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Sunday 27 May 2012

Say no to wind farms: Shale of the century

Matt Ridley

15 October 2011

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The arguments for wind farms just became obsolete. We’re entering an era when gas will be cheap, plentiful – and green

Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s column with blades noisily thrumming the air? The energy they can produce over ten years is similar: eight wind turbines of 2.5 megawatts (working at about 25 per cent capacity) roughly equal the output of an average Pennsylvania shale gas well (converted to electricity at 50 per cent efficiency) in its first ten years.

Difficult choice? Let’s make it easier. The gas well can be hidden in a hollow, behind a hedge. The eight wind turbines must be on top of hills, because that is where the wind blows, visible for up to 40 miles. And they require the construction of new pylons marching to the towns; the gas well is connected by an underground pipe.

Unpersuaded? Wind turbines slice thousands of birds of prey in half every year, including white-tailed eagles in Norway, golden eagles in California, wedge-tailed eagles in Tasmania. There’s a video on YouTube of one winging a griffon vulture in Crete. According to a study in Pennsylvania, a wind farm with eight turbines would kill about 200 bats a year. The pressure wave from the passing blade just implodes the little creatures’ lungs. You and I can go to jail for harming bats or eagles; wind companies are immune.

Still can’t make up your mind? The wind farm requires eight tonnes of an element called neodymium, which is produced only in Inner Mongolia, by boiling ores in acid leaving lakes of radioactive tailings so toxic that no creature goes near them.

Not convinced? The gas well requires no subsidy — in fact it pays a hefty tax to the government — whereas the wind turbines each cost you a substantial add-on to your electricity bill, part of which goes to the rich landowner whose land they stand on. Wind power costs three times as much as gas-fired power. Make that nine times if the wind farm is offshore. And that’s assuming the cost of decommissioning the wind farm is left to your children — few will last 25 years.

Decided yet? I forgot to mention something. If you choose the gas well, that’s it, you can have it. If you choose the farm, you are going to need the gas well too. That’s because when the wind does not blow you will need a back-up power station running on something more reliable. But the bloke who builds gas power stations is not happy to build one that only operates when the wind drops, so he’s now demanding a subsidy, too.

What’s that you say? Gas is running out? Have you not heard the news? It’s not. Until five years ago, gas was the fuel everybody thought would run out first, before oil and coal. America was getting so worried even Alan Greenspan told it to start building gas import terminals, which it did. They are now being mothballed, or turned into export terminals.

A chap called George Mitchell turned the gas industry on its head. Using just the right combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) – both well-established technologies — he worked out how to get gas out of shale, where most of it is, rather than just out of (conventional) porous rocks, where it sometimes pools. The Barnett shale in Texas, where Mitchell worked, turned into one of the biggest gas reserves in America. Then the Haynesville shale in Louisiana dwarfed it. The Marcellus shale mainly in Pennsylvania then trumped that with a barely believable 500 trillion cubic feet of gas, as big as any oil field ever found, on the doorstep of the biggest market in the world.

The International Energy Agency reckons there is a quarter of a millennium’s worth of cheap shale gas in the world. A company called Cuadrilla drilled a hole in Blackpool, hoping to find a few trillion cubic feet of gas. Last month it announced 200 trillion cubic feet, nearly half the size of the giant Marcellus field. That’s enough to keep the entire British economy going for many decades. And it’s just the first field to have been drilled.

The impact of shale gas in America is already huge. Gas prices have decoupled from oil prices and are half what they are in Europe. Chemical companies, which use gas as a feedstock, are rushing back from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico. Cities are converting their bus fleets to gas. Coal projects are being shelved; nuclear ones abandoned.

Rural Pennsylvania is being transformed by the royalties that shale gas pays (Lancashire take note). Drive around the hills near Pittsburgh and you see new fences, repainted barns and — in the local towns — thriving car dealerships and upmarket shops. The one thing you barely see is gas rigs. The one I visited was hidden in a hollow in the woods, invisible till I came round the last corner, where a flock of wild turkeys was crossing the road. Drilling rigs are on site for about five weeks, fracking trucks a few weeks after that, and when they are gone all that is left is a ‘Christmas tree’ wellhead and a few small storage tanks.

Jesse Ausubel is a soft-spoken academic ecologist at Rockefeller University in New York, not given to hyperbole. So when I asked him about the future of gas, I was surprised by the strength of his reply. ‘It’s unstoppable,’ he says simply. Gas, he says, will be the world’s dominant fuel for most of the next century. Coal and renewables will have to give way, while oil is used mainly for transport. Even nuclear may have to wait in the wings.

And he is not even talking mainly about shale gas. He reckons a still bigger story is waiting to be told about offshore gas from the so-called cold seeps around the continental margins. Israel has made a huge find and is planning a pipeline to Greece, to the irritation of the Turks. The Brazilians are striking rich. The Gulf of Guinea is hot. Even our own Rockall Bank looks promising. Ausubel thinks that much of this gas is not even ‘fossil’ fuel, but ancient methane from the universe that was trapped deep in the earth’s rocks — like the methane that forms lakes on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.

•••

The best thing about cheap gas is who it annoys. The Russians and the Iranians hate it because they thought they were going to corner the gas market in the coming decades. The greens hate it because it destroys their argument that fossil fuels are going to get more and more costly until even wind and solar power are competitive. The nuclear industry ditto. The coal industry will be a big loser (incidentally, as somebody who gets some income from coal, I declare that writing this article is against my vested interest).

Little wonder a furious attempt to blacken shale gas’s reputation is under way, driven by an unlikely alliance of big green, big coal, big nuclear and big gas providers. The environmental objections to shale gas are almost comically fabricated or exaggerated. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses 99.86 per cent water and sand, the rest being a dilute solution of a few chemicals of the kind you find beneath your kitchen sink.

State regulators in Alaska, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming have all asserted in writing that there have been no verified or documented cases of groundwater contamination as a result of hydraulic fracking. Those flaming taps in the film Gasland were literally nothing to do with shale gas drilling and the film-maker knew it before he wrote the script. The claim that gas production generates more greenhouse gases than coal is based on mistaken assumptions about gas leakage rates and cherry-picked time horizons for computing greenhouse impact.

Like Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungle decades after the war was over, our political masters have apparently not heard the news. David Cameron and Chris Huhne are still insisting that the future belongs to renewables. They are still signing contracts on your behalf guaranteeing huge incomes to landowners and power companies, and guaranteeing thereby the destruction of landscapes and jobs. The government’s ‘green’ subsidies are costing the average small business £250,000 a year. That’s ten jobs a firm. Making energy cheap is — as the industrial revolution proved — the quickest way to create jobs; making it expensive is the quickest way to lose them.

Not only are renewables far more expensive, intermittent and resource-depleting (their demand for steel and concrete is gigantic) than gas; they are also hugely more damaging to the environment, because they are so land-hungry. Wind kills birds and spoils landscapes; solar paves deserts; tidal wipes out the ecosystems of migratory birds; biofuel starves the poor and devastates the rainforest; hydro interrupts fish migration. Next time you hear somebody call these ‘clean’ energy, don’t let him get away with it.

Wind cannot even help cut carbon emissions, because it needs carbon back-up, which is wastefully inefficient when powering up or down (nuclear cannot be turned on and off so fast). Even Germany and Denmark have failed to cut their carbon emissions by installing vast quantities of wind.

Yet switching to gas would hasten decarbonisation. In a combined cycle, turbine gas converts to electricity with higher efficiency than other fossil fuels. And when you burn gas, you oxidise four hydrogen atoms for every carbon atom. That’s a better ratio than oil, much better than coal and much, much better than wood. Ausubel calculates that, thanks to gas, we will accelerate a relentless shift from carbon to hydrogen as the source of our energy without touching renewables.

To persist with a policy of pursuing subsidised renewable energy in the midst of a terrible recession, at a time when vast reserves of cheap low-carbon gas have suddenly become available, is so perverse it borders on the insane. Nothing but bureaucratic inertia and vested interest can explain it.

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Grant Thoms

October 13th, 2011 10:55am Report this comment

What a short-termist view of business and society you have. It's attidudes like this that have brought the UK economy to its knees. Always looking for the fastest route to a buck and not thinking about the most sustainable route with the greatest return for all. Renewables will provide longer-term price stability more than a reliance on hydrocarbons such as shale oil and gas. They can be complementary rather than one choice over another.
But one obvious question to Mr Ridley is that even though a government may collect additional revenues through a gas duty, consumers are paying the market rate. Having North Sea gas is not making gas heating any cheaper in Britain. Having North Sea oil does not stop the UK having the highest excise duty on petrol in Europe.
This is blinkered opportunism if not a climate change sceptic's wet dream.

Tim Hedges

October 13th, 2011 2:25pm Report this comment

I have heard - I may be wrong - that shale gas requires a huge amount of tiny rigs, and that the Americans have this kit but we don't, and accordingly the in cost of investment in shale would be too high to contemplate. Is that right?

spatacusisfree

October 14th, 2011 8:07am Report this comment

What pathetic comments above.

Free the market and kill the wind farms abd the EUSSR for now.

In 100 years re-visit both.

James Delingpolle

October 14th, 2011 9:47am Report this comment

@Tim. You heard wrong.
@Grantthoms. Perhaps I missed it, but you didn't seem to find space in your rant to explain what your objection to cheap energy is. Are you bothered by the fact that people's heating bills will fall dramatically? Are you upset by the thousands of real, non-government subsidised jobs shale gas will bring to the Bowland Shale region? Are you worried by the boost it will give to the British economy by making it less reliant on imported LNG from West Africa and petroleum from the Middle East? Are you concerned that some of the British countryside may as a result be saved from the eyesore of views blighted ugly, inefficient wind farms which are only economically viable through taxpayer subsidy?
Obviously one doesn't hope for too much logic or sense from a SNP politician, but if you could engage with actual facts rather than playing with your straw men, it would be much appreciated. This is, after all, the Spectator you're talking to; not Marxism Yesterday.

Frank Sutton

October 14th, 2011 10:43am Report this comment

Problem is, shale gas doesn't have the hair-shirt feel virtuous factor which greenies find necessary.

Ellmathud

October 14th, 2011 3:21pm Report this comment

Of course in the last 100 years of European history there were a couple of little scraps Sparticus. The EU talking shop has prevented a repeat of that. http://shalegasoutrage.org/
I assume offshore Shale gas will be less contentious than other sites around the world?

James Reynolds

October 14th, 2011 4:12pm Report this comment

Oh James you blowhard. Do you really stupid playground 'nur nurr' questions like 'do you hate cheap energy?' or whatever are going to convince anyone but your acolytes?

He put down some reasoned argument. Respond to it with arguments or just go away. Surely the Spectator can handle more than one thread of opinion.

Draughtsman

October 14th, 2011 4:20pm Report this comment

Grant Thoms - I don't think you are appreciating just how much shale gas there is. The volumes in the Bowland shale alone are staggering, 200 trillion cubic feet, the deposit is 3000 feet thick, and there are several other extensive areas of shale in the UK to be assessed. What lies under the North Sea may dwarf what is onshore if we can get at it - and we will if we have to. In other parts of the world, although not sadly here, there are deposits of methane clathrates on the continental shelves the volumes of which make even the shale gas deposits look minor. Active research, particularly by Japan is taking place to find ways of recovering these deposits. The bottom line is that there are more than ample supplies of clean burning gas to power the world pending the harnessing of fusion power which I believe is a lot closer than we think, particularly in the field of low energy nuclear reaction.

It is said that you can never go back and to use wind power, a mediaeval concept, to attempt to power the 21st century world is as futile as it is absurd. The real money is likely to be made over the next decade by crews dismantling wind turbines.

What we need in this country is a bit more of the can do attitude that the US has, not the continual moans, hand wringing, and naysaying from the greens and other wets. In spite of successive governments we just about have left some engineering companies well able to make the equipment we will need to exploit the shale gas and the sooner we get our fingers out and get on with it the better it will be for us all. Mr.Huhne ought to study engineering so that he can appreciate just how daft his ideas on power generation are or get out of the way before he is bowled over in the rush. The country simply cannot afford him as he is.

Fenbeagle

October 16th, 2011 1:04pm Report this comment

Grant Thomas. What 'renewables' can compete with gas? The governments present intention is to build more and more wind follies. How can this compete? A system that produces less than 0.0% energy at low wind speeds?....You have to be kidding?!
But do they work over the course of a year, significantly?...No, is the conclusion of this study...
'Electricity in the Netherlands' (C le Pair)
Wind turbines increase fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emission'.

No says the BENTEK study USA 'Wind has no visable influence on fuel consumption for electrical production and the emission of CO2 in the atmosphere is not reduced.'

No is the conclusion of a study by Fred Udo in the Irish republic, using data from EIRGRID.

But Grant Thomas is keen to see wealth redistributed by the government, from electricity users, to the developers, and land owners, in ROC's and FIT's. Money that is often travelling from the poor to the less poor.

donpatrico

October 16th, 2011 1:13pm Report this comment

@james reynolds
Not sure Grant Thoms did put down a reasoned argument, actually. On second reading it's more like a series of unsupported and barely connected assertions. Could he be persuaded to try again?

Roger

October 19th, 2011 6:02pm Report this comment

Where did you get all the false innuendo about Neodymium, noise and bird kills?
I have been right next to a windmill and if you walk 100 metres away you can barely hear it. House cats kill 100 million birds a year, all the wind farms in all the world my kill 30,000. Do you want to ban cats too? And the Neodymium bit - one windmill (of some designs, not all) takes about 8 kg per motor. Not 8 tonnes. And you don't get it by boiling it in a lake.

Patrick

October 20th, 2011 1:47am Report this comment

"visible for up to 40miles"
The Empire State Building is visible for up to 100 miles, what's your point?

People in Europe are actually fighting to get one of these wind farms on their land because they receive money from the government and it doesn't take all that much space. Plus, in the US, soon there will be 2/3 of the population living in big cities so I don't think they would mind having some wind farms 100s of miles away from them. They wouldn't even think about them.

You're going to make us believe that you're worried about a few birds suddenly? First of all the numbers are negligible, not as much as you make it seem. Second, I'm pretty sure that trucks kill loads of animals every day, yet I don't see you trying to ban trucks? Hypocrite much?

And did you really use pissing off Russians and Greens as an argument for gas? Sounds like a bitter 10yo.

Fracking is environmentally risky. It contaminates the water and poses risk to air quality.

We can extract energy from wind farms as long as there will be wind and it's environmentally safe. How long until we have to worry about not enough gas resources? You're only thinking short term and completely exaggerating the subjective ugliness of a wind farm on a hill to make your argument. You realize how pathetic that is? It's like me saying that your essay sucks because I don't like the font.

Sir Graphus

October 20th, 2011 12:13pm Report this comment

James Delingpolle (presumably not THE James Delingpole);

You have outed Grant Thoms as an SNP politician; the other thing that shale gas does is demolish the SNP's argument that energy poor England is trying, vampire-like, to suck dry the oil and gas out of Scotland.

Adam Ramsay

October 22nd, 2011 10:42am Report this comment

hmm, well, for a start, you fail to mention the earthquake problem:

http://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/news/local/drilling_did_cause_earthquake_1_3876146

I'm not saying that this on its own is a killer argument, but in a fair assessment of the pros and cons of the two energy supplies, it might be worth touching on the fact that one of them causes earthquakes.

Also, towards the end, you talk about cherry picking data. Which is funny, because in the first half - when you are criticising wind power, you very carefully cherry pick data. The Californian turbines causing problems for eagles do so because they have lattace towers in which the eagles nest. For that reason, newer turbines don't have these. There is the odd place where badly placed turbines have caused problems for particular species, and you have listed the primary examples of those. In the UK, ecologists are employed to select sites carefully to prevent those problems.

Finally, you seem to be forgetting about cimate change. Whilst it may be true that, per unit power, shale gas produces less CO2 than other forms of fossil fuel - and while it may be true that claims that it allows vast quantities of methane to leak into the athmosphere are disputed, it is true that this is yet another fossil fuel.

And we have enough carbon dioxide in known reserves of conventional oil and gas to deliver runaway climate change already. Adding vast amounts more gas emissions to that is madness.

Adam

Ian Woollen

October 24th, 2011 7:19pm Report this comment

There are so many polarised 'arguments' here that it becomes difficult to know where the real answers are. Wind has done itself no favours by misleading politicians and the public by using nameplate capacity figures that inflate 300% the energy production of wind farms. Politicians have actually done wind no favours, nor themselves, by over-subsidising a proven technology, and over-paying farmers for allowing the placement of turbines in their fields, whilst the losers (local residents), due to visual impact, property values and noise, receive what? Not even a thank you.

No-one even bothers to ask the National Grid what they think!

Simon Silvie

October 25th, 2011 11:49am Report this comment

This all has the ring of truth. What is the Carbon Footprint of a wind farm???

When you look at is sensibly. Wind Power without a huge power storage system is as much use as chocolate fire-guard. The last really cold snap that we had coincided with high pressure and NO WIND.

So, who profits from wind turbines and who turns a blind eye to the cost and why?

Ghawker

October 25th, 2011 2:53pm Report this comment

Adam:
You have been misled by Blackpool,who has done this a number of times before. A well is not fraced (note I left off the improper hard "K" which makes it sound more insidious)until the drilling rig has been moved off the well pad. Therefore this well could not have caused this earthquake. By the way, this quake occured on the Fashing fault zone, which has had a number of similar quakes over the past 40 years, long before fracing was practiced there. You guys should get your facts straight before you specualate on the causes of natural phenomena.

El Sid

October 25th, 2011 3:06pm Report this comment

@Tim Hedges - it's true that shale gas needs a lot of drilling and hence a lot of rigs. A well in a conventional reservoir might drain a radius of a mile or more, in shale it's only a tenth of that. However the rigs required are not rocket science and the capex is not a particular economic factor; the lack of rigs is a bit of a factor in how quickly these resources can be exploited.

It also means you need a huge number of wells - in the American desert they can have thousands of wells at a spacing of one per 5-10 acres, even if you drill several wells from a well pad you're still going to need a huge density of wells and you just won't get planning permission for that in much of England. It can take 4 years or more to get permission for just one well in the Home Counties, places like Lancashire will be easier but a lot of the time you end up putting wells in sub-optimal places just because that's the only place you can drill.

The big elephant in the room is cost though. Matt Ridley blithely assumes that "the gas well will need no subsidy" when in fact it probably will, at current gas prices. The cost price of US shale gas is still controversial, but it's a lot higher than conventional gas - and there's various technical factors that mean UK shale gas could be twice as expensive again. You could be looking at anything up to 70-90p/therm; North Sea gas comes in at about 30p/therm and even then some fields get switched off in the summer as demand slows. We won't get a firm grip on the costs of UK shale gas for a few years yet, but even if there is a lot of shale gas, that doesn't mean it's a lot of cheap gas.

The volumes are also disputed - some geologists reckon that Cuadrilla's figure of 200tcf could be more like 20tcf. And that's gas in place - you only recover 10-15% of that (probably at the bottom end, given the planning constraints. So you're looking at Lancashire being somewhere in the region of 2-30tcf recoverable - for comparison, the UK consumes about 3tcf per year.

Brian H

November 12th, 2011 2:11am Report this comment

Denmark, poster child of wind farm development, has managed to close approximately how many coal-fired plants?

Ans: zero, give or take 1. Most of its wind electricity is dumped on the market at a loss because it's too spikey, and occurs at the wrong times of day.

Oops!

Bertie Bodhge

December 13th, 2011 3:25pm Report this comment

Adma is right. The CO2 is the problem. We are very concerned about this in our household and we have decided that this Christmas we wont use gas for cooking. We plan on have a raw turkey dinner with raw vegetables. Luckily we will be flying off for a two week round the world holiday trip the following day.