Ministers Accused Of Killing UK Shale Industry
In this newsletter:
1) Britain’s Fracking Commissioner Resigns And Accuses Govt Of Caving In To Green Zealots
David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 28 April 2019
2) Tory Ministers Accused Of Killing UK Shale Industry
The Times, 29 April 2019
3) Trevor Kavanagh: Tories Are Lost And Could Become Extinct In This Climate Of Hysteria
The Sun, 29 April 2019
4) Dominic Lawson: How The Kremlin Must Be Howling With Laughter Now Green Zealots Have Sabotaged Our Fracking Bonanza
Daily Mail, 29 April 2019
5) While UK Govt Kills Fracking, Saudi Arabia Sees Shale Gas as Kingdom's Next Energy Bonanza
Bloomberg, 29 April 2019 17
6) Europe’s Alternative Energy: Russia Expands LNG Operations In Arctic
Bloomberg, 8 April 2019
7) China Is Joining The Rush For Arctic Riches
Bloomberg, 16 April 2019
8) And Finally: Will Britain’s Carbon Cult Kill The Humble Freight Train?
Local Transport Today 26 April 2019
Full details:
1) Britain’s Fracking Commissioner Resigns And Accuses Govt Of Caving In To Green Zealots
David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 28 April 2019
The Government’s fracking ‘tsar’ today reveals her immediate resignation in The Mail on Sunday.
Natascha Engel’s decision to walk away from such a high-profile role is driven, she says, by her dismay that Ministers are jeopardising Britain’s energy security because they would rather appease noisy green campaigners than listen to scientists’ advice.
Natascha Engel, UK commissioner for fracking, at her home in South London
The result, she says in an exclusive interview, is that government policy is strangling the UK shale gas industry at birth – despite overwhelming scientific evidence that fracking, if properly regulated, is totally safe.
Killing off this industry, says Ms Engel, a former Labour MP, will cause higher, not lower, greenhouse-gas emissions, as we are forced to rely on increased imports of gas.
Full post
2) Tory Ministers Accused Of Killing UK Shale Industry
The Times, 29 April 2019
UK ministers were accused yesterday of deliberately undermining their own fracking tsar before she resigned in frustration at their “paralysis”.
Natascha Engel resigned seven months after being made the shale gas commissioner by the energy minister ALAN DAVIDSON/REX FEATURES
Natascha Engel quit seven months after she was appointed shale gas commissioner by the energy minister. The former Labour MP said that the government had caved in to pressure from campaign groups and had “instituted a de facto ban” on extraction.
The row revolves around the government’s rule that fracking must be suspended every time tremors of magnitude 0.5 and above are detected, which companies say makes drilling all but impossible.
Full story
3) Trevor Kavanagh: Tories Are Lost And Could Become Extinct In This Climate Of Hysteria
The Sun, 29 April 2019
THE Tories are facing extinction – without even the pleasure of a rebellion.
Having beaten themselves to a pulp over Brexit, they are now too punch-drunk to defend themselves over global warming.
Lifelong Swampy Jeremy Corbyn has latched on to climate change as a lethal weapon against a party which has lost control of the agenda. Idealistic young voters are all ears.
There is a solution to our looming energy crisis — cheap, clean shale gas. But feeble Energy Secretary Greg Clark threw it away, forcing fracking tsar Natascha Engel to quit yesterday in disgust.
After nine dithering years in power, with no idea how to keep the lights on, this Government is damned now whichever way it jumps.
Protesters claiming “The End Is Nigh” are swarming like angry wasps.
Their claims may be simplistic and sometimes false, but they have been nailed on Netflix by national treasure Sir David Attenborough and hammered home by Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg.
Jezza is using these crowd-pullers to turn dull carbon emissions into a glittering crusade — a national emergency no less.
His Momentum Marxists are tutoring the Extinction Rebellion protesters who gridlocked London and turned 16-year-old Greta into a global warming superstar. The Tories have nothing to say.
Gutless Clark abandoned fracking contractors who risked hundreds of million only to see Project Shale strangled at birth.
Engel’s walk-out should surprise nobody. I received a frantic call from the ex-Labour MP weeks ago warning about “nonsense” rules which stop fracking at the slightest tremor.
She told me: “This is a real threat to the industry and means buying more Russian gas.” Her argument doesn’t wash with Jezza’s anti-capitalist anarchists, Greta or Blue Planet’s Sir David, who between them now run UK energy policy.
Arguments for shale have been drowned out by images of raging bushfires, tidal waves and an Apocalypse Now soundtrack.
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4) Dominic Lawson: How The Kremlin Must Be Howling With Laughter Now Green Zealots Have Sabotaged Our Fracking Bonanza
Daily Mail, 29 April 2019
Who do you think will be most delighted by news that the UK’s commissioner for shale gas has quit in dismay at the Government’s craven surrender to lobbying by so-called environmentalists? Vladimir Putin, that’s who.
It might seem odd that the regime that unleashed biological and plutonium-based weapons of contamination in Salisbury and London should be in league with environmentalist campaigners against shale gas ‘fracking’ in the UK. But it’s not odd at all.
Russia’s economy relies upon Europe remaining dependent on the vast Siberian gasfields for its energy.
The prospect of the UK becoming self-sufficient in gas, and even an exporter ourselves by exploiting the colossal reserves revealed by the British Geological Survey, is deeply unwanted competition for Moscow.
That’s why the English-language TV station RT, funded entirely by the Kremlin, has engaged in ludicrous scaremongering about the consequences of gas ‘fracking’ in the UK.
For example, Max Keiser, who presents the Keiser Report for RT, claimed that ‘frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles’ because fracking ‘is giving British children cancer’.
According to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former secretary general of Nato: ‘Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with environmental organisations working against shale gas, to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.’
Full post
5) While UK Govt Kills Fracking, Saudi Arabia Sees Shale Gas as Kingdom's Next Energy Bonanza
Bloomberg, 29 April 2019
The world’s biggest oil exporter is ramping up efforts to develop natural gas with plans for a 15-fold boost in output from unconventional deposits of the fuel.
Saudi Aramco is building facilities to tap shale gas in the kingdom’s oil-rich eastern region and is making “a lot of progress” toward this goal, Chief Executive Officer Amin Nasser told reporters in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Plans include a plant to desalinate seawater that Aramco can then inject underground to frack for gas.
“We are looking to take our unconventional gas within the next 10 years to 3 billion standard cubic feet a day of sales gas,” Nasser said on Sunday...
“For the first time ever, we will be exporting gas either by pipeline or as LNG” -- or liquefied natural gas, Nasser said. “For gas, we will be a major player.”
Full story
6) Europe’s Alternative Energy: Russia Expands LNG Operations In Arctic
Bloomberg, 8 April 2019
MOSCOW and LONDON (Bloomberg) -- Almost 1,500 mi from Moscow, the tiny port of Sabetta nestles in a desolate Russian Arctic peninsula. A former outpost for Soviet geologists, it’s now the site of Russia’s most ambitious liquefied natural gas project, operated by a company that only entered the market just over a year ago.
Several times a week, a giant tanker leaves this remote place carrying the super-chilled fuel to buyers in Europe and Asia. It’s not the only LNG plant beyond the Arctic Circle, but it’s by far the largest.
Novatek PJSC, the main shareholder of the Yamal LNG plant, says plans for further projects will transform Russia into one of the biggest exporters of the fuel within a decade. Already the world’s top exporter of pipeline gas and second-biggest shipper of crude oil, exports from Sabetta are giving President Vladimir Putin’s Russia another conduit into the world economy for the country’s unrivaled energy resources…
Full story
7) China Is Joining The Rush For Arctic Riches
Bloomberg, 16 April 2019
James Stavridis
WASHINGTON - I recently wrote a column on the challenges posed by China both in the South China Sea and globally on the deep seabed. But there is another element to the maritime “Great Game” China is playing: the Arctic Ocean. This may seem counterintuitive — last time I looked at a map, China did not have any Arctic waterfront. But this has not stopped Beijing from an aggressive program of building influence in what the Canadians call the High North.
When I was supreme allied commander of NATO, I asked my friend, Gen. Walt Natynczyk, then the Canadian military’s chief of staff, whether he was worried about a Russian invasion of the Canadian Arctic. He chuckled and said, “Jim, if they tried to invade, my mission would probably turn out to be search and rescue.” His point — how difficult it is to execute operations up there — was well-taken. But China, which until recently has no experience in that harsh environment, is learning quickly and expanding its reach and expertise aggressively…
Icebreakers are key to two crucial elements of what makes the Arctic so strategically vital. The first is the enormous trove of hydrocarbons that will be uncovered as the ice melts. Some estimates approach 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and nearly 100 billion barrels of oil. Icebreakers open the logistics paths for placement of the necessary oil and gas rigs.
Additionally, the melting Arctic ice will create shipping routes that could be geopolitically central for China’s “One Belt, One Road” global development strategy.
Full post
8) And Finally: Will Britain’s Carbon Cult Kill The Humble Freight Train?
Local Transport Today 26 April 2019
Climate change killed the humble freight train. Who’d have thought?
The movement of passengers and goods by rail is generally regarded as a good thing for the environment. Trains can emit fewer emissions than cars and lorries on a per passenger/freight tonne basis and more use of rail has benefits for road safety and road traffic congestion too. But the Government’s Climate Change Act has not been good for rail freight operators.
By closing coal-fired power stations, the legislation destroyed the largest chunk of Britain’s rail freight market. And things may now be about to get a whole lot worse, as the National Infrastructure Commission’s report on the freight sector raises questions about whether the UK needs rail freight at all.
The Commission starts from the premise that freight policy should be dictated by a target of complete decarbonisation by 2050 (interestingly, this did not feature in the terms of reference for the study issued by the Treasury). The Commission is fairly confident that technology in the form of batteries or hydrogen fuel cells will develop in the next few years to replace diesel for lorries. These technologies offer possibilities for passenger rail too, but the Commission can see no such technological breakthrough to cope with the heavier loads of rail freight.
More rail electrification could be the way forward but the it says this will be expensive and disruptive. Moreover, if passenger trains can operate with batteries/hydrogen power, the business case for further wiring will have to be shouldered by freight operators, who are minority users of the network. Only 42 per cent of the network is currently electrified, so even if some key corridors are wired, as much as half the network could be no-go territory for rail freight in 2050.
If neither new fuels nor electrification are practical for rail freight, then the NIC says the only other option will be to transfer the freight traffic from rail to road, which will by then be operating with zero emissions. Given the long lead time for infrastructure investment, it suggests the Government launch a programme of studies soon to determine what is the best solution for individual freight corridors. This suggested piece of central planning is extraordinary to see at a time when we have a Government supposedly in favour of markets.
The NIC was set up to bring expertise to policy-making. Its freight recommendations are not yet Government policy and, even if adopted, there may be more twists and turns to this story. But, right now, the nation’s rail freight operators may well be questioning the wisdom of experts who appear willing to wreck an industry for the sake of a minute saving of CO2. And the overseas owners of the big three firms may be asking themselves, why bother with Britain?
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.
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