The UK's global gas challenge

A UKERC Research Report exploring the UK's global gas challenge. This report takes an interdisciplinary perspective, which marries energy security insights from politics and international relations, with detailed empirical understanding from energy studies and perspectives from economic geography that emphasise the spatial distribution of actors, networks and resource flows that comprise the global gas industry. Natural gas production in the UK peaked in 2000, and in 2004 it became a net importer. A decade later and the UK now imports about half of the natural gas that it consumes. The central thesis of the project on which this report is based is that as the UK’s gas import dependence has grown, it has effectively been ‘globalising’ its gas security; consequently UK consumers are increasingly exposed to events in global gas markets. - See more at: http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/publications/the-uk-s-global-gas-challenge.html#sthash.wEP831Zn.dpu

A bridge to a low carbon future? Modelling the long-term global potential of natural gas

This project uses the global TIMES Integrated Assessment Model in UCL (‘TIAM-UCL’) to provide robust quantitative insights into the future of natural gas in the energy system and in particular whether or not gas has the potential to act as a ‘bridge’ to a low-carbon future on both a global and regional basis out to 2050. This report first explores the dynamics of a scenario that disregards any need to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Such a scenario results in a large uptake in the production and consumption of all fossil fuels, with coal in particular dominating the electricity system. It is unconventional sources of gas production that account for much of the rise in natural gas production; with shale gas exceeding 1 Tcm after 2040. Gas consumption grows in all sectors apart from the electricity sector, and eventually becomes cost effective both as a marine fuel (as liquefied natural gas) and in medium goods vehicles (as compressed natural gas). It next examines how different gas market structures affect natural gas production, consumption, and trade patterns. For the two different scenarios constructed, one continued current regionalised gas markets, which are characterised by very different prices in different regions with these prices often based on oil indexation, while the other allowed a global gas price to form based on gas supply-demand fundamentals. It finds only a small change in overall global gas production levels between these but a major difference in levels of gas trade and so conclude that if gas exporters choose to defend oil indexation in the short-term, they may end up destroying their export markets in longer term. A move towards pricing gas internationally, based on supply-demand dynamics, is thus shown to be crucial if the if they are to maintain their current levels of exports. Nevertheless, it is also shown that, regardless of how gas is priced in the future, scenarios leading to a 2oC temperature rise generally have larger pipeline and LNG exports than scenarios that lead to a higher temperature increase. For pipeline trade, the adoption of any ambitious emissions reduction agreement results in little loss of markets and could (if carbon capture and storage is available) actually lead to a much greater level of exports. For LNG trade, because of the significant role that gas can play in replacing future coal demand in the emerging economies in Asia, markets that are largely supplied by LNG at present, we demonstrate that export countries should actively pursue an ambitious global agreement on GHG emissions mitigation if they want to expand their exports. These results thus have important implications for the negotiating positions of gas-exporting countries in the ongoing discussions on agreeing an ambitious global agreement on emissions reduction

Gender differences in research areas, methods and topics: Can people and thing orientations explain the results?

Although the gender gap in academia has narrowed, females are underrepresented within some fields in the USA. Prior research suggests that the imbalances between science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields may be partly due to greater male interest in things and greater female interest in people, or to off-putting masculine cultures in some disciplines. To seek more detailed insights across all subjects, this article compares practising US male and female researchers between and within 285 narrow Scopus fields inside 26 broad fields from their first-authored articles published in 2017. The comparison is based on publishing fields and the words used in article titles, abstracts, and keywords. The results cannot be fully explained by the people/thing dimensions. Exceptions include greater female interest in veterinary science and cell biology and greater male interest in abstraction, patients, and power/control fields, such as politics and law. These may be due to other factors, such as the ability of a career to provide status or social impact or the availability of alternative careers. As a possible side effect of the partial people/thing relationship, females are more likely to use exploratory and qualitative methods and males are more likely to use quantitative methods. The results suggest that the necessary steps of eliminating explicit and implicit gender bias in academia are insufficient and might be complemented by measures to make fields more attractive to minority genders

Growing importance of climate change beliefs for attitudes towards gas

Tense global politics, spikes in gas prices and increasingly urgent warnings about climate change raise questions over the future use of natural gas. UK longitudinal survey data reveal that beliefs about climate change increasingly reduced support for gas extraction between 2019 and 2022. Mounting public connections between climate and gas use suggest growing opportunities for climate communication to lower support for all fossil fuels, not just the more carbon-intensive oil and coal.</p

CO2 storage potential at Forties oilfield and the surrounding Paleocene sandstone aquifer accounting for leakage risk through abandoned wells

A numerical simulation study of CO2 injection into the Forties and Nelson oilfields to estimate their storage potential is presented in this paper. The estimation involves the consideration of key-performance indicator parameters that include: the pressure build-up for different rates and locations of injection, the regional mass fraction of CO2, the volumetric efficiency of the storage reservoirs, and the plume size. Various injection scenarios were compared in terms of these parameters, and the best scenario was identified for the capacity estimation. Potential leakage through the wellbores in the surrounding saline aquifer was also investigated