Shale gas a God given gift

That's how Owen Paterson described it.

I'd been meaning to highlight a couple of points from this interesting post by Nick Grealy a few days ago.

One modern shale pad with 20 wells would produce the energy output of 1200 2.5MW windmills operating at 30% efficiency.

And of course we know they don't operate at anything like 30% efficiency. So what's not to like?

• Power from shale gas will be constant - unlike windmills
   
• One shale pad will be far less intrusive than 1200+ windmills
   
• Shale gas will contribute to cutting our deficit - shale gas producers are likely to pay humungous taxes; windmills need subsidies.
  

And consider Grealy's claim that "the reality is that we do not have a climate crisis, we have a China coal crisis". How so? China emitted 34 thousand million tons of CO2 in 2011, 26% of the global total, compared with a mere 511 million tons in the UK or 802 million in Germany.

The conclusion must be that anything the EU does, or does not do, towards an 80% reduction target of fossil fuel in the generation sector by 2050 doesn’t even move the needle.

Actually we haven't got a global warming crisis at all - or if we have it's pretty odd that temperatures have been flat over the past 15 years.

But evidence isn't going to trouble an EU which keeps doubling up its taxpayers' bets that the eurozone can work in its present form, or considers it worth while to pronounce on reusing jam jars. Maybe they think Germany's policy of increasing reliance on coal will cut CO2 emissions.

But as a commenter writes on the Balcombe blog:

Shale gas has a lot of positives; It has value to the environment, because it is clean It has value to the consumers, because it is cheap, their energy bill will come down It has value to the economy, because it makes our industry more competitive It has value to the economy, because there is no outflow of capital to other nations for procuring energy we have ourselves It has value to the government, because it brings in huge tax revenues It has value to our national independence, as we are not dependent on foreign resource It will take us further for at least 40-50 years (maybe 100 years, with rapidly improving technologies), but until such time we have a economic recovery, and money to invest in creating a renewable energy technology that will take us in to the future!