Europe's self induced energy crisis

Jazz Shaw:

By this point, most of you are likely aware that Europe is facing an even more dire energy crisis than the one threatening the United States. The loss of natural gas supplies from Russia is one of the primary drivers of this issue, with sanctions cutting off some avenues of access and mysteriously exploding pipelines impacting others. The good news is that northern Europe has a vast trove of natural gas supplies available in the Groningen field, located in the northeastern part of the Netherlands. It contains enough natural gas to meet nearly all of the region’s needs for some time to come. The bad news is that they are shutting down all gas drilling in the Groningen field, but it’s not because of climate change concerns or protests by Greta Thunberg. They are terminating all natural gas extraction because the process has produced earth tremors. And no… you can’t even make this sort of thing up. (Liberty Unyielding)

Europe faces a critical shortage of energy this winter. It has a big gas field that could replace the natural gas supply it lost due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it won’t use that rich gas field and is shutting it down. Instead, Europe is burning more coal — including dirty lignite coal — and even that won’t be enough to fill unmet needs, due to supply bottlenecks. Coal generates much more pollution than natural gas.

The sprawling Groningen field, beneath the windmill-dotted marshlands of the Netherlands, is Europe’s largest natural gas reserve. It holds enough fuel to replace what Germany once imported from Russia, reported Bloomberg News.

But instead of supporting Europe, as a brutal winter approaches, the field is being shut down, merely because of tremors similar to the tremors that fracking for natural gas produces all the time in states like Oklahoma.

Over… tremors? (No, not the movie about the giant worms.) Apparently so. The Netherlands is citing the measurement of minor tremors in the region where drilling was taking place as a reason to pull the plug.

...

The alleged tremors are overrated events.  Somehow, fracking in the US does not lead people to shut down a vital industry.   It is certainly a better way of dealing with Russia energy cuts than burning coal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more