Looming UK gas crisis......

Vital Trivia will give you as usual a through analysis of the looming gas crisis.

Because of the closure of storage at the Rough North Sea terminal, there is a major drawdown of short term storage.

One last point that must be highlighted is the complete silence on this subject from the DTI's Joint Energy Security of Supply Working Group (JESS) writes VT.

"They are meant to publish a report twice a year, it’s description:

"A key part of JESS’s work is compiling information and making it available to the energy markets via published reports. These reports provide an insight into the work of the Group, information on background to the issues relating to security of supply and an update to the indicators on security of supply that the group is developing.

This was due in November 2005 but didn’t appear - I was subsequently promised it by the end of February and it still hasn’t been published. The latest promise from them is the end of March. I won’t hold my breath.

I suspect it wasn’t published last year since they couldn’t get the numbers to add up in such a way to instil confidence and admission of ‘the challenging situation’ was not acceptable. If serious problems do develop JESS might be a good place to start an investigation."

The BBC graph of the wholesale gas prices shows the impact on costs especially to industry - which will of course result in factory shutdowns.This also affects the running and costs and running of closed Cycle Gas trubine electricity generation plants reducing electricity supplies as demand switches to electricity.



The MSM remain totally silent about the tightrope, presumably warned off by No 10 to prevent panic. This wholly predictable shortage and the consequences for industry were apparent to anyone capable of back of the envelope reckoning 2 years ago.

In the long term decisions made today take years even decades to work through - fiddling while the UK freezes. But don't worry we've squandered Lotto money on sunsidizing some of the richest companies in Europe and Britains's biggest and richest landowner - welcome yet again to the economics of the mad house.

Perhaps we could start a "build a gas import terminal and storage facility and get an Earldom" program - even curry zillionaires have to keep warm.