Good energy news

It was reported widely yesterday that the company Cuadrilla had announced an enormous UK shale gas find. Assuming a 20% recovery rate (which is conservative) then this find is as big as the North Sea Troll super giant oil field. The gas produced would meet around 15 years of total UK energy demands. Put another way it would meet all current LNG imports for 40 years.

Of course the eco-nuts and warmists have been out in force explaining how this source of energy is bad, and of course the BBC have been at the forefront of publicising these opinions and presenting them as facts. For once I will not 'have a go' at the BBC for their clear and obvious bias and for campaigning rather than reporting, I will leave that to Biased-BBC. However I will pick up on one point made by the eco-nuts and reported eagerly by the BBC. The BBC report that:

'could provide 5,600 jobs in the UK, 1,700 of those in Lancashire.'
but also that
'Phil Thornhill, from Campaign Against Climate Change, was one of those protesting outside the meeting.

He said: "Those jobs could and should be in green energy. We need a revolution in the economy to really deal with climate change effectively.

"We need to be moving much quicker than we are to a low carbon economy, that would be a lot of jobs, a lot of development.

"They could create jobs in renewables if they put the investment there." '

Ah green jobs, the eco-nuts holy grail Shall we have a quick look at the reality of green jobs? As HotAir revealed a week or so ago:

'Today’s Washington Post acknowledges what everyone already knows, and what Spain learned the hard way as well — green-jobs subsidies are sinkholes.  When Barack Obama loaded his 2009 Porkulus with nearly $40 billion in subsidies to the green-tech industry, he promised that it would produce an explosion of jobs in a new, green US economy, starting with 65,000 directly created from his largesse.  With half of the money gone, how many jobs has Obama’s investment created?

A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.

The program — designed to jump-start the nation’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies. …

Obama’s efforts to create green jobs are lagging behind expectations at a time of persistently high unemployment. Many economists say that because alternative-­energy projects are so expensive and slow to ramp up, they are not the most efficient way to stimulate the economy.

That may be the understatement of the year.  Even with Obama’s initial promise of 65,000 jobs created (or “saved,” which makes zero sense in this context), that would still come to $593,846 per job, which is hardly an efficient use of capital.  If a private-sector business had that kind of capital, it could easily create five jobs from that amount with $100,000 in compensation each, with enough left over for a substantial profit margin.
But the actual results in this case are much worse.  With $17.2 billion spent on these programs, the cost per actual job created comes to $4.853 million.  That kind of capital could launch entire new businesses, let alone multiple jobs.  Any company that ate through $4.853 million to create a job would shortly become a former company … kind of like Solyndra, where $535 million disappeared and took 1,000 jobs along with it.'

That's the reality of green jobs and I wish someone would put the point to Chris Huhne, David Cameron, the BBC's eco-journalists or any of the spokespeople for  the various eco pressure groups.