Locator: 48443GREEN.
Global climate change economy teeters: Bloomberg link here.
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For The Archives
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For The Archives
I flew with the 525 TFS, Bitburg Air Base, Germany, from 1984 - 1986, and again, from 1989 - 1993, also Bitburg AB, Germany. My primary a/c was the F-15.
In the photo below, the F-15 is the second a/c from the POV of the aircrew member pictured.
Locator: 46689B.
Wind: wow, look at these Germany numbers. I must be missing something. Link here.
MPC: I figured this was the reason, but I did not know for sure. Great to see this confirmed. Link here.
Ohio-based oil refiner Marathon Petroleum (MPC) saw its Q4 profits exceed analyst expectations, the company reported on Tuesday—thanks in part to OPEC's production cuts.
The U.S. refiner reported a net income of $3.84 per share—or $1.5 billion—for the last quarter of 2023, while analysts estimated a figure far lower, at just $2.20 per share. This overachievement came even as global refining capacity increased, thanks to production cuts by OPEC+ combined with healthy demand, which helped to offset struggling fuel prices.
Marathon's crude oil capacity utilization came in at 91%, for a total throughput of 2.9 million bpd for Q4, while net income attributable to company settled at $1.45 billion. This compares with $3.32 billion in Q4 2022.
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Back To The Bakken
WTI: $77.82.
Active rigs: 39.
Three new permits, #40487 - #40489, inclusive:
Five permits renewed:
Three permits canceled:
Nine producing wells (DUCs) reported as completed:
| Pool | Date | Days | BBLS Oil | Runs | BBLS Water | MCF Prod | MCF Sold | Vent/Flare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BAKKEN | 11-2023 | 7 | 9479 | 9438 | 13168 | 8180 | 7289 | 862 |
| Pool | Date | Days | BBLS Oil | Runs | BBLS Water | MCF Prod | MCF Sold | Vent/Flare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BAKKEN | 11-2023 | 17 | 25821 | 25710 | 38170 | 17688 | 15786 | 1841 |
| Pool | Date | Days | BBLS Oil | Runs | BBLS Water | MCF Prod | MCF Sold | Vent/Flare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BAKKEN | 11-2023 | 26 | 45670 | 45474 | 93852 | 34458 | 30732 | 3607 |
| Pool | Date | Days | BBLS Oil | Runs | BBLS Water | MCF Prod | MCF Sold | Vent/Flare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BAKKEN | 11-2023 | 30 | 25941 | 26011 | 78823 | 16658 | 16289 | 261 |
| BAKKEN | 10-2023 | 29 | 35003 | 35088 | 129764 | 20851 | 20409 | 286 |
| BAKKEN | 9-2023 | 4 | 4214 | 3938 | 25731 | 2054 | 1992 | 36 |
| Pool | Date | Days | BBLS Oil | Runs | BBLS Water | MCF Prod | MCF Sold | Vent/Flare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BAKKEN | 11-2023 | 30 | 36673 | 36727 | 69486 | 21662 | 21187 | 336 |
| BAKKEN | 10-2023 | 25 | 41358 | 41133 | 81899 | 23020 | 22537 | 313 |
Wells of interest:
Germany wind turbine makers: in trouble; selling at a loss; link here.
Germany wind power: down to 3%; link here.
Work set to begin on Williams County wind far, Tradewind Energy; 300-MW Aurora Wind Farm; northeaster Williams County; up to 121 turbines spanning 44,000 acres; centered five miles northwest of Tioga; range in size from 2.0 to 4.8 MW; includes construction of a 20-mile 345 KV transmission line; will terminate at Basin Electric Power Cooperative's Tande Substation east of Tioga in Mountrail County; $385 million.And that's on top of existing wind farms in Williams County.
“With France, which had a good first 6 months, Spain, Norway and Sweden will now have to help pick up the slack in the second half of the year,” Tardieu said. “The EU has set a renewable energy target of 32% for 2030 and is talking about a net zero economy by 2050. The rate of installations we’ve seen so far this year won’t get us there,” he argued.
The growth of onshore wind energy is collapsing in Germany, jeopardising both German and EU renewables targets. Germany installed just 134 MW of new onshore wind farms in the first quarter of 2019 – the country’s worst first quarter for onshore installations since 2000.The reader who sent me the link, and who follows this a lot more closely than I do, suggests that the wind issue is much more serious in Germany that this article implies/suggests. That would make sense. The article is a press release from an advocacy, lobbying group. On the one hand, they want a bit of hyperbole to advocate their position, but if they tell us how bad it really is, they run the risk of getting even less support.
Germany is likely to install a total of just 1-2 GW of onshore wind this year. This is significantly down on the past five years when Germany installed an average of 4.3 GW per year. This is well below what Germany needs to meet its own 65% renewable electricity target by 2030 and to deliver its share of the EU’s 32% renewable energy target. Offshore wind will not fill the gap: Germany is due to build just 730 MW per year up to 2030.
This is in contrast with Spain, for example, which will build around 4 GW of new wind energy in 2019. Some of the slowdown in Germany is the result of failed auction systems in 2017, when a lot of community projects won without a permit. Many of these projects are still to be built due to more generous realisation timelines.
But permitting for new wind farms remains the underlying problem. The process used to take just 10 months but is now taking over two years. Public authorities are not applying deadlines and many wind farm projects are getting stuck in legal disputes. Plus there is a lack of staff to process the applications, especially at Bundesland level. Just 400 MW of new wind farm permits were awarded in Q1 2019, well below historical levels. All this has meant the last three onshore wind auction rounds were undersubscribed leading to rising prices.
WindEurope CEO Giles Dickson said: “Onshore wind energy in Germany is in deep trouble. The development of new wind farms has almost ground to a halt. The main problem is permitting – it’s got much slower, more complex and there aren’t enough civil servants to process the applications. It seriously undermines Germany’s ability to meet its 2030 renewables target and contribute to the EU target. And it’s affecting Germany’s wind turbine industrial base. Half of Europe’s 300,000 wind energy jobs are in Germany. But 10,000 have gone in Germany in the last five years. And this could get worse: there hasn’t been a single turbine order recorded in Germany in Q1 this year.
Capacity factor equals {(total actual power output)/(total rated capacity assuming 100% utilization)}. The Capacity Factor of wind power in Germany equals about 28%. However, capacity factor is not a true measure of actual usefulness of grid-connected wind power.
The true factor that reflects the intermittency of wind power is the substitution capacity, which is about 5% in Germany – a large grid with a large wind power component.
Substitution capacity is the amount of dispatchable (conventional) power you can permanently retire when you add more wind power to the grid. In Germany they have to add ~20 units of wind power to replace 1 unit of dispatchable power.
Earlier this month, the German government conceded that the country is on track on miss its 2020 climate goal targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent compared to 1990.
Due to the economic boom, immigration, and high carbon emissions from the transport sector, Germany is on track to cut emissions compared to 1990 by 32 percent—an 8-percentage-point gap short of the goal.
Companies from all energy sectors and environmental organizations have criticized the German government for failing to clearly state future policies, incentives, renewables targets, and emissions targets. Germany has been lately slowing down climate action “domestically and at the European level,” Simone Peter, president of the Renewable Energy Federation, told Clean Energy Wire.
The summit caps off a week of climate diplomacy in Europe. Today the ninth Petersberg Climate Dialogue wrapped up in Berlin, co-hosted by the German and Polish governments.
The main purpose of the Berlin summit was to stump up money for the Green Climate Fund, the vehicle to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 from the developed world to help the developing world fight and adjust to climate change. The fund is almost out of the $19 billion in start-up contributions it received at its launch several years ago.Just those two paragraphs raise these questions/observations:
Voters across Europe have lost faith in politics partly because of “unachievable targets” on renewable energy, said German Energy Minister Peter Altmaier, who rejected calls from a group of other EU countries to boost the share of renewables to 33-35% of the bloc’s energy mix by 2030. Altmaier made the comments during an on-the-record exchange between the 28 EU energy ministers, who are gathered in Luxembourg today (11 June) for a meeting of the Energy Council.So many story lines. I particularly liked that last line: even if we did manage to get enough electric cars, we wouldn’t have enough renewable electricity to keep them on the road.
Energy ministers are expected to thrash out a joint position on three clean energy laws which are currently being negotiated in the EU institutions – the Renewable Energy Directive, the Energy Efficiency Directive and a regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union.
“Germany supports responsible but achievable targets,” Altmaier said from the outset, underlining Berlin’s efforts to raise the share of renewables to 15% of the country’s overall energy mix.
But he said those efforts also carried a cost for the German taxpayer, which he put at €25 billion per year. “And if we are setting targets that are definitely above 30%, that means that within a decade, our share has to be more than doubled – clearly more than doubled,” Altmaier pointed out.
“We’re not going to manage that,” Altmaier said referring to an objective of putting 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2020 in Germany. “Nowhere in Europe is going to manage that,” he claimed. “And even if we did manage to get enough electric cars, we wouldn’t have enough renewable electricity to keep them on the road,” he stressed.
As such, 2016 is a dramatic illustration of the limits of energy sources that depend on the weather. Their output varies dramatically not just hour-to-hour but also year-to-year.
Anti-nuclear advocates have long insisted that this radical intermittency can be solved through more transmission and storage. But there's a problem: neither more transmission lines nor more storage would have made Germany any sunnier, or windier, in 2016.
Direct-drive wind turbines from Siemens are gaining ground on the German market: Siemens has now received five orders for 23 of these state-of-the-art wind turbines. Two of the wind power farms are situated in Germany's northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein, while the other three are to be erected in Lower Saxony. Installation of all five projects, comprising anywhere from one to eight of these gearless units each, is to be completed by the spring of 2017.
The first Siemens model SWT-3.3-130 wind turbine to be installed in Germany is to be erected in Schleswig-Holstein by the end of this year in the municipality of Südermarsch near the town of Husum. This unit that Siemens is installing for Südermarsch Wind GmbH & Co. has an 85-meter hub height on a steel tower and a rotor diameter of 130 meters designed to operate in moderate wind speeds and deliver a rated electrical generating capacity of 3.3 megawatts (MW). Six other wind turbines of this model make up the Damme Wind Farm project being erected near the city of the same name in Lower Saxony. Owing to the wind conditions at this site, however, Siemens will install the units on steel tube towers with a hub height of 135 meters. Both projects are scheduled to go on line by the end of this year.
...EROEI for turbines is usually based on 30 years at utilization greater than 0.3, while actual turbine life is less than 20 years and actually closer to 15 years, and actual average utilization is under 0.2, just this two things drop the EROEI of wind turbines from 18 to 6.
Add reserve grid capacity and you will be lucky to get over 1 for EROEI.
Add dismantling - and you will be firmly under 1.
I understand that probably there are some factors I don't know regarding wind turbines. So there could be mistakes in my calculations. But still even if any one of the angles proves to be reasonable - wind power EROEI is greatly exaggerated.Along with that note, the reader sent me this most interesting article -- the largest wind operator in Germany declared bankruptcy last year:
Prokon, which has been rumored for the past weeks to be teetering on the brink of default, finally filed for insolvency.
The company, which runs over 50 wind parks with hundreds of windmills in Germany and Poland, and employs 1,300 workers, is Germany’s biggest, with a capital of 1.4 billion euros, collected from over 75,000 private investors.
These, however, are not shareholders in the normal sense; the “shares” they own at Prokon are certificates only, which do not give holders any say in the running of the company, nor any sound legal base for requesting detailed information from the management on the company’s doings. All they learn comes from media reports on Prokon.
Certificates operate in a legal gray zone in Germany, and the Prokon default has prompted new calls for legislation to impose strict controls or better, a total ban on these “financial products.”
There have been voluminous withdrawals of capital, altogether 280 million euros in the past weeks, after critical reports appeared in the German media that questioned whether Prokon’s profits matched its interest payments: indeed, accounts published on Prokon’s own website show, that in the first nine months last year, it paid out interest of [Euro]67.2 million, double its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation of [Euro]33.5 million for the same period.
With a yield of 6-8 percent promised to certificates owners, Prokon has particularly attracted people whose normal savings accounts did not offer any revenue near that. The company apparently ran a classic Ponzi scheme, paying old investors from the money new investors brought in. Prokon last week denied running a Ponzi scheme, claiming: “Our projects are merely unconventionally financed.” The end of Prokon is, however, a rather conventional one, appropriate for a Ponzi scheme. The state prosecutor’s office in Luebeck, northern Germany, is investigating Prokon.Think about this. If XOM went bankrupt this year, do you think that would have been reported by ABC, NBC, CBS, Rachel Maddow, and the Huffington Post? Do you think you might have heard about that? Quick: name Germany's biggest wind energy operator that went bust last year. I couldn't, and I'm somewhat well read. This speaks volumes on the slanted reporting by ABC, NBC, and CBS.
Peter Duprey's top priority when he became CEO of Broadwind Energy in 2010 was to ensure that the wind was at the Cicero-based manufacturer's back.
Instead, he's still fighting headwinds.
Six years after Broadwind began trading on the Nasdaq stock market, the company has yet to turn an annual profit and its stock has lost most of its value on Duprey's watch, slumping to $4.89 on April 2, down 80 percent since touching $24.30 in January 2011.
Broadwind is one of a clutch of manufacturers in the Chicago area, including Chicago-based S&C Electric, Winergy in Elgin and Vernon Hills-based ZF Services, that depend at least in part on the development and operations of wind farms.
Like the others, the company stands to gain if wind becomes a bigger part of the energy mix around the country—a recent U.S. Department of Energy report predicts that the U.S. could derive 20 percent of its power from wind by 2030, up from 4.5 percent in 2013.Later in the article:
For manufacturers focused on wind energy, the need for a federal tax credit has “been less and less over time as technology has matured, but it's still a key component and it has a pretty noticeable effect on the construction pipeline when the credit goes away,” says Steve Piper, a Boulder, Colo.-based associate director at SNL Financial who focuses on energy and power markets.For wind, we are still talking about "federal tax credits."
Die durchschnittliche Einspeisung (arithmetisches Mittel) beträgt über alle 25.000 Anlagen hinweg gerade einmal 14,8 Prozent der Nennleistung.Yes, you read that correctly: "einmal 14,8 Prozent der Nennleistung."
One does not even see any real available baseload – a sort of reliable minimum output to rely on.”Germany is also going non-nuclear which means a lot of coal-burning power plants to provide the baseload as well as provide electricity when the wind is not blowing -- which seems to be a lot of the time.