Europe vs. fracking
Europe has a great deal of fracking potential, but Europeans have for the most part rejected that possible solution to its energy problems. Here’s some of what’s been going on, and why:
Proponents of fracking hold that Europe’s shale gas potential is needed now more than ever, though Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Bulgaria have all previously banned fracking. Now, the debate is being revived by recent moves in the UK.
Britain’s new Prime Minister Liz Truss has announced that the UK is lifting a 2019 moratorium on shale gas fracking as the country looks to ramp up domestic energy resources and help households and businesses struggling to pay soaring energy bills…
Europe has more recoverable shale gas than the U.S., according to estimates. However, the only major fracking activity is in Ukraine, which managed to wean itself off of Russian gas years ago…
The big problem with fracking in Europe is that some of the conditions that fueled the U.S. shale boom don’t exist in Europe. In most countries, it’s the state, and not private landowners, that owns the mineral rights to oil and gas in the ground. Contrast that with the U.S. where landowner’s cut can be as much as an eighth of production revenue. This in effect means that fracking does not yield big financial rewards for European landowners.
To garner more public support for the technology, the British government and some companies have previously proposed direct payments to people affected by fracking. However, environmental groups have strongly opposed the move, terming such payments as bribes. The situation is not helped by the fact that the population density in Europe is more than 3x that in the United States, fueling not-in-my-backyard protests. For instance, many rural projects have in the past been rejected because they would bring trucks and equipment used for fracking onto picturesque roads dating back to Roman times. Indeed, Gazprom has previously said that the difficulty in finding unpopulated land in Europe and enough water to exploit shale wells will help Russian gas stay competitive.
So although some of the objections involve the green lobby, some of it is connected with the fact that fracking isn’t as easy to do in Europe compared to the US, and the costs are greater.
“not as easy” means it could be done with time, effort, and some expense. Which is to say, if they’d started and kept it up, they’d be okay by now. If they’d started and gotten it going reasonably well and then stopped, they could probably fire it back up more or less quickly.
If they have to start from scratch, they have a problem. Which is to say the folks who forbade even starting are going to have a problem.
I presume that a sufficient and effective end to the current difficulties, in part because they start fracking, would allow money and circumstances to repair or mitigate the damages to their travel-poster country side. As is said in mountainous country versus, say, Iowa; you can’t farm scenery. Nor can it keep you warm.
Europe needs to move towards new-model nuclear power generation ASAP.
When Vlad decides that you and yours can freeze to death in the dark in your urban flat, well the social and “environmental” costs may get reassessed.
Inexpensive Roosian gas has its own costs. Too cheap to meter? Nope, no BTUs for you at any cost, comrade!
Europe needs to move towards new-model nuclear power generation ASAP.
Kate:
Agreed. I think we all do.
With abundant, reasonably-priced energy so many problems can be solved. If the world ends up fighting over oil and gas, that’s a recipe for Armageddon.
I’m not sold on the climate change narrative, but I think it’s worth keeping an eye on carbon emissions. Plus, there are plenty of other uses for oil and gas besides fuel.
Armageddon outta here!
California needs multiple nuclear power facilities running multiple desalination plants. Either that, or deport half the population.
Most Europeans have a different mindset than the conservative or enterprising American. They like their customs and charming buildings, glens, meadows, and farms because they don’t have vast expanses of farmlands, deserts, and unproductive land as we do here in the U.S. They have manicured their forests, their vineyards, their mountain meadows and use them with care. There are ugly places in Europe, but many places that I’ve been to in Europe look like they are right out of “The Sound of Music,” or “Robin Hood.” So, I understand their reluctance to having drilling rigs and water trucks in their well-cared-for neighborhoods.
They also don’t seem to be as enterprising and wealth seeking as Americans. We encountered several restaurants that were only open a few days a week and their competitors were open on the days they were closed. It was a compatible arrangement, and everybody seemed satisfied with it. Much more laid back than we Yanks are.
They do have a serious energy problem that they need to come to grips with, and because of their typical mind sets, it’s going to be hard. I wish them well, but fear there is going to be a lot of suffering before they take up their task and solve it.
Of course, we have a problem too, but ours seems much less difficult to solve than theirs.
The UK can do it. It’s reach for Australia to do it. But Continental Europe cannot.
But why? Successful long-term fracking requires four things besides suitable parent rock. It needs flexible VC-oriented investment pools of capital, skilled and flexible labor, a suitable pipeline system to distribute the oil for refining, and independently owned ground mineral rights to secure and coordinate the effort.
Australia has the best parent rock to exploit and markets in Asia already being serviced. It could reform its laws on mineral rights enough for the last hurdle to be overcome.
Australia’s long term geological and mining tradition and economy suggests that the rest could be forthcoming. But the politics of AGW hysterics keep it from happening, despite the fact that there’s nobody to be bothered by drilling in the vast outback. The sociopolitical environment from 15-20 years ago could have accommodated present day fracking tech. But not anytime recently.
The UK was on the cusp of making a go at it, but enviro-alarmists got the upper hand some years ago. Will new PM Truss run the gauntlet?
But Europe has so many hurdles to overcome. It would take Herculean institutional changes — things that the EU is weakest at.
so who paid off all the right players to prevent any energy independent, that would be gazprom, they did the same in this country, pelosi schumer, the big guy got 20K individually, the party got a larger cut,
The UK’s environmentalists are certain to scream ‘bloody murder’.
In effect, expressing a willingness to see people freeze to death.
Given that position, it is incumbent upon them to set an example.
It’s their patriotic duty to be the first to make that sacrifice for Gaia through voluntary suicide. That would be the sincerest example possible in virtue signaling.
“With abundant, reasonably-priced energy so many problems can be solved.” huxley
Abundant, cheap energy is one key factor in societal wealth generation. Jordan Peterson relates that as part of a Canadian government panel, he spent 4 years rigorously studying environmental factors. He maintains that the most effective means of combating humanity’s deleterious effects upon the environment is to create as much wealth for as many people as possible and, as quickly as we can. Because well off people have the luxury of caring about the environment, as they have the resources to secure less harmful means of interacting with the environment.
Whereas the poor’s day to day struggle to exist doesn’t allow for that consideration.
miguel cervantes,
“so who paid off all the right players to prevent any energy independent, that would be gazprom…”
I’m doubtful that Gazprom had anything to do with it. Though Russia certainly approved of dependent customers.
As TJ points out, “the politics of AGW hysterics keep it from happening” and Europe’s politicians, no doubt with the approval of the West’s Global Elite bought the argument that the West could use Russia’s cheap oil and gas until they could fully transition over to fueling their economy fully with renewable energy.
Environmental Nazis and climate fanatics (but I repeat myself)
refuse to accept that renewables can never supply all of the energy needed by a modern industrialized civilization.
Politicians are rarely if ever the sharpest pencil in the pack, so ‘easy solutions’ that keep political pressure off them strongly appeal.
The Global Elite are willing to sacrifice as many peons as necessary (for the greater good), in fact today some wonder, “What shall we do with all these useless people?”
The little guy takes it in the shorts and the well off shrug. At the top, some smile, for such as they, “It’s not enough that I should win, others must suffer.”
But Europe has so many hurdles to overcome. It would take Herculean institutional changes — things that the EU is weakest at.
–TJ
No doubt, but freezing in the winter without power “can concentrate the mind wonderfully,” as Samuel Johnson said of the prospect of being hanged in two weeks.
This winter will be an interesting test of European adaptability. Either way, an example for the rest of us.
The state of the climate change arguments simply amaze me. Climate Change Armageddonists have managed to coax public perception over the line of acceptance, to accept junk science without any meaningful formal scientific debate. CO2 Bad! We’re all going to burn before we drown from rising sea levels!
The United Nations hosts the IPCC and they publish an annually-updated report on this fraud and still, to this day, we have classically-disciplined scientists like Judith Curry leaving the field out of frustration that they cannot find a forum to progress the science, scientifically – while the junk-science paper publishers are adamant in their refusal to debate and air a discussion of the actual data – even in the courts. Looking at you, Mr. Hockey-Stick of Mysterious Methodolgy.
Fracking for oil and gas has been undertaken safely for years. In my early days we would drill through formations exhibiting ample ‘shows’ of oil and gas, that we knew to be un-commercial because of their low permeability. Now these are targeted for modern drilling and production techniques. And often in densely populated areas with very tight environmental controls: Pennsylvania comes to mind. The solution is to have drilling centers that house multiple wells radiating out underground in many different directions. It can be managed.
Similarly, the UK has the whole of its offshore North Sea province to explore, now that its heyday of conventional production has passed. Of course, it’s a hard row to hoe, advancing the idea. If a country is so ignorant that it turns away from nuclear power in the name of global warming, there’s a lot of education that has to take place before common sense is back on the table. Although with the coming winter, European appetites for hydrocarbons might return.
As someone involved with natural gas worldwide for much of my career, I find the attitude of many Americans and Europeans opposed to unconventional gas production to be baffling. Aggie notes above that tight gas formations and unconventional “Devonian” shales have been known about since at least the late 1970s. We understood at the time that there was more gas in these formations than all known reserves of oil. All we lacked was the technology to open up the rock economically. The Europeans knew of similar formations in Germany, Austria, France, Netherlands, Poland, and the UK. No one knew what to do with them at the time.
As Aggie explains, incentives for land owners are important to the success of such production. Even in formerly communist Ukraine we were able to come up with a payments system that turned the public tide on fracking
We use the new technology today throughout the country, except for those enlightened bastions of New York and California. Like our betters in NY and CA, most Europeans believe that their tap water will start to spark and flame if authorities allow fracking. Thank you, “documentarists.” {that special effect required the producers to introduce natural gas into the water pipe in one case and to drill a water line through a methane rich coal seam in another}
The combination of fracturing the rock using horizontal drilling methods minimizes the land impact once production has started (Look up “shale gas production pads, Pennsylvania”). As for other environmental effects, certainly using gas in a highly efficient plant beats coal and lignite very time. The Russians know that, we know that, but the Europeans are convinced that butterflies and unicorns will rescue them from their imagined Mordor-like future with fracking. And about the theme park aspect of Western Europe, no one seemed to care much about that in Belgium and Eastern France in the 20th century.
I go back and forth on the efficacy of Soviet/Russian propaganda. In any event the Soviets/Russians have worked that angle hard, backing the racist and environmental narratives to America’s detriment and their advantage.
Several commenters here have linked Yuri Bemenov’s video on KGB subversion of the West.
–Yuri Bezmenov: The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion (1984)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yErKTVdETpw
Recently I discovered someone is using “Yuri Bezmenov” as a nom de web on Substack. Kinda fun in a 4chan way.
https://substack.com/profile/64905469-yuri-bezmenov
The real Bezmenov died in 1993 of a massive heart attack, likely due to alcoholism … or some insidious KGB/FSB toxin.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/53029092/yuri/
“In most countries, it’s the state, and not private landowners, that owns the mineral rights to oil and gas in the ground.”
Not that long ago, liberals when confronted by conservative paeans to American freedom would retort with something like “England has freedom. Germany has freedom. France has freedom. What’s the big deal?”
This sort of thing is “the big deal.”
Mike
Along with arab partners previously the uae financed stinkers like gasland and promised lands and all those terrible anti war films they also financed zd 30
JJ: Regarding the Europeans liking “their customs and charming buildings, glens, meadows, and farms because they don’t have vast expanses of farmlands, deserts, and unproductive land as we do here in the U.S. They have manicured their forests, their vineyards, their mountain meadows and use them with care.”
Yet they’re okay with the millions of square kilometers of windmills despoiling the landscape? I remember flying over Germany a few years ago and seeing ugly windmills as far as the eye could see.
Chris B. It’s an excuse where they need one.
You wouldn’t know it from reading the news but there are vast deposits of oil and gas in California. It was a major industry in the first half of the 20th century, but in 1969 the state stopped almost all new drilling.
California is still an enormously rich state, but I guess they are going to have to run it entirely into the ground before they wake up.
Beznenov was name checked in the previous call of duty another figure of note was ladislav bittman who gave us dezinforma the real thing not whatever makes progs look bad
@ JJ > “They have manicured their forests, their vineyards, their mountain meadows and use them with care.”
@ Chris B > “Yet they’re okay with the millions of square kilometers of windmills despoiling the landscape?”
They also seem to be okay with cutting down huge swaths of old-growth (like centuries old) photogenic forests to burn the wood, which is the most intensive carbon-releasing source of fuel ev-uh.
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/europe-is-sacrificing-its-ancient-forests-for-energy/
Fascinating story of “unintended consequences” — as is usual with leftist pet policies — and some good information on why the Europeans are burning wood as a “renewable” energy source.
As we know, however, unintended doesn’t mean unpredictable.
Like, as far back as 2014: note how closely the 2022 story tracks the information in this “old news” —
https://grist.org/climate-energy/europe-is-burning-our-forests-for-renewable-energy-wait-what/
They didn’t.
When they get cold and loose their jobs, gas profits and the Russian monopoly on fuel may change their mind. Solar cells and “windmills” aren’t going to keep things running and warm.
“You wouldn’t know it from reading the news but there are vast deposits of oil and gas in California. It was a major industry in the first half of the 20th century, but in 1969 the state stopped almost all new drilling.” Huxley
We just bought a condo in Signal Hill. Even though we saw it on the Title Report and HOA documents, the last document we signed was one stating that the oil reserves beneath the property were owned by Shell Oil.
As with so many junk-science, virtue-signaling, woke-policy positions, long-term considerations seem to be missing. Solar panels and electric batteries are decomposition/landfill issues that will come home to roost. Like the electric bulbs that replaced the lovely incandescent ones we use to buy more cheaply. I wonder how much it will cost a homeowner to junk their retired solar panels once this comes to the fore.
As to climate-change (global-warming) a few years ago I spoke with a gentleman who headed the public landscape of Los Angeles county. He informed me that every tree on any development plan was in place to keep down the ambient temperature of the city in consideration of the hardscape,building materials etc. For years now, the City has let those trees die, encouraged homeowners to put rocks instead of lawns etc etc. There has been a massive escalation in building multi-unit dwellings and no evidence of the trees needed to keep things copacetic. He only had a couple years left and was planning to retire in New Hampshire with his California pension.
California needs multiple nuclear power facilities running multiple desalination plants. Either that, or deport half the population.
The west might benefit from a revised water rights regime. If we could figure a scheme to indemnify the current holders of water rights, we might implement a new regime wherein tranches of water of a dimension determined by ecological criteria were sold in periodic auctions. Local water authorities could be participants in the auctions or could buy on a secondary exchange. In lieu of state boards regulating the price of water, they might regulate the compensation water authority employees could receive and the amount of retained earnings a water authority could hold at the end of a fiscal year (requiring any excess be rebated to customers on a per capita or per firm basis). The board of the water authority could then set charges at its discretion with 30 days notice (say, have peak and off peak rates and rates for residential customers and other customers). In that way, the price system would ration the available water. Growers would take land out of production or substitute one crop for another in response to price signals and urban customers would make short term and long term adjustments in their water use. (One adjustment might be replacing deciduous trees with those more appropriate for arid climates and replacing lawns with desert gardens).
I dream of a world where science has a quality process and practitioners care about honesty, integrity and truth.
Imagine how different and better the world would be if the percentage of journalists interested in telling the truth could be raised to as high as 10%.
Suppose we had as many as a dozen college campuses in America where professors were free to speak honestly. How much better would policy be?
Oh
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/09/15/rescued-66000-sheets-of-real-uk-rainfall-observations-refute-alarmist-claims-of-more-drought/
To leave out the messy details, I had a further pile of evidence: Interesting couple of days.
The conclusion is that the masters of moral outrage assign what is to be the subject of moral outrage. See George Floyd. Those not so assigned are ignored and excused. See Cannon Hinant or Darrell Brooks.
It was not a mere observation; it was a lengthy set of discussions. Those not assigned were simply not worth their interest. No anti-Asian hate crimes since the last Great White Defendant wore out, about two years ago? Well, blacks and Asians have a history…..
Justine Damond…..
It’s not independent thought. They get the Word and they go along with it without question.
It had always seemed to be the case but…man, did it get solid in the last couple of days’ discussions.
Long story short…same thing wrt climate with even more adamant assertions of non-fact.
Thus, it’s going to take particularly hard experience to get the climatistas to back off. Not just a sufficiency of evidence.
Rest assured that Russia, surreptitiously of course, is helping fund the anti-frackers in Europe and probably the USA.
As for all those used up solar panels and windmill vanes that will be dumped into landfills sometime in the future, the greenies will ignore it. It will not be a problem because the greenies will not assign it to be a problem. Nobody will.
If all sorts of birds, raptors, etc fly into a windmill and die, or get roasted in some sun-powered generating facility, nobody gives a s**t, in case you have not noticed.
If ONE raptor flies into an oil derrick and dies, well, the EPA and their green pals are right there issuing fines, penalties, etc, and making sure it’s written up / reported by the demokrat propaganda machine (the MSM).
If a zillion acres of trees have to be cut down to allow installation of windmill farms, the greenies do not care; it is not a problem because they will assign it as a non-problem; it will be ignored.
If ONE TREE has to be cut down to allow one oil derrick to go up, the greenies will be all over that like white on snow, claiming all sorts of deadly enviro problems that will end all life on earth.
We have to get over the notion that the greenies do not realize what their policies will produce or what their effects (mostly bad ) will have on the citizenry. They know full well what they are doing.
If in pursuing the green agenda, people have to die, so be it. As long as their policies are seen to be moving towards their desired end goals, the greenies are all for it.
They just do not care if ordinary people have to die or suffer.
What they really hate – with a white hot burning flame – are ordinary citizens going about their business and taking advantage of all things available to use and/or enjoy.
When someone mentions that Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot were hate filled, murderous despots, who had no problem murdering millions of people to obtain their goals, you will not get an argument from most people (excepting folks like the former MIT Linguistics professor, Noam Chomsky who spent 20 years explaining why PolPot was a nice guy).
What normal folks have trouble wrapping their heads around, is that you do not need a Hitler or Stalin or a Pol Pot that want you dead if you are considered a “problem,” or somehow are seen as a roadblock in achieving some sort of end goal.
This end goal can be the elimination of certain ethnic or religious groups, or “enemies of the state,” as determined by those in power – all in the effort to achieve that utopian social paradise – or eliminating just ordinary folks who insist that having adequate amounts of electricity or natural gas or gasoline for their autos should not be restricted / eliminated just to suit the pseudo-religious demands of radical greenies.
If this winter in Europe people die due to lack of heat, don’t expect the greenies to change their goals or concede that they are wrong.
They will just double down and insist that if Europe had been more aggressive in building wind and solar facilities, there would have been enough power generated to meet the needs of the citizens.
And they will insist that people just dress warmer when in their homes.
Geoffrey, when people are uncertain where their next meal is coming from …
… they are more likely to filet Willy than free him.
Stan: I dream of a world where science has a quality process and practitioners care about honesty, integrity and truth.
And where they, and the public-policy decision-makers that look to them for guidance, take one phrase from the Hippocratic Oath to heart:
“First, do no harm.”
Oh really
https://www.ien.com/regulation/news/22445454/judge-tosses-permits-for-94b-plastics-complex-in-la
Kate…”Europe needs to move towards new-model nuclear power generation ASAP”
Wise countries should get their purchase orders in very soon, because manufacturing capability is limited. There are two companies in the Small Modular Reactor business that can credibly accept orders now–the GE-Hitachi joint venture and a startup called NuScale…several others working in that direction, including Rolls-Royce, but not as far along.
Big opportunity for some country to order a significant number if SMRs, all at once (though with delivery necessarily space out over time) in exchange for a considerable discount on purchase price. Both GE and NuScale have cited attractive pricing for ‘Nth of a kind’ systems, though neither has indicated exactly what the value of N might be.
Chris B. & Aesop Fan, I have to admit that I have not been in Europe since 201o and never in Central Europe. The windmills in Germany weren’t there or weren’t in the areas we visited. I’m surprised that the “oh, so practical” Germans did that.
As to Central Europe, made up of nations formerly behind the Iron Curtain, it doesn’t surprise me that they are more enterprising than the people we met in Western Europe. Watt they are doing by harvesting wood for fuel is practical, and in their view, necessary for maintaining their needs. Very American-like in those values.
The biggest problem has been the embrace by the pseudo-scientists and the MSM of CO2 as the cause of climate change. It’s a theory looking for a proof. And yet the mass hysteria engendered by the propaganda has resulted in crazy, suicidal energy policies by nations that ought to know better. It is to weep.
This may be the best example of high ROI ever. The Soviets funneled money into the environmental movement and it’s still paying off.
Richard Cook,
The Russians have continued this. They buy German pols, active and retired. And all anti-fracking propaganda is subsidized by them.