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Coal trains in Bihar, India November 2023. by Salil Kumar Mukherjee
By Jo Nova
India is going gangbusters building coal
The need for energy in India is so dire, the Modi government just leaned on the power companies to get their act together. Instead of adding the usual 1 – 2 gigawatts of new coal power, which they have for a lot of the last decade, last year they ordered enough gear to build 10 gigawatts. And this year Modi wants them to aim for 31 gigawatts. Which is about the same capacity as the entire coal generation of the Australian National Grid (and our gas plants too).
Somewhat miraculously, they are talking of building them “in the next 5 or 6 years”:
India ‘Asks Utilities to Order $33bn in Gear to Lift Coal Output’ Rush to add more coal plants
India is rushing to add fresh coal-fired plants as it is barely able to meet power demand with the existing fleet in non-solar hours.
Post pandemic, the country’s power demand scaled new records on the back of the fastest rate of economic growth among major economies and increased instances of heatwaves.
July 5th, 2024 | Tags: Coal, Fossil Fuel, India | Category: Fossil Fuels, Global Warming, India, Uncategorized |  Print This Post | |
By Jo Nova
The real cost of back up
Imagine building and maintaining a perfectly good gas plant and then having it sit around for five whole years “just in case”?
There’s been a wind drought in the last three months in Australia, which meant hydro power had been used more than expected to fill the gap. But wouldn’t you know it, it’s been dry spell for most of the last year in Tasmania too and the dams were getting low. So on June 6th, the Combined Cycle Gas plant at Tamar Valley was set up to run for the first time since 2019.
Back in 2016 the maintenance costs of the keeping the CCGT at Tamar Valley on “30 day” standby was $12 to $24 million a year, depending on who you asked. So the five year cost of gas backup is in the order of $100 million, but those costs will be slapped on the gas plant bill, when really they’re a weather dependent renewables cost. What we need is reliable energy, not random electricity. If energy companies were only paid for reliable dispatchable power, the wind and solar plants would have to build their own “back up […]
By Jo Nova
Global fossil fuel use hits a new record level in 2023
We spent $1.77 Trillion dollars on the clean energy transition last year, yet our fossil fuel use is still rising and our emissions are still increasing.
The Energy Institute released their annual “Statistical Review of World Energy”. Total energy used in the world went up by 2% showing no sign of slowing down. For the first time, more coal was used in India than Europe and North America combined, a trend that is unlikely to stop soon. Despite there being more EVs on Earth than ever before, oil consumption was up 2% to above 100 million barrels for the first time. China overtook the US as the country with the largest oil refining capacity in the world last year at 18.5 million bpd. But the US overtook Qatar as the largest exporter of LNG. And global man-made emissions of carbon dioxide exceeded 40 gigatons for the first time.
Imagine what a different place the world would be if we spent that money on something useful? Just a tenth of that might provide clean water and sanitation for the poorest of the poor and stop children […]
By Jo Nova
Stop Storms with Censorship!
The UN Chief reminds us that we are babies who need an unelected tribal chieftain to protect us from seeing naughty persuasive words. Lord help us if grown up doctors, dentists, economists and people who keep planes-in-the-sky are accidentally exposed to The Word Of Exxon, or Shell, or BP. They might vote the wrong way, or buy the wrong car. They might influence their own children. (They might wonder why they pay money to The UN?)
What looks acts and smells like a global government in waiting? The United Nations wants your money and control over what you read and see. They also want control over the voices of the industry they are proposing to destroy.
The latest science decree from the Experts is that fossil fuel companies are the “Godfathers of climate chaos”. They’re probably sneaking around behind you like the mafia, dropping flood-bombs on your children’s school and raining on your Pride Parade. Fossil fuels are just like tobacco now — apart from how they harvest the fields and feed the children and fly us to Barbados for beachy weekends. (Marlboro only did that in the adverts…)
The UN need […]
While no one was paying attention, a Russian ship exploring Antarctica claims it has found oil and gas deposits that are ten times larger than the North Sea. Presumably quite a lot of countries would find this very interesting. At the moment Antarctica is supposedly protected by a piece of paper, but those who want to keep something so valuable to themselves will be needing more than cellulose.
It could take some fossil fuels to protect these fossil fuels
Hard to see any nation keeping control of this oil and gas field using sailing boats, solar powered ships and missiles running on palm oil.
Russia finds vast oil and gas reserves in British Antarctic territory
Johnathon Leake, Telegraph
Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in areas claimed by the UK.
The surveys are a prelude to bringing in drilling rigs to exploit the pristine region for fossil fuels, MPs have warned.
Reserves totalling 511bn barrels of oil – about 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – have been reported to Moscow by Russian research ships, according to evidence given to the […]
By Jo Nova
The clean energy revolution is failing, and everyone knows it
In a radical move, the CEO of an oil giant actually defended oil. For a brief moment the space-time continuum opened a worm hole to reality, and leaders of some of the world’s largest corporations briefly said sensible things.
The energy transition is falling apart so fast, even the prime targets of hate, the Big Oil Men themselves, are now openly pointing out what a waste of time and money solar and wind power are. BP was trying to cut oil production 40% until very recently when it flipped to increasing it. But now we have a whole conference of Big Oil.
Saudi Aramco CEO says energy transition is failing, world should abandon ‘fantasy’ of phasing out oil
By Spencer Kimball, CNBC
HOUSTON — Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday that the energy transition is failing and policymakers should abandon the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
“In the real world, the current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts as it collides […]
By Jo Nova
There’s no hiding that this is a major backflip
History books will be written about corporate mistakes.
Twenty years ago BP called itself “Beyond Petroleum” and by 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. They pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, and promised to pivot into renewable power. The media was thrilled — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico, and shines a light on “stranded oil and gas”. Only two years ago BP talked of “accelerating” it’s green investments. Then the price of oil and gas exploded and problems with unreliable energy started breeding.
Now BP is writing off a billion dollars in offshore wind investment, and the new CEO is calling for “pragmatism”. The company has flipped from cutting oil production 40% by 2030 to increasing it instead.
The new chief, Murray Achincloss said they still want to be “an integrated energy company” (presumably so it looks less like a full-reverse and more like a “tweak”), but he betrayed himself when he said: “we see growing demand for energy right now across the globe”. “It is not slowing down.” When he says energy, he means oil and gas.
BP to […]
By Jo Nova
They didn’t tell us, the term “fossil fuels” might be wrong too
Dr Willie Soon unleashes on the failures of climate change and modern science for 40 minutes with Tucker Carlson (see below). As an opening he explained how one of Saturn’s moons has more liquid fuel than than all the oil and gas deposits of Earth, which rather pokes a hole in the idea that fossil fuels are only ever made from fossils.
Essentially a frozen, lifeless moon with no dinosaurs, forests or peat bogs, somehow has lakes of methane. Not only does Titan have liquid seas of hydrocarbon fuel — but we’ve known this for years. In fact even in 2005 a NASA scientist quietly admitted that Titan had methane that wasn’t made from fossils. But where was NASA in the 18 years since?
Soon explains that Titan proves that abiotic oil and gas formation is true. In 2009 an experiment showed that when methane is put under great pressure like the kind we find 50-100 miles underground, it can form more complex hydrocarbons. (Kolesnikov). Several papers in the last dozen years find more exotic kinds of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons all over the place, […]
By Jo Nova
Top 20 Energy mining nations are planning to increase production, not decrease it.
Despite 151 nations signing the Paris Agreement, the UNEP has all but admitted that most of the world is not even pretending to meet their emissions promises. As is obvious in the graph below, governments of the top 20 producers of the evil coal, oil and gas are planning to dig up even more of it by 2030 than they do now. These 20 nations produce 80% of the world’s fossil fuels and somewhere out there are lots of customers.
The report appears to be a scorecard to guilt-trip the 20 naughty nations into giving up warmth, food or billions of dollars in exports, but it reads like the Paris Agreement is pure charade.
Governments plan to produce double the fossil fuels in 2030 than the 1.5°C warming limit allows
Stockholm, 8 November 2023 – A major new report published today finds that governments plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, and 69% more than would be consistent with 2°C.
Who are we kidding?
The Production Gap really means “The […]
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
We are a fossil fueled world. Solar & wind power make up just 7.5% 6% of our energy needs.*
The world has set a new record for energy use in the last year. And even though renewables are being installed at the fastest rate they ever have been, it isn’t enough to keep up with the growing demand for energy let alone to “convert” the world to Net Zero.
Overall, despite our best efforts to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the world remains “stuck” getting 82% of its energy from them.
The Energy Institute has released the Statistical Review of World Energy, and it shows global energy use has not only recovered from the pandemic, it is now 3% higher than it was pre-Covid in 2019. The relentless human desire for energy continues. In 2022, humans used 1% more energy than they did the year before and 70% of that growth was from China.
To put the historic size of the “Renewable Energy Transition” into focus, here’s the last century of energy transformation. The Energy Institute did not seem to want to highlight the insignificance of renewable energy, so […]
By Jo Nova
Some overpaid academics think the rich nations owe $192,000,000,000,000 to poorer nations because of the “carbon pollution” they emitted.
Jo Nova says that fossil fuels built a civilization that invented cars, trains, planes, penicillin, the Haber-Bosch process, and clean water — making seven billion more lives possible. Fossil Fueled nations added free fertilizer to the atmosphere, increased crops and forests, greened the world and fed more people than ever.
The uncosted benefits owed to the West far outweigh the imaginary losses, so call off the parasites and let’s consider it all a free gift from the West to the world. What are seven billion lives worth?
The global population was resolutely stuck under 1 billion people for a hundred thousand years, then we discovered fossil fuels. | Source: OWID
It’s just another jumped up claim, not to feed the poor, but to enrich the bureaucrat class:
Rich Nations Owe $192 Trillion for Causing Climate Change, New Analysis Finds
By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on June 6, 2023, Scientific American
High carbon countries owe at least $192 trillion to low-emitting nations in compensation for their greenhouse gas pollution. That’s the conclusion of […]
Source: IQAir
By Jo Nova
The trend is clear: Burning more fossil fuels per person means less polluted air
Tell the world: two weeks ago a new study showed Australians and New Zealanders breathe the cleanest air on Earth. Not far behind them are people in the US, Canada, most of western Europe and Japan.
Naturally, hypnotized journalists either ignored the story or repeated the magic spell conclusions that fossil fuels were to blame, along with wildfires “caused by climate change”. All of them momentarily forgetting that Australians burn more fossil fuels per capita than nearly anywhere on Earth and are also renown for wildfires so big they drop ash on New Zealand.
The best air in the world turns out to be in nations that burn a lot of fossil fuels per person. The most polluted air is in poorer nations, poor sods.
Report: Only six countries met ‘healthy’ air quality standards in 2022
March 14 (UPI) — Just six countries had “healthy” air quality levels last year, as air pollution surged across the globe.
Only Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland and New Zealand, met the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines, according […]
Emden, Germany by Gritte, @gritte
By Jo Nova
Germany is at the leading edge of the climate wars and the Greens are starting to lose both in polling and policy. Despite the claims that the energy crisis will push everyone into renewables, one year later, the dominant energy source for German electricity is coal, up by eight percentage points to 33% of generation.
While the world is supposedly caught in a renewable rush to 2030, the German government just announced it will build 25 gigawatts of gas powered plants by 2030 so they are there when “when [the] wind and sun do not provide enough”. And this week Germany is doing a backflip on their recent EU deal to ban sales of petrol and gas powered cars by 2035. It appears now they will ban the ban, rather than the car, and Germany has the power in the EU to do that. Though it’s not freedom to buy any car you want, but quixotic car loophole.
It’s still a mess of awful, subsidized craziness in a futile quest to control the clouds — but there are signs it is getting less crazy.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch for the links:
[…]
By Jo Nova The environmental fashion parade suddenly has a smell…
This is a notable shift: Twenty years ago BP called itself “Beyond Petroleum”, and only one year ago the CEO said BP was “accelerating” its green investments. But now the CEO is reassuring investors that BP is not going to be distracted by environmental goals, and are focused on maximizing profits. Furthermore those profits would be found where it has a competitive advantage, including it’s “legacy oil and gas operations”.
Just like that: it’s OK to talk about profits and energy security. Key words here are “dialing back”, “disappointed”, “narrower” and “less emphasis” and they are all used in relation to environmental investments.
After years of sunshine and unicorns on the forced transition to unreliable energy, the mood appears to be changing.
h/t Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat
BP’s CEO Plays Down Renewables Push as Returns Lag
Bernard Looney seeks to sharpen strategic focus, with less emphasis on environmental goals
Jenny Strasberg, Wall Street Journal
Chief Executive Bernard Looney plans to dial back elements of the oil giant’s high-profile push into renewable energy, according to people familiar with recent discussions.
By Jo Nova
Affected by high winds?
Whatever the question, the excuse is always “climate change” and the answer is always Wind and Solar.
Are you an Energy Minister? Did you stop drilling for gas, let teenage girls design your national grid, and rely on a hostile power to supply your fuel? Stupid you, but that’s OK, because if your reliable grid is failing, it’s not your fault, it’s “climate change”. See how this works? It’s not that you vandalized a highly engineered system with frivolous vanity projects but that you didn’t do enough of them.
Heatwaves are apparently wrecking coal plants now. That extra one degree outdoors makes all the difference to a turbine that runs 24 hours a day at 540 degrees C. If only we’d known? Or maybe we did. In 1962 we could build coal plants in Arizona that are still running, and gas plants (in 1959) in Yuma County where the average maximum is 45C (115F) for three months of the year.
Seems the engineers had hot weather sorted out 60 years ago.
The lamest excuse for grid failure yet
Is it gas-lighting, or just stupid?
How the climate crisis is threatening […]
Make no mistake, the story of our lifetimes is that we got wildly lucky. It’s not just that most our economy is no longer dedicated to finding fuel (for our corporeal bodies or our machines) but that a vast share of our lives is not consumed with collecting wood or dung, rolling up hay, or gathering berries.
The graph below shows a remarkable transformation from a lifestyle where 80% of all the work done was just the daily task of finding fuel. The advent of the industrial revolution cut that effort in half, but the wild success of coal power and technology in the 1800s cut it by factor of ten. It almost appears as if coal did not just fuel the 19th Century, but created the 20th Century too. It was the great disruptor…
The real energy transition in the last 700 years
This was the economic transformation of the United Kingdom
By the 1990s the hunt for all the energy we needed was just a tiny 7% of the economy. And the most remarkable thing about that which is not shown in the graph, was that the total energy consumed had not shrunk at all, it […]
The vainglorious shunning of gas production in Europe in quest for weather salvation will hurt the world’s poor the most. As Europe scrambles to replace the astonishing loss of 70% of their own fertilizer production they will be competing to import fertilizer from stretched markets around the world.
The price rises in gas, fertilizer and next year in food, will hurt the poorest of the poor far more than the theoretical temperature rise ever could. Thank the EU. Thank the Greens.
Click to enlarge: It’s a wipeout
Higher gas prices deepen Europe’s fertiliser crunch, threaten food crisis
Europe’s fertilizer crunch is deepening with more than two-thirds of production capacity halted by soaring gas costs, threatening farmers and consumers far beyond the region’s borders.
As Europe becomes a net importer of fertilizer, the fallout from the supply crunch will spread. The region will start competing for scarce supplies with poorer nations, especially in Africa, where food insecurity is exacerbated by persistent droughts and conflict.
These prices cause third degree burns:
Fertiliser shortage threatens farming, food security in Europe
According to the CRU Group, a business intelligence firm specialising in commodities, fertiliser producers in the EU […]
Shut Up, say Climate Alarmists trying to ban Fossil Fuel Ads
When science is not on your side you have to stop the other half speaking somehow. Obviously, these marketers are not going to win a science debate.
So 300 public relations geniuses who are dependent on fossil fuels want to deny the companies that feed, cloth, warm and move them — the right to even pay to make their case? Well, Over to you I say. When you switch off the grid, we’ll believe you are sincere, rather than status seeking junkies looking to earn fashionista points in a debate you haven’t done five minutes of real research in.
They, the physics dropouts of university, may protest that they have solar panels, and an EV, and timeshares in a windfarm near Ararat, but not one of them has the integrity to do this properly. All of them rely on power from coal plants in the dead of night to keep them warm, to stabilize the fifty hertz, and to be there when the wind don’t blow. Even in the unlikely event one of the 300 has bought the Super-Uber battery bank that charges their car and the fridge […]
Not the kind of article we’d expect to see in Time Magazine. A 100% endorsement of the inescapable need for fossil fuels?
The Modern World Can’t Exist Without These Four Ingredients. They All Require Fossil Fuels
By Vaclav Smil, Time Magazine
Cyron Ray Macey
Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.
Does any other odd factoid capture the rise of China so well?
China now produces more than half of the world’s cement and in recent years it makes in just two years as much of it as did the […]
It’s the Great Reset in Global Energy complacency
There is pandemonium on the markets and suddenly many nations want to be energy sufficient. It’s perhaps not The Great Reset than the collective-types were expecting?
The gas flows from Russia to the EU are sporadically tightening, and the Yamal-Europe line has been cut off. Gas in Europe is now trading at €340/MWh which is fully 22 times the long term average. Newcastle coal normally trades around $60 per ton, but now is over $400 USD.
A few days ago the former head of MI6 in the UK called for an immediate lifting of the frakking ban which was set to see concrete poured down the only two shale gas wells in England by March 15th. Thirty-five Tory MPs and four peers sent a letter to Boris demanding the same thing. Now even Boris Johnson is suggesting the Green targets could be relaxed, not just for Britain, but for all the West. He went so far as to suggest The West could give itself a “climate change pass” while we figure out how to get energy that isn’t Russian gas.
Thanks to NetZeroWatch
So much for the end of Fossil […]
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