Gossage Gossip

Chinese Checkers

For years I have expressed serious doubt about whether the third nuclear fission power station at Sizewell on the Suffolk Coast will ever be built.

Yes, I know that the Government has formally declared itself to be in favour, but it only did so by ignoring the official Inquiry Inspector’s decision, that construction must not proceed without receiving firm guarantees regarding the availability of sufficient ordinary water supplies to function. And that, as I have revealed before, is definitely not forthcoming from the local water suppliers, Essex & Suffolk Water. That water company is part of UK Power Networks, just about the largest electricity distribution company in Britain – which just so happens to be owned by Mr Li-Ka Shing, who also happens to be a close ally of President Xi of China. Coincidentally, Shing is known to be mightily irritated that Chinese money – 40% of the original construction total of Sizewell C – has now been forbidden at Sizewell by the UK Government on national security grounds It is now acknowledged that the site owner, Electricité de France, is in such a perilous financial state that it cannot possibly fund Sizewell C alone, the cost for which seems to have increased by 40% to £27 billion even before any serious construction work has begun. Special legislation has been pushed through Parliament that will mean that every electricity consumer, big or small, will be forced to pay into EDF’s coffers should any construction ever take place. But even so, that still leaves a hole of nearly £10 billion of investment capital which will need to be found before work can ever get going on this White Elephant manqué. Earlier this year in May, amidst fanfares of publicity, the Government contracted Barclays Bank to provide ‘financial advice on Sizewell C’. Their role is simply to tap up one or more monied entities that might be prepared to fill the financial hole left by the Chinese Government’s departure. The finders’ fee for this work is understood to be a cool £50 million per annum. The contract is for an initial two years, with an option to renew for a further 12 months. All of which means that the assumption has to be that it will be summer 2025 before Barclays are under any obligation to report back. In all probability, negatively. And construction will be no further forward.

CCS Scam

For too many years, I have been concerned that the future for carbon capture and storage is nowhere near as rosy as its proponents monotonously continue to claim. The problem is, put crudely, that in almost every circumstance, CCS prototypes are turning out to be far too expensive for them ever to be rolled out for any kind of mass market. A new survey, undertaken by no less an authority than the Global CCS Institute, has found that the 153 projects in development globally, alongside the 41 others that are already operating or under construction, would together store less than 1% of the CO2 added to the atmosphere just in 2021. My gut feeling is that the main promoters of CCS, or CCUS as it has been gratuitously renamed, are fossil fuel companies that are convinced that this chimera alone will permit their fuels to remain viable when the developed world does hit net zero emissions. It doesn’t. And it won’t.

Academic Bias

Like me, do you assume that, if a report is published by a university, its conclusions are trustworthy, and will show no commercial bias? If so, like me, I fear you are now in for a rude awakening. For those of my devoted readers who for some reason never see that esteemed journal Nature & Climate Change, let me tell you about a study paper that is summarised in the current edition. In essence, it concludes that university departments that receive their primary funding from fossil fuel companies “are more favourable in their reports towards natural gas than towards renewable energy, and tweets are more favourable when they mention funders by name”. The authors have examined the policy positioning of universitybased energy centres towards natural gas, by conducting sentiment analysis on more than a million sentences in more than 1,700 reports from 26 different universities with faculties covering energy policy. The Nature & Climate Change authors conclude that centres with less dependence on fossil funding have a “far more neutral sentiment towards gas, favouring solar and hydro power.” In other words, this purity of thought in academia is a total myth. The piper paying still plays all the tunes.

British Gas in the Wild West

There are no laws governing the voluntary carbon offsets market, with critics calling it the “wild west of carbon markets” with “poor transparency.” The booming market is now worth more than $1 billion, after tripling in size last year. Each year the annual COP climate change conferences try to bring some order to this free-for-all chaos. Each year they fail to do so. Enabling unscrupulous companies to get away with making spurious claims to be helping save the planet, when they are doing no such thing. Right now, British Gas is misleading tens of thousands of customers by selling them “green energy” that may have little or no environmental benefit. The energy giant claims to be reducing its climate footprint by using “carbon credits,” which pump money into environmental work abroad. But almost half the carbon offsets held by British Gas owner Centrica are “junk credits” that were issued under a discredited Chinese scheme dismissed by the UN as a scam. These “carbon credits” came from a chemical factory in China that was previously forced to deny “gaming the system,” following an international probe into its supposed green credentials. Records from June this year show that 44% of Centrica’s carbon offsets came from Shandong Dongyue Chemical Co Ltd, which produces a type of greenhouse gas, HFC-23, used in fridges and air conditioning. The UN no longer allows Shandong Dongyue to issue HFC-23 credits, but the Chinese company can still sell old credits that were issued between 2007 and 2013. And they have found a willing purchaser.