This happened last Saturday December 1st, but I just now became aware of it. From their website the photo looks like a lot of people, but the video that follows shows it to be a rather modest affair.
I think they might be a bit unclear on the concept:
Thank you to everyone who turned out on one of the coldest days this year. With our 7.2m fracking rig, we took a clear message to Parliament – “No Fracking in the UK”, a message backed up by other actions around the country, and one that was picked up by the BBC (see here and here) amongst others. Not only that but there could hardly have been a more critical moment to stage a conspicuous show of opposition to the the government’s unfolding plans for an expansion of fracking and a new dash for gas.
And what did they do to warm up afterwards? Chances are they went to a nice fossil fuel (gas) heated pub or their home.
From the video, it looks like there might be 200-300 people at this “national” event standing out in the cold.
I wonder what sort of yelling we’d hear if they couldn’t retreat to a nice warm place afterwards, and they were forced to stay out in the cold for a few days to experience firsthand what they preach?
h/t to Fay Kelly-Tuncay via facebook
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Fracking is not only being used for natural gas, it is being used on all the oil pools now. In fact, the new enhanced fracking technique was originated on the Bakken shale oil pool in Montana. Bakken has turned into gold mine and this was until 10 years ago thought to be just a curiousity.
This new enhanced technology (it was used decades ago but it is now used more intensively) has extended the productive life of many ageing oil pools already, has opened many previously thought inaccessible shale oil pools and has many extensions that have just started to be exploited so far.
Peak Oil can no longer be defined or estimated because we don’t know how far this new thought process/technique will take production. The Saudi’s are now using this technology on their existing oil pools with the drill bits direction/orientation being controlled remotely from a Lab hundreds of miles away.
Peak Oil is at least in 2040 now.
(Note some people are almost obsessed with the thought about Peak Oil even though it depends entirely on technology to extract the oil. When was the last time technology reached a Peak in any area?)
@ur momisuglySilver Ralph;12:16 am excellent point hydrocarbons versus slavery.
A sarcastic man would say these protesters are slavering for slavery.
@ur momisugly Stephanie Clague 11:42. Best summation of this wave of social hysteria I have read in ages. Thank you.
Stephanie Clague at 11:42 am is possibly post worthy on its own.
Course it could degenerate fast, but it speaks to me, wonderful precision of passion and language.
I keep telling the under 40s that this is the best of all possible times , in human history, to live.
We have never had it so good and easy.
Cheap reliable electricity changed everything. Reliable transport next best thing.
These are the things the worlds poor are being, I think deliberately, denied. And this hypocritical ludditism is being used to do it.
We could save a lot of time and money by giving these people what they insist others should have.
Living without refrigeration and easy hygiene should help their cognitive processes kick into gear.
@Silver Ralph
“If you have ever lived in the Mid East…”
I have…,have you?
“Firstly, Peak Oil has nothing to do with reserves – its about production rates, not reserves…”
No it isn’t..
richardscourtney explained it perfectly, read it!
It’s about economics. We will never run out of oil.
“When I refuel my car I spend €100 instead of €10. That is an early manifestation of Peak Oil – because easy oil is getting more scarce and much more expensive to extract.”
Only partly.
Check out the tax component of the price. Some 60 per cent of the pump price in Britain is down to tax and duties. And oil is controlled by a cartel (OPEC) keeping the price artificially high.
We haven’t even used a fraction of the Earth’s carbohydrates (Oil, Coal and Gas).
And check out the reserves of gas hydrates.
The worldwide amounts of carbon bound in gas hydrates is conservatively estimated to total twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth.
http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydrates/title.html
We won’t be running out of fossil fuels anytime soon.
richardscourtney says:
December 9, 2012 at 12:06 pm
Stephanie Clague:
Thankyou very much indeed for your excellent post at December 9, 2012 at 11:42 am.
——————————————————————-
john robertson says:
December 9, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Stephanie Clague at 11:42 am is possibly post worthy on its own.
Dear friends,
Thank you both for the kind words of support, I am pleased that you find some truth in my humble words. I speak from the heart and usually end up making errors that look quite funny when I find them, being dyslexic I can read and check my posts four or more times and still not spot the obvious errors. I fully realise that we dont wash our shoes once a week as I described in my post!
Yours
Stephanie Clague.
richardscourtney says: December 9, 2012 at 1:48 pm
And when are you going to stop your “ostrich-like approach” and admit ‘Peak Oil’ is bollocks?
_____________________________________
So you are going to set up Moon Base Alpha and Mars Base Charlie based on burning Cretacious plants, are you? Massive colliers hauling coal to the Moon?? Geezzzz.
Admit it, Richard, you are a dinosaur who will shackle the potential of human civilisation for the next few centuries.
.
richardscourtney says: December 9, 2012 at 1:08 pm
‘Peak oil’ is not a problem, and never will be a problem, because it cannot be a problem.
_________________________________________
‘it cannot be a problem’ ???
What planet are you on Richard? I am paying €100 ($130) for a tank of gas in my car. Now that is a real problem – NOW. This is Peak Oil in action Rich, easy oil has gone, expensive oil is here to stay, and the difficulties and expense of extraction are only ever going to make oil more and more expensive. That is the what the looming summit of Peak Oil gives us, Rich – ever more expensive energy.
Besides, what on earth are we doing burning the feedstock for the petrochemical industry?? We will need those oil based raw materials for the next few thousand years, to create what the world needs – and you are happy that we are simply burning it??
Geez Rich, do you ever look further forward than your own ‘old fella’?!
.
AndyW says: December 9, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Richard Courtney At Dec 9th, 2012 at 1:48pm
“I was part of the team which perfected the Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process which can produce syncrude from coal at competitive cost to crude oil.
Silver Ralph,
The above comment from Richard has given you a very large verbal slap.
Richard works in the industry and knows what he’s talking about. He’s right: you’re talking bollocks.
______________________________________________
No he has not.
Richard Courtney is a desk jockey who thinks that the highly fractured coal seams of the UK are an advantage to extraction !!! Geezzzz. He also thinks that the decision to close Selby (the great modern white hope of the UK coal industry) was political (because he is an uber-socialist and Scargill supporter). In reality, Selby (which sucked in hundreds of millions in grants) was closed because the fractured seams were impossible to work, at anything like the cost of world coal.
Unlike Richard, I was working down those mines, and I saw first hand how difficult and expensive those mines were to work – all the men and machinery working in a deep seam only 2.5 feet high. Can you imagine the difficulties, and the heat – with the mine roof crashing to the floor just a meter behind you? And then comming across yet another fault-line and having to reset all the machinery to the new level. Modern health and safety would have closed those mines down the very next day.
.
So what we have here in the UK is a good example of Peak Coal. We have worked the coal in the UK for hundreds of years and all the easy coal has gone, thus the costs and dangers of extraction have gone through the roof. Now there might be ‘300 years of coal’ in the ground, as they like to proclaim, but that coal ain’t going to be extracted at world prices, I can assure you. UK coal and UK coal-to-liquids will always be three times the world price, and will require vast subsidies to keep the industry alive (especially if the Greens want to extract and bury the CO2 as well !!)
Face facts, Rich, we have reached economic Peak Coal in the UK (ie, production has peaked due difficulty of extraction). That, is a definition of Peak Coal. Face a further fact, Richard, we have also reached economic Peak Oil in the UK (ie, production has peaked due difficulty of extraction). That, is a definition of Peak Oil. Britain has reached Peak in many raw materials and energy sources, and reliance on foreign tyrants in Russia and Saudi Arabia is not always a sensible option – which is why we need Thorium and Fusion energy. End of story.
And Rich, before you make a reply, please confirm that you have at last been north of Watford to see the real problems of the UK coal industry.
.
Silver Ralph says:
December 9, 2012 at 12:16 am
>>I fully agree that Brits are wimps and should experience some real cold.
>>They don’t even know what winter tyres are.
Winter tyres do not work well in the UK. Over the last 30 years there has been precious little snow, and even then only for short periods. Winter tyres when temps are above 7 degrees are acrually dangerous, as they have less grip, and UK winter temps were often above 7 degrees.
Off topic I know but your inference that winter tyres are actually dangerous when the temp is above 7 degrees, is to put it politely BS. There are many independent reviews of Winter tyres that have concluded that because of the softer rubber and block pattern they don’t last as long as summer rated tyres but it is perfectly acceptable to run them all the year round. See here for but ONE example http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/tyre-guides/36694/winter-tyre-test-2011
I wish people would do some research before making such alarmist comments!
@Silver Ralph
” I am paying €100 ($130) for a tank of gas in my car. Now that is a real problem – NOW. This is Peak Oil in action Rich, easy oil has gone, expensive oil is here to stay, and the difficulties and expense of extraction are only ever going to make oil more and more expensive.”
In Saudi Arabia the cost of producing 1 barrel of oil (158.9873) is less than US$2.00 or $ 0.013 US cents a liter. Converted in pounds sterling this is approximately 0.0078 pence per liter.
They are selling it for $ 85.98 a barrel or 54 British pounds sterling (34 pence a liter).
The oil company adds another 21 pence for refining, transporting and distributing it.
The government adds another 83 pence a liter.
You are paying approximately 138.5p per liter.
The problem is OPEC and a greedy government, not ‘peak oil’.
Silver Ralph says:
December 9, 2012 at 11:26 pm
richardscourtney says: December 9, 2012 at 1:08 pm
‘Peak oil’ is not a problem, and never will be a problem, because it cannot be a problem.
_________________________________________
‘it cannot be a problem’ ???
“What planet are you on Richard? I am paying €100 ($130) for a tank of gas in my car. Now that is a real problem – NOW”
Dear Ralph,
The point Richard was making about peak oil has little influence on the price of petrol you pay at the pumps. The amount of duty charged exceeds the cost of production from the well head through the refinery and into the pump you use. If the oil and gas companies were using the same production and refining techniques they were using 50yrs ago you would be correct in asserting the notion of peak oil. However, oil and gas technology has moved on in leaps an bounds in a few short decades and areas not thought cost effective to exploit are now accessible.
It is in the interests of the producer nations to keep the price of oil high enough to ensure decent revenue but not so high as to provoke an economic crash, for instance Venezuela needs the price of oil to remain above $75pb to sustain its social programmes. The price you pay at the pumps is not a reflection of scarcity or dwindling reserves but includes costs like refining and profits through the supply chain not to mention taxes which pay for the services we need. One other related factor is the use of pricing to dampen demand and encourage user end efficiencies like the purchase of a vehicle that uses less fuel.
The oil Companies are experts at finding and mapping reserves and calculating when the price per barrel would justify profitable extraction, and those reserves are vast and increasing all the time as new technologies allow for tar sand extraction and re exploitation of old fields and incredibly a new drill system that allows one rig and one pipeline to get to each isolated pocket of reserves that tapped alone and in isolation would not be profitable. All in all the future is bright and there is good cause to believe that the shores around Africa alone will start to provide as much new reserves as we have extracted to date. The future is brighter than some would believe, there are those who have a political motive for peddling scares about running out of fossil fuels, they have very loud voices and do not care about the facts.
Silver Ralph,
“So what we have here in the UK is a good example of Peak Coal.”
I do not think we are anywhere near “peak coal” in the UK, whatever inference you may draw from Selby. Thatcher closed the coal mines because it was cheaper to import open cast coal from eastern europe.
Where I live in Derbyshire, there is a planning application to open cast for coal along the A61 corridor. The coal is there.
Silver Ralph:
At December 9, 2012 at 11:50 pm you ask (I think) me
I was the Vice President (VP) of the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM) during the period when British Coal (aka the National Coal Board) was being demolished. The managers of that industry repeatedly re-elected me to that office despite my being the Senior Material Scientist based at the Coal Research Establishment (hence, my work on LSE) so I was not employed at a colliery.
However, I attended several collieries as part of my work as Senior Material Scientist so I could understand problems which I was called-upon to solve. This required my understanding of the technical problems affecting individual collieries. Also, collieries invited me to visit them in my capacity as VP of BACM, and such visits almost always included underground visits. Most collieries were “north of Watford” and I am now looking at an engraved, silver, whisky flask given to me by a Scottish colliery when I visited it.
The managers of the industry had ample opportunity to assess me and they repeatedly elected me as their VP to address “the real problems of the UK coal industry”.
Incidentally, the Selby coal field was closed upon completion of the project and not for any other reason. There is still coal there but its extraction would cause subsidence problems for e.g. the city of York.
But so what? The UK deep mines have gone, and none of that has any relevance to this thread or to your nonsense about the non-existent possibility of ‘peak oil’.
This thread is about fracking and not me.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
December 9, 2012 at 1:48 pm
I was part of the team which perfected the Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process which can produce syncrude from coal at competitive cost to crude oil. The existence of the LSE process sets a limit on the long-term cost of crude
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Imteresting. Presently, the cost of crude bears little resemblance to the costs of extraction/production and transport. A profit was being made when crude was half the price.
A while back I read an article that suggested that long term crude ought not to exceed about $100 per barrel since the viable cost of syncrude was between $80 to $100 per barrel. There are vast reserves of coal (and algae) so syncrude has a lengthy future. No doubt it is political forces and big business which are delaying syncrude being widely used, but I have little doubt that its day will come.
There is a relationship between all terms being discussed and it is the weight that one puts on the various terms that leads to debate. With any finite resourse, there must by definition be a peak. But that said, it does not inevitably follow that the resource will ever be exhausted. As technology moves on, the resource may be replaced in whole or part such that it is never exhausted.
The shale gas ‘revolution’ has obviously put back peak oil since shale gas will be used for some things which oil is presently used for. Obviously it cannot replace oil in total, but it can replace some uses of oil and plentiful (and cheap) supply of shale gas therefore extents peak oil. So whilst peak gas and peak oil are different, there is a relationship between the two.
Some argue that we should be looking at new technologies. Necessity is the mother of all invention. This is with good cause and I have no doubt that when the need arises, new technologies will quickly be found and will quickly come on stream. But that time has not yet come. Fossil fuels are still plentiful, they are a wonderful package and will meet our needs for at least a couple of generations to come. I have little doubt that energy supply in the year 2050 will look quite different to that of today. It will not be solar or windmills, whether it will be thorium, and/or hydrogen cells, who knows.
I endorse the views expressed to the effect that fossil fuels are a miracle discovery which have benefited and advanced humanityimmensely. High energy costs are arguably the greatest evil/threat facing mankind.
fretslider says:
December 9, 2012 at 5:19 am
Revenge for Juliar?
DaveE
richard verney:
For clarity, I write to say that I agree all you say in your post at December 10, 2012 at 5:46 am.
Richard
As for ‘fracking’, does anyone have a link to a good rebuttal of the purported hazards of fracking that the enviro-alarmists and fear-mongers are constantly touting? If there was such a rebuttal here on WUWT, I missed it.
/Mr Lynn
Vince Causey says: December 10, 2012 at 4:20 am
Silver Ralph,
“So what we have here in the UK is a good example of Peak Coal.”
I do not think we are anywhere near “peak coal” in the UK, whatever inference you may draw from Selby. Thatcher closed the coal mines because it was cheaper to import open cast coal from eastern europe.
__________________________________
Thatcher did not close Selby, it was the coal industry’s great white hope for the future, and remained open for nearly another 20 years. It was finally closed due to it being too expensive and riddled with geological faults.
But this is the whole point about Peak Anything. When a raw material is no longer economic to extract, and production falls as a consequence, you have reached the Production Peak in this case, Peak Coal for the UK. Hint : Peak anything does not refer to reserves in the ground, but to production rates.
According to The Independent, UK Peak Coal was reached as far back as 1913, and UK coal output has been falling ever since. This is Peak Coal in action.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uks-coal-output-falls-to-preindustrial-levels-769769.html
Why did the UK reach Peak Coal? Nothing to do with Mrs Thatcher, matey, it is because UK coal is deep mine coal with very thin and highly faulted seams. (Hint: UK Peak Coal was reached over 60 years before Thatcher became prime minister.) How on earth could the UK compete with Western Australia, where the coal seams are 6m deep and close enough to the surface to strip mine??
Now you could argue that coal is a national resourse, and we should extract it at any price. And Scargill could have argued that. But if we subsidise coal, who else will want a subsidy? And if we tax industry to pay for that huge coal subsidy, industry will simply reloate to the Far East (as it has done for similar wage-related reasons). In a world economy, you cannot ignore world prices, and one of the most basic cost for industry is energy.
This, therefore, is a clear illustration and warning for the world. Peak Oil and Peak Coal are a reality – we have already reached those peaks in the UK. Only hindcasting will tell us when the world reached Peak Oil, but my estimation is that it is not too far off.
As Verney just pointed out, shale gas may well delay Peak Oil because it will take some load off oil supplies, but that is simply a delaying tactic.
.
richardscourtney says: December 10, 2012 at 5:20 am
I was the Vice President (VP) of the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM).
Incidentally, the Selby coal field was closed upon completion of the project and not for any other reason. There is still coal there but its extraction would cause subsidence problems for e.g. the city of York.
——————————————————————–
What a stupid thing for a Vice President of the British Association of Colliery Management to say. As you should well know, unmined pillars are left under every city in the UK, to prevent subsidence. Thus the reserves under York would never have been in the original calculations for Selby coal reserves.
Selby closed because the reserves were more fractured than expected, as even Wiki explains. And Selby also probably closed because mining management were completely out of touch with what was happening on the ground – as we have seen amply demonstrated in this thread.
When I went through mining school, they said ‘this is how it is done’. When I went underground, they did completely the opposite, because they had neither the time nor resources to do the job properly. But management were completely unaware of the short-cuts that were being taken. If Scargil wanted to make a name for himself, instead of playing politics, this is what he should have addressed.
So coming back on thread – any coal to liquid fuel extraction would only be at the $80 – $100 level if we used world coal prices. If we used realistic UK prices instead – at production volumes to satisfy UK oil demand – the prices of this synthetic fuel would be horrendous (because the UK is already well past Peak Coal). And as a result the UK economy would crash once more, as a result.
This is why shale gas is so importsnt to the UK. But if politicians are reading, please note that this is only a temporary stop-gap. The UK is already well past UK Peak Oil, and so we need Thorium and Fusion energy as soon as possible – other wise we will be back in the grip of Russian and Arabian tyrants.
P.S. Who do you think is sponsoring terrorism around the world? For every $100 spent on Arabian oil, $10 comes back to the West in the form of fundamentalist education and terrorism.
.
The environmentalists support fracking beneath heavily populated cities and massive recovery/circulation of deep ‘radioactive contaminated’ water for green geothermal energy, see:
http://www.publicsectorexecutive.com/Energy-Efficiency-and-Sustainability/Page-13/manchester-geothermal-heat-network-announced
– barely 40 miles from the rural site of the shale fracking tests greens intend doing some fracking of their own. The concepts of irony and hypocrisy are lost on true believers.
The green’s idological problem with fracking for gas is that it makes heat and light cheaper than it would otherwise be and encourages industrial society, the real enemy.
@Silver Ralph,
Global peak oil will happen only when there is a viable alternative liquid fuel that is less expensive to produce than the most expensive oil that is technically possible to extract at the time.
There is little to no reason to believe that this will happen any time in the forseable future.
With only a few hundred turning up to protest maybe they need a new slogan, how about “Vote Green and there will be No Fracking UK”
Other_Andy says: December 10, 2012 at 2:04 am
In Saudi Arabia the cost of producing 1 barrel of oil (158.9873) is less than US$2.00 or $ 0.013 US cents a liter. Converted in pounds sterling this is approximately 0.0078 pence per liter.
____________________________________
You really don’t get it, do you.
Firstly, you give us Saudi production costs, not total costs.. Total Saudi costs, including research and development, are more like $6 a barrel.
Secondly, the amount of tax and profit that Saudi is creaming off is irellevant to the Peak Oil argument. Saudi Arabia can only charge these astronomic prices for its oil because all the new fields coming onstream have much higher production costs – up to $100 a barrel according to Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/07/28/oil-cost-factbox-idUSLS12407420090728
So the world price of oil (and thus the price of petrol in my car) is being driven by ever increasing production costs, and Saudi Arabia is simply smiling broadly and following suit. Why are we contemplating such difficult and expensive oil fields? Because we are approaching Peak Oil, and these difficult fields and locations are all the oil companies can find. And Saudi could not fill the gap in supplies even if it wanted to, because its own cheap oil fields are drying up and cannot deliver any more flow than they already are. Oh, yes, they can invoke ever more complex technology to get more oil out, but that is simply adding to the price once more.
Thus the price of oil will rise and rise as we approach Peak Oil – ie: peak world oil production rates. And they will continue to rise until one of two things happen.
a. people cannot afford oil and economise by significant amounts.
b. a new energy source comes along that will undercut oil, and save the day. Shale gas may be a partial answer to the Peak Oil problem, but only Thorium or Fusion will finally end it.
But if we don’t find an alternative, and we do hit Peak Oil (peak production rates), be prepared for prices to go through the roof. This is what would have happened to UK energy supplies when the UK hit Peak Oil and Peak Coal – but the UK put off the eventual crisis by subsidising coal prices, and finally by importing cheaper oil and coal supplies. The UK can do this, but the World cannot – not unless we can start importing coal and oil from the Martians….. !
.
Just so people know. The first patent for Fracking was applied for just after the CIVIL WAR in the USA. It is OLD technology.
Again as usual ‘much ado about nothing’ with the MSM propaganda mills leading the way.
Richard Verney said;
“Fossil fuels are still plentiful, they are a wonderful package and will meet our needs for at least a couple of generations to come.’
Putting petrol in my portable generator provides immediate and measurable power which can be readily topped up by addng more fuel. My solar panels are a law unto thremselves and become increasingly useless as the light levels fall as the seasons change and of course are completely dead at night.
It is not at present an appropriate technology for the UK let alone appropriate to use as a main source of power.
Personally I favour wave/tidal power to which additional power can be grabbed through using integrated wind towers. However, despite the Salter Duck proving the viabilty of this technology by 1976 we are really no nearer developing the huge power station lapping at oiur coast. So like it or not we need to use fossil fuel in all its forms for at least 1 or 2 generations more
tonyb