Turns Back To Coal, Abandons Emissions Targets
From Dr. Benny Peiser at The GWPF
The Japanese government is moving to speed up the environmental assessment process for new coal-fired power plants. According to Japanese media reports, the government intends to make 12 months the maximum period for assessing and approving new coal-fired power plants as its utilities seek to develop more power stations to stem surging energy supply bills. With the government considering the closure of much of the installed nuclear capacity over the medium term, the spotlight is back on coal as the cheapest energy source, notwithstanding plans to cut carbon emissions. A commitment to slice 2020 carbon emissions by 25 per cent from their 1990 level will be revised by October, according to Japanese newspaper reports. –Brian Robins, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 2013
Japan is likely to abandon an ambitious pledge to slash greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter, the top government spokesman said on Thursday. Asked to confirm if the new administration would review Tokyo’s 2009 pledge, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government was “moving in that direction in principle”. “I have been saying for some time that it is a tremendous target and would be impossible to achieve,” he told a regular news conference. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s business-friendly Liberal Democratic Party ousted the Democratic Party in December elections after pledging to review the emissions cut target in light of the post-Fukushima switch to fossil fuels. —AFP, 24 January 2013
New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. Estimates of the global supply of methane hydrate range from the equivalent of 100 times more than America’s current annual energy consumption to 3 million times more. –Charles C Mann, The Atlantic, May 2013
Across Europe, both policy makers and the public remain wary of the potential environmental impact of technologies like hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, used to extract shale gas. A slowdown in Europe’s efforts to exploit its shale gas reserves, roughly 10 percent of the world’s deposits, could not come at a worse time for Europe’s companies, which are already suffering from a continental debt crisis and anemic growth and are becoming increasingly uncompetitive compared with rivals in the United States. –Mark Scott, The New York Times, 25 April 2013
MPs criticised the government on Friday for unnecessarily delaying development of shale gas, saying it should now encourage companies to come up with more accurate estimates of recoverable reserves. The lack of progress over the past two years in exploration and development of UK shale gas is disappointing and needs to speed up, members of the influential cross-party Energy and Climate Change Committee in parliament said in a report. —Reuters, 26 April 2013
The 18-month moratorium on shale gas drilling was a “scandal”, member of the UK House of Commons select committee on climate change Peter Lilley said late Monday. Lilley said that a fortnight’s trip to the US — the birthplace of the shale gas revolution — could have answered all the questions surrounding the risks of hydraulic fracturing, enabling shale gas production to start that much earlier. “Most of the concerns are either exaggerations or lies,” he said. —Platts, 24 April 2013
Europeans have spent hundreds of billions of euros on renewable energy – ultimately borne by taxpayers, consumers and Europe’s competitiveness – for no gain. As the shale gas revolution spreads, it promises to swamp the economics of green energy, leaving it dependent on unaffordable subsidies. –Rupert Darwall, City A.M. 25 April 2013
Looks like Jim Hansen will have a very busy protest schedule this year…good thing he’s retired.
How extraordinary!
Japan has been nutty throughout this whole energy/emission business. Shutting down their nuclear plants makes zero sense no matter how you slice it. Japan is paying the price for its inability to address issues in anything other than thru ignorance and fear and hysteria. Small
wonder China is cleaning Japan’s clock. China is well along a path of a heavy build program
of nuclear reactors, looking to having over 500 nuclear plants by 2050 and 1600 by the end
of the century.
India and China took no notice of the no coal-fired power stations nonsense.
Germany woke up just before it was too late, and now it looks like Japan has also woken up just in time..
That leaves the UK looking at the world’s most unreliable and expensive energy system with guaranteed rolling blackouts and brownouts just a few short years away..
There is no way the goofy political ‘elite’ are going to admit the insanity of the UK’s energy policies, which can guarantee only one thing – economic decline.
The AFP article is hilariously misleading.
“Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s business-friendly Liberal Democratic Party ousted the Democratic Party in December elections after pledging to review the emissions cut target in light of the post-Fukushima switch to fossil fuels”
That was not the reason. Not at all. China’s rising aggression in Japanese waters and the inability of the DPJ to deal with it, then add the DPJ messing up the reconstruction in the Tohoku area, then add how the DPJ was completely lost at what to do with the TPP, etc. Also calling the complete destruction of the DPJ as “ousted” is quite an understatement. They lost 173 seats.
There is also no word that nuclear power will be completely stopped. The LDP is more positive towards nuclear power and when we look at the election results, then it’s very clear that any anti-nuclear sentiment was no issue whatsoever for the Japanese people. There was a screaming fringe minority pretending to be speaking for the Japanese people (you know, the usual enviro lunatics), but they were never a factor. Anti-nuclear protests happened but were really small and, except one in Tokyo, really not worth mentioning. The Tokyo protest, given the sheer size of the city, was also pretty irrelevant.
The DPJ and one newly formed party (the so called Tomorrow Party) were heavily riding the anti-nuclear horse, but it brought them nothing. The Tomorrow Party (basically a merger of two already existing parties and several disgruntled DPJ members) that wanted to throw out nuclear power yesterday (if that was possible) was completely murdered in the polls. They started with 61 seats, expected a huge triumph, and ended with 9 seats (on the same level as the communist party, aka practically irrelevant.) One of the parties that merged with the Tomorrow Party was the “Tax Cuts Japan – Anti-TPP – Zero Nuclear Party”. No surprise they were slaughtered.
The LDP won big (+174), Nippon Ishin no Kai didn’t quite get what was expected but still won (despite the Japan Times claiming they lost, I guess moving from 11 to 54 seats is losing), and the DPJ is now just three few seats ahead of NInK. If anything, this year’s upper house elections will lead to another bloodbath for the DPJ, because right now the LDP is sailing the high winds and they’d have to mess up really big to drop this. PM Abe and his cabinet had an approval rating of 74% in April, 4 months into this adventure, which is unprecedented. The DPJ prime ministers were already stalling and heavily dropping at this point. And that same PM Abe has said that he’s in favor or rebuilding and restarting the reactors.
@Peter Miller
That’s pretty spot on. I remember reading that, even if all the Kyoto Protocol countries would achieve their goals, the result would still be zero, because especially China and India would keep pushing CO2 anyway.
Japan should not be shutting its nuts unless they are poorly sited/inadequately constructed. Fukushima was both. They can go to coal because the plants only take 4 years to construct, and coal can be imported from Australia. USC technology like all the new plants in China provides about 41% ner thermal efficiency at the busbar.
The UK should go to CCGT. Higher net efficiency (Siemens best achieved almost 61% in 2012) and plants only take 3 years to construct. Works because UK has appreciable frack able shale gas reserves.
But it will take an electricity crisis to turn around the politics of the situation.
GWPF should also be more selective in its information sources. It cited the new Atlantic article on methane hydrate clathrates. That article, in turn, makes unsourced fact assertions that are complete speculation. Methane hydrate RESOURCE estimates vary by a factor of ten. Much of what has been sampled is of very low quality (gas per unit volume), or so dispersed as subsea nodules (the usual images) as to be unharvestable with any known of envisional technology at any price (bring the stuff toward the surface without containment and you increase temperature, reduce pressure, and release into the sea the GHG methane).
By comparison, shale gas resource estimates in the US alone are also very large, but at best only 13% is technically recoverable via horizontal drill/ frack, and much less at current prices.
There are methane hydrate deposits like the Nankai trough off Japan, or Siberian and Alaskan permafrost overlying traditional source rock shales, where concentrations are sufficiently high and the deposits sufficiently large that production may someday be technically possible, at rates unknown. Theses are unlikely to compensate for depletion of existing thermogenic reservoirs.
Nice one Edohiguma :thumbsup:
Good analysis (from Hector in Tohoku)
OT..back in March there was a short video of a talk given by a gentleman in which he explained that the Earth has greened, not in spite of, but because of fossil fuels. It came a day or so after a discussion of African desertification.
I can’t seem to find it in the archives, and need to show it to a AGW fanatic friend, who simply will not believe it.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Dale
And in Australia, we were committed to both Kyoto and Kyoto 2…we are still bombarded with the usual propaganda. But tonight, we were treated to a spectacle…
One presenter speaks of the CO2 emissions that would result from a power station for that house for the duration of the experiment (In balloons that floated in air – LOL). What the presenter failed to note were the CO2 emissions from the cyclists. Humans expel CO2 at ~40,000ppm/v AT REST let alone under physical stress! That’s why someone invented the steam turbine and hooked it up to a generator. It’s so much more efficient. Reminds me of a test where some man-powered fire service water pump was tested against a steam powered pump. The steam powered pump won!
The mind boggles!
Rud. The Fukushima failure was putting the backup generator in a tin shed on the beach. Any and all half-decent reinforced concrete structures survived the tsunami, no problem (I live in Tohoku and have visited the areas). Fukushima would have not have been a problem if TEPCO had not been asleep at the wheel.
Perhaps it’s time for Lilley, or any other sympathetic MP, to use parliamentary privilege to call those with vested interests in parliament who are preventing shale exploitation “corrupt”. Parliamentary privilege means that Lilley, or whoever, can’t be sued but the media would be bound to report the subsequent row.
This would mean that more people would be aware of how and why their fuel bills are going through the roof and the names of at least some of the people who are benefiting from their misery, the excess deaths and how we are heading literally for the Dark Ages while every other country with any sense is baling out fast.
The sooner the guilty parties are widely exposed the better.
It would be interesting to do a study to piece together just how AGW managed to destabilize so many well educated leaders into making so many poor decisions regarding energy and environment.
The CO2 obsession has left Britain, Australia, the US, Japan, Western Europe in the position of making non-sensical policy choices. The irony is that not only are those choices not going to impact the stated concern of global warming, they are not even giong to impact CO2 emissions. AGW hypesters have utterly failed in achieving their stated goals of reducing CO2 emissions.
And they have failed at the cost of increased nergy prices, growing energy poverty, and increased CO2 emissions.
Edohiguma says:
April 26, 2013 at 7:56 am
@Peter Miller
That’s pretty spot on. I remember reading that, even if all the Kyoto Protocol countries would achieve their goals, the result would still be zero, because especially China and India would keep pushing CO2 anyway.
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Zero squared actually, because there is no measurable effect on global warming or climate change following recent level changes in atmospheric CO2.
@ur momisugly edohiguma
I agree – good analysis.
It is interesting that Fukushima Daini (2) nuclear power plant suffered almost none of the failures of Fukushima Daiichi (1) even though it was only about 7 miles south of the famous Daiichi power station. It is true that the tsunami was estimated at about 13 meters at Daiichi (the newsworthy plant) which was over twice the height that it was designed to withstand while Daini experienced “only” an estimated 9 meter wave. The Daiichi plant design was originally meant to remain on the top of an existing hill at the ocean’s edge but was excavated closer to sea level in order to bring much of the heavy nuclear power plant infrastructure to the site by ship. Clearly all of the remaining 50 reactors (out of a total of 54) survived a very extreme natural disaster and after some much needed (and in some cases completely ignored by TEPCO and other operators) retrofit they could and probably should be used to bring much needed power to the long suffering Japanese population.
Bernie
Reminds me of the pharmaceutical industry where all the investment is in drugs to control effects and not the causes. Addressing the cause doesn’t result in an endless supply of funds, and controlling the effects produces more funds to control the unwanted side effects. There’s no motivation to stop the gravy train.
Japan is so far down in the rank of nations with proven coal reserves they don’t even show up in the top 27 (Zimbabwe ranks at #25, but lack of coal isn’t the root of their problems). However they somehow managed to mine 1.3 million tonnes in 2007, barely edging out France at the bottom rank (#32) with 0.9 million tonnes.
So if Japan stays the course of abandoning nuclear for electric power and using coal instead, they’re going to have to import a bunch — roughly 30 terawatt hours per month according to the chart above.
Hello Australia: are you listening? I suspect Japan would rather buy from you than beg coal from China. I’d invest in Australian coal industries except I’m worried your politicians will do something stupid like prohibit export of evil CO2-belching fossil fuels. Sounds like to good issue for the opposition parties to use in your upcoming elections.
I agree with previous posters: this only makes sense once you accept the insanity of abandoning nuclear. Japan is a wealthy industrial country with plenty of know-how to build and manage safe nuclear. I guess that means they can also build and maintain clean coal plants.
The US stands alone in having plenty of coal, oil, natural gas, uranium and thorium. We are so blessed with energy resources our politicians have not yet been able to mismanage all that bounty, although they keep trying. If you Australians do manage to send Julia Gillard packing, please don’t send her here. Maybe Zimbabwe could use her help.
Nuclear power… Chinese construction standards… what could go wrong? 😉
Edohiguma says:
April 26, 2013 at 7:56 am
“That’s pretty spot on. I remember reading that, even if all the Kyoto Protocol countries would achieve their goals, the result would still be zero, because especially China and India would keep pushing CO2 anyway.”
True. But due to German Gesinnungsethik, where the motives, not the efficacy, decide about the worthiness of an effort, German warmists shrug this off with “But we need to do something” – and they dominate all parties. (Reason behind this bizarre ethics is the Kantian/Pestalozzian negation of objective reality but Germans are in general not deep enough to understand the flaw in the basis of their logic; a strange disconnect from their general obsession with efficiency. Detail-obsessed yet building on a faulty fundament.)
Maybe it is about time to buy Peabody Energy who will be shipping much of their vast Australian coal to Japan.
Peter Miller says:
April 26, 2013 at 7:46 am (Edit)
India and China took no notice of the no coal-fired power stations nonsense.
Germany woke up just before it was too late, and now it looks like Japan has also woken up just in time..
That leaves the UK looking at the world’s most unreliable and expensive energy system with guaranteed rolling blackouts and brownouts just a few short years away..
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It sounds to me that most social democrat governments are using Climate Change as a vote getter. The science is shonky and the cheering squad is , frankly, largely certifiable. That said the Alarmists have the ear of authority and it will take something awesome to break that bond.
You would think that our legislators would have seen through the “Chicken Little” stuff by now. If they haven’t they are extremely dull and if they have then they are stealing our money and effort with every subsidy for no return beyond a few “on sides” types get piles of subsidy dosh for something that can’t ever work. Up until now subsidised nonsense used to be dropped pronto unless it enhanced national pride like, say, Concord. Unlike Concord nobody loves these “renewables” except the recipients of government cash, tax rebates, and a generous feed in tariff.
It is amazing that they can scrape up cash for these follies. You might think they have run out of stuff to spend the cash on. After all the health and education system works well enough nowadays. Put enthalpy into your models and let’s put this CO2 bugaboo out of its misery. Go and find something to subsidise that makes life better for the largest number of people. Wickedly fast broadband available to all for a simple connection fee and nothing else to pay would be a great start and something all parties could endorse.
The total greenhouse gas in the atmosphere hasn’t changed in any measurable way. The small CO2 component is 120 parts or 0.4% of all the greenhouse gasses. Using the oft quoted 30 deg of extra warming then the extra CO2 should be at best 0.12 K if it doesn’t displace something else in which case there is no additional warming. Enthalpy may tell us more about what happens to the water vapour which would be a huge step forward.
Yes I know my calcs are a bit rough and ready but the intention still caries. Oh and big thanks to Bob Tisdale those maps and charts and graphs of his simply scream out the importance of water vapour in this temperature stuff.
Peter Lilley is one of the few honourable people in the House of Commons as he was almost alone in voting against the appalling Climate Change Act. For this alone he should be for ever venerated.
120 parts being the increase from 280 to now of course.
Despite what you have heard from companies in the business and the government, we still have no idea of the true cost and gain of shale gas in Britain or the Continent. The numbers are stupid large as they are gas-molecules-in-the-ground estimates, not gas-in-the-pipeline-with-costs estimates.
The costs of drilling and completing shale gas in Britain are immense, and the drilling densities are great. Infrastructure is probably a lesser cost than direct drilling, completing and equipping (including dehydrators, probable heaters/methanol feeds for the winter months or pressure drop hydration, compressors, water disposal facilities and wells …. and general land use) but still significant.
The MSM – and the GWPF, surprisingly – have been still to the point of deer-in-the-headlights on the practical aspects of shale gas development in the UK. If conventional gas is your reference price for gas-energy, then you must expect at least double that for shale gas: if it weren’t, you’d have it already.
In the US there is a lot of wet shale gas, i.e. light hydrocarbons that come with the gas. The wet part pays for the gas; the gas is a problem, really, just as gasoline was a problem back in the early part of oil drilling: a product that they had to get rid of as the production was greater than the demand. But the shales in Britain are “dry”, meaning the methane content is essentially all there is. Other than co-produced water, that is. So the sale price of Brit shale gas has to cover the cost of its production by itself.
If you don’t have high rate wells in Britain as you do in the States – depth of burial and a pressure gradient equal to water or more – you are burdened on your sticker price again, as all projects have to be paid for within a certain number of years to be attractive as a project. In socialist worlds, this is not the case – a 20 year payout is okay, in fact no payout may be okay if production leads to profit somewhere else in the economy of the nation. But in a for-profit world, investment follows returns so payout length matters. If you have a high volume well as in the northern US, a large amount of gas may be produced in 18 months, paying for the initial investment. A four-year payout is often used as a metric, though probably 6 will survive if there is an economy of scale. In otherwords, a return of the investment of 16 – 25% per annum is targeted. If, as in Britain, the wells do not produce as quickly, then your payout still must be of the 6 year level, but since there is less gas produced, for example, 0.6 of the US equivalent, then your gas cost must be 1.7X the US situation.
The minimum price for Brit gas can be determined by simple math: the inverse of how much gas are you going to produce per dollar invested within (say) 6 years. But thes numbers are difficult to find – not because the background data isn’t there, but because both industry and government hedge on the essential numbers, the recovery factor and the expected production profile. They DO exist, as both sides work these out to determine whether they are interested or not, or at what energy cost level consumers must be happy with (resigned to).
Shale gas isn’t going quickly? You might be suspicious that the only part you hear from either side is excitement about total energy available. What counts in a real world, not the socialist, eco-green world, is what the cost of that energy is, as every dollar you use to do your “thing” is a dollar less you use “as” your thing, be it the tool you now have or the public pleasure you indulge in.
Energy is not the goal. It is the means to the goal. When governments speak of all the money to be made, they speak as if your energy production is the product you seek. It is not: it is the tool to get what you want, whether it is heat, light, indoor plumbing or turning the bit at the factory. Energy is part of the cost of production, not the result of production.
We must keep reminding ourselves that the object is not to run quickly but to get somewhere and then to do something. Whatever we have to do to get to our point of “doing” takes away from the doing. And if Brit shale gas is to be the “solution” to Brit’s getting to that good place, it behooves us to understand what that cost will be.
The future is not dark, but it is expensive. Regardless of what you hear.
Peter Miller says: That leaves the UK looking at the world’s most unreliable and expensive energy system with guaranteed rolling blackouts and brownouts just a few short years away..
There is no way the goofy political ‘elite’ are going to admit the insanity of the UK’s energy policies, which can guarantee only one thing – economic decline.
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Well we have our recently canonised St Margaret to thank for destroying the indigenous coal industry and locking our native resources of high quality coal in the ground.
Oh, and for starting the whole CO2 AGW scam of course which was part and parcel of the same “goofy political” aims to sell out and destroy the country.