Posted on 06/30/2013 8:31:23 AM PDT by texas booster
The UK is sitting on a cheap energy economic revolution comparable to the heyday of North Sea Oil, the British Geological Survey suggests.
The Survey’s estimate of the potential gas reserves of the Bowland–Hodder shale formation - finally published today – indicate that using today’s technology, the rocks should yield 1,329 TCF (trillion cubic feet) or 37.7 TCM (37,631 BCM, or billion cubic metres) of gas.
Bowland Shale is a rock formation stretching from the Irish Sea, across the Midlands and Lancashire, to North Yorkshire. It’s just one of several promising rock formations in the UK rich in gas. Others in the West Country, South East England, and Scotland have yet to be surveyed and estimated for their potential.
Nevertheless, the scale of the Bowland shale resource – which rips up the UK’s energy reserve estimates – needs to be put in perspective. 1300TCF is equivalent to 47 years of total UK gas consumption, 268 years of UK gas imports, or 90 years of the UK’s North Sea gas production.
Last year the world’s biggest gas exporter, Russia, produced 592 BCM of gas, or just 1.5 per cent of the Bowland shale field alone.
Some private estimates put the figure even higher. iGas, which has licenses to explore Bowland, reckons up to 170m TCF can be recovered from the area in which it operates.
The UK is also uniquely dense and layered, say gas experts, meaning higher yields, and a lighter footprint.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the figures are based on a 10 per cent recovery rate – a figure likely to increase with technological innovation and know-how.
To sway nervous NIMBYs and other Radio 4 listeners, fearful of an impending frackocalypse, the Government has promised sweeteners of £100,000 worth of “community benefits”* per well site and 1 per cent of revenues at the production stage.
Cheap energy also has knock-on effects for the economy. It’s less of a factor for marketing consultancies or search engine optimisation (SEO) boutiques, but rather more important for things like manufacturing, construction, transport and other industries which make and deliver actual stuff, create serious jobs for serious numbers of people and drive exports.
In the USA, shale gas has transformed long-term economic decline, helping industry bring jobs back to the United States that it was losing to overseas rivals for decades. While the USA cannot compete on labour costs with China and other Asian rivals, labour is just one factor in the mix – cheap energy has made manufacturing and heavy industry competitive again.
Meanwhile energy regulator Ofgem today warned (pdf) of an increased risk of power cuts as the UK’s diminishing electricity production capacity falls to within 2 per cent of demand – a squeeze Ofgem says has come faster than anticipated.
“Reducing emissions means we have to leave shale gas and other unconventional fuels in the ground,” televised wrestling conglomerate hard-green pressure group WWF insisted in a policy statement on shale gas last year.
Good luck with that, chaps. ®
10,000 years ago, that part of the world was under a mile of glacial ice.
what differecne does it make? Nobody is goign to be able to afford energy in the very near future trhanks to our dear leaderr who has VOWED that energy prices are goign to skyrocket under his watch-
Thanks America- Thansk for voting in our demise
Wonder what Putin thinks about this new found wealth?
No matter what the kleptocrats in Washington say to the public, they will keep the machine running so long as it benefits themselves.
The UK doesn’t need 50 years of shale/oil. In 25 years it’ll be Libya as various Muslim factions fight over the table scraps of a once proud nation.
For some obscure reason people don’t seem to realize that most countries in the world have immense reserves of shale gas. Including most European countries.
The great advantage of shale gas is not that it will make the US energy self-sufficient, though that is double plus good, but that it will make perhaps most countries in the world energy-independent, greatly reducing the importance, though not perhaps the income, of our enemies with all the non-shale oil.
This is getting hilarious. Every few months a new gigantic find of oil or gas is being reported. The tree hugger’s heads must be exploding.
Excellent. I like to see Western powers be self-sufficient.
Now..., lets just hope the UK remains a Western Power.
It’s another nation suffering from immigration overload.
LOL, for certain...
Now, stop importing Jihadis.
The technology for finding, recovering, and even the more efficient use of, oil and gas just keeps increasing. One of these days some scientist who isn’t thinking about the politics of it is going to announce, with a stack of hard data in front of him to back it up, that there is enough gas and oil to go hog wild for a million years. ;-)
While the shale isn’t going to be a replenished resource, oil seems to be to a certain extent. This must drive the moon-bat left into the arms of their on-call psychologists.
Glad that is not a part of my life.
I personally don’t agree with that number, depending on the number of well and how many stages you have in your fracks we open up allot of area. Gas like oil is not trapped in it’s zone but it does take time for it to migrate. Maybe at some point and time it doesn’t migrate fast enough to be cost effective but it will continue to migrate non the less. I shut in a well on the backside of the ranch back in 98, it was down to about 2 barrels a day. I went in and pulled the pum. checked the tubing and put it back on line, it made 348 barrels in the first 3 weeks, today it’s making about 5 barrels a day and I expect it to be down to two here shortly. That oil and gas can only move so fast unless you have some type of secondary recovery in place such as a water flood to increase that migration.
I do not understand the death wish that Western democracies seem to be acting out.
Looking into the future maybe they’ll finally realize that the process of making oil is right in front of their eyes, it’s called the ocean and it’s churning it out daily. the real discovery will be when we’re able to duplicate that process at a level to become feasable.
I do not understand the death wish that Western democracies seem to be acting out.
Sanity can be a tough row to hoe but I prefer to keep plugging away at it. lol
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