Bit of a missed opportunity there:
Soaring gas prices have forced two industrial sites in the north of England to close as fears grow of a winter energy crisis.
CF Industries, a fertiliser manufacturer, said that it was halting operations at its plants at Billingham in Teesside and Ince in Cheshire “due to high natural gas prices”. The company could not say when production would resume.
The two sites, which employ about 600 people, produce roughly 40 per cent of the UK’s fertiliser needs. Officials in the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, the government’s crisis planning unit, were believed to be meeting yesterday to discuss the impact on fertiliser supplies to farmers.
Given the costs of exporting natural gas – it’s entirely possible but it’s not wholly and exactly cheap to do so – we would have had, if we had fracked, significantly lower gas prices domestically than currently apply across Europe.
How grateful we should all be for Princess Nut Nut’s fears of earthquakes, eh?
Prices were already going up and now a fire in Ashford Kent has shut down all that nice eco friendly nuclear generated electricity we buy from France.
Current UK demand = 33 GigaWatts.
Good job we have 24 GigaWatts of wind plus 13 GigaWatts of solar to rely on……….
“Princess Nut Nut’s fears of earthquakes”
Sounds like the title of a Booker longlist novel.
Coupla’ questions.
If this was Texas, no doubt we’d have plenty of gas, But our planning system is so sclerotic we might still be waiting.
Transport costs may be significant but prices are fungible. GasCo would be selling now at European price less a penny.
Some large consumers may still have part of their supply at locked in medium / long term prices set in 2019. So there is more pain to come.
Never mind. That nice Frau Merkel will no doubt negotiate a discount on supply in exchange for being more like Belorussia and throwing Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland off the sled.
Never mind, apparently a really good earthquake in the Canaries could send a tsunami across the North Atlantic and obliterate the cities of the US east coast. That would obviously depress the cost of oil and gas, eh? Unless it also did horrible damage to the fields in and beside the Gulf of Mexico.
Question: why doesn’t China just let off a well-placed set of bombs in the Canaries? Answer: the USA is presumably her biggest customer?
I’ve always liked Linc Energy’s underground gasification of coal idea. If you’d done that, the UK would now be a major oil exporter.
Of course if we’d done it in Oz, so would we.
The energy of a nuclear bomb doesn’t come close to the power of an earthquake. Orders of magnitude out.
It’s one reason I’m sceptical that rising carbon dioxide is primarily caused by humans. We just don’t have that sort of power.
It’s one reason I’m sceptical that rising carbon dioxide is primarily caused by humans. We just don’t have that sort of power.
Of course its bollocks. Remember when the Icelandic volcano went off? It produced more CO2 that the whole of humanity did for the year.
Chester & Flubber
That the Global Monitoring Laboratory which checks trends in atmospheric CO2 is sited on Mauna Loa, an active volcano, does also add to my scepticism.