GWPF Newsletter - Big Breakthrough: First Shale Gas Flows At UK Fracking Site

U.S. shale oil and gas boom keeps defying expectations

In this newsletter:

1) Big Breakthrough: First Shale Gas Flows At UK Fracking Site
Reuters, 2 November 2018 
 
2) Ta-Da! America’s Shale Boom Has Just Created A New Mexico
Bloomberg, 1 November 2018 

 
3) How Climate Obsession Is Destroying Europe’s Car Industry
OilPrice.com, 4 November 2018
 
4) David Attenborough: Too Much Alarmism On Environment A Turn-Off
James Delingpole, Breitbart, 4 November 2018 
 
5) Professor Valentina Zharkova: The Solar Magnetic Field And The Terrestrial Climate
GWPF TV, 5 November 2018
 
6) Met Office’s Latest Extreme Weather Report
Not A Lot Of People Know That, 2 November 2018
 
7) Why Wind Power Isn’t The Answer
Robert Bryce, City Journal, 30 October 2018

Full details:

1) Big Breakthrough: First Shale Gas Flows At UK Fracking Site
Reuters, 2 November 2018 

LONDON (Reuters) – Cuadrilla extracted its first shale gas from its site in northwest England, it said on Friday, after it began fracking operations there just over two weeks ago.



Cuadrilla said the gas flows were small but coming at such an early stage of the project were evidence of the potential of the site.

“This is a good early indication of the gas potential that we have long talked about,” Cuadrilla Chief Executive Francis Egan said in an emailed statement.

Fracking, or hydraulically fracturing, involves extracting gas from rocks by breaking them up with water and chemicals at high pressure. The practice, which started at the New Road site on Oct. 15 has been halted and restarted twice since then after small earth tremors were detected. Britain’s regulatory system calls for any fracking to be paused if any tremor of magnitude 0.5 or above is detected.

Cuadrilla said it plans to fully test flow rates from the current two exploration wells towards the end of 2018 and into the New Year to determine whether full-scale gas extraction would be viable.

Full story

2) Ta-Da! America’s Shale Boom Has Just Created A New Mexico
Bloomberg, 1 November 2018 

U.S. oil and gas production keeps defying expectations, including a nation-sized surge this year. And energy analysts expect production from America’s top five shale oil regions to more than double by 2025.

The contrast between the success of the U.S. oil and gas industry and unpopularity in the stock market grows ever starker.

The Energy Information Administration released revised monthly figures for U.S. oil production on Thursday. The headline is that production is up — way, way up. It reached 11.35 million barrels a day in August, fully 2.1 million barrels a day higher than a year before. That’s almost like adding a whole new Mexico in the space of 12 months.

For all the pipeline problems threatening the Permian tight-oil basin, production in Texas and New Mexico keeps pumping higher. The two states, which also include the Eagle Ford basin in southern Texas, accounted for more than two thirds of the increase.

That said, growth was fairly widespread, including North Dakota’s Bakken basin, Colorado and — attracting a lot of buzz these days — Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.

Forecasters at the Department of Energy have just begun raising their projections for U.S. oil production in 2018 again, having trimmed them over the summer amid brewing logistical problems in the Permian basin.

They will have to raise them again. In October’s short-term outlook, fourth-quarter production was projected to be 11.14 million barrels a day. But average production in July and August was already at that level. Moreover, production is now way ahead of what was predicted only 12 months ago.

Trouncing forecasts and forcing revisions has been a hallmark of the shale boom (just ask OPEC). Some prognosticators have done better than others, though. Rystad Energy, a consultancy based in Norway, said on Tuesday that EIA forecasts for production growth in August were too low, with its own prediction, at the top end of the range, coming in at it 11.3 million barrels a day — which is roughly what production turned out to be.

Rystad has been one of the more bullish voices in terms of U.S. production growth, and thus far it has been vindicated. Its own forecasts have output rising close to 18 million barrels a day by 2025, assuming $65 a barrel, or more than 20 million a day at $75.

Importantly, Rystad expects production to rise above 15 million barrels a day by then, even at $55 a barrel, close to the planning decks of companies such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp. Beneath Rystad’s headline number are expected increases in production of light, tight oil from five main regions:

Part of the story here is emerging evidence of E&P companies having learned to keep growing with less reliance on massive infusions of fresh capital. They still have some convincing to do on this front when it comes to investors, who are far more focused on bottom lines these days rather than setting new production records.

But another part of it is the continued entry of competitive players into the market. About 130 companies have been active in the Permian basin so far this year, according to Artem Abramov, who runs shale research at Rystad, up from 120 last year and less than 90 back in 2013 when oil still traded in triple digits. He has tracked 22 privately owned operators initiating horizontal drilling for the first time this year alone — a source of new spending outside of the traditional, listed sector. While consolidation is likely to pick up in the Permian basin, it clearly still has a long way to go.

Full story

3) How Climate Obsession Is Destroying Europe’s Car Industry
OilPrice.com, 4 November 2018
Haley Zaremba

While Europe has long been at the forefront of the automotive industry, it will most likely be overtaken in the very near future by another economic superpower--China. 

The world’s second-biggest economy is already well-established as the global leader for the batteries that power electric vehicles, which are seen as a vital component to the future of the automotive industry.

In light of this dynamic, Europe will become increasingly dependent on China as an integral part of their automotive sector, an industry with millions of employees across the continent.

The European market should start contending with the likely outcome that European car production will soon be making a mass move to China. This will have a major impact on the region that has long counted companies like Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Renault among its economic strongholds.

China produces about two thirds of the whole world’s supply of lithium ion batteries, the most common battery type used in electric vehicles. Furthermore, these highly valuable batteries make up a staggering 40 percent of the cars’ value. As it stands, Europe is far from being able to compete with China when it comes to the production of lithium ion batteries. In fact, currently the entire continent is estimated to hold just 1 percent of the market.

Moving the production of electric cars to China is a no-brainer for European car companies. Not only is China the site where many of the essential parts are manufactured, allowing car companies to avoid the heft tariffs currently imposed on electric vehicles, it’s also home to what is by far the world’s biggest market for electric cars. China already accounts for about half of electric vehicle sales worldwide, and these numbers will only continue to grow. Last year the Chinese government went so far as to release a “road map” that shows a plan to replace at least one-fifth of new car sales with alternative fuel vehicles by 2025. These are all facts that the international car industry has not let go unnoticed--investments in Chinese-made electric cars are through the roof.

Last year Volkswagen announced that it would be pouring a whopping $12 billion into the production of electric vehicles in China. Meanwhile, electric car wunderkind Tesla is busy building a Shanghai factory that will have a production capacity of half a million electric cars per year. To compare, currently in the whole of the United States only about 100,000 electric cars are produced annually.

Even European battery companies are investing overseas instead of building the industry locally. Take the Dutch lithium ion battery maker Lithium Werks, which already has two plants in China, and has now announced plans to build an additional factory outside Shanghai to the tune of €1.6 billion ($1.8 billion). The massive factory will, when up and running at full capacity, be able to manufacture enough batteries to power 160,000 cars a year. The company cited better infrastructure and easier access to building permits as their primary reasons for building in China--in Europe a similar venture would simply be met with too much red tape.

Full post

4) David Attenborough: Too Much Alarmism On Environment A Turn-Off
James Delingpole, Breitbart, 4 November 2018 

Sir David Attenborough has decided to ditch the finger-wagging and the doom-mongering from his next wildlife TV documentary series, Dynasties. Viewers, he has finally realised, find it a turn off.



Attenborough, 92, told the Observer (sister newspaper of the Guardian):

“We do have a problem. Every time the bell rings, every time that image [of a threatened animal] comes up, do you say ‘remember, they are in danger’? How often do you say this without becoming a real turn-off? It would be irresponsible to ignore it, but equally I believe we have a responsibility to make programmes that look at all the rest of the aspects and not just this one.”

This will come as a relief to the many viewers who respect Attenborough as the pre-eminent TV naturalist but are bothered by the relentless green propaganda.

Sometimes he raises important issues, such as the pollution of the oceans with plastics. Too often, though, his points are tendentious and unscientific: a regurgitation of fashionable green pieties which are unsupported by real world data.

One of the most egregious examples was his promotion in his last series Blue Planet II of the thoroughly discredited ‘ocean acidification’ theory.

Attenborough claimed: “If the temperature rises up by two degrees and the acidity by a measurable amount, lots of species of coral will die out. Quite what happens then is anybody’s guess. But it won’t be good.”

A lot of huckster activists on the climate alarmism gravy train have built tenuous careers promoting this nonsense. But no serious scientist believes it, for ocean acidification is just another environmentalist scare narrative.

As Matt Ridley noted:

The most dishonest sequence in the series was when Attenborough watched shells dissolving in a tank of acid, to a soundtrack of fizzing noises, and was told by Professor Chris Langdon that although this was “more dramatic than what’s happening in the oceans”, nonetheless “the shells and the reefs are really truly dissolving”.

This is highly misleading in several different ways. Was it carbonic acid, or another acid? The reduction in alkalinity will get nowhere near neutral, let alone actual acidity, even by the end of the 22nd century, so “dissolving” is false, let alone happening now. The changes in ocean pH expected even by the end of this century are minuscule compared with what was shown in that tank, and by comparison with the daily and seasonal changes that an average reef experiences. (Coral bleaching, a different issue, is more serious, but more temporary.)

A 2010 analysis of 372 studies of 44 different marine species found that the world’s marine fauna is “more resistant to ocean acidification than suggested by pessimistic predictions” and that it “may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st century”.

Attenborough also got it completely wrong about walruses, which he made out to be much more endangered than they are.

Full post

See also: David Attenborough is accused of climate change sensationalism by Lord Lawson

BBC backs down on David Attenborough's climate change statistics



5) Professor Valentina Zharkova: The Solar Magnetic Field And The Terrestrial Climate
GWPF TV, 5 November 2018

Professor Valentina Zharkova gave a presentation of her Climate and the Solar Magnetic Field hypothesis at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on 31 October 2018.



To watch the full lecture click here or on image above

6) Met Office’s Latest Extreme Weather Report
Not A Lot Of People Know That, 2 November 2018
Paul Homewood
 
The UK Met Office has just published a new report on “Climate Extremes” in the UK:

It has already generated spurious headlines, such as this one from the BBC:


https://web.archive.org/web/20181102011920/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46064266

The report says nothing of the sort, and certainly does not support the BBC’s disgraceful attempt to link it to drought, as it actually says the opposite.

Having said that, the Met Office report itself is in some ways misleading. […]

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/2018/climate-extremes-report-supplement

Overall, the report actually confirms much of the recent GWPF report on extreme weather, “DEFRA v The Met Office”.

Full post

7) Why Wind Power Isn’t The Answer
Robert Bryce, City Journal, 30 October 2018

As a new study confirms, turbines would have to be stacked across state-sized swaths of the American landscape

On October 8, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report warning that nations around the world must cut their greenhouse-gas emissions drastically to reduce the possibility of catastrophic climate change. The report emphasizes “fast deployment of renewables like solar and wind” and largely ignores the essential role nuclear energy must play in any decarbonization effort.

Four days earlier, to much less fanfare, two Harvard researchers published a paper showing that trying to fuel our energy-intensive society solely with renewables would require cartoonish amounts of land.

How cartoonish? Consider: meeting America’s current demand for electricity alone—not including gasoline or jet fuel, or the natural gas required for things like space heating and fertilizer production—would require covering a territory twice the size of California with wind turbines.

The IPCC and climate-change activists love solar and wind energy, and far-left politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a wartime-style national mobilization to convert to 100 percent renewable-energy usage. But this credo ignores a fundamental truth: energy policy and land-use policy are inextricable.

The renewables-only proponents have no trouble mobilizing against land use for the extraction of hydrocarbons. Consider the battle in Colorado over Proposition 112, which will prohibit oil- and gas-drilling activities within 2,500 feet of homes, hospitals, schools and “vulnerable areas.” Environmental groups including 350.org, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace have endorsed the initiative, which will appear on the November 6 ballot. If it passes, Proposition 112 would effectively ban new oil and gas production in Colorado, the nation’s fifth-largest natural gas producer.

Or consider the months-long demonstrations that ended last year in South Dakota over the Dakota Access pipeline. More than 700 climate-change activists and others were arrested during protests claiming that Dakota Access, by crossing the traditional lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, was violating the tribe’s cultural and spiritual rights. These energy- and land-use battles are waged by climate activists and environmental groups whose goal is to shutter the hydrocarbon industry. Most of these groups, including 350.org and Sierra Club, routinely claim that the American economy can run solely on renewables. Further, the Sierra Club has tallied 74 U.S. cities that have pledged to get all of their electricity from renewable energy.

But the new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, shows yet again that wind energy’s Achilles heel is its paltry power density. “We found that the average power density—meaning the rate of energy generation divided by the encompassing area of the wind plant—was up to 100 times lower than estimates by some leading energy experts,” said lead author Lee Miller, a postdoctoral fellow who coauthored the report with Harvard physics professor David Keith. The problem is that most estimates of wind energy’s potential ignore “wind shadow,” an effect that occurs when turbines are placed too closely together: the upwind turbines rob wind speed from others placed downwind.

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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.