andrewducker | Interesting Links for 24-03-2021

The UK government can issue as many licences for North Sea oil and gas as it likes but I'm not sure the long-term price really supports deep-water offshore oil production.

Yeah, unless the price goes back up or the government decides to subsidise the industry...

I don't think there's much point subsidising the extraction industry. You're just taking tax payers money to buy something in an expensive way that you can buy more cheaply from lots and lots of more or less friendly places around the world.

Different model for the extraction technology industry which might long term profitable prospects exporting if it can weather the downturn in the North Sea.

I don't see the price going back up much for very long. Shale oil production is profitable about ??somewhere?? less than ??$60?? a barrel. And it's relatively low capex and relatively high marginal opex. (Quite the reverse of deep-water extraction) Any time the price goes much above $60 (or maybe $40) the tight oil producers switch on and supply increases and the price stops going up. And every time the price goes up for sustained period it makes electric vehicles more cost competative.

I think that there is a certain value to security.
Particularly if you're the kind of country that repeatedly pisses of your trading partners.

There is.

However, the market for oil and gas at the moment is reasonably liquid and served by lots of different outfits. I'm sure Venuzuala would sell us as much oil as they could any time we asked.

If we were really worried about energy security we'd build a bunch of offshore windfarms and make electric vehicles mandatory.

2030 for all electric cars isn't it?

For sales of new vehicles.

Probably about half of all vehicles on UK roads in 2035 would still ICE.

Yeah, there'll definitely be a lag.

I wonder how long until petrol stations become uneconomic.

I reckon about 2% of vehicles currently on the road will be replaced by electric cars each year between now and 2030.

Then about 5% a year between 2030 and 2035.

I don't know about the petrol stations cost structure eg what proportion of costs are marginal cost of goods sold vs fixed operating cost.

Also whether they will be able to sell recharging services to electric vehicle users.

From the data here it looks like there will be a significant number of petrol cars on the road until about 2050.
https://www.smmt.co.uk/industry-topics/sustainability/average-vehicle-age/

So that's an average of about 7% of cars being scrapped each year.

I suspect that insurance company policies will be what takes ICE vehicles off the road. Not because of the engine, but because collision-avoidance systems in newer vehicles will make older vehicles riskier to insure in comparison, with correspondingly high premiums. ICE vehicles will rapidly become status symbols for the rich.

The same goes for self-driving cars. The technology doesn't have to be perfect before there is a sudden change, it just has to be better than the average driver. The day insurance companies start charging you extra for having a steering wheel is the day that autonomous vehicle adoption will spike.

I think there is a something in what you say. In a world where collision avoidance technology is rapidly improving newer cars will be cheaper to insure than older cars. Anhd combined with other cost factors like new electric cars being cheaper to buy and to drive and to own we might see a bit of an uptick in car turnover.

I'm not convinced that it's enough of a difference to drive a signficantly increased turn over.

I'm not sure I know by how much it would reduce car insurance. I don't know how much of the cost of an insurance policy is changed by a reduction in the likelihood of crash. A fair bit based on the reduction in premiums you see between young men in their first few years of driving and pretty much everyone else.

But young men in their first years of driving usually lack the capital to buy a brand new car.

My Lovely Wife's car insurance policy is about £200 a year. She's a good driver, with many, many years of no accidents. My 23 year old daughter pays £600 a year to be the second named driver on her boyfriend's car. My 40 year old brother in Australia is about £250 a year.

So even if collision avoidance software on a new car halved those insurance premiums I'm not convinced that's enough of a difference to bring forward the purchase of a new car.

There might be more of an impact for fleet vehicles.

WOW!

Googling indicates the UK averages £471 per year, but that's really cheap compared to North America. I don't understand why there is such a significant difference.

The average price of car insurance in my province (Ontario, Canada) is double that of the UK, at $1920 CAD per year, or 1,108 UK lbs. Asking around at work gave similar numbers - my department (mostly women in their 50s with no accidents) is $1100 - $1600 Canadian per year (635 to 924 UK lbs). Most insurance companies will discount this by 5% if you install snow tires each winter.

In the US, perhaps because of its health care system, the average price of car insurance is higher, with one source giving the average to be $2388 US per year, or 1727 UK lbs.

https://insureye.com/average-car-insurance-rates-in-ontario-1920-per-year/
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-cost-of-car-insurance
https://www.finder.com/uk/how-much-does-car-insurance-cost
https://mozo.com.au/insurance/car-insurance/guides/car-insurance-in-2019-how-much-does-it-cost-and-how-can-you-save#:~:text=Aussies%20are%20paying%20an%20average,Australia%20is%20%241%2C047%20on%20average.

It's the gas, not the oil that's the key to this decision to licence more fossil fuel exploration in the North Sea. The Netherlands is losing the goldmine Groningen gas field in a couple of years so it will want more gas in the near future. The Germans are pushing for the Nord Stream II pipeline down the Baltic to be completed to double their supply of Russian gas. They're losing their nuclear generating capacity completely at the end of 2023 and they need fast-response gas turbines to keep the lights on when the weather gods don't oblige if they go too deeply down the 'renewables' rabbit-hole for electricity supply. The French are talking about getting out of the nuclear power generation biz and moving to cheap gas like everybody else in a couple of decades. The result is an expected large increase in demand for gas by 2050 across Europe.

Britain is planning and building a lot of new combined-cycle gas turbine generating plants and the Government wants to have a guaranteed gas supply to feed them without relying too much on outside actors who control the pipeline taps. The North Sea is the only place Britain can source that gas without on-land fracking which affects property prices and gets people to vote against the Conservatives.

Thank you, that's useful context.

This is absolutely going to backfire on Johnson and company, just as it's doing to Jason Kenney in Alberta here in Canada.

What's happening in Alberta? And why do you think it's going to backfire on Johnson if he does something similar?

Jason Kenney is absolutely an oil industry devotee in his role as premier of Alberta. Anything he can do to screw up everything else in that province in order to put the oil industry first, he will try to do. And if the oil price further tanks worldwide, both he and Johnson will be taking that pain in the political neck.

Sounds like Jason Kenney is deliberately getting in the way of non-oil and gas industries.

IIRC Alberta has lots of shale oil and similar?

"And similar", definitely. Shale oil in the southern end of the province more than likely near its border with American states Montana and Idaho. The more infamous Tarsands region is up north of Fort MacMurray at the other end of Alberta.

This seems like a "stick to FOSTA-SESTA-style rules on your home websites, or we rip you off with impunity" warning by Amazon, doesn't it?

Anti-scalping measures are tricky.

I think the only thing that I can think of that the PAX article didn't discuss is giving preference for tickets to people who were at previous conventions. Priority booking if you went to last years con, or the went to 2 out of the previous 3 cons.

So long as you can tell they were at the previous convention that works well.

(As opposed to people who bought tickets to the previous convention and then sold them on.)

Indeed. I was thinking of something as crude as handing out a unique code at the Con.

This privileges people who already "won" the previous system. It's elitism.

Conversely it rewards long-term, loyal participants and builds a community. Scalping on the other hand allows people to buy their way to the front of the queue.

Sure, but the article repeatedly emphasizes that scalpers are a problem, but still a small minority of ticket sales. For everybody else, it would essentially entrench a lot of legacy power among the older members, essentially blocking younger (and typically more passionate) potential members, which is usually disastrous for any organization in the long run. It only takes a few years to breed a generation gap that you can never entirely recover from. (I am in multiple geek organizations that have made variations of this mistake.)

Also, it would breed a whole different flavor of scalping, as folks with legacy power discover that their ticket is worth that much money. So as people become less interested, they keep buying their ticket, and selling it on as essentially small-scale scalping.

Yeah, I see that.

The Covid one makes sense- even the horror, bubonic plague, hasn't gone away, although it's been in retreat for centuries.

People need not to get panic stricken- many diseases never go away.

Yeah, it needs to be brought down to manageable levels, not eradicated.

Everyone I know, who has a business relationship with Amazon, has both 'company town' horror stories about tgeir oppressive business practices, and a clear sense that Amazon are no longer able to manage their data.

Interesting Links for 24-03-2021

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Amazon

Anti-scapling

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