We recently moved in too a new build - gas. It's great.
The reserves aren't infinite - but we have gas reserves under our land and seabed for over 100 years.
Ideally we will get cracking on nuclear (see my manifesto thread) as that is key in my opinion.
Richard Taylor
"William Tell could take an apple off your head. Taylor could take out a processed pea."
Sid Waddell
There's oodles of it under 'unfriendly' countries like Iraq, Iran and Russia. The US likes to get in there and manage the resources for them. Rumaila is the latest acquisition in Iraq; super-giant field, billions of barrels, none of which Saddam wanted to release. Guyana is the latest poor country to have its arm twisted over the other way, lots going on there.Originally Posted by Travs
When I went to University (to read Fuel Sciences) the known world oil reserves were around 20 years. Sixty years later the known oil reserves are higher than ever.
It is a truism that nobody goes looking for what they cannot sell in the short term to get their investment back. Nobody drilled very deeply for oil when it came bubbling out of the sand in Arabia or Texas.
If I was concerned about natural resource shortages it would be with the future long term supply of rare elements that are needed for electric car batteries that tend to be mined in countries that are not particularly friendly to the UK.
And thinking about minds. I think the Gadarene rush to universal electric cars is mindless. When the head of Toyota said something similar he was sacked in a rerun of the "king's new clothes".
And gas? Well you can of course readily make gas from oil. That is the oil that will be needed by power stations to generate electricity for electric cars which are no longer allowed to run on...er... oil.
Last edited by Graham Breeze; 04-01-2024 at 01:56 PM.
Here's a viewpoint from an admittedly rather abrasive Aussie engineer, and he's not to everyone's tastes and sensibilities with his presentation style. However, an engineering point of view he's spot on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5ibnHDxRFA
For a more nuanced and polite, but extremely authoritative report see below by Michael Kelly ended his academic career as the inaugural Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge. His main research focus was in new semiconductor physics and technology for ultra-high-speed electronic devices and the manufacturability of semiconductor structures at the nanoscale. He is a trustee of the GWPF. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
His paper points out the growing concern about the absence of a
proper cost-benefit analysis which stands up to scrutiny. To that end, he
asks important questions about why there has not been full transparency about the methodology behind the figures used by modellers, which in turn drive the Net Zero target. Professor Kelly makes the interesting
point that ministers have been presented with only one possible path, instead of a range of possibilities and actions, as would be normal in most other areas of Government business.
In this paper, Professor Kelly explains clearly that a critical study of what would be the biggest engineering project ever undertaken is missing. He makes the point that the need for materials, the required workforce, and the scale of the costs should be considered in the most robust manner, but this does not appear to have happened to date. This is particularly important when as we see, the country is already
feeling the growing cost of our progress towards Net Zero, and we have barely begun the process. In everything else we propose, Government plans receive the toughest scrutiny and even then, costs almost always
end up higher than planned. One only need look at the HS2 railway programme to see how costs there have spiralled as an illustration of how often the cost of Government outstrips expectations.
The important point that comes out in this paper is that change on this scale needs to carry the public through open debate. The proposals and actions that are required to meet our current Net Zero commitments in the promised time frame will not be sustained if based only on fear.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uplo...ess-Report.pdf
Am Yisrael Chai
"Solar panels, on the roof, charging your vehicle for free, OVER NIGHT"...!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyS9uqRLbB8
The level of Green-woke magical thinking the West is having to deal with...!
Am Yisrael Chai
Magic thinking?
Surely not in our government?
Alas I suspect more conservative MPs can discuss the Peloponnesian wars than have, say, A level maths: and even "O" level might help them do sums.
It was reported that Johnson struggled to understand exponential growth during COVID - but he certainly does know a lot about the Trojan wars.
Priceless
Richard Taylor
"William Tell could take an apple off your head. Taylor could take out a processed pea."
Sid Waddell
That's rubbish. A heat pump-powered central heating requires as much insulation as a gas or oil-powered one
That's true but the technology is available, and there are big grants for domestic installations that make it a comparable cost to a new gas boiler (I'm not familiar with oil boiler prices).
More rubbish. An air source heat pump has a COP of 3, and increasing with new technology, whilst a gas boiler has one of 0.93. An oil boiler's COP will depend on what fuel it is burning, but I've read a value of 0.84. This means electricity has to be 3.2 x more expensive than gas to cost more, and 3.57 x greater than the cost of heating oil, to cost more overall.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67511954
And then there's the future. It is almost certain that green taxes will be added to domestic fossil fuels in increasing amounts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. And then who would want to buy a house with a gas or oil boiler in 10 years time?
Must have been specified or installed badly. They're huge in Scandinavia, and have more than 40 heat pumps per 100 households and increasing.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-po...90%20to%202021.
I've just had a new 2600 litre oil tank fitted (thumb-nose-to-Swedish Doomgoblin). We had to wait a few weeks as they local company that installed the tank are inundated with requests. It seems quite a few are also from properties that have decided to take out their Air Sourced heat pumps.
The oil we have is used mainly to supply an Aga, but I had been thinking of re-awakening our old oil boiler that sits in the byre. A Tranco Refyre, circa 1973. It was run a couple of times annually to keep the system ticking over, but I've lapsed for the last 5 years or so. I was also wondering if it needed to be replaced as a back-up to the Aga and multi-fuel stove. What make of oil boiler are you considering installing?
Am Yisrael Chai
I love that, but everything in Australia is a bit upside down and back to front, so maybe he has a point and that’s how they work out there 😂.
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