Potential new North Sea oil and gas fields with early stage licences from the UK would emit as much carbon dioxide as British households produce in three decades.
They’re being naughty. All the emissions from all hte oil being burned are being included here. The Scope 3 emissions in the jargon. Which is to assume that if these fields are not developed then no others will be developed to replace that output. Which isn;t, at all, how global markets work.
Sites that have been licensed for drilling but have not yet been developed are estimated to hold up to 3.8bn barrels of oil equivalent. If burned, this would release 1.5bn tonnes of carbon dioxide. Emissions from the UK’s 28m households amount to about 50m tonnes a year.
The 3.8 to 1.5 looks dodgy to me but then what do I know? Myself I tend to think that the CO2 – because of the addition of the O2 there – might be heavier than the C at the starting point. But I agree that’s a possibly wrong first assumption.
But households emit 50 m tonnes a year? Gerraway. 500 million.
Because there are only us here. As with GDP – it’s all production, or all incomes, or all consumption. So, all household incomes equal GDP. Because the only things here in the country are all households – and everything is owned by them. So too all incomes must flow to them. This is definitional.
So, the same with emissions. There are only us here. All economic activity – and thus all emissions – flow to, emanate from, households. Thus it’s 500 million.
The 3.8 to 1.5 looks dodgy to me but then what do I know? Myself I tend to think that the CO2 – because of the addition of the O2 there – might be heavier than the C at the starting point.
Wikipedia says a barrel is 159 litres. Brent crude has a density of 0.835, so the multiplier from oil barrel to CO₂ ton would be ~0.49 if oil was pure carbon. That would mean 3.5 bn barrels of oil would produce 1.7 Gt of CO₂, so for once the G’s arithmetic is plausible, allowing for the hydrogen and other non-C stuff in oil.
I don’t understand that.
We start from pure C (as an example). Then we add atmospheric O2 to get CO2. The CO2 has to weigh more than the original C. By, umm, O2? Things *gain weight* when they burn.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-can-burning-one-ton-fuel-create-more-one-ton-co2
Ahhhh – I get it. It’s barrels of oil to tonnes of CO2. My bad – I was thinking tonnes of oil to tonnes of CO2. Tsk.
You’ve got it. At times I wish everything was done in SI, but things like “barrel” are so ingrained in the system. The one I really hate is the US’s use of BTU for heat. The Yanks wanted to be independent from us, and got on well with the revolutionary French, so WTF didn’t they adopt the metric system?
Because the imperial system is more use in the real world. Particularly if you’re trying to conquer a vast wilderness full of dangerous animals and angry natives.
It can subdivide into more fractions and it’s based on a human body.
Need to measure the distance between two posts to buy some material for fencing? Measure with your feet heel to toe and count. A lot easier than carrying a metre ruler. Who carries a one-ten-millionth-of-the-distance-between-the-equator-and-the-north-pole-in-1791-along-a-line-running-through-Paris around for reference?
“Because the imperial system is more use in the real world.”
It’s a total PITA in engineering. When the company that I worked for started importing machinery from the US it caused no end of problems. The lack of standardisation was quite baffling. You could have two screws that appeared to be identical but had slightly different thread pitches so they couldn’t be used interchangeably. We had to hold a complete second stock of fastenings just for them.
Somewhere in the development hellhole I’ve a piece on why the truly democratic economy won’t work. My actual example is screws – threads, pitches, metals, left or right, phillips, slat, etc. How could we possibly have votes on who makes – and how many – the brass, half inch, left hand thread, phillips top, etc etc screws? And then the brass, half inch, right hand thread, phillips top, etc etc
@Stonyground
I too work for an American engineering company (I’m maintenance).
A while ago, we used to have to wait for a few weeks after project delivery, then drill out all the fastening and up size them to metric before up revving the drawings.
Thankfully the American designers have cottoned on now and use metric from the start.
To second Stonyground’s experience, many years ago I was on the edges of the then-new Spearfish torpedo project.
It used (and still does) a gas turbine from Sundstrand, based in Illinois; and we had exactly the same issue of having to ruthlessly segregate “turbine work” from “rest of weapon” because it used US-specific threaded fasteners – some of which, if interchanged, would seem to fit until they came under load… and when you’re using OTTO fuel (stabilised nitroglycerine) with HAP (hydroxylammonium perchlorate) as an oxidiser, leaks are something you do not want.
Even more fun; the American BTU used not to equal the British BTU because the British one was written BThU i.e. British Thermal Unit. For why? For because BTU meant Board of Trade Unit.
My memory says it was something to do with town gas but Google says it’s identical to the kW-hr so the connection to town gas is perhaps a false memory.
BTAIM, I found this paper on the conversion of the UK to natural gas. Does anyone suppose the country/government would be capable of such an engineering feat nowadays?
https://www.wwutilities.co.uk/media/5331/lessons-learnt-from-the-past.pdf
It takes about 7 barrels of oil to weigh a ton. So the arithmetic already looks v dodgy to me.
If they all went aheadthe resulting emissions would have a global impact on the ability to stave off catastrophic levels of climate change, according to research by the campaigning group Uplift.
About Uplift:
Tessa is an international climate change lawyer and campaigner. Before founding Uplift, she was co-founder and Co-Director of the Climate Litigation Network, which supports groundbreaking strategic climate litigation around the world. She has spent two decades supporting grassroots, regional and international movements for justice and has served as an expert advisor to UN human rights bodies and national governments, while working in Thailand, Egypt, India, the US, the Netherlands and Australia. Her writing has been published in international media outlets and academic publications, and she has been invited to speak at the United Nations and events convened by the Financial Times, the Economist, and TED. She is also a regular media commentator. Tessa is a graduate of the University of Oxford (BCL(Dist)) and University of Western Australia (LLB(Hons)/BA). In 2019, she was named by TIME magazine as one of fifteen women leading the fight against climate change.
These people are credentialed wreckers and saboteurs.
CO2 has an atomic weight of 44. Of this 32 comes from the oxygen and just 12 from the carbon. So burning 1ton of pure carbon gives close to 4 tons of CO2. Crude oil is a pretty dense source of carbon: about 85% by weight. Multiplied together gives about 3.1 tons of CO2 for each ton of crude,
Carbon dioxide is not a problem.
There you go, all those people beavering away trying to figure out ‘how many million metric tons of CO2 causes X’, or ‘how do we spaff £22Bn on Carbon Capture and Storage’ and ‘who is going to get their leccy turned off when the wind doesn’t blow’ etc. etc., can fuck off and find a proper job and save every body tens
of thousands of pounds. Each.
You mean there is enough easily extractable good stuff down there to cheaply power the entire UK for the next 30 years?
Awesome lets get it out and used rather than buying that expensive “green energy” or importing the stuff!
Energy bills should fall 30-40% as a result. Which will save some thousands of grannies from freezing to death becasue they cant afford their heating bills.
*sigh* the stuff isn’t classed as “hydrocarbons” on a whim, y’know….
*on average* in that mix each C has 2H attached, so burning those chains completely gives 1 CO2 and 1H20 per C present.
And that’s only if you manage complete combustion, which you usually don’t. You will burn off all the hydrogen, you won’t burn all the carbon, so in reality you’ll produce more H2O than CO2 for a Mol of hydrocarbons. Sometimes a lot more.
Which is why it’s extremely tricky to do Napkin-Fu by weight or density here. You need to convert to average Mol to a barrel of Brent Crude to get even near the correct numbers.
There’s no need to vote; we do that with our wallets. Useful standardisation comes about because the standard makes it easier for everyone. Hence roads, car control layouts, ICE fuel, HTTP, ATMs, mains voltages, etc.
The useless stuff includes centrally-imposed standards that are good in theory but not in practice. Exhibit A: EPCs, house purchase info packs, etc. Then there’s proprietary stuff like every connector Sony has ever made, which is simply profiteering, walled-garden, useless shit. Or incompatible/barely compatible EV charger/charging networks.
Grikath,
While your chemistry re. the hydogen is correct, it’s irrelevant to the mass of CO2 per mass of petroleum.
The ‘2 H per C average’ means that the H contributes very little to the mass of 1 mole of oil (2 in 14), while the H2O combustion product isn’t CO2. It’s rain.
I’d also disagree re. the incomplete combustion. Old clunker diesels maybe, but in general, very little soot or CO in the exhaust. Well under 1%, so again, not material to the mass of CO2 (plantfood) produced per ton of oil.
Changing the topic slightly, I am always amazed by the cognitive dissonance of the greenies: “People are starving, we need more food” and “Plant food (CO2) is evil, ban it!”. Two incompatible ideas in the same head at the same time. Enough to please Big Brother, or open that door on The Heart of Gold. Must go and drink my not tea.
I was gobsmacked by the IEA (not the London one) saying last week that the earth burns just over 8 billions tonnes of coal each year, or tonne per person. So just from coal alone humans are generating 3 tonnes of CO2 per year in round numbers. Ah, but, they said China burns half of it – so just from coal China if 1/5th of population of the world generates 7.5 tonnes of CO2 per year (even more than world average of 5 from just one primary source).
Ed Miliband is a non-serious person: if there is a problem he would tax embedded emissions in imports. If there isn’t then he should repeal net zero.
re: standards, one of those was imposed by government dictat: UK mains voltage (and frequency). Stanley Baldwin – probably the last prime minister to understand engineering principles – commissioned some electrical engineers – yes, actual engineers of the actual subject in question – to work out a uniform set of UK-wide electrical standard to allow the market to perform efficiently without having to ensure you bought a “Derby-rated” cooker instead of a “Nottingham-rated” cooker. With a UK-wide standard mains system, that then allowed efficiency of production of appliances, and also efficient production of supply, and the construction of the national grid.
Arguing about the technical limitations, economic costs or Letists having multiple contradictory positions on Net Zero is pointless (like arguing about the number of angels that can fit on the sharp end of a needle).
None of that is relevant to the underlying premise of the “elite” making us all confirm to a communist agenda of forced poverty and depopulation.