Gas Crisis Threatens Britain's Supplies

27col

This government has done absolutely nothing to stimulate the replacement of our ageing energy infrastructure. They seem to have ignored the problem completely, apart from assisting the de-industrialisation of this country. They seem to be like rabbits caught in a head light beam. We should have had twice as many nuclear stations many years ago. We need a good mix of different sorts of energy. When we do finally get around to building whatever is needed( assuming that we ever do) we will be lucky if we have any industry capable of doing the work.

WTF?_2

mardatha wrote: »

...and meanwhile there's years & years & YEARS of coal under the ground in the UK... but coal, like miners, is dirty and bad and out of favour.
Is much much more sensible to smirk and tell ourselves how green we are, while the Russians switch the gas off and the French over-charge us like hell for the elect .
Erm. isnt it ?

I'm sure that coal will be exploited eventually as the government gets more desperate.

Then again, maybe as was the case with Nuclear we won't have the skills any more and will have to turn to a foreign country to provide the know-how at a pretty penny, which we may or may not be able to afford by that stage.

1echidna

Paul_M wrote: »

Since methane is lighter than air, I can only assume there is some kind of plastic covering on the ceiling that directs the methane to a tank for storage, purging the air from the tank. It won't have much (any?) effect on the air available at ground level, as I expect there is some other pre-existing source of fresh air.

I have to say this is absolute bunk. Due to diffusion the gases will mix and remain mixed just as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not separate out (or for that matter oxygen)

hippey

tesuhoha wrote: »

Gas cuts like power cuts are not possible. Its either turned off or on. If the gas was turned off it would be an incredibly time consuming and complicated matter to reinstate it which would take many months, perhaps years. You may have seen what happened when the explosion took place recently before Christmas and several thousand people lost their gas supply. They brought in engineers from other areas and it still took a long time just to reconnect each house. They had to visit each house individually and check each appliance before reconnecting it. This would have to happen countrywide if we lost our supply and we would not have extra engineers working in any one area as they would all be in their own.

As the main gas pipes are so big the gas would have to be brought back down the pipe with nitrogen. It would not be possible to use air as the mixture would be highly explosive and one spark would be enough to set it off. It would be a highly dangerous situation so lets hope that it never happens. I have no idea what percentage of gas Britain receives from Russia.

We do have the capacity to have 'gas cuts' in the UK, it forms part of the strategy for power resiliance, in the gas market there are sites that are classed as Shipper Nominated Interuptable or Transporter Nominated Interuptable, in these some sites are classed as Network Sensitive Loads, these are normally large users (industrial sites) that can be prevented from taking gas to protect the pressure and amount of gas in the network.

The electric market has the potential for 'rota cuts' these have to be invoked by government and are done according to load. Obviously we rely on Gas for Power generation, but in reality do we take enough gas from Russia to be a problem, I would say not yet. But give it a few years and the situation may be different.

1echidna

I sawthe figure of 2% somewhere for Russian gas as a percentage of present UK consumption. Though I imagine that a large scale disruption of Russian gas to western continental Europe would have a larger knock on effect on the UK than this figure might imply as countries like Germany and France would be mopping up alternative sources as much as contracts permitted to make up much larger shortfalls in supply.