H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

The numbers can be debated, but the point that there is an economic opportunity in front of the UK is clear. Take it or ignore it?

LONDON (Reuters) – Fracking Britain’s shale gas reserves could cut the country’s imports of gas to zero by the early 2030s, an industry group said on Monday.

Britain currently imports more than half of its gas via pipelines from continental Europe and Norway and through shipments of liquefied natural gas from countries such as Russia, the United States and Qatar.

Environmental groups strongly oppose the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves extracting gas from rocks by breaking them up with water and chemicals at high pressure.

But the British government, keen to cut Britain’s reliance on imports as North Sea gas supplies dry up, last year gave Cuadrilla permission to frack two wells at its Preston New Road site in Lancashire.

Industry group United Kingdom Onshore Oil and Gas on Monday published updated forecasts for the county’s shale gas potential in the wake of recent data from Cuadrilla’s sites.

The forecasts for well productivity were increased by 72 percent to 5.5 billion cubic feet (bcf) per lateral well, compared with estimates made in 2013 by Britain’s Institute of Directors.

One hundred fracking well pad sites, each with 40 lateral wells could produce almost 1,400 bcf a year by the early 2030s, equivalent to the gas use of 35 million homes, the industry association report said. This would be more than the country needs as it has around 27 million households.

Full report here.

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March 12, 2019 at 08:42AM

From Forbes Patrick Gleason  AUGUSTA, Maine — The beginning of March brings bad news for carbon tax supporters, who have been successful in getting legislation to impose the regressive tax introduced at the federal and state levels, but not in getting it enacted, not even in left-leaning, Democratic-run states that should be most inclined to…

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March 12, 2019 at 08:05AM

Barnaby Joyce and senior Nationals MPs have warned that the ­Coalition agreement could be severed over energy policy, setting up a showdown with city-based Liberal MPs fearing a voter backlash over coal in affluent blue-ribbon seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

After Scott Morrison yesterday rejected a push to fund new coal-fired power plants in central Queensland, Mr Joyce, the Prime Minister’s hand-picked drought envoy, told The Australian the termination of the Coalition was an option on the table.

Mr Joyce, who would stand for the Nationals leadership if a spill were called, openly defied the Prime Minister, declaring there was “no law saying the Nationals and Liberals must be together”.

“It is misleading to tell people that we are bound by covenant to always be together,” Mr Joyce said. “The only thing we are bound by is that we must represent our people to the best of our abilities.”

Mr Joyce, who lost the Nationals’ leadership last year after revelations he had an affair with a staffer, described the ­Coalition as a “business arrangement, not a marriage”.

Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals leader Michael McCormack responded with what ­appeared to be a veiled swipe at the breakdown of Mr Joyce’s ­marriage.

“I understand what it takes to have a successful marriage, to make sure that we work together to build a better Australia — that’s what I do with the Liberals,” Mr McCormack said.

Rejecting any threat to his leadership, he said: “There is no coal war. There is no war absolutely whatsoever.”

While no move is expected against Mr McCormack’s leadership before the election, Nationals MPs said the future of the Coalition was under pressure and they would defy the Prime Minister by campaigning on a pro-coal platform.

The warning from Mr Joyce — who said he was hurt by Mr McCormack’s comment about ­ marriage — came after Mr Morrison stoked Coalition tensions by ­talking up renewables and slapping down the push by some Nationals MPs for a new clean coal plant in Queensland. The Prime Minister argued that the Queensland Labor government had “no intention of approving any such projects at all”.

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The post Green Energy Wars May Bring Down Australian Government appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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March 12, 2019 at 07:41AM

By Paul Homewood

 

Whoops!

 

From edie.net:

 

Plaintiffs from six countries filed a lawsuit last week with the European General Court in Luxembourg, which seeks to annul the forest biomass provisions of the EU’s 2018 Renewable Energy Directive (RED) II.

The case is designed to disqualify forest wood from contributing to the directive’s target that 32% of all energy consumption across the EU should be generated from renewable sources.

The plaintiffs challenge the directive’s criteria for assessing greenhouse gas emissions, which they say fails to count the CO2 coming out the smokestack when wood is burned.

They say that if this is taken into account, biomass plants emit more CO2 per megawatt hour than fossil-fuelled power plants, including coal.

And while equivalent CO2 can be sequestered by regrowth of woodland, replacing the trees that have been harvested can take over a century and will not happen if the land is converted to agricultural uses, according to the suit.

A background note says: “It (the directive) undermines its own purpose of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and in fact will result in increased net CO2 emissions and degradation of forest carbon sinks.”

The note estimates that around half of renewable energy across the EU is generated from biomass-fired plants, like those converted from coal by Drax at its North Yorkshire station, a proportion which it says is expected to grow as a result of the directive.

The plaintiffs are composed of groups representing communities in virgin forest areas of the EU and the US who are concerned about the upsurge in demand for wood fuel as a result of the directive.

The case contends that increased forest cutting will exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the capacity of this woodland to absorb and sequester carbon.

Dr Mary Booth, director of the US-based Partnership for Policy Integrity and lead science adviser on the case, said: “The EU’s policy relies on the false and reckless assumption that burning forest wood is carbon neutral.

“However, scientists from around the world, including the EU’s own science advisers, warned that burning forest wood actually increases emissions relative to fossil fuels.”

Sasha Stashwick, senior advocate at the US-based National Resource Defence Council that is backing the court case, urged the UK government to drop its support for Drax.

She said: “The whole business is a house of cards, based on the discredited claim that chopping down trees around the world, shipping them to North Yorkshire, and burning them for electricity is somehow good for the climate.“

“The government has all the information it needs to end this fake green energy fiasco. Hopefully, this legal challenge finally pushes them to do the right thing and end Drax’s subsidies so it can invest the savings in real clean energy like solar and wind at a fraction of the cost.”

Responding to the lodging of the suit on behalf of Biomass UK, Benedict McAleenan said: “Expert authorities around the world agree that we need bioenergy to fight climate change. From the UN’s IPCC to the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, bioenergy is seen as key to cutting emissions. So we need robust regulations like the EU’s RED II to oversee its growth and ensure its delivered sustainably.

“These campaigners are seeking to dismantle the regulations before they’re even in place, based on theories about how the new rules will work. They should be rejected by the court.”

https://www.edie.net/news/10/European-lawsuit-on-biomass-rules-threatens-Drax-plant/ 

To be clear, the court case, details of which are here, cannot challenge payments of subsidies to Drax which are already contracted. Instead, it challenges the treatment of forest biomass as a renewable fuel in the European Union’s 2018 revised Renewable Energy Directive (known as RED II).

This may therefore affect future subsidy schemes for biomass operations across the EU.

It would also make a dent in the UK’s current calculation for renewable energy, and of course CO2 emissions. Plant biomass currently accounts for 6% of UK electricity generation, about the same as offshore wind.

 

 

And it is not only CO2 that is the problem, according to EU Biomass Legal Case, who are coordinating the action. They say that emissions of particulate matter from Drax have quadrupled since they switched from coal to biomass, even though power output has remained fairly constant:

 

http://eubiomasscase.org/2019/03/08/drax-uk-1000-tonnes-of-deadly-particulate-pollution-a-year-a-400-increase-since-they-switched-from-coal-to-biomass/

 

They say that Drax states that the increase in emissions is actually due to its use of “advantaged fuels” – i.e., coal ash, petcoke, and biomass ash, which apparently contains enough carbon after burning the first time that it is worth burning a second time.  Drax does not consistently report its use of these ‘advantaged fuels’ in its annual reports, thus the data in the figure are incomplete. Nonetheless, it is clear that increased biomass use at the plant has not led to a reduction in particulate emissions, but has occurred concurrently with a significant increase.

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March 12, 2019 at 07:33AM