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A group of geologists have drawn my attention to the 2010/2013 Geological Society of London‘s statement on climate change and asked if I could arrange an on-line discussion about it. The lead author of the statements is Dr Colin Summerhayes who has participated as guest blogger and commenter on Energy Matters before. And so I asked if I could reproduce the statements on these pages and invite informed commentary. This modus operandi was approved by Dr Summerhayes’ co-authors and the committee of the Geological Society of London.

Main sources:

Climate change: evidence from the geological record
A statement from the Geological Society of London November 2010

An addendum to the Statement on Climate Change: Evidence from the Geological Record
December 2013

The addendum is arranged such that some sections are unchanged from the original. For other sections additional information is provided, but this is not merged with the original content. Its is therefore not possible to read a single updated report. What I have provided below is the full text of the original 2010 statement which is ~ 3000 words long and a copy of the 2013 Addendum summary. Those who want to read the full addendum should simply use the link provided above.

The Discussion in comments

What I am soliciting in primary comments is informed opinion driven mainly by what data tells us, backed up by references to data sources. Primary comments may also take the form of questions.

What I am not going to permit is social commentary and chit chat. Comments will be strictly moderated.

What I am aiming for is to assemble information in one place that either supports or refutes the position of The Geological Society.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Blowout Week 211

January 13, 2018

Blowout Week 211

This week we return to the Big South Australian Battery (BSAB), the alleged success of which – the “Tesla effect” – is spawning a raft of similar projects elsewhere in the country. Coming after we have Frydenberg on Snowy River; the usual dose of OPEC; Russia sells gas to the US; less gas to come from Groningen; California to close Diablo Canyon; coal in Finland, Poland, Bulgaria and Japan, hydro in Colombia; Germany’s Energiewendeproblems; renewables in Denmark and Colorado; less gas capacity planned for UK; Ineos to challenge Scotland’s fracking ban; a contingency plan needed for cold winter nights when the wind doesn’t blow; Trump reconsiders Paris and how climate change makes turtles female.

Guardian: Big new renewable projects planned across Australia as “Tesla effect” hits

Australia’s renewable energy sector responds to the success of South Australia’s Tesla lithium ion battery.

South Australia will build the world’s largest solar thermal plant, and a Queensland wind farm may be the site of a new record-breaking battery. The Aurora solar plant in Port Augusta, SA, will begin construction this year, and is slated to provide 100% of the state government’s electricity needs by 2020, the state’s acting energy minister, Chris Picton, announced on Wednesday. In Queensland, French utility Neoen – which partnered with Tesla in SA to create the world’s largest battery – may trump its own creation by building an even larger storage system at the Kaban Green Power Hub, 80km from Cairns. In December the (South Australia) state government hailed the battery’s effectiveness in dealing with power outages, and Neoen and Tesla have recently announced plans for a second collaboration to build a 20MW battery in Victoria. In order for the proposed Queensland battery to be the world’s largest, it would have to beat a soon-to-be-completed battery in South Korea, from Hyundai Electric & Energy Systems Co, which at 150MW would take the crown from South Australia.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The 2018 Oil Production Forecast Explained

January 11, 2018

The 2018 Oil Production Forecast Explained

In my recent post, Oil Price Scenario for 2018, my global supply forecast was seriously at odds with those presented by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and Rystad Energy, a respected Norwegian consulting firm. This post puts more flesh on my 2018 oil production view. The post could easily have been called “Oil Production Forecasting for Beginners” and explains things like decline rates and oilfield interventions in addition to presenting an overview of global production and rig count statistics. The second half of the post is effectively Oil Production Vital Statistics for December based on the Energy Matters Global Energy Graphed database.

The Rystad View

The Rystad view on US oil production and future oil price is very different to my own. They see US oil production up 2 Mbpd and a virtually static oil price from 2017 to 2018. Rystad have a vast data base of relevant data and so I would not bet against them being right. Its just that I cannot see any evidence for their forecast in the data I review. Today, Brent was above $69 / bbl and the Rystad view is mean $55 / bbl in 2018. So they are forecasting another oil price crash.

Figure 1 The Rystad Sep 2017 view of US production. This non-zero scaled chart should be compared with actual US production (Figure 2).

Natural Oil Field Production Declines

A good way to summarise oil field operating dynamics is to begin with a spanking new oil field, recently discovered with 10 production wells drilled on it. Once the platform is installed, production begins and because of the high reservoir pressure the oil gushes out at an aggregate rate of 100,000 bpd (barrels per day). In fact, it wants to gush so fast that the wells are chocked back to control the flow.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Blowout Week 210

January 6, 2018

Blowout Week 210

Is the US about to become the world’s largest oil producer? Our feature story says yes. To follow we have Trump’s offshore leasing program; record Russian gas production; Saudi Arabia’s gasoline price hike; Germany shuts down a nuclear reactor; Australia’s industry to power down during heatwave; Coal growth in Asia; the Snowy hydro project a “write off”; UK releases plans for coal phase-out; North America’s largest lithium battery; the wind (almost) always blows somewhere in Europe; fossil-fuel burning without the CO2; Scotland’s plans to combat coastal erosion and the struggle to save chocolate from climate change extinction.

CNN Money: America could become oil king of the world in 2018

The United States is poised to ramp up crude oil production by 10% in 2018 to about 11 million barrels per day, according to research firm Rystad Energy.

Surging shale oil output should allow the United States to dethrone Russia and Saudi Arabia as the planet’s leading crude oil producer, Rystad predicted in a recent report. The prediction shows how the fracking revolution has turned America into an energy powerhouse — a transformation that President Trump has vowed to accelerate by cutting regulation. This long-term shift has allowed the U.S. to be less reliant on foreign oil, including from the turbulent Middle East. The U.S. hasn’t been the global leader, nor ahead of both Russia and Saudi Arabia, since 1975. “The market has completely changed due to the U.S. shale machine,” said Nadia Martin Wiggen, Rystad’s vice president of markets.

Reuters: U.S. oil rig count ends 2017 40 percent above year-ago levels

The U.S. oil rig count rose by about 42 percent by end-2017 compared to the corresponding period last year, as energy companies boosted spending amid a recovery in crude prices.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Chile’s electricity sector can go 100% renewable

January 3, 2018

How Chile’s electricity sector can go 100% renewable

If pumped hydro plants that use the sea as the lower reservoir can be put into large-scale operation Chile would be able to install at least 10 TWh of pumped hydro storage along its northern coast. With it Chile could convert enough intermittent solar into dispatchable form to replace all of its current fossil fuel generation, and at a levelized cost of electricity (provisionally estimated at around $80/MWh) that would be competitive with most other dispatchable generation sources. Northern Chile’s impressive pumped hydro potential is a result of the existence of natural depressions at elevations of 500m or more adjacent to the coast that can hold very large volumes of sea water and which form ready-made upper reservoirs.

Valhalla’s pumped hydro plant

My recent review of the Valhalla solar/pumped hydro storage project is what set me to wondering how much untapped pumped hydro potential there might be in Northern Chile, so I begin with a brief recap of pumped hydro potential there.

Valhalla’s project layout map shows its two upper pumped hydro reservoirs (they will be connected by a canal) occupying two natural depressions at around 600m elevation and about seven kilometers from the sea. According to Valhalla they can hold at least 25 million cubic meters of sea water and according to my estimates about 15 gigawatt-hours of stored energy:

Figure 1: Valhalla’s pumped hydro project layout

The question I had was how to go about identifying other prospective pumped hydro reservoir sites in the area, and the best tool at my disposal was Google Earth. So before beginning my search I checked to see whether I could duplicate Valhalla’s reservoir outlines and volumes from Google Earth, which in Northern Chile uses good-quality imagery and gives spot elevations to the nearest foot.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oil Price Scenario for 2018

December 29, 2017

Oil Price Scenario for 2018

It is that time of year again where we try to forecast what the oil price will do over the coming 12 months. Last year I forecast $60 / bbl for Brent year ending 2017 and with Brent trading on $66.50 as I write I can conclude that I got lucky this year. My friend wagered on $78 and our bet this year was too close to call. My forecasting effort is based on trying to understand the supply, demand, storage, price dynamic and since this seemed to work pretty well this year I will repeat the exercise with some slight modifications.

I have some reservations about the methodology stemming from 1) US LTO production has unpredictable impact on supply elasticity and 2) OPEC + Russia et al are withholding ~ 1.8 M bpd from the market. In effect this group will determine the oil price in 2018. If the price goes too high they may open the taps a little to maintain the price they want, whatever that may be.

[The inset image shows “shale” fracking pads in the USA.]

Disclaimer

No one has ever been able to confidently forecast the oil price that is subject to a vast array of socio-economic, geo-political and technology variables. The best we can do is to assemble some of the key data and to try and use our experience to draw some inferences about what may happen. Readers act upon the information presented here at their own risk.

Oil Price Narrative for 2018

The oil market is now subject to production constraint amounting to ~1.7 Mbpd. This has led to rebalancing of supply and demand by the end of 2017. The Brent oil price has recovered strongly since the summer to close the year at around $66.50. Last year I forecast $60 / bbl for December 2017 and therefore came close.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Valhalla solar/pumped hydro project

December 27, 2017

The Valhalla solar/pumped hydro project

When and if it gets built the Valhalla project will consist of a 600 MW solar farm and a 300 MW pumped hydro plant which, it is claimed, will in combination deliver continuous baseload power to Northern Chile. If the project works as planned it will indeed deliver continuous baseload power, but only enough to fill about 5% of Northern Chile’s baseload demand. However, it would be the first to demonstrate that baseload power can be generated from a utility-scale PV plant. Development is presently on hold while Valhalla seeks $1.2 billion in financing. (Inset: Valhalla’s solar farm.)

The Valhalla project will send intermittent generation from the 600 MW Cielos de Tarapacá solar PV farm to the 300 MW Espejo de Tarapacá pumped hydro plant in order to convert it into baseload power. I touched on it in my 2016 solar in Chile post, and here I subject it to a more detailed review.

The pumped hydro plant

Valhalla’s pumped hydro plant is often claimed to be new technology because it uses the sea as the lower reservoir (there being no other option in the Atacama Desert). It is, however, preceded by the Yanbaru pumped hydro plant on Okinawa, Japan, a 30MW plant that used the sea as the lower reservoir. No details on Yanbaru’s performance are readily available, but the plant operated for 17 years between 1999 and 2016 and in fact went into commercial operation in or around 2003. Yanbaru’s purpose was to supply balancing services to the Okinawa grid (it was decommissioned in 2016 because of lack of demand) rather than convert large volumes of intermittent solar to baseload, but the fact that it operated for so long (and won a number of awards) suggests that seawater/pumped hydro technology can be regarded as at least partially proven.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More on going off-grid in UK

December 14, 2017

More on going off-grid in UK

In my previous Going off-grid post I reviewed the question of whether Tesla Powerwalls or overgeneration, considered separately, might allow a UK homeowner with a rooftop solar array to go off-grid. In this post I consider the two in combination. Once more using 10 Mossbank Way as an example I find that there are circumstances in which it might make marginal economic sense for Mossbank to install up to one Powerwall, but that again that there is no realistic combination of Powerwalls and overgeneration that would allow Mossbank to power itself year-round with solar alone. Going off-grid is again found to increase Mossbank’s electricity costs substantially no matter what combination of the two is adopted.

It’s becoming progressively more obvious that 100% renewables-powered grids will never work without adequate energy storage, and at present the storage system of choice is the Tesla battery. I therefore make no apologies for presenting the third post in a row on Tesla Powerwalls. This post, however, evaluates their performance in more detail than did the previous two by reviewing the impacts of varying the number of Powerwalls and the amount of solar overgeneration at the same time. To do this I had to construct a rather complex spreadsheet algorithm which after checking appears to give the right answers but which I can’t guarantee to be 100% correct in all cases. Having made this necessary disclaimer, on to the results.

First a brief recap. Mossbank’s rooftop solar array has an installed capacity of 4kW(p). I have again used Mossbank’s hourly solar generation data for 2016 (total 3,809kWh) and have again assumed that this was equal to Mossbank’s 2016 demand. The hourly demand curves are the same as those used in the previous post. Sixteen cases are considered – zero to eight Powerwalls and either 4kW or 8kW of installed capacity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Virtual Energy

December 11, 2017

Virtual Energy

Has the day of the smart computer controlled micro-grid arrived? They reduce dependency on power from large centralised utilities whilst at the same time empowering communities to become self sufficient in energy supplies. Blockchain computer code is the enabling technology that allows the vendor of surplus solar power to trade with a neighbour who wants to buy electricity.

Disclaimer

It is rare for me to write on a topic that I do not understand. It is equally rare for me to spend several hours trying to understand a topic and to be not much wiser after doing so. Some or all of what I have written here may turn out to be nonsense and readers are well advised to take no actions based on my words.

Microgrids

For a long while, I have read energy articles in the Green Tech Press which I believe are utter rubbish and I have understood the technical reasons why this is so. More recently I have been finding it increasingly hard to understand the jargon particularly with regards to the application of blockchain technology and I decided it was time to try and find out what is going on. This, for example from General Electric:

But the lasting impact of bitcoin may end up being blockchain, the technology that makes the currency work. Blockchain has the potential to integrate renewable energy into the electricity grid in a way that is clean, easy and meaningful to the average energy consumer.

The graphic is from General Electric Corporation and is for Carros on the Mediterranean coast of France (see below). GE continues…

This is all doable because Carros is home to the world’s first smart solar grid: a large scale experiment to integrate renewables into the grid. GE worked with French grid operator Enedis to install solar panels on residential and commercial rooftops, implement demand response technologies and create battery storage across the grid.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Going off-grid in the UK

December 7, 2017

Going off-grid in the UK

In my recent post featuring a residence in Tucson, Arizona (latitude 32 north) I found that no reasonable number of Tesla Powerwalls would allow the homeowner to go off-grid using a combination of solar and battery storage. In this post I review a residence in UK (latitude 52 north) and find, unsurprisingly, that its prospects for going off-grid with solar and Powerwalls are likewise non-existent. Further reviews show that the overgeneration approach does not work well in the UK either. The only presently-available option for a UK homeowner with a solar array who wants to go off grid is to combine solar with a backup generator.

Solar Generation

The solar array I chose as my UK example is on the roof of 10 Mossbank Way, Shrewsbury (data from Sunny Portal). With a capacity of 4kWp (16 Sanyo HIT-H250E01 panels), total 2016 generation of 3,809 kWh and a capacity factor of 10.8% it’s about as average as you can get for a rooftop UK system:

10 Mossbank Way, Shrewsbury

Daily average solar generation from Mossbank during 2016, the last full year for which data are available, is shown in Figure 1. Average power output was highest in May (0.71kW) and lowest in January and December (0.13kW) – a seasonal range of more than a factor of five:

Figure 1: Mossbank average daily solar generation, 2016 (a plot of hourly solar generation for the entire year is hard to interpret). The red lozenges are monthly means

Hourly solar generation data for May and January are shown in Figure 2 for illustration purposes. The large differences in total generation and the abundance of January days with minimal solar generation are apparent:

Figure 2: Mossbank hourly solar generation, January and May 2016

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End of Economic Growth

December 1, 2017

The End of Economic Growth

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond (finance minister) delivered his budget on Wednesday last week. The tame budget was overshadowed by news that UK productivity and hence economic growth had stalled. In this post I search for the underlying causes of economic malaise and explore the structure of UK GDP; UK Government and private debt levels; demographics, in particular our ageing population; Higher Education policy, in particular over-production of sub-prime graduates and lastly UK Energy Policy that is focussed on high cost inefficient energy systems.

It has been frustrating to say the least listening to politicians, their advisors and a host of media commentators proclaim surprise and bewilderment that the UK economy seemed to be broken. Since no one seems to know how it broke, then it is clear no one will know how to fix it, if it can indeed be fixed. In this post I voice opinions on several factors that have combined to create these unwelcome circumstances and in the traditions of this blog, there is an energy theme, which I will leave until last touching on the topics of debt, demographics and sub-prime education en-route.

In very simple terms, the size of the UK economy can be expressed as the number of people times their average economic output. A refined measure would be the number of working-age people (16 to 66) times their average economic output. Economic growth is defined as the percentage change of this aggregate productivity from one year to the next. With the current economic model, growth is vital to the country since it feeds directly through to tax receipts used to deliver public services such as health care, welfare, education and defence. The level of aggregate borrowing (national debt) considered prudent may also be compared to GDP. If GDP growth stalls, so does the ability of the government to borrow prudently to finance public services.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls meet your home’s energy needs?

November 29, 2017

Will solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls meet your home’s energy needs?

Tesla is now marketing its Powerwall2 storage battery for domestic applications, claiming among other things that it can make your home self-powered and blackout-proof. Here I review Tesla’s claims using an existing rooftop PV array in the Arizona desert as a real-life example. Will a few Powerwalls allow the homeowner to go off-grid? Not a chance. Will they make the home blackout-proof? Maybe, maybe not. Will they save the homeowner money on his electricity bills? Not that I can see.

The example rooftop array is in Tucson, Arizona. I selected Tucson because if a solar-Powerwall2 combination won’t work there it won’t work anywhere in the US. Except for the area around Death Valley to the northwest the solar resource is about as good as it gets, the low (about 30%) seasonal solar range means that there is no large seasonal storage requirement and seasonal generation is not in antiphase to demand, as it is in some areas farther north:

Figure 1: US solar irradiance. Image from Arizona Solar Center

The real-life example I use is the array of panels on the roof of the residence of a Mr. Gary Bynum. Their listed capacity is 8.28 kW(p). Figure 2 shows the installation:

Figure 2: Mr Gary Bynum’s rooftop solar panels. Image from Sunny Portal

In the year I selected for review (2013) the panels generated 15,500 kWh (capacity factor 21.6%), and I assume here that this would have been sufficient to cover all household consumption durng the year had it been possible to store the surpluses for re-use. How many Powerwalls would have been needed to do this? According to the Tesla website
two Powerwalls would be needed to back up 15,500 kWh/year of consumption (42.5 kWh/day).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Blowout Week 204

November 25, 2017

Blowout Week 204

In this week’s Blowout we continue our recent focus on energy storage, featuring the just-published ACOLA study which claims that Australia can get 75% of its electricity from intermittent renewables with 105 gigawatt-hours of long-term storage, enough to cover demand for all of four hours. We follow with Russia jumping into bed with OPEC; the race for light crude; France considers spinning off EDF; the truth about Chernobyl; Germany’s coalition crisis; Tesla meets its battery deadline; interconnectors in Europe; subsidies in UK; Hinkley under fire again; Brexit and Euratom; EVs as virtual power stations: a Swedish coal plant that burns old clothes; the cooling properties of deep fat fryers and how climate change makes lizards less intelligent.

Australian Council of Learned Academies: The Role of Energy Storage in Australia’s Future Energy Supply Mix

A National Electricity Market (NEM) model was used to assess the requirements of energy storage out to 2030. The model was based on hourly supply and demand data for a year where there was the longest period of low availability of variable renewable resources (worst case scenario for variable renewable supply).

Three scenarios underpinned the modelling in this report: (1) ‘LOW RE’ (where variable renewables account for approximately 35 per cent generation); (2) ‘MID RE’ (approximately 50 per cent generation); and (3) ‘HIGH RE’ (approximately 75 per cent generation). Under the three scenarios, storage capacity requirements for energy security and reliability are shown in Figure 1. Energy storage is both a technically feasible and an economically viable approach to responding to Australia’s energy security and reliability needs to 2030, even with a high renewables generation scenario.

(“System reliability” is the ability to meet electrical energy demand (GWh) at all times of the day, the year, and in future.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China’s “Hualong 1” passes the first stage of the UK GDA process

November 24, 2017

China’s “Hualong 1” passes the first stage of the UK GDA process

With little fanfare last week, the Chinese designed HPR1000 (previously Hualong-1), pressurised water reactor, cleared the first of four stages in the General Design Assessment (GDA) administered by the UK Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR). China General Nuclear (CGN) proposes to build 2 reactors of this design at the Bradwell site in England, in partnership with French state-owned EDF that currently operates all UK commercial reactors.

This guest post by Andy Dawson gives a preliminary overview of the design focussing on safety systems.

Introduction

As almost all readers of the blog will be aware, a team of EdF and China General Nuclear (CGN) have proposed the construction of a Chinese designed nuclear station at Bradwell, in Essex. On Thursday of this week, the UK Office of Nuclear Regulation announced that the design proposed for the station -the “HPR1000”, originally known as the “Hualong-1” has successfully completed the first, preparatory stage of the Generic Design Approval (GDA) process. This appears to have been completed on time, or perhaps a few weeks early.

While we shouldn’t over-state the importance of this particular transition – GDA is a four stage process, in which stages 2 & 3 are where the great majority of the detailed evaluation of the design from a safety perspective is undertaken – it is important in that it’s the first point at which the developers have to publish reasonably detailed data on the design. That data is available here.

This piece is intended to give an overview of the design, highlighted particular strengths and weaknesses that may affect the GDA outcome, and giving a comparison against the virtues and vices of the other contenders for UK build.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Helm and the death of UK wind and solar

November 22, 2017

Helm and the death of UK wind and solar

In his recent post on the Helm Review Euan Mearns predicted that Helm’s recommendation that “intermittent producers need to bear the cost of converting intermittent to firm capacity” will, if adopted, “sound the death knell for new wind and solar projects in the UK”. This post presents ball-park estimates of the economic impacts of Helm’s recommendation for two cases – wind-plus-storage and wind-plus-CCGT. The wind-plus-storage case is uneconomic at any reasonable carbon price and the wind-plus CCGT case is at best marginally competitive with alternative generation sources. These results suggest that Euan’s prediction is probably correct for wind and probably for solar too, although I did not review any solar cases.

First a brief disclaimer on Helm’s “firm capacity” recommendation. It can be interpreted to mean that intermittent producers would have to convert their output into 100% dispatchable form before it can be sent to the grid, and for the purposes of analytical simplicity I have assumed here that this interpretation is the correct one. However, Helm’s recommendation refers not to “firm capacity” but to “equivalent firm capacity”, which according to Helm:

…. focuses on the de-rated capacity value to the system of the different forms of generation. As the cost of addressing intermittency falls with DSR and storage, so the de-rating factors lessen.

In three pages of explanation (beginning on page 192 of his review) Helm fails to make it clear how these de-rated capacity factors are to be calculated, and because I don’t know how to calculate them either I have ignored the potential impacts of a de-rating approach.

Estimating wind generation

Rather than attempt a market-wide study I structured this review around a hypothetical 1GW offshore wind farm in the North Sea, the annual generation from which I assumed would be proportional to the generation achieved by Danish offshore wind farms in 2016 (hourly data from P-F Bach). I then performed the following operations:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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