Member Info for ZippyFrood

Thanks for your detailed and in-depth analysis Rob!

Yes he definitely made a tool there!!

Modestus - latest bidding for a WTIV on projects is €300k-€350k. Lower rates *may* be possible. but only on longer term charters. If you want to install over a late spring/summer/early autumn only, the Contractors are also building in the downtime for the year if they have no alternative utilisation, so the rate can be even higher if you're only wanting a ~6 month booking.

The lack of vessels and raw materials and the duration of lead times, all seem to have escaped Ed and team's notice.

IT's classic academic "things exist in perfect market/system" approach, when supply and demand seem to have no bearing.

Hi Dumbly, fully agree with what you've said there.

The problem is the industry reaction has been so feeble, so pathetic, I think they've _almost_ brought it upon themselves.

OEUK have been telling us for a few years they have the ears of ministers and they were talking to the opposition (now the government) to lobby for good things.

Operators themselves have been effectively mute on the topic, apart from Serica and likely Steve Brown from Orcadian has probably been making noise.

The majors have been egging it on, whilst knowing it will not affect them and whilst scaling back their wind divisions.

MPs local to Aberdeen and Shire have been pathetic, towing their respective party lines.

Every oil CEO that I've seen has nodded along with net zero and the need for the transition and whatnot, whilst they must know it's (currently) all an Emperor's new clothes facade.

I disagree with KO on the backtrack - both main parties have proven to use they give little to zero fcks about the next parliamentary term, so the long term damage to the exchequer/country is a moot point.

AB will play this in the most astute way he can, with little to no spend in the UK, unless it's through Veri and hopefully hoovering up a load of subsidies in the mean time - as for the likes of Drax, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

Oct23; from the article;

------

The power station operator saw its pre-tax profits jump around 37% for the first half of the year.

The company’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for the first half rose to £515m up from £417m in the same period last year.

The company said full year earnings will be around £996 million.

------

Incredible that a private entity can generate "profits" when being handed hundreds of millions of taxpayer subsidies, and hand these profits to shareholders. Surely tapering of subsidies is a better use of profits? Obviously I'm not against profit, but the use of tax payers money to generate private profits is absurd.

The hilarious thing is the government actually engaged with *ANYONE* working in wind, they'd know these facts straight away.

Any wind development in planning now, will not get COD before 2030/1/2, in part due to the general timeline of a major project, but also due to the supply chain constraints.

It's as if Labour are so far removed form reality, that they are unaware they are setting themselves up to fail in all of the pledges as it's simply physically impossible to complete the proposed volume of projects and number of gigawatts.

But then when do politicians exist in reailty??

Ahhhh, good old Yousless, what have we done to deserve such an imbecile?

I did wonder if this was going to be based on new support from the Ayatollahs or Hezbollah or ISIS-K or something.

I do wonder if the ScotGov actually thought this was a good idea to withdraw the commitments or just wanted to get ahead of the bad news.

Classic that Mairi MacAllan has blamed Westminster. Of course, who else's fault could it be...??

Incredible that the the independence fantasy was wholly based on "Scotland's Oil" just a short decade ago.

What I want to know is why no politicians are pointing out the nonsensically high price in AR6 for fixed wind (£73/MWh 2012 or £100.51/MWh Feb 2024) and floating wind (£176/MWh 2012 or £242.32/MWh Feb 2024) but all are "in our just transition and journey to net zero, reduced bills, cheap renewable energy blah blah blah blah....

I'm away to noise up my MP about it again. His EPL responses have been a bit wishywashy to date. I assume I'll get something the same here.

FYI,

using https://grid.iamkate.com/, past year wholesale price has been £78.57, which equates to around £57 in 2012 prices.

The AR6 prices are a 28% increase on 2023 average for fixed wind and a 208% increase on 2023 average for floating wind.

Remember though, renewables are 9 x cheaper.........

Meanwhile Drax, that green & renewable "biomass" (ha ha) and HIGHLY SUBSIDISED (not ha ha) power station, gets rumbled burning wood from old growth forests.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68381160

We all knew this anyway, despite all the green washing pish on the Drax website.

JUST GET THE RR SMR BUILT FFS!!!!

20 of them gives ~35% reliable UK base load, plus existing nuclear = 50% reliable baseload and then sell excess wind when we can. Sorted.

Interesting to see on this chart using the all time (at least from 2012 to now) function that;

Coal has declined from 40%+ of UK energy generation (15.6GW) to zero

Nuclear has decreased from 7.5GW to 3.5GW

2.3GW of biomass which is hilarious as it gets shipped across the Atlantic and is subsidised!

What would we do without gas (the reliable back-up/swing producer)? But yet we don't frac it from under our feet and trying to undermine production of same from the UKCS.

Madness.

Ron,

The simple fact is that up here, the SNP have gone from "It's Scotland's Oil" and relying on it to fund independence, to "Keep it in the ground" as a condition of the Bute House Agreement, that is the Greens supporting the SNP minority government.

The Greens seem more interested in other people's kids that actual environmental issues.

They are an utterly useless group, consisting of leader Patrick Harvey who associates with members of PIE, Lorna Sutherland who was previously a project manager in renewable energy (though these days she seems unable to manage a coherent thought), Maggie Chapman who in her "professional" life lectured in cultural geography, environmental ethics and social justice (I don't know either) and Ross Greer who is a speccy little twat who was likely bullied at school.

It's as if a student politics group is now part-running a country.

Embarassing and so very damaging to Scotland.

It is a demented policy position, isn't it?

Setting up rods for backs, petards to be hoist by and sharp objects for self-skewering.

Savings?

No way; costs are rapidly increasing in offshore wind.

100% clean energy?

No way; windless days and cloudy days.

Cut energy bills for good?

No way; the amount of redundancy required would mean hundreds of billions of investment, IF, the space and materials were available, which is not posible.

Create thousands of good local jobs?

No way; Fabrication is not UK based, transport and install contractors are European, SOV crew "may" be part UK based...

Deliver energy security?

No way; windless days and cloudy days?

Make the UK energy independent?

No way; see myriad reasons above.

LOL at the fantasy?

Yes.

Started replying to Ron's comment at 10:44 but managed to delete it.

I think a lot of the offshore wind targets are utter gubbins. Having moved from Oil and Gas to Wind in the last year, I'm amazed that the wind industry is still making such bold claims.

On the developer side, they never have really had a downturn. They have to date called the shots abd ridden rough over the supply chain, as seen by previous contractors and OEM's results.

Now the shoe is most definitely on the other foot. Strike prices agreed are not going to sustain the developments. It's just too low, or the windfarm is just too expensive, depending on your view.

The next-gen (20MW+) WTGs that are being touted for large developments are not happening. SGRE/GE etc have not made any money on the previous/current generation of turbines. See Siemens recent calamity.

The vessel contractors are increasing their rates due to demand. Larger newer vessels are being taken on term charters that developers will then utilise across their portfolios or possibly try and sub-let? Smaller developments will become very challenging.

The fabricators for foundations are experiencing materials shortages and price increases. As are the cable manufacturers.

You can "go east" but shipping (and the Houthis!) and material quality becomes a concern.

Net effect; the promised XGW by 20XX will not happen. A proportion will, but I'd say around half. It will also be more expensive and there will be intense lobbying from wind to amend strike prices.

Another observation from wind is that they spend not enough time engineering and designing, try and make things too bespoke and then try to rush everything. Costs increase and then projects get pulled.

Probably less organised than big oil projects!

I'd also say too many clever people and not enough experienced people.

Just my observations.

Jeffrey, don't be too sure about Labour losing the Scottish vote on this issue alone.

We have a very different battle being fought up here. Oil and Gas is pretty key to the economy, even more so (on a short to medium term) if Scotland was to become independent.

On the Indy trail there are a number of Indy fans who probably back oil and gas and Indy but hate the SNP. the SNP are now even more in to gesture politics than Miliband. Most of their time is spent deflecting their failure and pushing nonsense policies.

We also have probably the majority of the country who will vote along a "anyone but the SNP basis" and a lot of the central belt will always be anti-Tory given the mining belt history.

So you'll likely see Labour gains in the central belt, Tory gains in the farming/foshing/oil areas and libdem gains in the islands.

As long as Scotland remains in the Union and Labour realise their recent policy announcements need further u-turning, we are hopefully on a slow road to recovery.

At the risk of sounding like a tinfoil hat type, I did wonder if there had been a speculative offer(s) made to Amjad and he has firmly told them no and now there are murky shenanigans going on in the background involving trades of ENQ shares such that the pricing is kept down.

Is it theoretically possible to do this?

We all know market abuses happen, could it be happening here?

More likely we are still deemed as high risk, but it's fun to speculate

Someone needs to point out to Hunty and the Net Zero zealots regarding Siemens' Kaiser stating that renewables are only going get more expensive V gas which can be produced indigenously.

Must be something in it for the politicians. Probably see Hunt turn up on some renewables board(s) when the stories get ousted.

On the original Kraken FDP there was a requirement to have gas power N years after first oil. I'm not sure how EnQuest managed to not comply with this, but the tie-in to Norpipe never materialised.

There's no chance they'd manage to do that again with B&B So as Ron says I'd think electrification would be required from First oil.

Remember that the big old "Dibnah" spec steam boilers ran on burning crude or MGO.

No way either of them would pass the climate change checkpoint part of FDP approval these days.

Unless I am very much mistaken, it seems like we have a fair few new posters on the board today. AND they seem to be spreading festive cheer and positivity and buying!

This bodes very well for 2024 after today's great news - a nice bookend for the year!

Merry Christmas all

Great spot Modestus!

Regardless of your feelings on the rights and wrongs of Brexit and the EU, this would surely be a case where we can all agree that aligning with the EU would be an excellent outcome!

I wonder if Cameron can help arrange this?

Correct Ron

P&J is the alleged broadsheet of the North East, it's pretty amateur and you need to pay for the online service now. No loss!

Euan Mearns used to be the editor of theoildrum.com and I think he's a subsurface professor or some such!

His comment is very valid!