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I am struggling to find a chart that shows historical data going back to the early 2000s. I read that this is the highest price since 16 years ago so I want to see the historical data. I am also struggling to understand that market and the differences between spot prices and later delivery prices.
– “I read that this is the highest price since 16 years ago…”
So the price was this high, sixteen years ago, or it’d be “a record high”.
The spot price for gas has done this sort of thing before, much more recently than sixteen years ago. In 2018, while everyone was distracted by the Skripal fiasco, the UK nearly ran out of gas:
https://squonk.tk/blog/2015/03/15/the-general-discussion-thread/comment-page-94/#comment-28449
The reason is that, uniquely in Europe, the UK no longer has any long term gas storage. It used to; a depleted gas field at a place called Rough in the North Sea. Rough could hold enough gas to supply the UK for about a week, with no other sources of supply. But Blair’s mob sold it off, to Centrica Storage, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Centrica the energy company.
The contract specified that the new owners would maintain it, as a “strategic” facility of the UK, ie. as important as nuclear weapons. But they didn’t. Instead, Centrica used Rough for playing the market; they pumped it up when gas was cheap and sold it off again when the price was high – which shouldn’t be done with an old gas field, it should be kept pressurised, as a reserve for times of emergency. After a decade with no maintenance Rough fell into disrepair. Instead of suing Centrica for breach of contract, the government let them close it.
The 2018 UK gas crisis went almost entirely unreported except by the Financial Times.
Algeria is or was a big gas producer. A large-scale LNG reception plant was commissioned on Canvey Island in 1964, this received LNG from Algeria.
The In Amenas hostage crisis began on 16 January 2013, when al-Qaeda-linked terrorists affiliated with a brigade led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar took expat hostages at the Tigantourine gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria.Gas plants and distribution of gas is always going to be vulnerable to terror.
Algeria’s prime minister Abdelmalek Sellal in a press conference on 21 January praised the decision by Algerian special forces to storm the site, adding that the aim of the kidnappers was to “blow up the gas plant”. He stressed that “The terrorists also shot some of the hostages in the head, killing them”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Amenas_hostage_crisis
There has been quite a bit of trouble in Algeria/Libya/Tunisia/Egypt/Israel/Palestine/Lebanon/Iraq/Kuwait/Syria/Iran over the last few years, most of these places produce gas.
I wonder if all the troubles of the last twenty years has made Natural Gas more expensive?I found this chart which is in USD which might reflect global situation in general. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas
It looks to me that there is steep rise from low bottom and we are not close to 2005 or 2006 hights.
Statistics can be so abused (something just trebled)BTW in next few weeks China is going to test small Thorium nuclear reactor https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w
M N
China is the biggest CO2 producer but it is also the biggest renewable producer.
The following chart is interesting:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267233/renewable-energy-capacity-worldwide-by-country/Pidgeon English, I have seen that chart but it relates to American futures and not UK or Netherlands. Generally it seems natural gas is a lot chaper in USA. Like oil there seems to be lots of different natural gases to buy and it relates to where you are buying it. I guess that reflects on how you get it there. It’s complex I am finding out.
The UK wholesale price of electricity just went through the roof, up by over a factor of thirty, though I expect this to be transitory. The UK has a lot of its modern gas-fired power stations offline for maintenance, and European gas storage is unusually low for this time of year. The UK is very vulnerable now; not only are we out of the EU and the mutual obligation treaties that protected us, we’re also at the arse end of the European supply networks. Things had better improve or we’re in for a rough ride this winter.
The UK just lost a 2GW interconnect from France:
Gareth Stace, the director general of trade group UK Steel, said the “extortionate prices” were forcing some steelmakers to suspend work during periods when electricity prices were at their highest. He called on the government and the industry regulator to “take action as this situation continues”.
How come World prices for fuel have gone up so dramatically?
The U.K. has turned some coal fired power stations back on because the cost of Natural Gas has skyrocketed.
Global Britain ought to be capable of keeping the electricity running?
Where was I posting comments last 10 minutes
This “Climate, the science, politics, economics and anything else” sections is not wide enough.Let’s start 10 more
A large remit indeed.
Where to start. Chemistry, Geology, life and climate are linked.
Some of the first organisms – Cyanobacteria – Stromatolites, Oxygenated the World.
Take it from there.The U.K. government is to hold urgent talks with representatives from the energy industry amid growing concern about a spike in wholesale natural gas prices.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng will talk to gas suppliers and others on Saturday to hear how wide-reaching the impact of the surge in prices could be.
High global demand, maintenance issues at some gas sites and lower solar and wind output are blamed for the rise.
The high prices have already led two large UK fertiliser plants to close.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58605735
Clark was right, we are in a bit of a pickle.
However we do get Natural Gas from the North Sea, can’t they shift some more or import more from Norway?
Very, very soon the North Sea Link should go live.
https://northsealink.com– “can’t they shift some more or import more from Norway?”
In the 2018 UK gas crisis, we were drawing gas from Norway so fast that production had to be reduced to avoid causing earthquakes.
ET, are you still here? I’ve remembered some more problems with nuclear.
In the U.K. we are running out of Methane, CO2 and Electricity and it has not rained much, it is from rain we get our water.
The British Meat Processors Association has now warned that the industry will only be able to continue for two weeks at most before stocks of CO2 run out. You could not make this up. First the Green People tell you Carbon dioxide is the Devil incarnate, now we will run out of food if we don’t get more Carbon dioxide.
Then we were told Methane is bad because after you burn it Carbon dioxide is produced or if Methane escapes to the atmosphere it will eventually break down to Carbon dioxide.
Is this the best Global Britain can manage?As well as the food and drink industries, CO2 from the plants is used by hospitals and the nuclear power industry.
So, no fizzy drinks, no beer, no cheap wine, no frozen food, no chicken, no pork and we may have to turn off the reactors.
I blame the French.Michael! 😀
Think of CO2 like a genie. Very useful until you can’t get it back into its bottle 😀
“ET, are you still here?”
Yes, I am. Premeptively, I’ll state I know there are many problems with nuclear. Right now and in the forseeable short term (10–20 years) it’s the only reliable, scalable source of CO2-free energy and only electricity at that. Electrcity is only a part of the total energy we currently use and we need to transition heating homes and businesses and vehicle engines, both of which use far more total energy than our total electricity output, to using electricity.
“This “Climate, the science, politics, economics and anything else” sections is not wide enough.”
“A large remit indeed.”I apologise. My intention was to create a topic where people could debate the issues and hopefully give us all some greater insight.
“if Methane escapes to the atmosphere it will eventually break down to Carbon dioxide.”
It’s not only that Michael, Methane itself is a far more potent green house gas than CO2, 28–84 times depending on your timescale (it’s complicated). How Potent Is Methane?. The leaking of methane itself is a problem even before it breaks down.
I see an article in the Guardian today “Majority of UK’s small energy suppliers could be left to collapse this winter.”
“By the end of winter the industry may shrink to as few as 10 energy suppliers, according to analysis from experts at Baringa Partners for the Times, from about 70 suppliers at the start of the year.”
I don’t know how relaible that assessment is but it makes me think some companies are going to benefit from this crisis. Which makes my conspiracy theorist self wonder if it were not designed to do so and if not so, is the response designed to do so.
I want to note, I am not against solar and wind or other renewables. They will surely have a significant role to play. How significant is the question and where should we be putting resource to reduce emissions as effectively and quickly as possible.
ET, I think the only available course is to economise, hard and fast.
The IPCC says we have ten years to halve emissions in order to avoid the worst. Well, ten years is about how long it takes to build a nuclear power station these days. The Experimental Breeder Reactor at Dounraey was indeed built in about three and a half years, though that excludes planning and commissioning. If we call it five years, that’s still half of our available time, leaving the entire CO2 saving to be made in the second half.
Next we have to consider scale. There are currently over 400 nuclear power stations worldwide, producing about 10% of all electricity. These have been built over the course of about four decades. OK, maybe we can build some power stations in five years, but globally we’d need over four thousand just to address current electricity generation. A lot of the construction is highly specialised, so we’d need to train people in the techniques – more delay.
Then we need to consider fuel. Both uranium mining and uranium enrichment would need to be expanded by a factor of ten. Enrichment in particular is even more specialised.
Is this still looking practical?
Enrichment produces tailings of depleted uranium, in the form of depleted uranium hexafluoride. It’s corrosive, highly soluble, highly toxic chemically, and mustn’t get into the groundwater. The photo on the left is just one of three DUF6 storage yards in the USA alone; note the older cylinders going black from corrosion:
Having done all this, we’d be set to exhaust conventional uranium supplies in around a decade, so concurrently we’d have to have built a similar quantity of renewables infrastructure as well, in any case.
I see great promise in the molten salt reactors, breeding fuel from thorium, and fast spectrum reactors that can cook down our existing spent fuel, releasing centuries’ worth of energy. But they aren’t even properly prototyped yet. There simply isn’t time to go this route.
Note that my estimates above are merely for electricity, not replacing other forms of energy with electricity. Multiply everything by another factor of three for that, and we start running short of uranium before we’ve even finished building the power stations and enrichment plants!
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Hydroelectric system will be the largest in all of Africa. Installed capacity of 6.35 GW.
The role of GERD will be to act as a stabilizing backbone of the Ethiopian national grid. There will be exports, but only if there is a total surplus of energy generated in Ethiopia. This is mainly expected to happen during rainy seasons, when there is plenty of water for hydropower generation. Ethiopia has a young population, keen to work, the second largest population in Africa, after Nigeria. Some years ago they were starving, because the rains failed.
This will also retain a lot of fresh water, flooding downstream is also expected to become at least partly manageable.So it ticks a lot of boxes, not that downstream countries are convinced.
It concerns me that the Severn tidal barrage was ruled out in favour of Hinkley Point C. One twentieth of the U.K. need for electricity could have been supplied by the Severn barrage for the next few centuries.
Even if Point C produces 1/20 of U.K. needs that is only for half a century. Then what do you do with the poison?Hinkley Point C
The plant, which has a projected lifetime of 60 years, has an estimated construction cost of between £19.6 billion and £20.3 billion. The National Audit Office estimates the additional cost to consumers (above the estimated market price of electricity) under the “strike price” will be £50 billion, which “will continue to vary as the outlook for wholesale market prices shifts”. Financing of the project is still to be “finalised”, the construction costs will be paid for by the mainly FRENCH state-owned EDF and Chinese Communist state-owned China General Nuclear Power Group.According to December 2017 estimates, Hinkley is being built for £20.3 billion by 2025, to be paid over a 35-year period. According to Dieter Helm, professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford, “Hinkley Point C would have been roughly half the cost if the government had been borrowing the money to build it at 2%, rather than EDF’s cost of capital, which was 9%.”
There are several problems that I can now detect.
We now hate the Chinese Communist State, so presumably we will have no further truck with them and not be taking their geld?
We have just upset the French, who are in charge of constructing the project and will be running for the next few decades.
I suspect the ramming through of this project in the Bristol Channel was partially about having Nuclear Power but also weapon grade stuff for our Trident missiles, so we can stay at the top table of nutters. I also suspect that the Nuclear Nutters did not want the barrage to go ahead?Michael norton, Sept 18, 09:33 (previous page):
– “Clark was right, we are in a bit of a pickle.”
It may be worse than I thought. The following is from the Telegraph, but Yahoo financial news has a non-paywalled copy. Remember I complained that the gas storage facility at Rough was permitted to decay, and was then closed. Well –
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/mounting-fears-1970s-style-three-092842868.html
– Mounting fears of a 1970s-style three-day week as Britain’s energy crunch deepens
– The UK has slashed its strategic gas storage to barely 1.7% of annual demand by closing the Rough facility off the Yorkshire coast, subcontracting the costly task of storage to Germany and the Netherlands. Clive Moffatt, a gas consultant and former adviser to the Government on energy security, said: “It should be nearer 25%.”
– …Mr Moffatt said he warned that closing Rough was a dangerous decision in key meetings with British officials but the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy dug in its heels. “They refused to listen and kept saying that we had diversity of supply: they misunderstood the responsiveness of liquefied natural gas to short-term shocks,” he said.
– “We are now extremely vulnerable and I’m afraid the situation is going to get worse. Prices could go through the roof. You can’t rely on the interconnectors. Contracts can be rescinded and suppliers can declare force majeure: end of story. The EU made this very clear during the negotiations over Brexit,” Mr Moffatt added.
