kenny-hay.bsky.social
Falkirk Bairn and engineer working in the energy transition
111 posts
71 followers
114 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
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It’s the sort of thing an embarrassingly crap boss who’s watched too many episodes of The Apprentice would say
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It’s not great that the world is entering a potentially catastrophic phase of predatory imperialism because Americans thought the cost of filling up their gasoline tank was a bit too high.
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There’s a disconcertingly large amount of otherwise informed people who view CCS as a devious distraction technique by the fossil fuel industry rather than an essential service needed to decarbonise hard to abate industrial emitters. We won’t get to net zero without it.
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If they were, they (and us as bill payers) would learn a very quick and sore lesson on how renewables projects are financed.
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Yes we need to have informed debate about trade offs, but the 'green v growth' framing is flawed and misleading to the general public.
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But in the real world, even notwithstanding climate change risks, the UK still needs to spend capex re-building energy infrastructure that might have made sense during the dash for gas but is now increasing becoming obsolete and problematic.
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The populist right likes to frame this discussion as 'green v growth' because it gives the impression that business as usual and a reliance on fossil hydrocarbon infrastructure is a viable path back to growth.
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We also know that LNG is structurally more expensive and more polluting than the piped gas from the North Sea. Furthermore recent history tells us that an over-reliance on gas imports from undemocratic states can bring catastrophic risks.
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There is clear evidence that the role that gas plays as our marginal producer within the spot markets was a major contributor to the recent cost of living crisis. There is also evidence that the UKCS and NCS is facing long-term production decline that will require increasing amounts of LNG imports.
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Even if you ignore climate change risks to growth, a growth debate needs to acknowledge that the UK's energy infrastructure was built for a time of cheap and plentiful O&G that no longer exists and will increasingly impoverish us of we do nothing. A 'green v growth' trade-off framing is flawed.
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What I think labour has underestimated is the need to keep O&G supply chains healthy by encouraging continued investment into the UKCS while the Scottish energy transition project pipeline becomes more real. It may not pass the climate purity test but an expedient industrial strategy is needed here.
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I'm more optimistic now that the government will start to address known bottlenecks, such as consenting and grid connections. Chris Stark is an impressive guy and there's some good stuff in the clean power 2030 action plan.
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The transition needs Grangemouth skills, and then some. There's many like myself working for a just transition, but the project pipeline isn't moving fast enough, especially in wind, transmission, and industrial decarb (very much in the grangemouth wheelhouse). I hope Labour can kick it up a gear.
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Agreed. I haven’t seen any, but do think it needs a lot more thought leadership than it currently is getting as I don’t think it would be simple. The recent Danish wind auction failure is a cautionary example of the challenges that small nations with big renewables ambitions face.
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Are you aware of any articles or papers exploring how Scotland’s project pipeline could be banked if Scotland stepped out of the UK electricity market and CFD rounds?
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I suppose a generator’s pain is a consumer’s gain. I still think there needs to be a much bigger power to X pipeline in Scotland.
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Agreed. The whole point of annual ARs was to bring a predictable and smooth pipeline needed to give businesses the confidence to make investments. It’s not going to work if we keep on introducing self imposed boobie traps like ASPs and REMA.
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From my own experience, I suspect consumer demand flex will only become big when automated response through algorithms/ai is widely available and adopted.
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CCS isn't just a technical enabler for net zero, it is vital for a just and fair transition for communities across the country impacted by net zero. The alternative is a recipe for resentment and anti-net zero populism that will eventually backfire on the climate movement's core objectives.
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Thanks, understood. The misuse of CCS by bad actors has severely damaged it's reputation, but it doesn't negate the need for it. I hope the climate movement quickly makes peace with this and the importance of an effective and pragmatic industrial cluster strategy.
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I am genuinely curious to understand what it is about and why there seems to be a strong reluctance to support a technology designed to decarbonise our industrial heartlands.
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There seems to be a disconcertingly large amount of people who are genuinely concerned about climate change, but who then choose to ignore expert advice on CCS, despite a pretty broad consensus across the CCC, IPCC, and the IEA that it is a critical tool in the fight against climate change.
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The prioritised Track 1 industrial clusters are in England
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Net zero means decarbonising our economy, not just our power system. Too many people forget this.
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The UK may have a great wind resource but it has failed to capture much manufacturing GVA within the main packages.
In terms of emitter industries that CCS aims to service, I'm struggling to see what out of chemicals, steel, glass, cement, hydrogen, etc is going to die any time soon.
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We have loads of storage capacity, which other nations don’t have.
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From a carbon abatement cost I agree. But insulation and heat pumps won’t get us to deep industrial decarb. Thats why we need CCS as part of a broad solutions toolkit.
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The UK has world leading CCS capabilities in ways that we don’t have in nuclear or renewables. £22bn spent on fostering home grown supply chains for carbon markets is a lot of money but it’s likely what competitor nations would do if it had the UK’s supply chains and geology.
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1. Nuclear and CCS serve different purposes. It should never be a question of either/or
2. Opinions of an energy supplier should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.
3. CCS is the one area of the transition where UK PLC has comparative advantage, that is favorable to UK GVA. This is important
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If Scottish energy companies can’t make profit from existing markets then how will they find the time and money needed to invest and diversify into clean energy markets? For a petrostate like Scotland, a just transition needs to involve listening to industry and not just wishful thinkers.
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It makes more sense economically. ScotWind and INTOG is still years away from providing a major jobs boost to Scotland. In the meantime it’s important that we don’t let Scottish energy supply chains atrophy from deliberately constraining domestic O&G markets, which is what labour is doing.
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And the pro-wind Scottish government actually built wind farms during the same period and now it produces more renewable power than it consumes. Political choices matter.
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Yep, guaranteed we’ll now see well paid American job cuts and projects being shelved now.
A sad consequence of a vindictive coastal property NIMBY being voted into power.
It should improve supply chain bottlenecks and inflation in other regions like Europe though.
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What an embarrassment the USA has become
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Welcome!
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Yes, I'm not seeing the logic of Big Tech willingly signing up for expensive SMR cPPAs when they can continue to leverage their dominant cPPA buyer power on cheaper tech like wind and solar.
I hope I'm proven wrong but are still just paper projects.
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Interestingly I know 2 people on my street in the O&G drilling community who are now working on overseas geothermal projects. It’s an obvious career transition pathway.
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Agreed, the fiscal regime is still important wrt investment, jobs and economic value. Labour’s vision for the UK to become a clean energy superpower is welcome but it makes little sense to cut back support for the UKCS while we still need to import expensive and carbon intensive gas like LNG.
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The gas production decline is not largely driven by changes to the fiscal regime. It is mainly down natural depletion of the basin due to us extracting gas for decades.
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Crikey, I didn't know that. The likely costs to the consumer for every abatement option looks grim.
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I personally wouldn't assume similar cost sensitivities between FF CCS PS + T&S vs electrolyser + DAC given that they are quite different asset types (technically and commercially) and actual project demonstrated cost data on key parts of this infrastructure is still very immature.
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Until we get actual data on constructed and operated clean hydrogen production and CCS plants/clusters, any deterministic analysis like this needs to come with a big asterisk. My intuition says they are under-estimating DAC and PS CCS costs, but we’ll only have the answer after we build and operate!
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Notwithstanding other bottlenecks, I don't see how that amount is deliverable without problematic supply chain inflation on what are typically low IRR projects. It's not going to work, at least at that scale, without a hike in offtake prices. Total UK installed wind capacity is only c.30GW!
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Yeah, this is what happens when you prioritise production and not transmission. Hopefully, investment in flex, storage, transmission, and the coming end of the RO subsidy for early gen projects will help ameliorate this problem, but cheap finance will only come with revenue certainty.