Energy infrastructure

It's actually interesting or confusing if you look at the figures and consider the arithmetic of annual flows of NG.

Ireland currently consumes 6.3 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year of the stuff - I think this figure is for the whole island but it's difficult to get a definitive statement on-line.

About 60% of this - say 3.8 bcm comes from Corrib. This will be gone in a few years.

About 3 bcm are currently imported over the various interconnectors. I know the numbers don't add up exactly - I'm pulling them from different sources in different units so I'm not surprised there are some discrepancies. Still the numbers are ballpark.

Note the pipelines are not operating at capacity - total capacity is higher, I've seen a number around the 5 bcm mark. At that level, the current pipelines don't have the capacity to meet current consumption without Corrib gas.

However, the capacity of the proposed terminal is 8.2 bcm. This is far more than current domestic consumption - which is bound to decline particularly as 55% of it is used for electricity production and renewables are starting to eat into this share.

It could be that the backers of this project are expecting the interconnectors to be adapted to allow exports, but that seems weird also. In that case it would make more sense to site the terminal somewhere on the European mainland - and avoid all the transit costs - but I guess if they did that, then Ireland would run short of NG in a few years.

There's something not right here.

Sure antoine an LNG terminal in the Shannon estuary makes sense to supply Irish demand.

But why build a terminal with 8.2 billion cubic meter per year capacity for a country that consumes 6.3 bcm per year? And consumption will only fall as multiple GW of renewables are added to the grid over the next few years.

I've googled other LNG terminal projects. For example, the Dutch are building a 12 bcm terminal for just over €1B, while the Croats are building on with 2.6 bcm for €233 million. The one proposed in Ireland is 8.2 bcm and will cost €650 million. I would have thought that a smaller terminal - but bigger than the Croatian one - would make more sense if the aim is to serve local demand and would cost a good bit less.

Storage can be great for smoothing prices and meeting demand variation over the year - although it's more complex than simply as buy-low/use-high. Most supply contracts lock in prices for periods of longer than a season.

But storage alone can't solve Europe's NG issues. The inevitable and imminent loss of imports from Russia - currently about 160 bcm per year - has to be made up somehow with other facilities to import NG. The entire Norwegian output already goes to Europe and it's about 120 bcm. So the conclusion is that Europe will need to find alternative methods of importing NG.

In this regard LNG terminals are the only game in town so they will have to be built and soon, unless we want to continue handing over billions of euro to Putin's repulsive regime. The only question is where in Europe to build them.

Biogas is a bit of a curate's egg - where it comes purely from agricultural waste, which would naturally leak methane into the atmosphere if disposed of in the normal way, it's an easy win. The issue in that case is whether it can be done at a scale which would make it economic.

Biofuels, where crops are grown specifically to provide the feedstock for producing methane or ethanol, are generally a terrible idea. In the US - the Renewable Fuel Standard which requires the addition of bio-ethanol to all petrol sold - actually increases CO2 emissions over extracting, processing and consuming petrol/gasoline. And that's before you count the cost of government subsidies used by farmers to grow the corn - money which could be used for actually useful emissions reduction initiatives. Same with burning wood pellets for electricity - a tech supported in Germany for example - is awful from an environmental point of view.

In terms of synthetic methane from hydrolysis - it seems to me to make more sense than hydrogen as you can use all the existing infrastructure without modification to distribute and consume it. And it's equally CO2 neutral as hydrogen. NG leakage from infrastructure is a thing but even accounting for that (and hydrogen isn't harmless in that regard either) if all NG was produced in this way, the emissions reductions would be huge.

But (like with hydrogen), I can't see it working in terms of current finances. The auction prices achieved for wind and solar mean that consuming carbon-free electricity to store energy in the form of methane (or hydrogen) is phenomenally expensive when you take into account the round-trip energy losses involved.

David McWilliams had a very good podcast about our energy needs during the week. The engineer who he interviewed came across brilliantly i thought