Russia Is Flaring Less And Keeping Natural Gas In The Ground

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Sep 29, 2022

• Some analysts assumed that cutting Russian gas exports would force the country to either shut down some production of natural gas or flare it.
• 
  
• Satellite data shows that flaring in Russia has declined substantially since it invaded Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean it has shut down wells for good.
• 
  
• To deal with seasonal demand, Gazprom had already designed its operations so that it could reduce production and then turn it back on again when needed.

When the breakup between Russia and the European Union began earlier this year, one of the reasons for the severity of the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the assumption that Russia could not afford for its gas exports to drop.

The assumption was an enduring one for oil and gas both. A number of analysts toured the media, arguing that if production at an oil or gas field is suspended, this field eventually risks becoming unproductive forever.

While this is a valid argument overall, Gazprom appears to have found a way to avoid permanent loss of gas production, and it’s not flaring, either. In fact, flaring in Russia—a major “flarer”—is down.

This is according to satellite data cited by a Bloomberg report on Gazprom’s production, which has declined substantially since the Ukraine invasion and the EU’s response to it.

Total gas production is down by 473 million cubic meters daily since the start of the year, data showed, to a total of 838 million cubic meters daily, but flaring is also down, at least over the past month, by 28 percent from a year ago. And this, according to the analysts Bloomberg talked to, is because Gazprom is simply producing less. And it has been doing it for years.

Because demand for natural gas is highly seasonal in nature, Gazprom has organized production at its biggest fields in such a way as to be able to increase or reduce it in relatively short order.

“Due to the uneven consumption patterns, Gazprom has to change its production significantly on monthly basis every year,” Vyacheslav Kulagin, a department head at the Energy Research Institute in the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Bloomberg. “Gazprom’s several major upstream projects function like gas cylinders, where the tap is sometimes opened to the full, and sometimes significantly turned down.”

This means that the risk of Gazprom losing production permanently may well be limited. However, it does not change the fact that most supply to Europe is now almost certainly permanently gone after the suspected sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2.

This decline in Russian gas imports may be in line with the European Union’s plans to wean itself off Russian gas fully, but it will mean a shortage while the weaning-off process is taking place.

According to a report by Rystad Energy, European countries are in for a gas shortage from next year to 2025 if Russia stops all deliveries of gas to the continent. This would change in the second half of the decade thanks to more LNG imports, but over the short term, LNG would not be able to cover the lost Russian supply.

European decision-makers seem to be aware of this and have started promoting demand reduction as an integral part of energy crisis plans. Earlier this year, the EU agreed on a Commission proposal for a 15-percent reduction in EU-wide gas demand this winter, but that was a voluntary cut. Now, cuts are on their way to being made mandatory, despite higher than usual gas-in-storage levels in most of the EU.

Meanwhile, although exports of natural gas to Europe have been decimated, exports elsewhere made up for the lost market: Gazprom reported earlier this month that total exports outside the Commonwealth of Independent States were down by 37.4 percent in the first eight months of the year and production was down by 14.6 percent.

Production flexibility appears to be a winning demand management tool for a commodity whose demand patterns are highly variable depending on the season. And it seems Gazprom is weathering the blow from losing most of the European market better than Europe would like to see.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

EDF Plans To Extend Lifespan Of Two UK Nuclear Power Projects

By City A.M - Sep 29, 2022

The Nuclear Industry Association (NIA) has welcomed EDF’s intention to extend the lifespan of two of its domestic nuclear power projects.

Tom Greatrex, the chief executive of the NIA, said: “Getting the most out of our existing nuclear stations is vital to ensuring Britain has a secure supply of power going forward. Extensions would provide a critical, immediate boost to UK energy security in the short term, cutting gas use and cutting bills.”

He also urged the Government to sustain its plans to ramp up nuclear power generation to 24GW over the next three decades.

EDF revealed yesterday it was hoping to extend the lifespan of its Hartlepool and Heysham I nuclear power stations beyond their current projected end dates of March 2024, having previously extending their lifespan on two separate occasions.

Collectively, the power plants generate 2.2 GW – enough to power to meet the energy needs of 3.5m households.

The Government is determined to boost supply security over the coming years, committing to a vast expansion of renewable and nuclear energy following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

It is also looking to extend the shelf life of key power plants, even if only a backup sources of power, having secured the operation of all four of the UK’s coal power plants this winter.

EDF operates each of the UK’s eight nuclear power plants, five of which are still providing power to the grid, around 13 percent of the country’s electricity.

However, the entire fleet is set for closure by 2028 apart from Sizewell B, which will close in 2035 – with EDF currently overseeing the construction of Hinkley Point C, and holds a stake in the proposed Sizewell C project.

EDF has pledged to invest £1bn in the UK fleet to sustain output and help maintain security of supply over the next three years.

By CityAM

Kremlin Calls Nord Stream Attacks State-Sponsored “Terrorism”

By Alex Kimani - Sep 29, 2022, 

Four days after leaks spewing gas into the Baltic Sea were first spotted, Russia is blaming the incident on state-sponsored "terrorism”. 

“This looks like an act of terrorism, possibly on a state level. It is very difficult to imagine that such an act of a terrorism could have happened without the involvement of a state of some kind," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, as reported by Reuters. 

Three leaks--one in the Swedish zone and two in the Danish zone and--were discovered earlier this week in Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines designed to ship natural gas to Germany. On Thursday, Sweden said its coast guard had found a fourth leak.

Russia has also launched a thinly-veiled allusion to the United States, saying the U.S. stood to benefit, in a war of words with the West, over who was responsible. Moscow has previously said the leaks occurred in territory that is "fully under the control" of U.S. intelligence agencies. 

Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova says that Washington would be able to boost its liquefied natural gas (LNG) sales if the pipelines were put out of use.

The European Union has said that it suspects sabotage was behind the damage off the coasts of Denmark and Sweden as it continues to investigate the cause of the leaks in the Gazprom-led Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. 

Meanwhile, NATO has voiced "deep concern" over the apparent attacks and extensive damage sustained by the Nord Stream pipelines, calling the incidents "deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage." It remains unclear who might be behind the attacks on the two pipelines that Russia and its European partners spent billions of dollars building.

Citing three sources, CNN has reported that European security officials had observed Russian navy support ships and submarines not far from the leaks while Peskov has countered by claiming that there had been a much larger NATO presence in the area.

Zakharova has called for an EU investigation to be "objective”, saying that Washington would have to "explain itself," apparently in reference to President Joe Biden's comment in February that if Russia sent troops into Ukraine "there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2". However, Biden was more likely referring to possible sanctions on the new pipeline, which has never been put into service despite being completed before Russia invaded Ukraine.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

 

The Idea Of A Windfall Tax On Oil And Gas Is Gaining Popularity

By Felicity Bradstock - Sep 29, 2022,

• The EU plans to launch a deep and comprehensive reform of its electricity market, a reform that will likely be funded by a windfall tax on oil and gas companies.
• The UK has already introduced a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, although Lizz Truss has since said that she is against it and has ruled out using further windfall taxes.
• Pressure on President Biden will be mounting to implement something similar, although he has resisted so far and there is plenty of resistance to such a move in the U.S.

As the European Union introduces an extensive windfall tax, the region is putting pressure on other parts of the world to do the same. The U.K. may have already taxed oil and gas companies to subsidize rising consumer energy bills, but the E.U. is going one step further by planning a total overhaul of the energy market. Yet, other world powers, such as the U.S., have avoided taxing energy companies, instead turning to the oil and gas industry to increase production as it faces major shortages and price hikes. It remains to be seen if the Biden Administration will be influenced by European policies.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in a statement on September 14th that the E.U. had plans to launch a “deep and comprehensive reform” of the electricity market. She explained that the current market was organized around merit order and was not fit for purpose. Von der Leyen stated: “Consumers should reap the benefits of low-cost renewables,” adding, “So we have to decouple the dominance of the price of gas on the price of electricity.”

In her speech, von der Leyen made her position on the oil and gas industry clear, suggesting that their profits had been far too high during a period of energy scarcity, high oil and gas prices, and rising consumer costs. She highlighted the outdated market measures. For example, the benchmark in the gas market still centers around pipeline gas, rather than the more prevalent liquefied natural gas. These archaic mechanisms, she suggested, must be addressed to reflect the realities of the market. 

The world has faced increasing energy volatility in recent months, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions imposed on Russian oil and gas. This has led energy prices to soar as governments scramble to find other energy sources to establish new trade partnerships. Yet, the one industry that continues to profit from energy scarcity and rising consumer costs is the oil and gas industry.

Earlier this year, the U.K. government announced it would be introducing a windfall tax on oil and gas companies operating in the U.K. to alleviate the pressure on consumers. The Labour party proposed such a tax early on, suggesting the government could raise $1.3 billion to provide consumers with subsidies on their home energy bills. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak agreed to introduce an energy profits levy (EPL) in May, to tax oil and gas companies on their earnings – which have significantly increased in recent months. The EPL could be in place until the end of 2025 and aims to raise $5.43 billion as part of a broader $16.3 billion consumer support package.

At the time, the British windfall tax seemed ground-breaking in a world that had continually supported the super-rich oil and gas industry. But now, the E.U. plans to supersede the U.K.’s EPL by curbing the power and wealth of oil and gas majors even further. E.U. ministers met this month to discuss a five-point plan that will curb Russian gas prices, introduce a windfall tax on fossil fuel companies, limit renewable and nuclear energy revenues, reduce peak hour energy use by 5 percent, and provide emergency credit lines for power companies. The plan was quickly met with hostility by Russian President Putin, who threatened to shut off the country’s remaining energy supplies to Europe. 

Von der Leyen emphasized that “it is wrong to receive extraordinary record revenues and profits benefiting from war and on the back of our consumers,” adding, “in these times, profits must be shared and channelled to those who need it most.” The aim now is to raise $139.8 billion in taxes from fossil fuel companies to split across member states in support of rising consumer energy bills.

Despite acting as a leader in the introduction of windfall taxes, it seems unlikely that the U.K. will extend its legislation on oil and gas companies further. The U.K.’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, stated that she opposes an extension of the windfall tax, saying “I am against a windfall tax,” and “I believe it is the wrong thing to be putting companies off investing in the United Kingdom just when we need to be growing the economy.”

But some world powers have avoided punishing the oil and gas industry for profiting off of high energy costs completely. U.S. President Biden has repeatedly called on American oil and gas companies to boost production to help improve the region’s energy security and reduce costs. Yet, he has not pushed for a windfall tax on oil and gas companies and there is plenty of resistance in the U.S. to such a move. With the E.U. taking such a dramatic step to redistribute wealth to consumers, in the face of dramatically higher energy bills, however, pressure on Biden and other world leaders to do something similar will increase. 

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com

Christiane Amanpour Reveals on ‘Daily Show’ Why She Was Never Going to Put on That Headscarf

Matt Wilstein
Mon, September 26, 2022 


Comedy Central

During his introduction of CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour as a guest on The Daily Show Monday night, host Trevor Noah joked that when Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi abruptly canceled a planned interview with her last week, he “left her looking like she was giving therapy to a ghost.”

Speaking from her home in London, Amanpour broke down why she ultimately decided to walk away from the coveted interview instead of wearing a headscarf as the president’s staff were demanding. She explained that she has always had the first international sit-down with the latest Iranian president, but never before had she been asked to cover her hair on American soil.

“There is no law in the United States that requires a journalist to wear a scarf for any interview,” she said matter-of-factly.

When the aide first approached her to say that Raisi wanted her to wear a scarf, Amanpour said her first reaction was, “Why?” followed quickly by, “No, I don’t have to wear a scarf.”

“As a journalist, I made, instantaneously, a journalistic decision,” she continued, snapping her fingers, “based on the principle that a) it wasn’t law, and b) you don’t get strong-armed by a foreign government or any government when you’re trying to sit and conduct a previously arranged interview.”

After the cheers died down, Noah brought up the conspicuous “timing” of the incident—amidst massive protests in Iran over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested for violating the country’s strict dress code.

Amanpour agreed that Raisi did “not want to be seen with a woman whose head was uncovered right at the same time that in his own country there was an uprising in the streets” over the very same issue. Later, she couldn’t help but laugh when she quoted Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi, who recently told her that if Iranian men are “so horny and so unable to control themselves” over a woman’s hair, “then maybe they should take a cold shower or look somewhere else.”

Finally, Amanpour likened Iran’s rules that restrict how women can dress to the many anti-abortion laws that have been going into effect after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “It’s something incredibly important that we have to keep an eye on,” she said, “and in that moment, I was not, as a journalist or as a woman, going to put a headscarf on.”

Bill Gates: You'll never solve climate change by asking people to consume less

Catherine Clifford - CNBC


And climate change advocates often advocate using less and consuming less as one potential solution to climate change — degrowth, it's often called. This idea is quixotic, according to Bill Gates.

"I don't think it's realistic to say that people are utterly going to change their lifestyle because of concerns about climate," Gates said to Akshat Rathi in an episode of the Bloomberg podcast, "Zero," which published on Thursday.

The only real solution, Gates said, is to innovate better and cheaper alternatives.


Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, speaks during the Earthshot Prize Innovation Summit in New York, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022. The first-ever Earthshot Prize Innovation Summit brings together climate leaders to showcase transformative solutions that repair and regenerate the planet.

Climate change is being fueled by the release of greenhouse gas emissions and those emissions are coming from every sector of the global economy: Electricity, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, industrial processes. Collectively, greenhouse gas emissions have generally been climbing for decades. Activists often advocate using less and consuming less as one potential solution to climate change — degrowth, it's often called.

This idea is quixotic, according to Bill Gates, who founded Breakthrough Energy, an investment fund for climate technology and innovation, in 2015 and published "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" in 2021.

"I don't think it's realistic to say that people are utterly going to change their lifestyle because of concerns about climate," Gates said to Akshat Rathi in an episode of the Bloomberg podcast, "Zero," which published on Thursday. The interview was recorded in August before the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.

"You can have a cultural revolution where you're trying to throw everything up, you can create a North Korean-type situation where the state's in control. Other than immense central authority to have people just obey, I think the collective action problem is just completely not solvable," Gates said.

Most individuals are not going to change their individual behavior in ways that make them less comfortable for the benefit of a global problem, the billionaire technologist said.

"Anyone who says that we will tell people to stop eating meat, or stop wanting to have a nice house, and we'll just basically change human desires, I think that that's too difficult," Gates said. "You can make a case for it. But I don't think it's realistic for that to play an absolutely central role."

Even if those countries and individuals who have enough abundance in their life and are able to cut back, that won't be enough reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to sufficiently rein in climate change, Gates said. Gates himself pays $9 million a year to compensate for his own greenhouse gas emissions, he said.


"But just having a few rich countries, a few rich companies and a few rich individuals buy their way out so they can say they're not part of the problem, that has nothing to do with solving the problem," Gates said.

Also, there are a slew of other issues competing for attention and dollars, including the global pandemic, rising health care costs, aiding poor countries for issues besides climate change, and the war in Ukraine, too.

"People who are in the climate space may not realize how many things are competing for the modest amount of increased resources that society has," Gates said. "And that not that many people are prepared to be worse off because of climate requirements."

The solution, according to Gates, is creating better technological alternatives where it is the same price or cheaper to accomplish the same goal in a climate-conscious way. Gates has long talked about the space between the cost of how something is conventionally done and the way it should be do in a decarbonized way the "green premium." To make meaningful change on climate change, that green premium has to slowly reduced and then eliminated in all sectors of the economy, according to Gates.

In an effort to close that green premium, Gates' investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, puts money into early-stage startups that are working to to create new pathways for producing things or new ways of doing things.

In the course of the interview, Gates hinted that Breakthrough Energy Ventures would be raising a third fund by next year to continue to invest in and accelerate the development of these climate startups. He also indicated that Breakthrough Energy will likely raise money to invest in later stage companies, too. "Even as the ebullience in investing in tech and climate companies is down a bit, I still think we'll be able to raise the money," he told Rathi.

Also important, the path to decarbonization is not always a straight path of progress away from fossil fuels. The war in Ukraine and Europe's efforts to reduce its dependence on energy from Russia has shown that there might be temporary setbacks in larger decarbonization goals for the sake of taking care of people.

"When people say to me, 'Hey, we love your climate stuff, because we can tell Putin we don't need him.' I say, 'Yeah, 10 years from now. Call him up and tell him you don't need him,'" Gates said.

Between now and then, the European Union may need to fall back on fossil fuels. "Should you reopen coal plants? Probably. These pragmatics are pretty important. Should that Netherlands' gas field be reopened? Maybe so. It's a very tough set of tradeoffs. Very unexpected," Gates said. "In the short range, you just have to find any solution, even if that means emissions are going to go up. The sooner that war ends, the better. But there's a lot of considerations that go into how to bring it to an end."

In the long run, however, finding new ways of supporting people is the only feasible solution, according to Gates. "I'm looking at what the world has to do to get to zero, not using climate as a moral crusade," he said.

How Fusion Energy Turns Into Spaghetti to Smash up Tokamaks

Ed Browne - Yesterday

Scientists think they have found the reason why fusion reactions often fall apart inside reactors—the intense magnetic-field lines scatter like spaghetti.


A stock illustration depicts a fiery plasma field. Tokamaks enable nuclear fusion by containing very hot plasma with magnetic fields.© sakkmesterke/Getty

This scattering means that the intensely hot plasma being confined by the magnetic fields is able to escape and make contact with the reactor walls, causing damage as well as ruining the reaction.

For decades, physicists have been attempting to create stable nuclear-fusion reactions—in which atomic nuclei fuse together under intense heat and pressure—since it is possible to harness these reactions to generate electrical power.

Doing so would be an energy-technology breakthrough, since fusion power is theoretically more powerful, safer, and easier to fuel than existing nuclear power plants, which rely on fission, namely splitting atoms apart.

However, no one has yet been able to create a fusion reactor that is capable of generating more power than it requires to operate, and it has also proved difficult to maintain a reaction for extended amounts of time.

One of the leading reactor types in the world of fusion is the tokamak, a donut-shaped machine that uses powerful magnets to control a circular flow of super-hot plasma in which fusion can occur. Unfortunately, these reactors are prone to a sudden and puzzling drop in heat.

Related video: Why Is There New Interest In Fusion Energy?

Duration 4:05

View on Watch

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) created a 3D model of the disarrayed magnetic-field lines to see how their shape affects the reaction, rather than the oversimplified, one-dimensional models previously used.

The 3D model was difficult to understand due to complex interactions between the electric and magnetic fields in the reactor, but the researchers were able to use a PPPL-developed particle simulation code to unravel it.

They found that tiny hills and valleys would form in the topology of the field lines, and these would allow the plasma particles to escape confinement and hit the walls of the reactor with enormous amounts of heat energy.

"The existence of these hills is responsible for the fast temperature collapse, the so-called thermal quench, as they allow more particles to escape to the tokamak wall," said Min-Gu Yoo, a post-doctoral researcher at PPPL and author of a study outlining the 3D modelling, in a PPPL press release. "What we showed in the paper is how to draw a good map for understanding the topology of the field lines."

Yoo's colleague, principal research physicist Weixing Wang, said: "In the major disruption case, field lines become totally [disordered] like spaghetti and connect fast to the wall with very different lengths."

Identifying these hills in the magnetic-field lines is an important step towards avoiding these plasma disruptions, which would allow fusion reactions to run for longer periods of time—a crucial factor in having fusion energy on the grid.

The Princeton scientists' study, titled 'The 3D magnetic topology and plasma dynamics in open stochastic magnetic field lines', was published in the journal AIP Physics of Plasmas in July.

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Carbon Dioxide Seems to Be Making Trees Grow Faster, Scientists Say

Noor Al-Sibai - Tuesday

Amid concerns about rising emissions, scientists have discovered something weird — that trees appear to be growing faster as carbon dioxide levels rise.© Provided by Futurism

Logging On

Amid serious concerns about the climate effects of carbon dioxide, scientists have discovered something intriguing — that trees appear to be growing faster and larger as levels of the compound rise.

In a press release, environmental researchers at Ohio State University claimed that the rate and size at which forests are growing may already be counteracting the worst effects of climate change.

"Forests are taking carbon out of the atmosphere at a rate of about 13 percent of our gross emissions," Brent Sohngen, co-author of the school's study published recently in Nature Communications and OSU professor of environmental and resource economics, said. "While we’re putting billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we’re actually taking much of it out just by letting our forests grow."

Fried or Fertilized

Known as "carbon fertilization," this unique process occurs when plants encounter larger quantities of carbon, increasing their rate of photosynthesis and thus makes them grow faster.

That's a big deal, potentially, because trees sequester a lot of carbon. In the US alone, per Sohngen, they're estimated to trap between 700 and 800 million tons of atmospheric carbon per year, which cuts the country's carbon dioxide emissions by around 10 percent. So the idea that as climate change gets worse, the trees will compensate is compelling, to say the least.
Sweet Tree-t

The researcher noted that the average person wouldn't likely be able to go out into a forest and tell that the trees are bigger, but that the additional volume added to trees over the past few decades is significant. This process doesn't just occur in younger trees, either — even the giant, ancient redwoods of California have been adding biomass from elevated CO2 levels, the statement says.

For now, this study's findings are very preliminary. They were gleaned from correlating tree biomass data and carbon emissions information between the 1970s and the mid-2010s rather than actually testing out the trees themselves.

But it is intriguing. Planting and saving trees was never a bad thing to begin with, but if these OSU findings can be replicated, it could be a huge deal for tree-huggers the world around.

READ MORE: Climate change is turning the trees into gluttons [The Ohio State University]

More on trees: Startup Says It's Gene Hacked Trees to Suck Up More Climate-Destroying CO2

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
Edmontonians lost $5.6 million to cryptocurrency investment scams: Police

Matthew Black - Yesterday -  Edmonton Journal

Edmonton police say local investors have lost more than $5.6 million to cryptocurrency scams between fall of 2019 and the end of last year.


Representations of cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Ethereum, DogeCoin, Ripple, Litecoin are placed on PC motherboard in this illustration taken June 29, 2021

EPS says it investigated 112 cryptocurrency fraud reports over that time. Complaints lost $50,000 on average or less to the scam, but the highest loss exceeded $1 million, police say.

“Sadly, we encountered several complainants who lost their life savings to this scam,” says Det. Dana Gehring with the EPS Cyber Crime Investigations Unit.

“Unfortunately, once funds are invested or sent to another party using cryptocurrency, there is little we can do to retrieve them. While we always aim to apprehend those responsible, our best tool with this type of fraud is to educate on prevention.”

More than 90 per cent of the incidents referenced bitcoin, according to EPS.

More recent numbers for 2022 are not yet available.

Police say in most incidents, investors were convinced to invest in cryptocurrency via what often appeared to be legitimate websites or apps but that are actually controlled by scammers.

Scammers befriend complainants via social media, phone calls, online advertisements and online dating platforms before encouraging them to make a small investment, police say.

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Police warn that at that point, scammers would often manipulate the data on their website or app to give the appearance of growth and encouraging victims to give them more money.

Eventually, the websites or apps disappear, leaving those victims without any means of recovering their money.

EPS says it recommends anyone considering investing in cryptocurrency to confirm the website or app is legitimate, be wary of anyone unknown approaching with investment opportunities, and to verify the investor or investment company registered with FINTRAC or the Canadian Securities Administrator.