British Steel [2]: where IS *Immingham*?

As recounted here before, in every energy co I worked for I always took every sensible opportunity to visit the plant - and make my staff do the same.  In an intrinsically physical business, a decent first-hand understanding of the hardware, the people that operate it, and the issues they must deal with, is IMHO damn' important for every one of a multitude of reasons.  (That includes getting the most and the best out of those folks on a sustained and sustainable basis, BTW.) 

With that as one's attitude, one quickly gets to share the disdain of the folks at the plant for those who treat the industrial nitty-gritty as something rather alien that happens somewhere, who-knows-quite-where, but in any case a long way from London & the Home Counties.  Is "Teeside" on the River Tee, perhaps?  It is in this spirit that over the past few days I have caught two different broadcasters offering the following couple of gems:

    "Scunthorpe get its raw materials** from somewhere called Immingham ..."

    "... the port of Immingham, in the North East of England"

That would be, errr, the second largest port by tonnage in the UK - wherever this obscure place might actually be.  Finally and at last, today I heard "... from Immingham, 20 miles to the East".  A simple and correct relativistic formulation which absolves them from knowing where either town actually is.  

Of course it's also somewhat rich to hear Greens and progressives of the non-labourist ilk eulogising belatedly over retaining a domestic, coal-fuelled virgin steel manufacturing capability, for building all that wonderful Net Zero kit, new houses etc etc, doncha know?  Well yes, here at C@W and its BTL friends, we always did know.  Pig-ignorant metro-gits.

ND

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** I swear the whole weekend went past without that convenient blanket euphemism "raw materials" being explicated as dirty old iron ore and COAL 

Coal: Guardian Speak With Forked Tongue (again)

Needless to say, the lower headline, 'coal on the way out', applies to the USA.  It would apply to most of Europe, too.  But there it stops.  It's the top item that matters, of course, if anyone's counting.  Which I'm not sure they are.

By the way, although da kidz may not wish to hear this during their school strikes, one of the 'ways they could save the planet' (bottom right) would be to stop online computer gaming.  That's now using so much energy globally, special data centres are being built for it, similar to bitcoin mining.  (And as for FB etc ...)

ND

Chilling Developments in China ...

... in more ways than one.

Firstly, the literal chill that has set in since the new "Xi Jinping Thought" was rolled out, including making China "beautiful" and, errr, less lethal to anyone depending on breathing for their existence.  This of course means switching off coal-fired power stations - not for reasons of CO2 emissions, about which they care little or perhaps nothing, but for reasons of outright air pollution.

I know exactly what you're thinking

Well of course this means people now freeze: and industry periodically suffers power shortages, too.   It also means the coal switch-off is more of an "on-off" and is being reversed whenever things get too bad (for industry, that is: people can put on another blanket) - which BTW is playing havoc in the coal and gas markets.  GDP trumps not only GHG, but pollution as well.

Yes, unless you are the USA or the UK with plenty of gas-fired capacity, phasing out coal is pretty damn' difficult, as Germany illustrates all too clearly.

But we know all this.  Back to China: what's more interesting to me is that "Freeze" article linked to above, from Greenpeace.  It makes extensive use of complaints aired on Chinese social media, which have evidently dodged the Great Firewall.

But for how long?  Read here and here about how China intends to institute a comprehensive monitoring / ranking / stick-and-carrot-consequences system controlling its citizens' every thought and action, very much based on the ubiquity of social meejah.  How many "Social Credit System" brownie-points will be deducted when you post about how the heating won't work?

The first of those two pieces is a definite must-read for the weekend.  Lots of politicians much closer to home than Beijing will be following Chinese Social Credit developments with *interest*.  Chilling?  Oh yes, very chilling indeed.

ND 

Say After Me: GDP Trumps GHG ...

While we await the outplaying of the Ameri-farce, here's an amusing story:

Greece set to win €1.75bn from EU climate scheme to build two coal plants

Yes, and lignite plants to boot.   Lignite! 

"You couldn’t make this up,” added Imke Lübbeke, WWF Europe’s head climate and energy policy. “The ETS was intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but it now risks being abused to facilitate investments in the new coal plants, which would operate well within the 2060s. This would violate climate targets and is in no way compatible with the leadership role the EU aspires to play in global climate policy and carbon markets.”

Well, there you go.  (In case you were wondering, I didn't make up "Imke Lübbeke", either.)  Law of unexpected consequences, plus my old motto of GDP always trumping GHG.  And this coupled with two other Grauniad stories this week:  hydro power turns out not to be 'clean', and wind turbines are conducting a massacre of bats.   

Life is never as simple as we hope, is it?  We feel their pain.

ND

Coal: Notes Towards a Gloomy Thesis

No more UK deep-mine underground coal production, then.  Momentous, in its own way.  Yonks ago I advocated moving to the new coal-burning technologies ("ultra supercritical" sounds suitably 21st C) but they don't seem to be gaining any traction in Europe or the USA, so maybe China? - but I'd be surprised to see them around these parts anytime soon.  No, it looks like gas for us which ain't so bad actually; the timing is good and there are things we can do as an accomplished trading nation to mitigate the geopolitical risks of import dependency.

But let me sketch out a gloomier thesis ...

Lovelock's great dictum, Civilisation is energy-intensive, should be written above every door in Westminster and Whitehall.  Remember how we got here.  In the 18thC, British engineers were moving ahead with the developments that would underpin the industrial revolution.  To fuel this, notably, there was a massive switch from biofuels / charcoal to coal, which marks a gigantic advance in efficiency - without it, the IR would have been dead in its tracks as almost every suitable forest in England had been cut down for burning.

In the relevant jargon, coal has excellent energy density (if not as good or flexible as oil) and an absolutely superb ERoEI (we ran a thread on this a couple of years back).  The ERoEI perspective is important, and if you don't know it, you should take the time.  (You'll find that it's not without controversy ...)  Tracking back downhill from using coal and there will be progressively less energy, and hence less wealth, to be spending on civilisation or the defence thereof, until someone figures out something really clever with boron or thorium or whatever.

So - civilisation: what sustains it?  Let's allow that ancient Greece was recognisably a civilisation; and Rome; and several others besides in the ancient world (we needn't be eurocentric about this).  Slave labour ... pillage ... and of course total military superiority over a relevant part of the globe.  No-one ever thrived freely to reach their civilisation-potential when an immediate neighbour had a clear and sustained advantage in weaponry.

Which brings us to the gloom.  What happens when one civilisation deprives itself of an economic 'weapon' of the first magnitude, while others (in this case China and India) have every intention of retaining it ?  We may shortly find out.

This isn't one-dimensional.  Gas really is pretty cheap just now, and plenty of the costs are sunk. China will slowly kill its population if it continues emitting outright pollution (as opposed to CO2) on the current scale: this alone will cause them to clean up their act  (& yes, that can satisfactorily be read both ways).  The west may, paradoxically, somehow, gain a mighty strategic benefit from forcing itself 'needlessly' into a more costly energy paradigm - though it's most unlikely to be the one the greens imagine ("it creates lots of jobs!" - yeah, and destroys plenty, too); far more likely to be a variant of the 'phoenix phenomenon' that I wrote about here.  It's hard to see chaotic India as a threat to the west: any gains they make in ERoEI will be frittered away rather than parlayed into Chinese-style slow-burning expansionist aggression.

And I well know that at this point many will chorus "go nuke!"  Well, maybe - but can we afford the decade-long development schedules, not to mention the grotesque costs?  If there's one 'authority' who enjoys the respect - often grudging - of most, it's Prof David Mackay, and he (if I've understood correctly) reckons nuke is the way to go.

Thanks to Scargill, King Coal has fewer friends in the UK than he might.  Guardian readers mourn his passing in the same way Telegraph readers lament the disbanding of a great infantry regiment or the scrapping of an aircraft carrier: but even most of the reds (well, the reds that read) have learned some green instincts.   By the end of March another substantial tranche of our coal-fired power plants will have closed forever.  The remainder will run for a few years on open-cast & imported coal.  Gas it is, for better or worse.  There's no going back.

ND