradable instrument, and are less effective than more straightforward measures like a direct tax on emissions.

There's definitely a lack of political will to act on something more straightforward which would reduce the ways to reduce the cost, and opportunities for green carpet-bagging.

Edited By Jelly on 13/11/2022 19:30:51

[Continued from above due to character limit]

With regards to flaring, they're businesses, which exist to make money and will do whatever is most profitable.

I think the practice of flaring gas is wasteful and hard to justify on a moral or technical level (although if the gas is coming up anyway, better that it is flared than just released as Methane with 10x greater global warming potential), but my opinions aren't going to change anything about the cold hard cash element which drives these businesses.

This is especially so because many of the producers (outside the USA) who are still actively flaring are State Oil Companies in low-middle income countries, which ALWAYS have a desperate need to maximise oil revenues, because they're propping up the economy of a whole country on their own.

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More generally I must say that I don't understand what this supposed hypocrisy you keep referring to is meant to be; if you have something to say, say it rather than dancing around the point.

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It's true that there is significant shale-gas (and shale-oil) production in the US especially in the Permian, and it has been somewhat vulnerable to price fluctuations, but it's definitely not "only commercially viable to sell because of Russia".

Shale gas is part of the story of how the US has managed to suppress gas prices locally relative to other markets, whilst the widespread commercial failures of operators (which was focused on the Permian basin area again) was the result of a lot of small "mom and pop" E&P operators seeing an opportunity to grow by drilling new wells, and over-leveraging their businesses with high cost finance, with no financial cushion in place to account for a potential decline in demand; then experiencing a huge drop in demand due to the Pandemic.

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In any case in this kind of context "Fracked" is something of a meaningless term... almost every active offshore well on the UKCS and in the Norwegian Sector will either have been fracked already, or will be fracked in its lifetime...

It's a process with nearly 40 years under it's belt, which was entirely uncontroversial for most of that time until a small number of greedy people started doing it inappropriately close to important groundwater aquifers to make ever smaller onshore wells viable.

The problem with fracking was never the process itself, but a combination of greed, inadequate regulation, worse enforcement, absent corporate ethics, and below par geological work.