Friday 29 March 2013

Offshore Fracking and North Sea Regulations

An interesting development that demonstrates in some of the poor decision making by the coalition and the challenge of financing all in one.

Trapoil, a real tiddler of a North Sea explorer, has made a big fanfare about starting to do off-shore fracking in the North Sea. Regular readers will know how immensely keen we are here on fracking for gas and oil  as it has the potential to solve our long-term energy needs in a way that wind farms simply won't.

And so to do it off-shore, all the better. However, since 2011 the North Sea has been a complete disaster zone for finance. George Osborne's tax raid inflicted massive damage on tall the smaller AIM listed oil companies that had moved in to replace the majors. Even the majors cut back on investment and since then falls in oil production have held down UK GDP and caused a double dip recession.

Now there are some hints at changes to the rules and regulations which will allow a better shot at exploration. But there is another problem that has reared its head and that is as the big deposits are all discovered, the smaller companies are not having such a good strike rate with their prospective drilling.

This means that the banks who used to lend to the companies are quite sceptical about lending more money, plus of course they are in financial difficulties themselves and much more risk averse to high risk lending than they were. Prior to 2008/10 Lloyds was the largest lender to the companies in the region and of course now this is one of the banks in the worst condition.

So whilst it is great that the Coalition Government are now looking to change the DECC rules to try and encourage the sector, it is only after two very deep self-inflicted wounds have been taken. It's a long way back from here and I doubt North Sea production is going to recover in time to boost the economy before the election.


7 comments:

dex said...

Have Trapoil just bought the interests of another north sea minnow, their name escapes me but the acreage on their website is almost identical to them, in particular the plan to develop the lybster field using deviated wells from an onshore pad.

CityUnslicker said...

Trapoil ahave been heavily tipped to me, but I have not looked into them much. If I get the time I will do a trading post on them this week.

Site web maroc said...

il faut bouger un peu ,il faut chercher partout pour arriver à un but très précis, il ne faut se faire un relâche ou bien chercher des textes sans aucun but, mais comme ce changement que je dévoile à l'encontre de cette recherche bien faite.

referencement maroc said...

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