Member Info for ZYX098

Congratulations.

You now own more that the UKOG BoD combined.....

It's The Guardian - did you expect anything else?

Scientists all over the World have been working on methods of predicting Earthquakes and none of them have come remotely close to succeeding.

Irrespective of the facts that the environmental effects of shale gas have been totally overblown, any meaningful contribution would take a bonfire of planning regulations (which no Govt will do), fast track of legal cases through the Court system and several years to ramp up the equipment & infrastructure required.

Don't forget, it's not been proved to be technically & economically viable in the UK yet.

Short answer - it's not going to happen.

Oh, forgot; one thing I didn't miss was the fire extinguisher salesman spamming the board every weekend.

HH-2z was shut in because it encountered natural fractures.

Those natural fractures are producing water.

Very, very difficult to fracture a formation that already is naturally fractured (like trying to fill a bucket which is full of holes).

And why try when you already know that those fractures will preferentially produce water?

But I'm sure a fire-extinguisher salesman spamming the board with years old quotes which are no longer relevant will point out the error of my ways.....

Wizard,

Yes, you do.

It's from the downhole pressure measurements taken during production.

If you produce 5,000 bbls of fluid and expect the downhole pressure to drop by 10 psi, but it only drops by 5 psi, then you know the voidage is at least being partially replenished by a downhole source.

If it drops by the expected 10 psi, then it's a closed structure with no outside pressure support.

While I'm here, just thought I'd point out what goes into the drilling of a salt cavity for storing gas;

After establishing a suitable formation is present, you need to get permission for the surface location and facilities.

Now, UKOG say that they plan 14 salt cavities.

That means 14 different Well locations are needed.

You cannot pad drill these - each needs it's own pad and surface facilities (obviously the main facility can be in one location, but you still need high pressure pumps / water lines / storage tanks / surface flowlines / control / ESD systems etc), because the Well HAS to be drilled vertically - it cannot be deviated.

It must be vertical because after the Well has been drilled and cased off, a leeching string is installed to leech out the cavity.

To put it simply, a tubing string is installed and it's moved vertically up and down over a period of 3 - 5 years while water is jetted out the bottom through a directed nozzle system to gradually leach out the salt.

It is this requirement to move the leaching string over such a long period of time that drives the need for the Well to be vertical.

You also need a work-over Rig to service the Wells on a regular basis while they are being leeched out to replace and / or reconfigure the leeching string.

The other major problem is getting an adequate supply of fresh water to pump down the leeching string and then finding some method of disposing of the salt saturated water that is returned - thousands of barrels a day per Well for 3 - 5 years.

Ten the leaching string has to be pulled and the production string installed.

Bear in mind that the production tubing and surface pipework will need special metallurgy if it's exposed to the Hydrogen, so it's not prone to Hydrogen embrittlement.

The other thing is that periodically the production string will have to be removed so the cavity can be leached back out - every time the pressure drops during it's production / storage cycle, it looses some volume as the salt moves back in.

So, huge amount of upfront cost over a period of years before you can hope to get an income stream from the project.

Ibug,

Spain and Portugal both put in support packages worth around 8 Billion Euros to put a cap on their energy costs.

As it counts as state aid, they had to get permission from the European Commission in Brussels to do it - they couldn't act unilaterally.

Odd that when the French (Macron, because he wanted to get re-elected...) did a similar thing by ordering EDF to keep the price down, they ignored that particular piece of legislation...

The Norwegian Cave dwelling Ogre is back.

Annnd there he is.

The "Good Law Project" is not.

It's lead by a Barrister who got thrown out of his own chambers and - last time I checked - was under investigation and may be disbarred altogether.

Even more ridiculous when you consider that he was Secretary of State for Energy from 2012 to 2015.

"Surface seep" = trap breeched.

"Small infill seismic" = more cost. More delay.

"Longer and higher angle trajectory" = Our bad. We drilled in the wrong place, so we are going to have to find a new surface location.

"Fractures acting as conduits for underlying water ingress" = We've finally got around to reading the Basur-1 DST report properly and realised that the test was cut short due to water ingress. Damn.

Nomlungu,

"Maximising return on investment by actively considering divestment after an asset has been derisked, where appropriate."

The only way to derisk Loxley is to drill it...

At the top of the link, the poster shows how silly they can be.

Environmentalists complained that flares (needed for safety purposes) were adding to CO2 emissions, so many refineries and production gathering stations spent $ Millions to convert to flareless venting of Methane.

Now they are being told that venting Methane is actually worse for global warming, so they have to spend more $ Millions to go back to the flaring that they were doing in the first place.

The environmentalists were also demanding downhole monitoring of Wells that had been P&A'd - in total ignorance that the method of monitoring they were demanding (cabling back to surface) would actually increase the potential for leaks.

Wells in the UK are P&A'd to the OGUK Well Decommissioning Guidelines (http://oeuk.org.uk/product/well-decommissioning-guidelines-issue-6/) which are very prescriptive and have been adopted by Authorities and Companies all over the World.

Sure some of the older Wells drilled and P&A'd with the older techniques and equipment may be problematical in future, but the industry is improving all the time.

A bit like cars - the fatality rate in accidents has decreased significantly over the years as better safety features have been introduced (seat belts, air bags, disc brakes, anti-lock brakes, crumple zones etc).

I am curious about the comment in the article that the short monitoring period on a couple of Wells was due to "security concerns".

BTW, IIRC, it was Long Clawson that had a couple of Wells on the local Golf course and one was in the middle of a housing estate - both of which were built after the Wells had been drilled.

As a Summer student, I went to NAM and was assigned to a W/O Rig, working over stripper Wells in the middle of Schoonebeek town in the Netherlands.

The wells didn't have any security around them at all and the locals were always stopping by and chatting with us.

The Well in the town square had watered out and was scheduled to be P&A'd, but the Residents petitioned NAM to repair it instead, as it was a symbol of an industry that they were proud of!

I'd prefer a maximum of 5 ID's before the person is banned for life from LSE.

I wouldn't miss Adrian one jot.....

Hydrogen disperses extremely quickly.

That's why the safety systems on H2 powered vehicles immediately vent the tank.

If you look at the Hindenburg disaster, the flames climbing skywards at the start is the Hydrogen - all the heat is heading up.

What killed the majority of the people was the fire on the ground from the ruptured diesel tanks.

Even so, a surprising number of the passengers and crew actually survived.

Morning Penguins,
Ummm, I don't recall there being a link between the oil & gas price - they are normally independent of each other.

Could be that associated gas produced from a particular oil field has a link to the oil price from that field though?

Bad use of words by me - c. 80% of our gas supply is on long term contracts, the rest is bought on the spot market.

Trying to predict how much they are actually making from energy supply is a wild guess at the moment - Centrica's last figures indicated it was about 7%.

My guess (huge guess!!!) is that, at the moment, they are being saddled with a lot of consumers from failed Companies on very low tariffs (which is why the Companies went under in the first place), while the price cap (which is set per unit, not overall as many think) is not covering the cost of production of electricity, so they are trying to make it up with increases in the standing charges and more than required for gas.

Your individual bill obviously depends on your energy mix.

I rely on gas central heating (my annual gas use makes up just over 80% of my total energy use) the standing charge for both gas & electricity has gone up and, obviously, the unit charge of electricity has skyrocketed.

I'm with Octopus too, but my contract has just finished and there are no suppliers offering any deals at the moment, so I'm on their default tariff at the moment.

And since you'll ask :)
Electricity Unit charge (day) in Feb - 19.66p
Electricity Unit charge (day) in May - 30.45p
Electricity Unit charge (night) in Feb - 11.02p
Electricity Unit charge (night) in May - 20.32p
Electricity Standing charge / day in Feb - 22.22p
Electricity Standing charge / day in May - 39.51p

Gas Unit charge in Feb - 2.95p
Gas Unit charge in May - 6.97p
Gas Standing charge / day in Feb - 20.00p
Gas Standing charge / day in May - 25.92p

It would be curious to compare these with industrial users costs, as their energy supply doesn't come under the OFGEM tariff ceiling.

Part 2 (sorry, got carried away – it’s a particularly boring Teams meeting I’m in…)

As for your assertion that consumers will move into electric cars "pretty much worldwide".

No, only in urban areas of developed Countries - e.g. the London bubble type areas.Otherwise EV's will continue to suffer from being too expensive for the vast majority of people and the cost of the EV's will not come down - it will increase.

The reasons for this is not just the increasing cost of inflation, but the increasing cost of Nickel, Cobalt, Copper, Lithium and the Rare Earths needed to manufacture them - especially the battery pack.

Current production levels of those elements will have to increase by a factor of SIX over the next two decades to meet forecast demand - simply not going to happen.

The "worldwide uptake" claim also ignores the simple fact that many Countries cannot even meet their current electricity demands - even in major cities - or have the distribution networks in place to distribute electricity outside major metropolitan areas.

In every less developed Country I have worked in, we've had diesel driven generators at our offices and accommodation because of this.

So to expect any significant uptake of EV's in these areas is fantasy.

Why pay for a relatively expensive diesel generator on top of the expensive EV to charge up your EV when you can get a cheaper diesel vehicle in the first place?

And that last point is why, in Countries where there has been a significant uptake of renewable energy, there is a direct correlation between the rising cost of energy (pre-Russian invasion of Ukraine) and the increasing % of renewables in the energy mix.

There has to be generating capacity available to cover when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing (or blowing too much). Incidentally, the UK Govts BEIS Department uses load factors (i.e. availability) of 11% for Solar and 34% for wind.

And don’t say batteries can be used to store the excess wind power – the largest battery in the world is the Tesla mega battery in South Australia.

It cost over $100 Million to build and can keep 30,000 homes powered for just one hour.

Vernonya,

Pre-pandemic, oil consumption was expected to remain constant or slowly increase out to 2040. After that, consumption was expected to slowly decline.

Nobody - NOBODY - was predicting oil consumption to fall off a cliff, like many of the eco-warriors would have you believe.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has just put a giant hole in the supply of oil and gas for many years to come, as the EU in particular will have learn the lesson of being overly-reliant on a single source controlled by an utterly corrupt dictator that is prepared to ignore international law.

They are also learning the hard lesson that although the Companies they have supply contracts with are nominally independent of the Russian Govt, in reality they are not - hence the news last week that supplies to Europe are being significantly reduced.

The result is that Govt all over the World are desperate to increase indigenous production and encourage production from 'reliable' international partners.

In the meantime, the oil industry was just recovering from a five year long price crash, which saw over $1 Trillion of projects cancelled or postponed indefinitely.

While many of these are now being reactivated, the oil industry shrank so much in that period that many Companies are finding that they cannot get the people or equipment they need to actually get these projects up and running.

Even low specification "off the shelf" equipment is now being quoted with a 12 month lead time. The project I am currently working on may well actually shut down for several months because we cannot get the equipment & materials we need.

The result of all this is that the current oil price will remain at or above $100/bbl for years longer than many people realise.

Penguins,

It would be wrong to say that the UK is 'being held to ransom' by Norwegian and SNS producers, or Qatar for LNG.

Virtually all the gas from those sources is covered by long term supply contracts with fixed prices. The UK buys very little on the spot market, which is the gas price quoted on a daily basis.

It's why the UK has the lowest wholesale gas price in Europe and also why we are apparently exporting gas.

The reality is that our imports of LNG have jumped and the LNG import terminals are operating at maximum capacity.

The excess LNG is being fed into the pipeline network and sold to Europe as they struggle to wean themselves off Russian Gas and fill gas storage facilities for Winter.

All of which is irrelevant to UKOG.

Mirasol,

Not really - you have a chance of winning playing Roulette..