EU Referendum

Showing posts with label gas. Show all posts

Booker+libya[i-Booker+libya]Anyone who thinks our energy supply is about greenery and "carbon footprints" is living on another planet. There are few things more intensely political, more so when we are about to become a net importer of gas which, for the foreseeable future, is to provide the mainstay of our electricity generation.

It is thus more than a little bit interesting to see two apparently disparate issues – the prospect of power cuts in the not too distant future, and the release of the "Lockerbie bomber" – come together, the links assembled by Christopher Booker in the main story for his column.

No reasonable person who has studied the Lockerbie issue, and read the transcript of the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed Megrahi, can come to any other conclusion other than – at the very least – he was not given a fair trial. More specifically, such are the gaping holes in the case, and the political ramifications behind the investigation, that his guilt must seriously be in question.

That leaves open to speculation as to why the British government should have put itself so much out on a limb to engineer the release of Megrahi, over and above the desire to prevent the case coming to appeal, with the risk of embarrassing disclosures. To that effect, there has been much speculation about trade deals with Libya, and in particular the pursuit of "lucrative oil and gas contracts".

However, as Booker points out, it is the need for gas more than oil which explains why the British government has been so keen to make friends with Libya, going back to Tony Blair's visits to Gaddafi in 2004 and 2007.

The primary concern is that, within six years we face an unprecedented energy crisis, arising from the loss of 40 percent (20 gigawatts) of our generating capacity, through the closure of eight ageing nuclear power stations and nine coal and oil-fired plants under an EU's large combustion plant directive.

The prospect of power cuts arising from capacity shortages – much discussed on this blog – has more recently won rather wider publicity through the dismal distortion by Tory propagandists of an obscure government graph. But, as we had already pointed out, behind the scenes, a "silent revolution" in the energy industry has been taking shape, with a new "dash for gas" to replace missing capacity.

This, Booker tells us, arises entirely from the failure of the government's own energy policy, its delays in getting the nuclear programme started and its insane reliance on wind power. But, as explained by Tony Lodge in his CPS pamphlet, Step off the Gas, there is a huge downside to this new "dash for gas", just as our own North Sea gas is fast running out.

Apart from the fact that using gas for electricity is highly wasteful (losing half its energy value), the government's hope that 70 percent or more of our power can come from gas (80 percent of which will have to be imported) is astonishingly reckless, in two ways.

First, we would be heavily dependent on countries which are politically unreliable, such as Russia or Qatar (which is vulnerable to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz). Second, gas prices are likely to soar, as other countries chase the same supplies, and we would be particularly vulnerable to price hikes through our lack of gas storage facilities.

This threatens to raise electricity prices high enough to plunge millions more households into "fuel poverty", defined as those which spend 10 per cent or more of their income on lighting and heating. (Ofgem calculates that every 10 per cent rise in gas prices pushes another 400,000 homes below this "poverty" line.)

And that is why, in gambling that we can derive 60 percent of our future power from imported gas, the Government has been so keen to cosy up to Libya. It is there that BP has already embarked on a £550 million project to find and develop enough liquefied natural gas (LNG) to give Britain the secure supply needed to keep its lights on.

Such deals, of course, are the stuff of real politics – no one ever said it was anything other than a dirty business. And it may have helped to send Megrahi home, but it won't be enough to save millions more British families from finding it harder than ever to pay their electricity bills. As with everything else, there is always a price to pay. And it is always the "little people" who pay it.

COMMENT THREAD

LNG-Tanker[i-LNG-Tanker]Tony Lodge hits the Telegraph letters today under the heading: "Lack of strategic planning for energy policy means Britain is over-reliant on imported gas."

He points out that the prolonged lack of strategic planning on energy has allowed Britain to become overdependent on gas-fired power stations. No other kind of base-load power plant has been approved since 1997. One third of the gas we use, he writes, is now consumed in such power stations, exacerbating the run-down of our indigenous gas reserves from the North Sea, leading to overdependence on imports.

This will increase, as 90 percent of all proposed and ongoing power plant construction is gas fired.

Lodge argues that there is an obvious way out of this looming crisis. The Government must look towards an early derogation from the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive, which rules that we must close more than 12 gigawatts of older coal and oil plant by 2015. The Government should also support the fitting of new pre-combustion carbon capture and storage technologies, which can capture a large proportion of the pollutants from older plants.

He concludes that it is most unlikely that Britain's new fleet of nuclear power stations will be on line by 2020, so the answer must be to renegotiate the directive and support available but unpublicised technologies.

The point, of course, it that this over-reliance on gas is very dangerous – having enormous price implications, and a significant effect on our balance of payments.

Lodge is also right to cast doubt on the scheduling for new nuclear capacity, so the quick way out – to avoid having to build even more gas capacity – is to seek that derogation from the LCPD. The chances of Mr Cameron doing that, however, is slight.

That leaves "unpublicised technologies". Lodge is a fan of in-situ gasification of coal, which is an attractive proposition. To kick-start that technology, though, will require government support – and that cannot be forthcoming because it would fall foul of EU state aid rules.

Every which way we look, the dead hand of the EU limits our options – the result of which is that we will have to pay until we bleed for our electricity. Yet, as Lodge points out, there is a way out. The problem is that neither this nor the next administration is likely to take it. We are doomed to poverty.

COMMENT THREAD