Wednesday 2 November 2011

UK SHALE GAS BREAKING NEWS


Am hearing that he report onto the Shale Gas drilling by Caudrilla in Blackpool has concluded that the fraccing did cause the minor earthquakes. This will be a big setback for Shale Gas drilling in the UK as politicians will reach for nurse and decide this is a bad thing.

No one will care that the US fraccing happens all the time, or that one of my small shares, AST.L has just confirmed a commercial well in Slovenia after fraccing.

I hate it when the green, lets-all-live-in-caves-off-the-warmth-of-our-love-for-each-other brigade get a win.

Sigh. One can only hope that DECC have some brains and that instead it will only be this area that is reviewed.....

12 comments:

Pogo said...

Firstly, who did the report and how disinterested were they?

Second, so what? The "tremors" were so minor that nobody actually noticed (they might, possibly, have thought that it was a truck driving past outside). Mining used to cause far more surface damage and subsidence yet this was managed quite effectively for many years.

I find it utterly inconceivable that the country is likely to be denied access to massive amounts of relatively cheap energy just because our government is too fucking stupid to recognise politically-motivated green wibble for what it really is!

Nick Drew said...

If (and it's a big if) the amount of gas in place is as big as they say, in the long run nothing will stand in its way - and in the meantime it ain't going anywhere !

(@ current prices, 200 trillion cu ft is worth ONE TRILLION POUNDS)

however ludicrous it will be if there is major delay, we can afford to sit back and wait

I suspect, however, that the money will talk: it usually does

and if we are in for really hard times in the next few years (did I say 'if' ..??) it will talk sooner rather than later

Mr Ecks said...

Citations please:Which report?

If this is the British Geological Survey piece-

A It is 2-3 weeks old and it is not any sort of definitive, researched document.
B It does not, as I understand it, say it IS because of shale gas--it sort of vaguely thinks it might be.

Again, which report please?.

Sebastian Weetabix said...

I think the odd 2.0 tremor is a measly price to pay for 400 years of domestic energy security (I don't suppose anyone remembers anymore the coal mining disasters, the subsidence and the early deaths of hundreds of thousands from soot particulates causing lung diseases). Once Huhne finally gets done for attempting to dodge his speeding ticket someone sensible can be put in his place.

Osborne has been making encouraging noises about not moving faster than anyone else on "carbon emissions" (Grrr! On the basis that CO2 is "carbon" you might as well call water "oxygen" but of course carbon is black and sooty unlike a vital plant fertiliser which is the foundation of life on earth) so hopefully sanity will prevail and the dozy limp dumbs and the greens will be told to f*** off back to the troglodytic caves they would like the rest of us to inhabit.

Sebastian Weetabix said...

Mr Ecks:
http://www.cuadrillaresources.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Final_Report_Bowland_Seismicity_02-11-11.pdf

released today.

Electro-Kevin said...

I agree entirely with Nick's comment.

And when I said - in an earlier post - that "If we don't get it then the Chinese will."

I meant it in this sense:

They will put us under such financial pressure that we will have no choice but to extract the stuff under their terms.

We are going to have to experience severe austerity before the motivation is there to throw the greens off our backs.

Judging by what is happening in Greece that won't be too long now.

Some white and blue collar rioting in Britain should put the shits up the sixth formers who run this country.

Anonymous said...

Why isn't Huhne doing jail time yet?

rwendland said...

If you read the Caudrilla report, you'll see that these Blackpool tremors are astonishingly exceptional for fraccing. To hit these on an exploratory mission does not bode well:

"Over the past decades, experience gained from mapping hundreds of hydraulic fracture treatments ... has shown that seismic events induced by these fracture treatments normally have a magnitude much lower than 0 on the Richter scale. ... in rare cases, events with magnitude up to 0.8ML have been detected. ... There are only two documented cases of a hydro-frac treatment causing events up to magnitude 1.9 ML and 2.8 MD, respectively ... The seismic events observed after two treatments in the Preese Hall well [(magnitudes 2.3 and 1.5 and 48 much weaker events] are therefore quite exceptional. ... The observed events are already 2 orders of magnitude
stronger than normally observed from hydraulic fracturing induced seismicity"

purplepangolin said...

Also from the report:

In this report. the probable mechanism of the events is described based on a careflul technical analysis of all
available data. It will be shown that many factors coincided to induce these seismic events. which are
unusual for stimulation treatments. Since the chance for any single factor to occur is small, the combined
probability of a repeat occunence of a fracture induced seismic event with similar magnitude is quite low.

diogenes said...

why not let the protestors pay the highest possible energy charges in the market while letting the frakking go ahead!

That sounds fair and reasonable to me.

CityUnslicker said...

depends if the media run with death gas will turn blackppol into atlantis.

Although the gas won't go away, the sooner we get it the sooner we can dispense with the windfarm and nuke nonsense.

rwendland said...

The Caudrilla CEO was on C4 News last night, and he didn't come across as certain as those that are interpreting the report to say there will be no further magnitude 2 events. He said: "using our early detection system ... no possibility of having a bigger event than what we saw and we really should be able to prevent those".

As the shale field is so large, I don't understand why they don't give up on the Blackpool rig, which is obviously in a particularly bad geological spot, and try somewhere else in the shale which hopefully has better geomechanical conditions.