Bishop Hill Has the UK government just killed the shale gas future?
Apr 17, 2012 Climate: other I'm grateful to Don Keiller for pointing out what may amount to a hidden agenda in today's fracking announcement. Here's Don's comment:
I'm not at all convinced that this is a victory for common sense, more like a "stealth killing".
"Under a proposed "traffic light" control system, a "red light" would be triggered by any tremor measuring 0.5 local magnitude or higher, meaning fracking should stop and safety procedures such as allowing water to flow back to the surface should be carried out."
According to the Richter scale an earth tremor of less than 2 is described as "micro", "not felt" and "continual".
Hence fracking will be hamstrung by background tremors.
Marvellous!
Bishop Hill
Nick Grealy, the shale gas expert, tweets in response to my query about this issue:
@aDissentient Not a problem industry geologists tell me
Reader Comments (62)
Rogue@ at 6:14 PM
Thanks for that... soo... that means that pretty much all seismic reflection surveying is well within the "danger" limits set for fracking....
Unintended consequences or what? - maybe it's a deliberate tactic to harass the seismic surveyors that the gweenies have been fantasizing so long and hard about...
What next - everybody has to start wearing sponge sole shoes so as not to cause "earthquakes"?
duh... difficult to make this up I think....
On reflection... may I humbly suggest that perhaps your Grace might consider modifying the title of the post to "UK Government Announces Ban On Oil and Gas Prospecting"?
For comparison, this is how earth tremors affect Iceland.
A normal 48 hours in iceland; 43 tremors, biggest ML2.7:
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volcanism/earthquakes/#view=map
An Icelandic geothermal powerplant:
http://www.or.is/english/projects/hellisheidigeothermalplant/
An earthquake swarm arising from use of a new borehole at the plant; over 400 tremors, biggest ML3.4 (!)
http://www.jonfr.com/volcano/?p=1514&cpage=1#comments
No Icelanders were harmed in the production of 433MW of geothermal power.
Magnitude 3.0 seems to be about the limit for human detection, anything less needs instruments. So this 0.5 proposal looks like another COBRA Met Office volcanic ash 'no level is safe' approach, resulting in grounding everything into a grinding halt.
Just a note of caution. I am reading some claims of huge UK shale gas reserves. But we should be aware that the correct definition of reserves is technically and economically proven and recoverable, as compared to some of the IGIP 'initial gas in place' numbers being thrown about in the press, which are anything up to 20 times larger. Also, a frac well has a steep productivity decline compared to a conventional gas well exploiting a permeable gas reservoir formation. There are certainly thick and extensive offshore shale formations in the UK offshore, but to date the costs of drilling completing and maintaining offshore wells and their pipeline facilities are sensitive to well head pressure/productivity thresholds that may be challenging for offshore shale gas exploitation.
Pharos: points taken. Another note of caution would be on Cuadrilla's positive response yesterday (16th) to DECC's proposals. Why mightn't we be totally reassured by that? Because the additional cost of unnecessary regulations tends to help the incumbent against its competitors. That goes back to Harriman on the railways, the Rockefeller oil guys and Carnegie handing over steel to JP Morgan for a cool cheque around the start of the 20th century. According to Anthony Sutton these massive businesses began to realise that government red-tape was their friend in helping to protect markets in which they were already dominant. Cuadrilla may be above such grubby thoughts of course. Even if they're not, shale gas can still be a blessing to the UK. But the warnings are worth sounding too.
I hope that the Government is not going to block Fracking.
Presently, the American economy is growing significantly compared to the UK and Europe. One reason for this is the shale gas finds in America. THis will power cheap energy in the US and cheap energy leads to economic growth.
In the US, gas prices have been falling for the past decade. They are now at their lowest levels for the past 10 years. They are about 1/8th the prioce that the UK pays for its gas imports!! Consumers of gas in the US are benefiting from this to the extent that consumers use gas as opposed to electricty for heating.
The gas price in the US is cheaper than in the MIddle East. The US is poised to become a significant world player in gas exports, perhaps second only to Russia. All of this is leading and will continue to lead to a boom in economic activity and wealth creation.
It is also good environmentally since gas produces much less CO2 per unit energy when compared to other fossil fuels. From a practical perspective, switching to gas is green and would result in a greater reduction of CO2 than either the use of wind or solar. If reduction of CO2 is an aim, then those that have that aim should be promoting fracking and the recovery and use of shale gas.
There is much discussion in the US about converting lorries and indeed manufacturing cars to run on gas rather than petrol or diesel.
Fracking for shale gas is truly a game changer and the UK will be left behind very much to the detriment of its citizens, if this potential asset is not exploited to the full.
Slightly off topic, but hopefully of interest.
On 17th April, the BBC aired on BBC4 an extremely interesting programme entitled Ancient Apocalypse. It was about the demise of the Old Kingdom of Egypt in 2200 BC.
More than 1/2 hour was spent discussing (and giving illustrations) of climate change these past 7000 years. CO2 was not discussed. This was all natural variabilty.
Illustrations of large variability were given and it was stated that these changes could develop quite rapidly, measured in decades and could last for centuries. Evidence was given that this variability was not limited to just Greenland, or the Mediterranean or North West Africa, but was in practice more global in nature.
Further, the impressiion was given that the problem for humans was when th changes were cold, or more particularly cold and dry.
I would very much recommend watching BBC iplayer to catch up on that programme. Very educational from a climate perspective and amazingly for the BBC no claims that humans are to blame. No greenist agenda on show, which, for the BBC,is quite amazing.
In Wellington NZ there are magnitude 2 earthquakes every day. They pass unnoticed. It's a log scale ie mag 2 has 10 times the energy of mag1. Mag 0.5 is trivial beyond belief. It's a trap
Correction. It's 10 times the amplitude for one step in the richter scale, but 31 times the energy release. Normally anything below mag 3 is coNsidered too small to be perceived and is classified a micro quake. So a 0.5 is.................. Near as dammit to sfa
I'm quite sure they don't realize that the Richter scale is logarithmic, and that a 0.5 magnitude seismic event is like detonating a large hand grenade .... at 1 mile to 4 miles below the earth's surface!
In North America (mainly Alaska and California), there have been 133 magnitude 0.5 earthquakes in the last two weeks alone.
"I'm quite sure they don't realize that the Richter scale is logarithmic"
And I'm equally sure the majority of them don't know what 'logarithmic' means.