There are none so blind as those who will not see: Amid fracking, Warmists are still running out of oil

The whole basis of the article below is that we are about to run out of oil. The Muslim Warmist below seems quite unabashed that that century-old prophecy never comes true and he has apparently not heard of the great boom in oil availability unleashed by fracking.

And as for economic growth collapsing, has he not heard of America's great Trump-led economic boom?  The man is a moron. He is living in a little self-congratulatory world of his own. It is another article from the far-Left "Medium" site, which appears to specialize in reality-deprived prophecies of doom

Although most of their articles are just Leftist boilerplate, an  amusing thing about the site is that many of their articles display a great sense of self-satisfaction -- as if they are revealing profound truths not generally known.  See below:



I have not reproduced the first half of the article below but if you read it you will find an epic sense of self-satisfaction


Nafeez Ahmed

The energy turning point is unequivocal. In the years preceding the historic Brexit referendum, and the marked resurgence of nationalist, populist and far-right movements across Europe, the entire continent has faced a quietly brewing energy crisis.

Europe is now a ‘post-peak oil’ continent. Currently, every single major oil producer in Western Europe is in decline. According to data from BP’s 2018 Statistical Review of Energy, Western European oil production peaked between 1996 and 2002. Since then, production had declined while net imports have gradually increased.

In a two-part study published in 2016 and 2017 in the Springer journal, BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, Michael Dittmar, Senior Scientist at the ETH Zurich Institute for Particle Physics and CERN, developed a new empirical model of oil production and consumption.

The study provides perhaps one of the most empirically-robust models of oil production and consumption to date, but its forecast was sobering.

Noting that oil exports from Russia and former Soviet Union countries are set to decline, Dittmar found that Western Europe will find it difficult to replace these lost exports. As a result, “total consumption in Western Europe is predicted to be about 20 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 2015.”

The only region of the world where production will be stable for the next 15 to 20 years is the OPEC Middle East. Everywhere else, concludes Dittmar, production will decline by around 3 to 5 percent a year after 2020. And in some regions, this decline has already started.

Not everyone agrees that a steep decline in Russia’s oil production is imminent. Last year, the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies argued that Russian production could probably continue to grow out to at least 2020. How long it would last thereafter was unclear.

On the other hand, the Russian government’s own energy experts are worried. In September 2018, Russia’s energy minister Alexander Novak warned that Russia’s oil production might peak within three years due to mounting production costs and taxes. In the ensuing two decades, Russia could lose almost half its current capacity. This sobering assessment is still broadly consistent with the Oxford study.

The following month, Dr Kent Moor of the Energy Capital Research Group, who has advised 27 governments around the world including the US and Russia, argued that Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel in its prize Western Siberia basin.

Moor cited internal Russian Ministry of Energy reports from 2016 warning of a “Western Siberia rapid decline curve amounting to a loss of some 8.5 percent in volume by 2022. Some of this is already underway.” Although Russia is actively pursuing alternative strategies, wrote Moor, these are all “inordinately expensive”, and might produce only temporary results.

It’s not that the oil is running out. The oil is there in abundance — more than enough to fry the planet several times over. The challenge is that we are relying less on cheap crude oil and more on expensive, dirtier and unconventional fossil fuels. Energetically, this stuff is more challenging to get out and less potent after extraction than crude.

The bottom line is that as Europe’s domestic oil supplies slowly dwindle, there is no meaningful strategy to wean ourselves off abject dependence on Russia; the post-carbon transition is consistently too little, too late; and the impact on Europe’s economies — if business-as-usual continues — will continue to unravel the politics of the union.

While very few are talking about Europe’s slow-burn energy crisis, the reality is that as Europe’s own fossil fuel resources are inexorably declining, and as producers continue to face oil price volatility amidst persistently higher costs of production, Europe’s economy will suffer.

In September, I reported exclusively on the findings of an expert report commissioned by the scientific group working on the forthcoming UN’s Sustainability Report.

The report underscored that cheap energy flows are the lifeblood of economic growth: and that as we shift into an era of declining resource quality, we are likely to continue seeing slow, weak if not declining economic growth.

This is happening at a global scale. EROI is already beginning to approach levels seen in the nineteenth century — demonstrating how constrained global economic growth might be due to declining net energy returns to society.

SOURCE







Home batteries could inadvertently increase carbon emissions, study finds

Large batteries installed in homes to store energy from the grid could actually increase carbon emissions under current policies, according to a new study.

It has been assumed that these storage systems, such as Tesla’s Powerwall, could be instrumental in lowering greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources.

However, a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego argue that deploying them today, without making fundamental policy and regulatory reforms, risks increasing emissions instead.

If residents use these systems to reduce their electricity bills, the batteries would draw energy from the grid when it is cheapest.

As the utilities don’t structure how much they charge with the goal of lowering emissions, the cheapest power more often comes from power sources that emit carbon, such as coal.

In addition, batteries do not operate at 100 per cent efficiency: as a result, households that use them draw more power from the electric grid than they actually need.

For the systems to actually reduce greenhouse gases, utilities need to change their tariff structures substantially to account for emissions from different power sources, the researchers said. They would need to make energy cheaper for consumers when the grid is generating low-carbon electricity.

“We sought to answer: what if consumers on their own or in response to policy pressure adopt these systems? Would greenhouse gas emissions from the electric power system go down and at what economic cost?” said Oytun Babacan, lead author.

This year, 2018, saw a substantial increase in installations of the systems compared to previous years, with sales tripling between January and September.

When they are set up to operate with the goal of cutting emissions, home batteries can reduce average household emissions by 2.2 to 6.4 per cent. The monetary incentive that customers would have to receive from utilities to start using their home systems with the goal of reducing emissions is equivalent to anywhere from $180 to $5,160 per metric ton of CO2.

“This is impractically high and very high compared to other emissions-reducing options that are available,” said Ryan Hanna, a postdoctoral researcher.

Most households adopting energy storage are likely to choose equipment vendors and operation modes that allow them to minimise electricity costs, leading to increased emissions, Babacan added.

“Thus, policymakers should be careful about assuming that decentralisation will clean the electric power system, especially if it proceeds without carbon-mindful tariff reforms that aim to reduce residential energy bills and energy consumption associated CO2 emissions,” he said.

Consumers could be encouraged to use the devices in an environmentally beneficial way by ensuring that system developers and equipment vendors favour clean energy use by tracking and adjusting to variations in marginal emissions across the bulk grid, the authors noted.

Although the systems do not encourage cost-effective emissions control at the moment, the research is quick to note that the advantages of batteries should not be overlooked.

“There is an enormous upside to these systems in terms of flexibility and saving households money,” the authors said. “While the increase in home batteries deployment is underway, we need to work on multiple fronts to ensure that their adoption is carbon minded.”

SOURCE





Trump cites massive winter storm to mock global warming

President Trump in an early morning tweet on Sunday suggested global warming could be helpful as a massive snowstorm dropped several inches of snow and sent temperatures plunging across the Midwest and swaths of the Northeast United States.

"Be careful and try staying in your house," Trump advised. "Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!"

The president, who has repeatedly cast doubt on the existence and effects of climate change, has regularly cited significant winter storms to mock the concept of global warming. He sent similar tweets in 2017 and 2011.

The current winter storm prompted the governor of Kansas to declare a state of emergency, canceled thousands of flights and dumped more than a foot of snow across most of upstate New York. Falling temperatures were expected to create icy surfaces, further increasing the risk of travel.

Trump and others who deny climate change have cited cold temperatures and winter storms to dismiss global warming, but experts have noted there is a difference between the climate and weather. [Climate is just the sum of weather.  They are NOT different.  The same instruments measure both]

A government report issued late last year concluded that climate change could cost the United States billions of dollars annually within decades if greenhouse gases aren’t dramatically reduced and could worsen environmental disasters like wildfires and flooding. Its findings aligned with those of the broader scientific community.

Trump dismissed the report, saying he did not believe its findings and disputing that climate change is man-made.

SOURCE





PURPA has long outlived its usefulness,/b>

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Congress to reform implementation of Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) of 1978 to remove mandates for electric utilities to subsidize small renewable generators:

"When PURPA passed in 1978 requiring electric utilities to purchase energy from small renewable generators, wind, solar and other renewables constituted 0.14 percent of the grid, but now it is almost 10 percent. Moreover, many states already require competition at the local level so that consumers can choose where they get electricity from. It therefore makes sense for FERC to lift the mandates and let renewable electricity sources compete with more standard electricity generation, instead of compelling coal and natural gas generators to pay for the renewable electricity.

"In addition, Congress should also consider addressing the mandates altogether via legislation by Sen. John Barrasso that would remove. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should agree that government-mandated subsidies that benefit billionaires like Warren Buffett while working Americans pay more need to be ended."

SOURCE





Australia: The great battery conjob exposed

Craig Kelly

To keep the subsidies flowing and the public hoodwinked, green-rent-seekers have peddled the delusion that the intermittency of solar/wind can be solved with ‘’big batteries’’.

This conjob was first sold in South Australia, as with their experiment of a 50% Renewable Energy Target descending into a costly farce, and to cover-up the fact they needed spend several hundred million on emergency diesel generators to keep the lights on just before the state election, with Hollywood fanfare SA announced they were installing ‘’the world’s largest battery’’ to save the day.

And unsurprisingly, the green useless idiots of the left have swallowed this hook, line and sinker - as rent seekers continued to go laughing to the bank to cash their millions from subsidies.

Well the performance of the ‘’world’s largest battery’’ last Thursday exposed what a complete con job it’s been - and delusion that we can power our economy on solar panels, wind turbines and big batteries is as dangerous to the economy as rabies is in a dog.

Let’s look at the evidence from 24th Jan ...

As wind power collapsed into the afternoon, prices in South Australia surged to $14,500 Mwh (they averaged around $40 Mwh before all these ‘cheap’ renewables flooded into the grid) at around 4.30pm ‘’the world’s biggest battery’’ started to dribble in 30MW to the grid.

The 30MW was less than 1% of South Australia’s total demand, and less than 0.1% of the National grid’s demand.

The world’s biggest battery continued to dribble out around 30MW until 7.30pm, then it ran flat, rendering it completely useless as peak demand hit at 7.30pm.

Meanwhile the emergency diesel generators (chewing through a reported 80,000 litres of diesel an hour) were doing the real work in SA, pumping out over 400MW at a time on demand - and they continued to so as demand peaked at 7.30pm, when the world’s largest battery had given up the ghost.

So at peak demand, in the renewables paradise of South Australia, 97% of their electricity was coming from fossil fuels.

Over the afternoon, I estimate the ‘’world’s biggest battery’’ delivered only around 100 Mwh of electricity - compared to 2000Mwh by the diesel generators.

The facts should be clear from the evidence that it’s a dangerous delusion that Australia can run the economy with solar/wind backed up by big batteries.

But sadly once leftists have been radicalised by green propaganda - evidence, engineering & economics no longer matter, because their belief is a semi-religious one based on feelings and emotions and their minds are closed to rational thoughts and logic.

SOURCE

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