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Why Britain Has to Be Really Nice to Norway and Russia

This article by Anna Shiryaevskaya  and Kelly Gilblom for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

Already buffeted by political chaos at home and abroad, the U.K. gas market must now operate without its biggest stabilizing force: the giant Rough gas storage facility under the North Sea.
     
The planned permanent shutdown of the Centrica Plc site, able to meet 10 percent of peak demand in winter, means Britain is becoming even more reliant on imports of liquefied natural gas or pipeline fuel from Russia and Norway. That sets up the possibility that traders would have to outbid Japan, the world’s biggest LNG buyer, and others to keep millions of homes warm.

Political uncertainty is making the supply game even riskier, with rules for international gas pipelines clouded in mystery as the U.K. negotiates an exit from the European Union.

And the diplomatic crisis this month involving Qatar, the nation’s largest LNG supplier, caused gas prices in Britain to jump the most since January as two tankers were diverted.
     
“It takes two weeks for a cargo of LNG to arrive from Qatar, which is not a politically stable place right now,” Graham Freedman, principal analyst for European gas and power at Wood Mackenzie Ltd. in London, said by phone.“That does raise the political implications quite a lot, along with Brexit. So it’s a perfect storm in terms of security of supply for the U.K.”
     
Last winter as much as 94 percent of the country’s gas came from sources other than storage. More than half of that was imports, mainly through pipelines from Norway. Statoil ASA, Norway’s state-owned producer, has repeatedly said it doesn’t plan to significantly boost exports, but can divert more fuel to Britain if needed.



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Musings From the Oil Patch June 20th 2017

Thanks to a subscriber for this report by Allen Brooks’ for PPHB. Here is a section on the rig count:

At the same time, U.S. oil output continues growing in response to the increase in the number of working drilling rigs. As a result, the International Energy Agency (IEA) is projecting that U.S. oil output will grow by almost 5% on average this year, and by nearly 8% in 2018, overwhelming projected demand growth and re-establishing the glut environment. This forecast is creating concern about the success of OPEC’s strategy of cutting its output. The pessimistic view of crude oil prices rests on the belief that the slow pace in reducing oil inventories will create an environment where cheating on production cuts occurs, making it impossible for demand growth alone to drive oil prices higher. The optimists, including OPEC, believe that its strategy is working, it will merely need more time – hence the nine-month extension rather than a six-month one.

What we know is that the lift in oil prices sparked a drilling rig recovery in 2016, which has continued into 2017, and has become the fastest industry recovery in history. Although the recovery has been the fastest, it has yet to reach the levels of the recoveries of 1979 and 2009. The current weakening of crude oil prices is likely to cut short this rig recovery below the levels reached in those earlier recoveries, unless something else is at work in the oil patch.

 



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Many Rivers to Cross Decarbonization breakthroughs and challenges

Thanks to a subscriber for this report from J.P. Morgan Private Bank which may be or interest. Here is a section: 

New York. This is more of a theoretical exercise, since in NY, wind/solar comprise only 3% of electricity generation. But in principle, NY could also reduce CO2 emissions to 90 MT per GWh in exchange for a ~15% increase in system costs. One difference vs California is that NY’s build-out would start from a much lower base. The other difference is that storage is less optimal given lower NY solar capacity factors. Instead, a more cost-effective approach to reaching the deeper 60% emissions reduction target would be to build more wind/solar and discard (“curtail”) the unused amount, and not build any storage.

Conclusions. Scale and innovation are creating cost-benefit tradeoffs for decarbonizing the grid that are more favorable than they were just a few years ago, even when including backup thermal power costs. However, this is likely to be a gradual process rather than an immediate one. Bottlenecks of the past were primarily related to the high capital cost of wind, solar and storage equipment. The next phase of the renewable electricity journey involves bottlenecks of the future: public policy and the construction/cost of transmission are two of the larger ones7. As is usually the case with renewables, there’s a lot of hyperbole out there. The likely trajectory: renewables meet around one third of US electricity demand in 2040, with fossil fuels still providing almost twice that amount



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Renault plans foray into energy market with mega battery

This article by Christoph Steitz and Edward Taylor for Reuters may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

Large batteries can help stabilize the primary reserve electricity market, which is responsible for ensuring the grid has at least 50 Hertz. Carmakers can also earn money competing with conventional power stations to guarantee the provision of electricity during periods of high demand or volatility.

"We forecast the combined market for electric passenger vehicles, electric buses and battery storage to increase eight-fold to over $200 billion by 2020, a five-year compound annual growth rate of more than 50 percent," Berenberg analysts said.

With about 4 million electric cars expected to be on the roads by 2020, vehicle manufacturers looking at ways to recycle batteries, including Tesla, which already sells everything from solar panels to batteries and electric cars.

Daimler, BMW, Volkswagen and China's BYD Co Ltd are also exploring so-called second-life storage projects with batteries.

That includes partnerships such as the recent collaboration between BMW and Vattenfall, in which the luxury automaker will deliver up to 1,000 lithium-ion batteries to the Swedish utility for storage projects this year.

"What will end up happening is that BMW and Daimler will ... become utilities themselves," said Gerard Reid, founder of Alexa Capital LLP, a corporate advisor in the energy, power infrastructure and technology sectors.

"They use Vattenfall now because they need to learn but I think the amount of batteries coming back will be so big that I think they'll end up engaging directly with the end customer themselves. And they've got the brand name to do that."  

 



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U.S. Won't Change Efforts to Cut Emissions Post-Paris: Tillerson

This note by Katia Dmitrieva for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here it is in full:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says the U.S. won’t change “ongoing efforts" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future, despite pulling out of the Paris climate accord.

U.S. “has a terrific record on reducing our own greenhouse gas emissions It’s something I think we can be proud of and that was done in the absence of a Paris agreement," he tells reporters before meeting at State Dept with Brazilian Foreign Minister Aloysio Nunes Ferreira

 



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Musings from the Oil Patch May 30th 2017

Thanks to a subscriber for this edition of Allen Brooks’ report which has a number of particularly interesting items this week. Here is a section on the pace of technology adoption: 

When the pace of adoption of technologies is examined, there are a number of interesting questions that bear on the projections of how quickly EVs and AEVs, as well as on-demand ride services, will be accepted. Are they going to be adopted as consumer technology items or truly revolutionary technologies and labor-saving devices? As shown in Exhibit 10, proponents of rapid technology adoption point to the cellphone, which took about a decade to go from zero to 60% penetration. That was about the same time span as the internet, but maybe only slightly longer than the VCR. On the other hand, the telephone needed nearly 50 years, while electricity needed only about 25 years, to reach the 60% penetration level. However, maybe we should look at these vehicle technologies as akin to those that brought significant lifestyle changes such as the stove, the clothes washer and the dishwasher, which needed between 35 and 50 years to reach 60% of American homes.

Our best guess is that the adoption rate will be somewhere between the cellphone and electricity, 10 to 25 years, but with a bias toward the longer timeframe. Why do we say that? It is important to understand that vehicles play an important role in family evolutions, something that hasn’t changed over generations. The hyped concern about millennials not getting married, starting families and buying homes, which was very popular during the years immediately following the global financial crisis of 2008, is disappearing. We now see millennials coming out of their parents’ basements, getting married, starting families and buying homes – although maybe not of the same size or in the same locations as their parents. These millennials are, however, continuing the generational pattern of societal evolution, although they are taking longer than previous generations to take some of the steps down that road. Given the pace of this phenomenon’s development, it is important to remember that automobiles remain the second largest purchase after homes for families. These purchases are not made frequently, they usually require significant research and time to reach a decision, and the decisions are often based on economic considerations involving all aspects of families’ lives and not just social concerns, such as climate change.

Given the factors involved in new car purchases, those forecasting the demise of petroleum must explain how those with limited incomes and wealth will voluntarily give up their perfectly functioning fossil fuel vehicle for an expensive EV, which because of battery technology may not get anywhere close to the advertised performance due to the climate where they reside. Their lives will become more complex until electric charging stations are as ubiquitous as gasoline stations, since they may not be able to afford the wait for battery recharges nor the cost of an installed charger in their home, if that option even exists for them.

There is also the question of what happens to the economics of EVs versus ICE cars when the values of used ICE cars go essentially to zero? In that case, unless gasoline and diesel fuels are banned, which may be the next target of environmental activists, it will be much cheaper to own and operate ICE cars than EVs.

There is also the question of how quickly the fleet of American vehicles can be converted to EVs or AEVs. For the past several years, Americans have purchased 17 million or slightly more new vehicles each year. At that pace, it will take 15 1/3 years to completely replace the approximately 260 million vehicles currently on America’s roads. To reach the magic 60% penetration rate, Americans must buy 17 million new EVs every year for more than nine years. Despite the high number of EVs in the fleet, it still leaves 104 million ICE vehicles on the roads burning fossil fuels.



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Trouble Brews for OPEC as Expensive Deep-Sea Oil Turns Cheap

This article by Serene Cheong, Sharon Cho and Dan Murtaugh for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

The falling costs make it more likely that investors will approve pumping crude from such large deep-water projects, the process for which is more complex and risky than drilling traditional fields on land. That may compete with OPEC’s oil to meet future supply gaps that the group sees forming as demand increases and output from existing wells naturally declines.

Saudi Arabia’s Al-Naimi left his post shortly after his speech targeting high-cost producers, and his successor Khalid Al-Falih organized production cuts by OPEC and some other nations that are set to run through March 2018. In a speech in Malaysia this month, Al-Falih bemoaned the lack of investment in higher-cost projects and said he fears the lack of them could cause demand to spike above supply in the future.

Warnings from OPEC of a looming shortage are “overstated and misleading,” Citigroup Inc. said in a report earlier this month. The revolution in unconventional supplies like shale is “unstoppable” unless prices fall below $40 a barrel, and deep- water output could grow by more than 1 million barrels a day by 2022, according to the bank.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc in February approved its Kaikias deep-water project in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, saying it would break even with prices below $40 a barrel. That followed BP Plc’s decision in December to move forward with its Mad Dog Phase 2 project in the Gulf, with costs estimated at $9 billion compared to $20 billion as originally planned.

Over the next three years, eight offshore projects may be approved with break-even prices below $50, according to a Transocean Ltd. presentation at the Scotia Howard Weil Energy Conference in New Orleans in March. Eni SpA could reach a final investment decision on a $10 billion Nigeria deep-water project by October.



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VW's Diesel Defeat Devices Finally Located, Cracked Wide Open

This article by Joel Hruska for EmtremeTech may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

But making those rules public does have a downside: It means companies know precisely how to cheat. Here’s how the Jacobs School describes the situation:

During emissions standards tests, cars are placed on a chassis equipped with a dynamometer, which measures the power output of the engine. The vehicle follows a precisely defined speed profile that tries to mimic real driving on an urban route with frequent stops. The conditions of the test are both standardized and public. This essentially makes it possible for manufacturers to intentionally alter the behavior of their vehicles during the test cycle. The code found in Volkswagen vehicles checks for a number of conditions associated with a driving test, such as distance, speed and even the position of the wheel. If the conditions are met, the code directs the onboard computer to activate emissions curbing mechanism when those conditions were met.

But VW didn’t stop there. The researchers who examined Volkswagen’s work pulled 964 separate versions of the Engine Control Unit (ECU)’s code from various makes and models of Volkswagens. In 400 of those cases, the ECU was programmed with defeat devices.

Now, you might be thinking that a single code model couldn’t possibly compare all the variables in play between various test facilities, and that some cars should have shown a fault simply due to random chance. But VW was aware of that possibility and took steps to prevent it. Their defeat device had ten separate profiles to allow it to detect various permutations in test scenarios.

Not all the defeat devices were sophisticated. The Fiat 500X (not manufactured by VW) has a much simpler defeat device. The vehicle’s emission control system runs for 26 minutes and 40 seconds after you first start the car, period. That’s long enough to pass most emission tests, and it doesn’t try to detect if the vehicle is being tested. But VW’s work was extremely sophisticated, it evolved over time, and the company’s claims that this was all instituted by a few rogue engineers are more farcical than ever.



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OPEC, Allies to Extend Oil Cuts for Nine Months to End Glut

This article by Nayla Razzouk, Golnar Motevalli and Laura Hurst for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

"The market seems to be a bit disappointed as there is no ‘something extra,’” said Jan Edelmann, a commodity analyst at HSH Nordbank AG. “It seems as though OPEC fears letting the stock-draw run too hot.”

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed in November to cut output by about 1.2 million barrels a day.

Eleven non-members joined the deal in December, bringing the total supply reduction to about 1.8 million. The curbs were intended to last six months from January, but confidence in the deal, which boosted prices as much as 20 percent, waned as inventories remained stubbornly high and U.S. output surged.

OPEC agreed earlier Thursday to prolong their own output cuts by nine months. Nigeria and Libya will remain exempt from making cuts and Iran, which was allowed to increase production under the original accord, retains the same output target, Kuwait’s Oil Minister Issam Almarzooq said after the meeting.

That deal gave the Islamic Republic room to increase output to a maximum of 3.797 million barrels a day.

 



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The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable

Thanks to a subscriber for this article by Pilita Clark for the FT which may be of interest. Here is a section: 

“I have been early twice in financing the low carbon energy transition,” says Bruce Huber, cofounder of the Alexa Capital advisory group. “But we feel it’s third time lucky.”

One reason for his optimism is what he calls the “tectonic plateshifting” in the car industry that is driving down the cost of energy storage. Storing clean power has long been a holy green grail but prohibitive costs have put it out of reach. This has begun to change as battery production has ramped up to meet an expected boom in electric cars.

Lithium ion battery prices have halved since 2014, and many analysts think prices will fall further as a slew of large battery factories are built.

The best known is Tesla and Panasonic’s huge Nevada “gigafactory”. Tesla claims that once it reaches full capacity next year, it will produce more lithium ion batteries annually than were made worldwide in 2013.

It is only one of at least 14 megafactories being built or planned, says Benchmark Minerals, a research group. Nine are in China, where the government is backing electric cars with the zeal it has directed at the solar industry.

Could this lead to a China-led glut like the one that helped drive solar industry writeoffs and crashing prices after the global financial crisis?

“It’s something to watch,” says Francesco Starace, chief executive of Italy’s Enel, Europe’s largest power company.

The thirst for electric cars, not least in China, means “the dynamics of demand are completely different” for batteries than for solar panels, he adds.

Still, Enel’s internal forecasts show battery costs falling by about 30 per cent between 2018 and 2021 and it is among the companies already pairing batteries with solar panels to produce electricity after dark in sunny places where power is expensive, such as the Chilean desert.



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