The Death Of Fossil Fuels

[Martin_B]

Dickhead. How long before these new wells become stranded assets?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis

Why do you think they'll become stranded assets? The article states that the licences: "... will have more flexibility than before to drill for reserves close to currently licensed areas, to increase the amount potentially removed." So they'll be targetting production via either currently operating, or potentially future operating fields. Lots of North Sea fields export via third-party facilities. The standard British oil price is based on "Brent Crude", even though the Brent oil field hasn't produced a barrel in years and the Brent oil pipeline to shore contained a mix of fluids from multiple fields, so you couldn't identify a barrel of "Brent" oil.

Or are you talking about "stranded assets" in an accountancy view, rather than as defined as an oil and gas terminology?

[bjn]

Accounting. Money will be spent on acquiring leases and drilling things that wont be necessary.

[Martin_B]

Accounting. Money will be spent on acquiring leases and drilling things that wont be necessary.

So you're concerned that the massive oil and gas companies will be wasting money? Bless.

[bjn]

Accounting. Money will be spent on acquiring leases and drilling things that wont be necessary.

So you're concerned that the massive oil and gas companies will be wasting money? Bless.

Not at all concerned for the companies per-se, so much as what could have been done otherwise with the capital.

[lpm]

Wasting resources, not money.

Plus will have a continuing incentive to corrupt politics, mislead voters and sabotage renewables.

[Grumble]

The eventual success of renewables is pretty assured. The immediate success is something that needs fighting for.

[nekomatic]

So you're concerned that the massive oil and gas companies will be wasting money? Bless.

As long as oil and gas companies can finance new extraction capacity and make a profit from it, they will - they're companies.

I think it's fairly widely agreed that in order to avoid disastrous climate change, we need to pretty much stop extracting oil and gas quite soon - as I understand it, sooner than the expected operating lifetime of new oil and gas projects.

This kind of implies that either new oil and gas extraction projects deliver their promised return on investment and we get disastrous climate change, or that current oil and gas extraction will have to be made impossible or uneconomic by legislation or regulation so that we can avoid disastrous climate change. I can't say I'm tremendously optimistic for the latter but if people can pull together any sense then it is what will have to happen. Hence the prospect that oil and gas assets may become stranded, under that definition.

The companies themselves are acting logically enough in that if they can continue to raise finance for doing stuff that is profitable on their investors' timescales then they will carry on doing so. After all the worst that can happen to any individual if the bet doesn't pay off is that the company goes bust and they lose their job and any personal shareholding becomes worthless, but if their personal risk perception doesn't make that seem terribly likely - or they plan to retire and cash the shares in before then - then they'll probably be happy to carry on for now.

I think the real target of the 'stranded asset' messaging is the banks, pension funds and other investors in oil and gas companies whose institutional inertia has stopped them reevaluating the risk of oil and gas investments based on the dilemma above. Sustainable finance is slowly becoming a thing, but it is a bit like, er, turning an oil tanker around. It's why I'm no longer an oil company shareholder, anyway (at least directly).

[bjn]

BHP, the world's largest miner, says it's going to flip to battery electric vehicles in its mining and hauling operations, annually saving 1,500 million litres of fuel when they are done. They considered hydrogen, but the inefficiencies kill it for them, even for their big pieces of equipment in remote places. One clever thing they are playing with is 'dynamic charging', whereby mine vehicles are connected to an electricity supply while in operation.

There's an awful lot of sunshine in many place that BHP operate and they already install solar in the remote ones.

“Our initial modeling suggests the cost [of electric] will be the same or less to operate compared to diesel,” said Wiley.

“As we transition from diesel to electricity, we will spend less on carbon exposure, but we will need to spend more on electricity. However we expect the cost will be less overall given the efficiency of the battery electric trucks and the expected energy price differential.”

“We also expect to see overall savings in truck maintenance as without a diesel engine or mechanical drive chain, there are significantly fewer parts making the trucks simple to maintain.”

[Grumble]

BHP, the world's largest miner, says it's going to flip to battery electric vehicles in its mining and hauling operations, annually saving 1,500 million litres of fuel when they are done. They considered hydrogen, but the inefficiencies kill it for them, even for their big pieces of equipment in remote places. One clever thing they are playing with is 'dynamic charging', whereby mine vehicles are connected to an electricity supply while in operation.

There's an awful lot of sunshine in many place that BHP operate and they already install solar in the remote ones.

“Our initial modeling suggests the cost [of electric] will be the same or less to operate compared to diesel,” said Wiley.

“As we transition from diesel to electricity, we will spend less on carbon exposure, but we will need to spend more on electricity. However we expect the cost will be less overall given the efficiency of the battery electric trucks and the expected energy price differential.”

“We also expect to see overall savings in truck maintenance as without a diesel engine or mechanical drive chain, there are significantly fewer parts making the trucks simple to maintain.”

This sort of thing is great progress and why the victory of electrification is inevitable. Nothing speaks louder than the saving of money!

[EACLucifer]

This sort of thing is great progress and why the victory of electrification is inevitable. Nothing speaks louder than the saving of money!

Mining industry vehicles are such an obvious candidate for electrification, too. Larger pieces of mining equipment are already electrically powered - things like those monster excavators on the Lusatian coalfiends, for example - and most of the larger haul trucks already have electric transmissions, so it's just a matter of replacing the diesel prime mover with a battery bank. Haul trucks work consistent routes and are often a bit customised anyway, so they can easily be set up to have the necessary range for what they need to do without any need spend more money and weight on batteries than necessary, and if the design is suitably modular one could change out the battery bank if the truck changes routes - moving a haul truck between routes isn't a simple thing anyway. And the machinery that does the actual mining tends to be slow moving and relatively static, and some equipment of that nature is already powered directly from the grid, the industry is already used to doing this.

[bjn]

They are also experimenting with charging on the move via powered rails. This sort of thing from a company called Bluvien (image is a composite).

[dyqik]

This sort of thing is great progress and why the victory of electrification is inevitable. Nothing speaks louder than the saving of money!

Mining industry vehicles are such an obvious candidate for electrification, too. Larger pieces of mining equipment are already electrically powered - things like those monster excavators on the Lusatian coalfiends, for example - and most of the larger haul trucks already have electric transmissions, so it's just a matter of replacing the diesel prime mover with a battery bank. Haul trucks work consistent routes and are often a bit customised anyway, so they can easily be set up to have the necessary range for what they need to do without any need spend more money and weight on batteries than necessary, and if the design is suitably modular one could change out the battery bank if the truck changes routes - moving a haul truck between routes isn't a simple thing anyway. And the machinery that does the actual mining tends to be slow moving and relatively static, and some equipment of that nature is already powered directly from the grid, the industry is already used to doing this.

Yes, once you get to the scale of larger heavy equipment, the typical power train is diesel electric/hydraulic (e.g. our antenna transporter, which lifts and carries 80 ton antennas on dirt roads at 14,000', is diesel hydraulic, with six hydraulic motors driving the wheels and lifting gear). That's an easy conversion to electric - just replace the diesel engine and tank with an electric motor and batteries to drive the hydraulic pumps. With the weight of the load and the 500m scale distances it has to cover at a few miles an hour, battery capacity and weight is not that much of a big deal (although cooling the batteries could be - high and dry equals poor air cooling).

[Grumble]

This sort of thing is great progress and why the victory of electrification is inevitable. Nothing speaks louder than the saving of money!

Mining industry vehicles are such an obvious candidate for electrification, too. Larger pieces of mining equipment are already electrically powered - things like those monster excavators on the Lusatian coalfiends, for example - and most of the larger haul trucks already have electric transmissions, so it's just a matter of replacing the diesel prime mover with a battery bank. Haul trucks work consistent routes and are often a bit customised anyway, so they can easily be set up to have the necessary range for what they need to do without any need spend more money and weight on batteries than necessary, and if the design is suitably modular one could change out the battery bank if the truck changes routes - moving a haul truck between routes isn't a simple thing anyway. And the machinery that does the actual mining tends to be slow moving and relatively static, and some equipment of that nature is already powered directly from the grid, the industry is already used to doing this.

Yes, once you get to the scale of larger heavy equipment, the typical power train is diesel electric/hydraulic (e.g. our antenna transporter, which lifts and carries 80 ton antennas on dirt roads at 14,000', is diesel hydraulic, with six hydraulic motors driving the wheels and lifting gear). That's an easy conversion to electric - just replace the diesel engine and tank with an electric motor and batteries to drive the hydraulic pumps. With the weight of the load and the 500m scale distances it has to cover at a few miles an hour, battery capacity and weight is not that much of a big deal (although cooling the batteries could be - high and dry equals poor air cooling).

At 14,000ft the combustion cycle will be harder as well I assume? I know the Pikes Peak cars/bikes start to struggle at altitude near the summit. You would probably get a performance boost just from going electric for the same nominal power.

[dyqik]

Mining industry vehicles are such an obvious candidate for electrification, too. Larger pieces of mining equipment are already electrically powered - things like those monster excavators on the Lusatian coalfiends, for example - and most of the larger haul trucks already have electric transmissions, so it's just a matter of replacing the diesel prime mover with a battery bank. Haul trucks work consistent routes and are often a bit customised anyway, so they can easily be set up to have the necessary range for what they need to do without any need spend more money and weight on batteries than necessary, and if the design is suitably modular one could change out the battery bank if the truck changes routes - moving a haul truck between routes isn't a simple thing anyway. And the machinery that does the actual mining tends to be slow moving and relatively static, and some equipment of that nature is already powered directly from the grid, the industry is already used to doing this.

Yes, once you get to the scale of larger heavy equipment, the typical power train is diesel electric/hydraulic (e.g. our antenna transporter, which lifts and carries 80 ton antennas on dirt roads at 14,000', is diesel hydraulic, with six hydraulic motors driving the wheels and lifting gear). That's an easy conversion to electric - just replace the diesel engine and tank with an electric motor and batteries to drive the hydraulic pumps. With the weight of the load and the 500m scale distances it has to cover at a few miles an hour, battery capacity and weight is not that much of a big deal (although cooling the batteries could be - high and dry equals poor air cooling).

At 14,000ft the combustion cycle will be harder as well I assume? I know the Pikes Peak cars/bikes start to struggle at altitude near the summit. You would probably get a performance boost just from going electric for the same nominal power.

Yeah. Although this machine only operates at altitude, so it can be tuned for that.

[IvanV]

The Death of Fossil Fuels has once again been postponed by the present government.

The government put areas of sea-bed up for auction to supply 5GW of wind farms, and it got no bids.

The reason is that apparently the present construction price inflation means that they are now a lot more expensive to build. The cost of building wind turbines doesn't only go down, it can go up too. (The stories I'm getting from neighbours doing large house upgrade jobs is pretty horrendous.) And the current available price support mechanism for wind at £44/MWh is apparently not enough to pay for to build them, even if you get the sea-bed for free.

Interesting that wind farm builders still feel the need for a price support mechanism, even one well below present wholesale prices, which have been persistently over £100/MWh for nearly 2 years now. But there's some logic to that. If there really is going to be 30GW of offshore wind on-stream in a decade or something, which the government has been talking about, the price for electricity is going to reduce - at least at times when the wind is blowing.

[Grumble]

Why even set a maximum price much below what gas generates at? It’s a Dutch auction, you’ll get the best price anyway, assuming no real collusion.

[IvanV]

Why even set a maximum price much below what gas generates at? It’s a Dutch auction, you’ll get the best price anyway, assuming no real collusion.

There are good reasons for setting technology-specific reserve prices, which is a different issue from getting them wrong. The reason for them is to support a diversity of technologies, and not just procure one technology that is currently relatively cheap. And since price goes up the more you procure at once, you would purchased it in such quantity that it's cost expands up to the cost of the next technology, which would grant them a lot of unnecessary profit. There is a large value in diversity, when procuring intermittent generation technologies, but quantifying it is difficult. So a mechanism to explicitly model that diversity value in an auction where they bid against each other to deliver the "perfect mix" has not been devised. So the technology-specific reserve prices and quantity allocations, with only some interchange at the margin, has been the imperfect method we use instead. This isn't the first time it wasn't done very well, but it is the most egregious case.

I don't think the problem is the mechanism, in the circumstances, rather what might have gone wrong could be the government's wishful thinking on how cheap wind generation is. They aren't the only people who suffer that wishful thinking. There's been a history of wind farm builders bidding for rights at prices representing a lower construction cost than it actually was at that moment. That's because they were betting on construction costs continuing to fall as they built out their allocation. But the government liked to think that was the actual cost at the moment. And now cost has actually gone up rather sharply instead of continuing to fall. Maybe they didn't believe them, but they have learned it is true. Or there's a cartel.

[El Pollo Diablo]

We need to talk about Rishi.

[Grumble]

We need to talk about Rishi.

f.ck me, I’d rather scoop my eyes out with a rusty spoon.

[bjn]

We need to talk about Rishi.

Even Johnson is lambasting him.

[Grumble]

We need to talk about Rishi.

Even Johnson is lambasting him.

Well it’s Johnson’s policies he’s trying to undo. For all his many faults Johnson was not bad on environment (at least EV’s and green electricity) and active travel. Of course Rishi wants to undo those ones.

[El Pollo Diablo]

I'll be fascinated to see the polling reaction to this. My guess is: there won't be one. He won't increase his support at all. Not sure if he'll decrease it though. He may, however, solidify floating voters against him.

[IvanV]

Well it’s Johnson’s policies he’s trying to undo. For all his many faults Johnson was not bad on environment (at least EV’s and green electricity) and active travel. Of course Rishi wants to undo those ones.

Johnson talked the environmental talk, but when you examined what they actually did, he didn't walk the environmental walk anything like as much as his talk suggested. Just like his immediate predecessors, in previous conservative administrations, delivery fell further and further behind, while continuing to make statements that couldn't in practice be achieved. But Johnson was very good at talk, discovering that in most cases you can lie and get away with it. Fortunately, he didn't spot that there are some exceptions.

Sunak, though he has not been around long, initially took the same line. What's changed is the very recent realisation that there's a substantial group of voters who have noticed that they might be bigger losers than others from environmental policies, at least as currently specified, and so don't like the talk. So they might be wooed with toning down the talk.

Sunak is also very right wing. Since he is skilled as coming over as reasonable, I'm not sure it has been broadly appreciated how right wing he is.

Johnson's usual "solution" in such cases was to promise inconsistent things to different groups of voters.

[jimbob]

I'll be fascinated to see the polling reaction to this. My guess is: there won't be one. He won't increase his support at all. Not sure if he'll decrease it though. He may, however, solidify floating voters against him.

I think it will combine with the sewerage rule relaxation to to soften his potential support amongst the sort of natural Conservative that probably feels King Charles is on the right track with conservation.

In other words, "Middle England" and the C of E Conservatives

[bjn]

I'll be fascinated to see the polling reaction to this. My guess is: there won't be one. He won't increase his support at all. Not sure if he'll decrease it though. He may, however, solidify floating voters against him.

I think it will combine with the sewerage rule relaxation to to soften his potential support amongst the sort of natural Conservative that probably feels King Charles is on the right track with conservation.

In other words, "Middle England" and the C of E Conservatives

The lib dems might pull a trick like the Teals did in Australia and go for the “fiscally conservative but not an utter c.nt” voter.