From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
New Zealand was on Saturday night expected to revoke a ban on drilling for oil and gas amid fears of blackouts, as Labour plans to impose a similar crackdown on the North Sea.
The country’s coalition government is preparing to invite energy companies to resume exploration in the three major offshore fields that supply most of its gas.
It comes after National Grid operator Transpower was last month forced to warn families to limit their electricity usage to avoid a shutdown during a cold snap.
The decision to reverse the ban, made by resources minister Shane Jones, will be a setback for green activists and likely to be regarded as a blow for Labour after Ed Miliband has repeatedly pledged to halt new drilling for oil and gas in UK waters.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
As the current EU elections are showing, consumers are getting thoroughly fed up with subsidizing renewable energy policies that are bringing nothing but higher prices for unreliable sources like wind and solar with few, if any, appreciable environmental benefits. So it’s good to see New Zealand is joining the common sense club. Hopefully US and Canadian voters will demonstrate the same type of sentiments this November and next year.
We’ve had a spate of welcome news today, it seems. Alex de Croo’s 5.9% of the vote was my favorite, even if off topic somewhat.
Sure. They’ll jump right in because New Zealand has such a fine track record as a reliable business partner.
It’s the oil companies that were unreliable. Almost all the explorer abandoned their permits for exploration after the 2014 oil price crash. And all had finished well before the change in policy in 2018.
To top it off the NZ taxpayer has had to foot the NZ$200 mill cost of removing production platforms that had exhausted their fields and the operator had closed up shop, as they do
So, does that mean NZ should forever not allow oil drilling?
Thank you for the links showing what you claim.
BTW, who will be removing all the bird choppers and solar scars from the NZ landscape when they wear out?
I am sure the taxpayer will be stuck with that too, to the tune of BILLIONS.
Don’t be like BigOilBob. Cover BOTH sides (reliable energy production, coal, oil, gas, nuclear vs unreliable wind and solar) of the decommissioning problem and cost!
The sea will eventually take down the production platforms. It may take some time, but the ocean is very patient, and relentlessly corrosive.
This is pointless just as the previous ban on drilling was pointless. NZ doesn’t have any substantial reserves. It is estimated that it has about 1 year’s supply of oil and 10 years supply of natural gas. See
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natural-resources/energy-statistics-and-modelling/energy-statistics/petroleum-reserves-data
In contrast it does have enough renewable energy resources to supply 100% of its electricity needs with renewable energy. The combination of a small population, lots of geothermal and hydroelectricity generation means that it is one of the few countries where it is achievable. So if NZ really wanted energy security and not to be reliant on imports it should shift as quickly as possible to electric cars etc. Plus it would improve the domestic economy since rather than spending billions importing fuel that money would stay in the country.
It does not have enough storage capacity to make any amount of renewable energy sufficient. They could cover the country with solar panels and wind turbines, fill the EEZ out to 200 miles with wind turbines, and still not have enough renewable energy. 1000%, 10,000%, a million percent — none would be enough.
They have immense storage with hydroelectric dams, which even in normal times supply 55% of electricity. If they move, like Tasmania, into using the water whenever wind and sun is low, they can do very well indeed. Tassie exports when the price is high, and imports cheap Vic electricity when the wind is blowing.
If, can, all as useless as the still wind and dark sun. Do those dams pump water up for storage? Gosh no. Useless.
THey don’t need to pump. It rains in NZ. The dams are big. They just need to use the plentiful water carefully and not drain the dams. Use wind when it is blowing, water when it isn’t.
aka: “Rationing”
The socialists’ answer to everything. Let me control who gets their fair share of X.
No, it is free market. They make money by using water when the price is high, and letting wind and sun do the job when available.
If that is the case then why “ National Grid operator Transpower was last month forced to warn families to limit their electricity usage to avoid a shutdown during a cold snap.” It would appear that the magic turbines do not do the job and neither does hydro in this case.
NZ doesn’t have sufficient Hydro to back up the Wind and Solar we already have. The Huntly coal fired power station provides the back up with coal imported from Indonesia. We shut down most of the local coal mines. The plan seems to be to electrify everything and generate the power from W&S but we will have to build some new back up generation capacity.
One problem is that when the wind blows, it often also rains, so the lakes are full and could be generating power, but they have to tip the excess water over the spillway without generation and use the wind power instead.
Shut down ? It was the previous conservative government who loaded the state owned coal miner- who had a mine under the power station- with too much debt , somit went bankrupt.
This now the local area coal mines don’t supply enough thermal coal , as they have long term contracts with the dairy industry for coal powered milk powder plants.Hence the import of coal from Indonesia, the world’s largest exporter of thermal coal.
In south island their coal mines export metallurgical coal, too expensive for thermal power .
I bow to your superior knowledge as to why they were shut down. But they were shut down.
Don’t bow to Duker’s “superior knowledge”, demand a link.
It wasn’t actually that Duker. Huntly was designed to be supplied by Hunty West Coal mine. I remember going down that mine for a visit in the late 80s. There is no rail link to the station, just conveyor belts from the portal.
Through a series of bad decisions by Coal Corp and its earlier incarnations., the mine caught fire and can’t be used. To get coal to station, they need to rail it Rotowaro, truck it from there to Huntly West site and then use conveyors to get it to the station. Rotowaro can’t supply enough coal and Huntly East (which actually goes under the station had been exhausted. No local coal in the quantities needed is suitable for the mills.
The straw that broke Coalcorp’s back was the wood pelleting plant in Taupo. That was Labour Government appointees on the board that pushed for that plant – an early decarbonisation disaster.
So as above and below, Duker provides no link, and may well be wrong about what happened. As a leftist, he will always claim the conservatives are to blame. Of course Chris Morris, as I asked Duker, please provide links to your information.
Note: I naturally believe that whatever Duker provides is at best a half truth, if not just an outright lie. That is due to experience with his posting here for years.
Drake -Firstly I’m in a different timezone to you – we are way ahead. Secondly, there is no one document about the failure of Solid Energy. But he is right that it had the plug pulled on its financing by National – our RoC governing party. It was a series of bad decisions The assets were brought by Bathhurst resources. I know all about the pelletising plant. I drive past it every day and a number of friends worked there to try to fix its defects. A cycling friend is also the manager in a company that bought it and fixed it, running it now.
But if you want to know more, do your own google research. You can’t be spoonfed all your life
Thanks again for the link to your claims that the “conservatives” are to blame.
“One problem is that when the wind blows, it often also rains, so the lakes are full and could be generating power, but they have to tip the excess water over the spillway without generation and use the wind power instead.”
So what is the problem? Turbines generating, dams overflowing?
I watch the data fairly closely and I do not remember ever seeing that happen. I have seen plenty of spills but they are floods, consent limits or line constraints
It was John who said it happened. I just commented that it didn’t seem to indicate a power shortage.
I didn’t say it was you Nick, but you can get spills when there are low levels in lakes. Happens on the Waikato a bit when northerly rains occur in headwaters of all the tributaries below Taupo. They can also spill when there is a need for water downstream and/ or there are units OOS in the hydro stations. Currently the situation at Rangipo, Roxburgh and a couple of the Waikato stations
Yes Chris. You are right. You can get spills when the lakes are low. But I was trying to make the point that when the lakes are full because it is raining a lot, it is also windy. Wind generation at this time is wasteful.
The problem is that the dams cannot store more water and therefore more energy than their holding capacity. What is supposed to happen is when it is windy the hydro can save up capacity by not generating, but if the dams are full that is not an option.
From Chris Morris’ plot below, the dams are operated within a 2 TWh mid range. Wind fluctuations will generally be far below that. There is no reason to push either limit.
it’s a waste of money and resources. It’s a choice between having 2 generating power plants or 1 generating power plant to produce the same amount of electricity.
You must remember that Nick HATES poor people. His religion requires the building of holy structures to the wind god at great expense to benefit the producers and developers of such false idols at the expense of the poor.
Of course the claimed reason is to “save the Earth”, from the devil, oops I mean CO2.
You obviously know nothing about dam operations and hydropower production. Really, just stop commenting ignorantly.
Actually NZ has a very modest hydro storage unlike say Canada.
Further the hydro is largely at max as is geothermal and gas offered a meaningful buffer to rainfall fluctuations but just like the Taliban the CC power plants were gas axed to satisfy the weather gods.
Not really big dams . Plus many hydro generation are on same river system hence low rainfall /snowfall in catchment affects a greater number of stations.
It’s really only 3 rivers . Waikato. Clutha . Waitaki. A 4th river system at Manapouri is dedicated to an aluminium smelter, which has just renewed it’s contract for another 20 years. That generator alone would solve all the peak supply problems for next 20 years if the smelter closed, as it would depress prices. Location isn’t the best but would be even better than a pumped storage as it has a very high drop fed fr?om a large lake. No need to buy power to pump back up if it was used only for shortfall situations rather as a cash generator and used constantly
“Not really big dams . “
You can’t do bigger than Lake Taupo. And those dams on the Clutha have plenty of capacity. But the main thing is, any dam storage will long outlast variations in wind.
No Nick. In terms of storage capacity, Pukaki, Tekapo and Hawea are bigger. The lakes behind Clyde and Roxburgh have very little storage capacity <10GWh each)
So why build the bird choppers in the first place Nick. To steal money from the poor to give to political cronies??
Until the next drought as in 2016 when the Hydro was forced to use diesel generators to supply the state with reliable power.
Oh that will never happen again 🫣.
The main thing then was that the BassLink was out of action. But they learnt from that. They had been selling power indiscriminately, and running down the dams. Now they sell when the price is high, and import when not. They actually import more power than they export, but their exports earn much more than they pay for imports. They import when winds are rife and prices low. And they keep the dams at a good level.
Nick if Tasmania has all the unreliables and Basslink, why have thjey just fired up their CCGT?
https://wattclarity.com.au/articles/2024/06/13june-tas-gpg-runningstrong-tamarvalleyccgt/
At the same time as generating at Tamar Valley, they are exporting more than its generation to Victoria because the wind has stopped blowing and its gone dark there..
Nick
The storage isn’t that much – if all the lakes are full (which is very rare) it is 5TWh capacity in 45TWhpa grid. Usually, the lakes sit in the 2-3TWh range, and they can go down at about 4-500GWh a week. They have a panic stations level of about 1TWh storage, They need that water for peaking.
In standard hydrological conditions, they need about 1000-1500MW of thermal to get through the peaks. Because of gas shortage, they have been running 500-750MW of coal then. The big peaks generally coincide with wind droughts – frosty nights.
5TWh is about 6 weeks supply, assuming no wind and no rain anywhere (and no sun, and ignoring geothermal). That is certainly better than any battery. It is a verygenerous buffer against intermittency.
No Nick – as the graph linkage I posted shows, the storage is usually about half the theoretical maximum
Here is an old graph showing 10 years of storage data. Never got near theoretical maximum.
https://static.transpower.co.nz/public/bulk-upload/documents/Market%20Summary%20for%20week%20ended%2008%20Dec%202019%20FOR%20WEB%20v2.pdf?VersionId=BuAiGr0CMXvlgnZQ2_gcYlM3GF6LJOHn
I also went back to last week mentioned in the report and they were spilling down the Waiau as Te Anau/ Manapouri were overfull and they couldn’t generate any more
Here is your plot; as you say, before there was significant wind and solar
As you say, they manage it within a central region. But they never go significanatly below 1.5 GWh.
The plot for the last ten years has been very similar. And guess what Nick, there is a very good reason they don’t go much below 1.5TWh. At about 2, they start to burn a lot more fossil fuels to conserve water. They don’t want a 1992 happening again.
I hear the whole world is doing really well in your cloud cuckoo land, Mr Stokes, with the public beginning to turn their heads and see what a nightmare solar, wind, EVs and batteries has created for their futures. Meanwhile sensible stuff like hydroelectric not only prove efficient all the time they give value for money too and that is what the public crave not daft ass schemes that cost fortunes to deliver zero!.
You’re promoting a self licking ice cream cone. There is a fixed volume of storage available in reservoirs. Those reservoirs already capture energy in the form of stored water that is released through turbines that convert hydraulic energy to electrical energy. If you use the same storage volume to take water pumped uphill that is produced by wind or solar powered electrically-operated pumps (or reversible pump-generators), then you just wasted all of that free water that is already being stored in those reservoirs. Plus you’ve wasted the electricity used to overcome the frictional head losses of the pumped water.
Granted, there may be periods when due to natural drawdown, there is storage available, but that greatly limits the total capacity of solar-wind energy that can effectively be stored and released.
“There is a fixed volume of storage available in reservoirs.”
Functionally, as Chris Morris showed with graph, there is a variable amount. The theoretical max (or min) is never approached. There is no need to pump. If wind intermittently provides MWh, then those are MWh you don’t have to use water for. Same with solar. And the intermittency of W&S is on a far shorter timescale than the storage of the dams.
But that will take a long wire for NZ to participate in this exchange.
The problem remains of dry year risk and peaking. And then there’s all the infrastructure set up for NG that there is little reason to write off if you can use your own – e-gases are just a waste of good renewable electricity.
Dry year risk can be remedied by using wind and sun instead of water wherever possible, keeping the dams at a good level. That is what Tasmania learnt to do after trouble with a drought. And peaking is just a matter of providing enough generators.
No. It’s geothermal that’s the newest renewable , at very high load factor too.
With the new plants being commissioned, should have about 8TWh pa of reliable baseload power by end of year.
Well, that too. It all allows them to use the water judiciously.
They use it judiciously now. The problem that you don’t seem to comprehend is they don’t have enough capacity in the hydros for the daily ramp-up when one looks at the volume of water coming down the rivers. They are about 1000MW short average. It is worse when they have a dry season.
The new geothermal is doing little displacement of thermal. More covering the growth.
“ The problem that you don’t seem to comprehend is they don’t have enough capacity in the hydros for the daily ramp-up when one looks at the volume of water coming down the rivers. “
No, I don’t. You talk of at least 2-3 TWh of storage, and daily use of about 80 GWh. How could that strain the storage, however peaky.
Or maybe you mean not enough generation capacity in GW. But that isn’t limited by water, just generators and transmission.
No Nick – as the lake storage goes down, the flow they can get out of the lakes reduce. Fully open gates on Taupo when the lake is at the top of its range is 330 cumecs. At minimum level, it is only 140cumecs. The storage isn’t evenly distributed. When we go a week or so without rain, the flow from the non-controlled catchments dries up, so storage water makes up a lot larger contributor to the flow.
The general rule of thumb is more than 6 weeks without significant rain in the Southern Lakes, they start getting worried about water storage and lakes running dry.
No Nick. Duker is correct. I discussed above the hydro storage requirements.
But you should know all this as it hasn’t changed since the article I wrote on this subject in Climate etc.
You are living in a fantasy world, not the real world, in your head anyway.
Losing electrical power in this modern real world is a monumental disaster. Anything that puts our power supply system at risk of running out is foolishness of the worst kind. So called “renewables” are only useful to a limited degree, not useless, but not very useful, in balancing the power greed such that supply always meets demand.
It would appear that the New Zealand government doesn’t agree with you and they probably have a much better idea of resources and capabilities than you have, times 1000.
why not go tell them?
They are clueless. Tax cuts for landlords were more important .
They problem isn’t about gas but the generators closing their peaking generation. It raised prices and they benefit from high prices ….Non?
The government’s own ministry is the one providing the estimates about the reserves. Have a look at the website.
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natural-resources/energy-statistics-and-modelling/energy-statistics/petroleum-reserves-data
And if the politicians don’t want to listen to the people they pay to advise them then they are certainly not going to listen to me.
That is 2022 data. They had big problems with a couple of wells on the major gas field last year which significantly reduced the supply. And no drill rig available as no exploration drilling occurring. They had to burn coal as they didn’t have enough gas to run those plants.
Or, it could do what Taiwan does. Import coal. They have very cheap electricity in Taiwan.
IIRC neither did Brasil in 1980.
Step by step …. inch by inch ….
More good news. The truth is a beautiful thing it is not always what some us want but it is what it is.
_______________________________________________________________
A [Ctrl-F] Search on “nuclear” turns up nothing.
Unless there is some sort of irrevocable contract for at least two decades, why would any capital intensive operation front-end invest in a hostile political environment when the next session of parliament or a new energy minister turns around and threatens to bankrupt the investor group for destroying mankind by providing reliable energy.
In light of this and other step backs ind UK, Netherlands, Germany …can political leaders understand the first rank risk to citizens’ health, the countries’ economies, food supply and national security is shortage of cheap, abundant reliable power. It is even is essential for a healthy environment which has been ignored
because full attention to imaginary problems the meningitis of climate change (witness Paris, Berlin, NYC being overrun with rats and the deterioration of healthcare). One in four of their Medieval ancestors died of plague because of such developments.
A supply of dispathable affordable reliable energy should be enshrined as a permanent minimum requirement in constitutions. Impregnable boilerplated free speech should be up there as well.
Fat lot of good that it did for the former United States.
Constitutions don’t mean a thing when the majority of those in power choose to ignore it.
The consequences are mounting and catching up with the AGW farce. Now that the impact is being felt at home people are noticing and asking the tough questions beyond “what can I do to save the world”.
Is it criminal to laugh at this reversal? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
.
Okay, convict me … (but I feel better now after the laugh.)
It is ok to laugh as long as you are laughing at the flip-flopping Shane Jones. Here is what he said in 2018 when he was regional economic development minister as part of the government that imposed the ban:
NZ First’s Mr Jones said the oil exploration ban signaled a clear commitment to combat climate change – something he said the National Party only issued hollow words towards.
“We have given a clear sense of the direction of travel that this Government seeks to take,” Mr Jones said
“It is enabling us with utter clarity to share with New Zealanders we are not climate change deniers.
“I guarantee you the other side of the house will soon stand up and they will prove as a consequence of their rhetoric that they might like going to these international conventions, hobnobbing, but their words are hollow, their actions are non-existent and a number of them are going to be shown up that they have no practical response.”
From “https://www.1news.co.nz/2018/04/12/shame-on-nz-first-paula-bennett-accuses-death-sentence-for-regional-nz-caused-by-oil-exploration-ban/”
Essentially NZ First will do and say anything that might get them into power and don’t be surprised if in 3 years time Mr. Jones is introducing a bill ending oil drilling yet again.
Shane Jones is about as trustworthy as a Trump wedding ring. This is the man who watched porn in a hotel room then charged the cost to the government.
Here is the current hydro storage and risk curves
https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/notices-and-reporting/weekly-reporting/electricity-risk-curves
As long as no major plant breakdown occurs and it isn’t that cold (big provisors), then NZ should make it through the winter OK
More good news from the recently installed conservative New Zealand government.
This following the winding back of funding of numerous country destroying nutty CAGW programs and bureaucracies initiated by the prior far left progressive (virtually totalitarian) regime under the now confirmed (but we already knew) WEF puppet prior PM Jacinta Adern.
N.Z. need to go further to unwind the insane policies,and get back to reality but Christopher Luxon has made a promising start.
Ooops. The big experiment of wind and solar supplying reliable sustainable power for modern societies is showing signs of imploding. Common sense and critical thinking may prevail after all.
Round up the greenies and ship ’em off for retraining as something useful. If possible.
“Mandatory Emissions To Achieve Net-Zero Is A Fool’s Game”.
Simply put, in the healthy and wealthy countries, every person, animal, or anything that causes emissions to harmfully rise could vanish off the face of the earth, or even die off, and global emissions will still explode in the coming years and decades ahead over the population and economic growth of China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Tanzania.
China, India, and Indonesia are three of the largest emissions generators, the same countries that do not have the financial wherewithal or technical capabilities to reduce or capture anything!
I’m curious.
Here in the US there are groups that have opposed building dams and have wanted to remove them for decades. But those same groups have jumped on the “renewable” bandwagon and love to claim hydro output as “renewable energy” to bolster the … less than promised … output of wind and solar.
Are there similar groups in NZ?
story tip
Study finds natural climate variability impacts Arctic and global warming (msn.com)
Unique Temperature Trend Pattern Associated With Internally Driven Global Cooling and Arctic Warming During 1980–2022 – Sweeney – 2024 – Geophysical Research Letters – Wiley Online Library