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Why we don’t do things any more

Britain’s biggest gas storage facility has been cleared to reopen by safety inspectors in a move that will allow it to start filling up for the winter within weeks.

Centrica, the owner of British Gas, is poised to begin pumping natural gas into the Rough storage site at the start of September after securing approval from the Health and Safety Executive.

It means the only remaining obstacles to reopening Rough are an agreement between Centrica and the Government on state support and final consents from the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which are not seen as problematic.

The layers of permissions it’s necessary to get to do anything. Each such layer adds to the cost of doing anything, humans do less of whatever is more expensive. It’s really not rocket science at all.

29 thoughts on “Why we don’t do things any more”

  1. Oh it’s called Rough !

    Because the article is paywalled, I was going by the headline. Is the gas rough? Do you get duffed up a lot working there ?

    Terriblegraph is getting worse Dailt

  2. To be fair, storing huge quantities of explosive gas might be something I wouldn’t leave unregulated to be honest. I really don’t want every sharp business operator thinking he can store pump gas into wherever he likes. A bit of independent oversight might just be in order in such circumstances, don’t you think?

    The issue here is not State bureaucracy gone mad, its the State making idiotic policy decisions that then have to be unravelled at high speed because of an emergency.

  3. Bloke in North Dorset

    Jim,

    Of course safety on this Is something that we need doing on our behalf, but I’d never heard of NTSA but according to Wiki (my emphasis)

    “ The North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), known as the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) until March 2022,[8][9] is a private company limited by shares wholly owned by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.[7][10] It is responsible for maximising the economic recovery of oil from the North Sea.[11][12] It is empowered to license and regulate activity in relation to oil and gas in the United Kingdom, including oil and gas exploration, carbon capture and storage, and offshore gas storage.[13]

    The NSTA’s role is to take the steps necessary to:[14]

    secure that the maximum value of economically recoverable petroleum is recovered from the strata beneath relevant UK waters; and, in doing so,
    take appropriate steps to assist the Secretary of State in meeting the net zero target, including by reducing as far as reasonable in the circumstances greenhouse gas emissions from sources such as flaring and venting and power generation, and supporting carbon capture and storage projects.”

  4. As I understood it, Rough was mothballed because Centrica wanted government funding to upgrade it. Ie the costs were larger than Centrica were prepared to swallow. It looks as if the government has caved

  5. “…Centrica wanted government funding to upgrade it…”

    Reasonable really.
    Security of supply is a national thing, not the responsibility of any one private enterprise company supplying gas.
    Quite properly to be provided and paid for by the taxpayer as National Security.

    And if Centrica had chosen to run it themselves, filled it with cheap gas which they then sold at a higher price in winter…..kill the kulaks!
    The Grauniad would have screamed itself blue.

  6. Germany was boasting yesterday about getting to 75% storage capacity a fortnight ahead of schedule.

    I think they’d have been better keeping schtum, because I’m fairly sure the Russians read the news, and are throttling Western Europe deliberately. I don’t think they’re gonna keep pumping at 20% of capacity for very long.

    Anyway, I was reading about WW2 cars being converted to gasified wood. Simple, low tech, and surprisingly efficient. If we’re in a bind… why not do something along those lines, but on a bigger scale for emergency power generation? Wood is abundant and cheap. Or we could gasify coal to make town gas. It’s relatively nasty stuff, but better than being cold. As a bonus it’d make the Elfin Safety and Extinction Slavery folks go mental.

  7. Coal gas needs different burners, so you’d need a job creation programme to go round everywhere changing them.

  8. Terriblegraph is getting worse Dailt

    Soon they’ll be Untouchable.

    jgh – we can call it “levelling up”

  9. Unfortunately Steve, the Beckton Alp is now a dry ski run.
    Family history has it that the great-great grandfather, a horse trader, used to graze his stock on a field at Beckton. Which was sold to the Gas Company as somewhere to tip the fly ash. So we have the distinction of having owned the only mountain in London.(Unless you count whoever owned the Mount Pleasant site before they built the post office.)

  10. Steve, In Dads Army, they converted Jonesy’s van to gas. It had a big balloon on top which got punctured when the platoon did its anti parachutist drill.

  11. Centrica?

    – the folk that have routinely massaged the UK spot gas market ? (AIUI)

    fwiw

    There’s photos in family albums of (WW2) chicken farming peeps with gas bags on top of their pickups.

    This “crisis” is either incompetence or deliberate sabotage – neither is acceptable – but equally, it’s not acceptable that the all too often absurd official narratives are slavishly followed by the MSM.

    Get fracking and pronto.

    – I’d add that the arithmetic of re-opening The Rough storage doesn’t get nearly enough (any) play – so the arguments advanced are all loaded with eco-mantras and “policy” BS – it’s almost as if a large proportion of the public bodies and pols opining on the matter do not have a f-ing clue – who’d have thunk it? but then we are talking about people that by and large think that EVs “run on batteries”.

    We’re fucked.

  12. When the stated aim of government(s) is to deliberately grind the fossil fuel industry into oblivion, is it any wonder the fossil fuel companies are reluctant to invest any more than the absolute minimum to keep things turning over.
    Ditto the ICE vehicle industry, ditto the nuclear power industry.

    TPTB know exactly what they are doing, are seeing the desired aims of their policies coming to fruition and are happy about it.

  13. BiS – I do get strangely nostalgic for my childhood surrounded by decaying Soviet-style heavy industry, punctuated by the welcome arrival of the rag and bone man. Imagine children these days being excited to sell bits of old metal to a tramp with a horse! They don’t know they’re born.

    In Dads Army, they converted Jonesy’s van to gas. It had a big balloon on top which got punctured when the platoon did its anti parachutist drill.

    Don’t tell him, Otto!

    Jim – I’m eternally impressed with the mechanical know-how of analogue era men. Even schoolboys in the 40’s were a lot handier than 99% of grown men today. Maybe some of our stupid public policy decisions can be explained by people no longer having an intuitive “feel” for the Newtonian and Kelvian facts of life. Western education is now highly abstracted from reality.

  14. What kind of business that you can go into these days without a lot of start up capital and without too many regulations?

    Genuinely interested.

  15. Software and online – which is a long standing theory of mine, that’s why that’s where we see all the innovation.

  16. @Steve: the older I get the more I wonder how the old guys got as much done as they did, especially during the war. I mean WW2 lasted less than 6 years. In that time the combatants managed to construct millions of tanks, aircraft, ships, lorries, railway engines, bombs, shells, weapons of all types, construct all manner of factories, defences and infrastructure for those weapons, shift everything all around the world, all the while still mining enough coal and pumping enough oil to power the whole shebang, and grow enough food to keep everyone fed (just), oh and fighting a world war on several continents at the same time. A local council will take 6 years to build a new car park these days.

  17. Another one that I can also think of is the development of GPS guided electric drone aircraft. I suppose it was related to the software industry in that remote controlled aircraft have been with us for a while. However, these were tricky to build and operate. Powerful micro controllers, GPS and off the shelf hardware turned these awkward flying gadgets into a new industry.

    However, in the UK you now need a license and indemnity insurance to fly them. However, for a while anyone with the time, a bit of money and gumption could have fun designing , building and flying drones.

  18. Tim: “Software and online – which is a long standing theory of mine, that’s why that’s where we see all the innovation.”

    This “Online Safety Bill” thing will soon put paid to that.

  19. I remember seeing gas-powered cars with a gas-bag on the roof during WW2. Stones Brewery in Sheffield also resurrected old steam-driven lorries for beer deliveries.

  20. “This “Online Safety Bill” thing will soon put paid to that.”

    In the UK … maybe…
    If I develop something and host it from …welll… anywhere, really.. a fat lot of good that bill will do.
    And no.. the Great British Firewall won’t help..

  21. Wrt rt.com, that’s simply for the cameras. Set Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), for example, as the DNS server on whatever device you are using – job done. Unless any particular ISP is taking that instruction more seriously?

  22. Jim – the older I get the more I wonder how the old guys got as much done as they did, especially during the war. I mean WW2 lasted less than 6 years. In that time the combatants managed to construct millions of tanks, aircraft, ships, lorries, railway engines, bombs, shells, weapons of all types, construct all manner of factories, defences and infrastructure for those weapons, shift everything all around the world, all the while still mining enough coal and pumping enough oil to power the whole shebang, and grow enough food to keep everyone fed (just), oh and fighting a world war on several continents at the same time.

    It’s incredible what they managed to achieve, and how quickly it was pissed away.

    I read today that the RAF has stopped recruiting white men, because – of course – Diversity. The RAF and MoD issued the usual gobbledygook non-denial you’d expect, full of effeminate wordsalad about how stunning and brave they are for treating white men as a lower caste. The situation is so serious Rishi even promised to Do Something. If we’re not careful, Lessons might even Be Learned. (I also think I might have contracted monkeypox just from looking at the weak, simpering face of Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Fucklington-Brownnose.)

    Nuke them, VV Putin. Nuke them until there’s nothing left but a glowing puddle of gay fluids.

  23. Solution, as it was over a year ago; drill, extract, frack, coal

    May 2021: Fracking won’t help, it takes 3 months to a year to come online…

    August 2022: Fracking won’t help, it takes 3 months to a year to come online…

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FZwdcbqWQAIbwL4?format=jpg

    @Jim
    To be fair, storing huge quantities of explosive gas might be something I wouldn’t leave unregulated to be honest

    Rough is an underground and undersea location

    Telegraph article
    https://archive.ph/AIZRy

  24. “Rough is an underground and undersea location”

    Thats as maybe, but unless there’s some controls some sharp suited spivs might decide to try and store huge amounts of gas somewhere a bit closer to civilisation, and there wouldn’t be anything one could do until it all went off in a big bang. I’m not some mad libertarian that thinks everyone should be able to have their own underground gas storage facility in their back garden, I’m quite happy that people who want to play around with huge amounts of explosive materials should have to jump through quite a lot of hoops to show what they are doing is safe. The issue is not how long it takes to get the regulatory green light for such a project, its the blank refusal of the UK State to make the decision that was staring us in the face the moment Uncle Vlad decided to holiday in the Ukraine this year. That was February. This decision should have been made within days, yet here we are, having pissed away 6 months, which can’t be got back. Winter is coming, and no politician can stop it.

  25. @Jim

    Anyone can have their own underground or overground gas storage facility in their back garden, same as oil, coal, wood, petrol…

    No doubt you, as a farmer, have large diesel / gasoil tanks and agree H&S regs are way OTT

    For Rough regs should be almost non existent. Centrica will not want leaks or explosions as that destroys they’re profit

    Most regs are to stop what already illegal operators do, they laugh and continue. See Wales 20mph speed limit to stop already illegal activities

    It’s always punish everyone with a “we’re doing something” law that achieves nothing but cost & misery

    One would think public would have wised up to this following lockdowns, distancing, masks, jabs etc for a like normal Flu virus. Sadly seems not

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