Yes, the price in Europe may stay high for another three years, but planning bureaucracy and impact statements ensure that nothing beyond a trickle would reach the gas mains before 2030.
The IEA has massively revised its figures since its World Outlook a year ago. One reason is the passage of Joe Biden’s $560bn (£483bn) green blitz, the US Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act combined. It is such a shock to the global energy order that Brussels deems it a direct threat to Europe’s industrial base. The US aims to halve CO2 emissions in the power sector and lift sales of electric vehicles ninefold to 4.5m a year by 2030.
The post-fossil arms race is moving into high gear. The EU is launching its own bid for economic survival with its Fit for 55 package, and its Hydrogen Strategy. So is Japan with its Green Transformation (GX) scheme. “The energy world is shifting dramatically before our eyes,” said Mr Birol.
China aims to eat everybody’s lunch. It is angling to conquer global market share across all zero-carbon technologies, much as it has already done to solar rivals, arguably by means of IP theft and predatory dumping. “They are going to meet their 2030 target of 1,200 gigawatts of renewables by 2025,” said Kingsmill Bond from analysts RMI.
If anything, the IEA’s forecast is too cautious. It assumes that the cost gains in wind, solar, storage, and electrolysis, stall at the end of this decade, unlike the findings by Oxford’s Institute for New Economic Thinking. The latter expects them to keep dropping under the time-honoured principles of Moore’s law and Wrights law, which posit that the costs of disruptive new technologies drop exponentially with time and by cumulative production.
Britain’s frackers have been treated dishonourably, the victims of caricature. Their technology has been used for over half a century and is not inherently more wicked than other forms of gas drilling.
Cuadrilla was harassed to death with earthquake limits set at 0.5 on the Richter scale, lower than thresholds routinely used in the construction industry. It was intended to nip fracking in the bud.
Shale gas has a lower carbon footprint than imported LNG. Supplies from US or Qatar must first be transported to terminals, cooled to minus 162°C, shipped thousands of miles, and turned back into gas.
If the UK had grasped the nettle on fracking a decade ago, it would today be safer and have a lower trade deficit, though shale would not have changed the price of wholesale gas in Europe.
To embrace fracking today it would be worse than pointless. The planned quadrupling of offshore wind to 50 GW by 2030, along with the tripling of solar, will make renewables the backbone of the power system. Gas will be reduced to a back-up fuel for Dunkelflaute episodes, eventually in competition with hydrogen. Gas will still be needed for heating but that is not an area of static technology either.
A licence for fracking would have thrown away the moral capital that the UK has acquired as the first big country to write a binding net zero target into domestic law. It would stain the UK presidency of COP26, considered a success within the climate policy fraternity. It would cut against the UK’s much more profitable bid to be a global player in green tech and green finance.
