Energy bills are expected to drastically spike in the coming months after Ofgem, Britain’s energy sector regulator, announced on Thursday that it would be raising its price cap on household energy bills by 54% starting April 1, a record-breaking increase instituted to stop power utilities from sinking into bankruptcy in the face of surging LNG prices. That’s on top of a 12% hike approved back in October.

The average household’s annual energy bill is currently between £1,277 ($1,730) and £1,370 in the UK, and the increase could saddle millions of families with enormously increased costs for heating and electricity.

As a result, HMG has decided to issue direct subsidies to the British people to prevent millions from being squeezed as a result of what have now been exposed as unwise energy policy decades in the making that has shifted Britain’s reliance on abundant coal that’s widely available within the UK to imports of the “cleaner” LNG.

Speaking before the House of Commons on Thursday, Chancellor Rishi Sunak proclaimed that “just as the government stood behind the British people through the pandemic…so we will help people deal with one of the biggest costs they now face – energy.”

…Consumers in the US are groaning about WTI crude at almost $90/barrel, but surging natty gas prices in Europe have squeezed European nations – which mostly import their gas and oil from Russia.

UK natty gas prices have nearly quadrupled over the last year…

But CNBC’s Brian Sullivan quickly pointed out that the UK largely brought this problem on itself: “The government is trying to help consumers out because poor policies that the government made have led to big price hikes on those consumers,” said CNBC’s Brian Sullivan. “So many of these power companies and utilities are losing so much money…every utility in the UK is going to raise prices.”

And with the Bank of England hiking interest rates to help combat soaring prices, Sullivan observed that the British people might soon face the largest drop in their standard of living in decades.

“It’s all happening at the same time and what’s it’s going to do is result in a steep drop in the quality of life for millions of people in England…I hate to be blunt about it but that’s the truth.”

You don’t say…

Hat Tip: D.S.

Drilling on the Cornell Campus? Say It Ain’t So!

Tony Ingraffea says “don’t believe what your eyes tell you.”

At a virtual community forum Jan. 19, a Cornell faculty and staff panel outlined the next steps for testing Earth Source Heat (ESH), the process by which water would be extracted from the Earth’s crust, its heat transferred to a separate supply of water flowing within Cornell’s heating distribution pipeline to heat most of the Ithaca campus buildings, and the original geothermal water returned to the subsurface…

Cornell first began exploring ESH in 2009, when the university created its Climate Action Plan, and has refined the concept in recent years through a series of studies and workshops. A $7.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced in August 2020effectively established Cornell as the national test case for the technology…

The mechanics of ESH are relatively straight forward. Hot geothermal water is extracted by pumping from a production well and then through a heat exchanger. The water is reinjected into a second well so that it can circulate through the naturally hot rocks via a network of underground pores and crevices, and the water’s temperature rises again as it is drawn back to the production well. At the heat exchanger, heat is transferred to a secondary loop that runs through campus and connects to individual buildings. The geothermal water and the campus heating water do not mix.

Based on preliminary estimates, the Ithaca campus could be heated by three or four pairs of wells, Burgess said, but additional research and analysis are needed to determine if the project is feasible and to mitigate potential adverse consequences.

Therefore, the university is set to construct a 10,000-foot deep observatory borehole to be located on a small facilities parking lot near Palm Road. The gravel lot is currently used as a contractor staging area and is owned by the university…

The diameter of the hole will be 36 inches at the surface and will contain progressively smaller casings in progressively thinner holes, all narrowing around a central 8-inch casing that extends the full length of the borehole, along with fiber-optic cables to collect and transmit data.

The borehole will be surrounded by five layers of casing and cement to isolate it, with no sections open below ground, said Tony Ingraffea, the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering Emeritus…

The only chemicals that will be used in constructing CUBO are those that are typically added to drilling mud – such as water and bentonite…

While one of the experiments scheduled for CUBO will use high-pressure water to locally fracture a portion of rock, Ingraffea said, “under no circumstances would we ever be doing anything close to what’s being done to our neighbors to the south in Pennsylvania right now.”

To ensure the safety of the CUBO drilling and activities, four water-monitoring wells have been installed around the CUBO site. A range of seismometers have already been placed around campus – on the surface and below ground, and near and away from the site – to establish a baseline of natural seismic activity, as well as to detect human-induced seismicity, such as pile drivers used in downtown Ithaca construction and quarry explosions.

Tony the Tiger doth protest too much. This is precisely what happens when a gas well is developed; drilling down through the water table, using bentonite, five layers of casing, pumping into rock fractures, water well monitoring, etc. And, what’s all this about mitigating “potential adverse consequences,” anyway?

Hat Tip: T.R.

Cognitive Dissonance in Full Bloom

Read this and weep:

Europe’s natural gas demand is set to decline this year as buyers begin to favor lower-priced coal, the International Energy Agency said in the latest edition of its quarterly gas market report…

The decline will be partially compensated by renewables, according to the IEA, which should see a “strong expansion” this year, but also “high gas prices continue to weigh on its competitiveness vis-à-vis coal-fired generation.”

…Global gas supply is seen remaining tight, the IEA also said, citing production outages, project delays, and a slow pace of new investment decisions on new production capacity.

“In the absence of strong policies to curb demand growth to achieve net zero emission targets, gas supply adequacy could emerge as a concern for the medium term on a combination of recent LNG project delays, the relatively small number of new LNG final investment decisions (FIDs) in 2020-2021 and a structural decline in upstream spending since the early 2010s,” the IEA said in the report.

So, delays and lack of investment In natural gas the IEA promoted to curb demand growth so as to achieve net zero emission targets, have caused more coal use and now it’s looking to blame someone else, right? What a cruel joke the IEA has become!

Hat Tip: S.H.

More Proof Global Warming Alarmism Is A Corporatist Scam

Bill Gates produced a lousy computer, got filthy rich and now wants to be even wealthier and run the world. Hence his acquisition of huge amounts of farmland and his investment in the global warming heist of others’ wealth:

A Massachusetts-based startup that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air has raised $80 million from investors, including Bill Gates-led Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Founded in 2019, Verdox Inc.’s technology is still only operable at lab scale. But Chief Executive Officer Brian Baynes says that a recent breakthrough with the key material used to trap the greenhouse gas has given investors confidence to invest such a large sum at an early stage in the startup’s development.

Gates speaking at World Economic Forum

As the world gets serious about reaching net-zero emissions within decades, there’s growing interest in technologies that can permanently sequester CO₂ already in the atmosphere. Nature-based offsets such as forests have become a wildfire risk—ironically due, in part, to climate change—and could release any CO₂ they might have stored. Direct air capture technology offers more hope that the offset will do away with the promised amount of greenhouse gas for thousands of years.