NOT so long ago it was the lawyers and journalists who were the activists. How times have changed.
With the birth of the environmental movement and social media it now appears almost everyone is.
In many schools, where teachers embed man-made climate change and gender-fluid narratives, youngsters are seemingly encouraged to take up a cause.
Just Stop Oil protestors - a combination of these youngsters and their expensively-dressed grandparents - are a manifestation of this mono-thought mayhem.
The irony of the anti-fossil fuel protestors stopping the traffic, while adorned with the very petroleum-derived products they want banned is lost only on them.
The roots of this anti-fossil fuel activism are widespread but secured a firm foundation with the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) and its promotion of man-made Carbon Dioxide, from industrial processes, as the primary driver of a warming planet.
This was back in the 1990s and the solutions identified by the IPCC - and gestated for many years - now feature prominently in our everyday lives, through the Net Zero agenda.
Solar panels and wind turbines, air source, ground source and hydrogen heating solutions, electric vehicles and low-emission zones are never out of the news.
As a result of these measures the UK has become the first major economy to halve its emissions, since 1990. We produce less than one per cent of total, global emissions.
Unreliable Energy Needs Storage
Despite the ongoing shift to the above, energy-dense oil and gas still meet three quarters of UK’s energy needs - it’s 80% across the rest of the world.
The magnitude of the task required to replace these hydrocarbons was highlighted in a recent Royal Society publication, authored by Oxford University Emeritus Prof Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith. (1)
The report entitled: ‘Large-scale electricity storage’ acknowledged the inability of batteries to provide the back-up needed for unreliable UK solar and wind.
It said the Government needed to immediately begin work creating ‘up to 90 clusters of 10 caverns’ to store green hydrogen to hit the Net Zero target by 2050.
Storing up to three million tons of hydrogen will not be cheap. Hydrogen is a highly flammable gas, and, as its small molecules escape easily three times the volume is required, compared to gas storage (2).
In a recent report former World Bank economist Prof Gordon Hughes said Net Zero would cost the British taxpayer at least 5% of GDP a year, between now and 2050. This will restrict expenditure on other public services at a time when the tax rate is at a multi-decade high. (3)
Questions have also been raised over the credibility of the Committee of Climate Change advice to Government after it suggested, in 2021, there were only seven days a year when wind turbines would produce less than 10% of their potential - in 2016 there were 78 (4).
With offshore wind and solar panels now commoditised by China, and most of the half-a-ton of rare earth minerals required for electric car batteries also, mainly controlled by the Chinese, the Labour Party is backing floating wind (5).
This is expensive, priced at £176 per MW/h in the latest Contracts for Difference round, it is more costly than offshore wind, which has a guaranteed price of £73 per MW/h. The current electricity price for the UK is around £65 per MW/h.
At a recent Offshore Energy UK (OEUK) event in County Durham Alan Dobson, of Tyneside-based FMC Technip, highlighted how developing and connecting floating turbines to the grid is ’super complex’ and will require standardisation to drive costs down.
Trade group, Aberdeen-based OEUK, formerly known as Oil and Gas UK, is embracing the energy transition with a focus on offshore wind and hydrogen, whilst also cautioning on the need to pace the transition effectively.
Energy, Not Just Electricity
In its 2023 ‘state of the industry’ report it says its members ‘cannot afford to invest in new areas without stable revenues from oil and gas projects’.
The report says the UK needs to make the most of its remaining reserves.
Speaking at the recent OEUK event in Durham its CEO David Whitehouse highlighted how the sector boosted UK economic activity to the tune of £20bn in 2023.
He said North Sea oil and gas can help suppress global prices and in some instances deliver gas to the UK at a 20% premium to our European neighbours.
Last year, the UK consumed energy worth 163m tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) whilst producing only around 100m toe, says OEUK.
This means the UK is now a net energy importer, despite usage falling by 30% since the turn of the century. Back then, the UK was a net energy exporter.
In the UK, domestic energy consumption accounts for around 40m toe, the transport sector is the most avaricious energy consumer with industry, services and agriculture making up the rest.
One of the primary - and often overlooked - issues by the Net Zero advocates is replacing hydrocarbons in these critical sectors.
Many industries require huge quantities of energy - delivered at extremely high temperatures - with oil, gas and coal capable of delivering that.
Alternatives being explored for powering the industrial heating and process industries include ‘green gases’ such as hydrogen, renewable dimethyl ether, and synthetic petrol and diesel.
But these will each require significant investment to reach cost-effective maturity, presenting these sectors with significant, Net Zero delivery challenges.
Replacing energy-dense oil as the main transport fuel will be a significant technical challenge, too.
Our Continued Dependence on Oil
At its peak, the UK oil and gas industry supported 500,000 jobs. This has now fallen to 200,000.
The equivalent of 47bn barrels of oil have been extracted over the last 50 years, with seismic surveys suggesting another 25bn remain, says OEUK.
With an election on the horizon the Labour Party is pushing hard on Net Zero electricity, saying it will refuse to grant any further offshore oil and gas licenses.
OEUK has warned this would wipe out North Sea oil and gas investment, (6) but some operators are still pressing ahead with their plans.
Just weeks ago EnQuest began drilling at the Bressay and Bentley fields, 80 miles east of Shetland, with the two fields having the potential to produce 500m barrels of oil over coming decades.
The Rosebank field, which was approved last September after months of wrangling, is predicted to yield 350m barrels of oil. This was the the largest UK approval since 2016.
Energy Bills On Upward Trajectory
In the last year solar, wind, biomass, and hydro have provided on average 40% of our electricity, with the cost of incorporating these evident in our energy bills.
In 2013, the environmental and network operating components of a duel fuel bill were around £400 a month, this has now almost doubled.
In the US, which is now energy independent following the shale gas revolution, household energy bills are half those in the UK.
The same is true for industry. The US economy grow by 2.5% in 2023; here in the UK growth has stalled and whilst this may be welcomed by the de-growth environmentalists it will leave any future Governments with a significant budgetary problem.
Labour says it will establish the state-run Great British Energy which it, unrealistically, says will make Britain a clean-energy superpower.
The Conservative’s meanwhile are looking to take the cost of renewables out of energy bills and fund them through general taxation. (7)
There are also moves afoot to introduce a surge-pricing system which effectively means those on lower incomes will not be able to afford to heat their homes or cook meals at times of peak energy demand. (8)
£60bn Subsidies or £400bn Revenues?
While the renewable energy industry received around £60bn of subsidies since 2015, the oil and gas industry has delivered £400bn to the UK Treasury in the last 50 years (9 & 10).
Elsewhere, in the developing world for example, the Net Zero agenda does not feature so prominently in discussions.
Over a billion people in sub-saharan Africa are still to benefit from the fossil fuel-inspired, standard-of-living revolution experienced by ourselves over the last 200 years, as was highlighted by Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, last month (11).
He elaborated on how the demand for hydrocarbons has grown by almost 100m barrels per day of oil equivalent since the turn of the century, going on to say the ‘hopes and ambitions of eight billion energy consumers around the world are at stake’.
And, he concluded that the energy transition narrative will increasingly be written by the Global South, with ‘peak oil and gas unlikely for some time to come, let alone in 2030’.
Back in the UK, and the rest of Europe, our lack of energy security was exposed in 2022 with the spike in energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
With conflicts breaking out across the world the military will be concerned if it has to rely on charging points for its drones, warships, planes and battle tanks to protect our national interests.
Over in the energy-independent US, Donald Trump has said that if elected President he will encourage the expansion of the hydrocarbon industry, coining the phrase ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’.
Here, in the energy-insecure UK, if the Just Stop Oil activists and Net Zero zealots get their way, we will be facing winters where we ‘Chill, Baby, Chill’.
ENDS
References
1. https://royalsociety.org/news/2023/09/electricity-storage-report
2. https://dailysceptic.org/2023/10/03/batteries-will-not-solve-renewable-energy-storage-problem-says-royal-society/?highlight=The%20Royal%20Society%20batttery
3. https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2024/03/Hughes-Financing-Energy-Transition.pdf
4. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/10/23/net-zero-target-relies-rise-windy-days/
6. https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/north-sea/547554/oeuk-labour-windfall-tax-plan-would-wipe-out-north-sea-investment/
7. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/01/claire-coutinho-axing-4bn-green-levies-electricity-bills/
8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/16/new-smart-meters-surge-pricing-function-government-plans/
9. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/09/fossil-fuels-more-support-uk-than-renewables-since-2015
11. https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2024/04/04/conflict_of_energy_forecasts_saudi_aramco_vs_international_energy_agency_1022803.html
