The Next Cold War?

The Kremlin is watching, European nations are rebelling, and some suspect Moscow is secretly bankrolling a campaign to derail the West’s strategic plans. It’s not some Cold War movie; it’s about the U.S. boom in natural gas drilling, and the political implications are enormous. Like falling dominoes, the drilling process called hydraulic fracturing, is shaking up world energy markets from Washington to Moscow to Beijing. Some predict what was once unthinkable: that the U.S. won’t need to import natural gas in the near future, and that Russia could be the big loser. --The Wall Street Journal, 30 September 2012

---

Gazprom, the natural gas company controlled by the Russian state, is in crisis. It is likely to fall victim to the shale gas revolution that is under way across the US. The shale gas revolution will probably have telling consequences for Russian state capitalism and President Vladimir Putin’s power. Gazprom's demise looks likely. With its demise, Russia’s revenues would dwindle. Mr Putin‘s model of state capitalism would suffer a devastating blow from Gazprom’s fall. If not even Gazprom is viable, which Russian state company is? --Anders Åslund, Financial Times[Registration Required], 28 September 2012 Wind farm operators were paid £34 million last year to switch the turbines off in gales. Two days last week saw householders effectively hand £400,000 to energy firms for doing nothing. Hidden payments discovered by the Mail show that wind farms are given much more money than previously thought. Murdo Fraser, a member of the parliament in Scotland, where many wind farms are sited, said: ‘The revelation that vast sums are being paid to wind power developers will just lead to more and more people questioning government policy.’ --Sam Greenhill And Graham Grant, Daily Mail, 1 October 2012

---

---

There’s a nasty shock in store for the British householder when a new ‘carbon’ tax comes into force. To meet that tax level in the years after 2013, we in Britain will have to pay electricity bills soaring to a level far higher than any others in Europe. All this is to promote the building of thousands more heavily subsidised windmills, which will in turn require us to build more gas-fired power stations to provide back-up for the constant fluctuations in wind speed. And these will be paying Mr Osborne’s fast-rising tax on all the CO2 they emit, with the bill to be picked up by the rest of us on a scale which, within 18 years, could alone almost double the cost of our electricity. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 30 September 2012 European natural gas prices will rise most on cold, still days in future as the fuel becomes the preferred backup for intermittent wind power toward 2030, according to Poyry Oyj. There will be an increase in gas-price volatility across Europe as markets with more wind capacity. Wind will be the main source of irregular supply, as output can still fall to zero no matter how much capacity is installed, while solar continues to produce even under cloud cover. “If it’s cold and still, it’s much more extreme for the gas network because you get the heating demand response to the cold weather and the power response to the still weather,” Cox said in a Sept. 18 telephone interview. --Matthew Brown, Bloomberg, 1 October 2012 If recent reports are to be believed, the North Sea cod’s days are numbered. The Daily Telegraph recently ran the headline: “Just 100 cod left in the North Sea”. It sounded fishy. Looking at the data, it seems a more accurate headline would read “Just 436,900,000 cod left in the North Sea”. Wrong by about half a billion, then, which is perhaps a new record for the most inaccurate headline ever covered by More or Less. --Hannah Barnes & Richard Knight, BBC News, 30 September 2012 News International is set to close Eureka, the monthly science and environmental magazine distributed with The Times, this week following a sustained loss of advertising from its global top spending companies. A source said the imminent closure was a sign of shifting consumer and corporate priorities, as the heightened time of political consciousness around the environment and green issues appears to have receded in these austere times. --Media Week, 1 October 2012

---