Irish Oil off the Mayo coast for free!!!!

granite man

Is wind and wave energy so impractical? Both would create much needed jobs and to be fair our energy needs aren't exactly huge compared to the much larger states of europe. A real green, renewable and sustainable energy. I suppose its just not corporate enough for needy Ireland.

Sponge Bob

We have no proper national grid west of Athenry, how do we gets the lekky out to market .

Floating turbine, the first one went live off Norway last month .

Wave energy , early days and most variants will not make it to scale or market. We have been faffing around with wave energy since the 1960s and the Barrage de la Rance and Salters Duck....more so at times of high hydrocarbon prices of course .

I am impressed with the Ocean Energy bouy which stuck out Galway Bay for two winters but Galway Bay wave energy is a quarter of what it would be off the West Coast . Some more work required there.

I expect results in 10 years . Robust scalable and capable of surviving long periods of deployment between scheduled refurbs and Barnacle scrapes.

granite man

It would be far more worth the investment than anglo irish bank. The main problem I think is the govt's priorities.

Sponge Bob

granite man wrote: »

It would be far more worth the investment than anglo irish bank. The main problem I think is the govt's priorities.

Anglo banked the people who banked FF , way it was . Of course FF will bail them out unles the greens crash the government first. But the greens are technological retards , especially that Eamon Ryan.

You simply cannot leave energy policy to a complete muppet like him..whatever chance Gormley would have of understanding and balancing the rather complex issues in play .

Anglo are dead on course to suck another €5bn-€8bn out of the exchequer by this time next year , apart from NAMA costs and EVEN IF there is a change of government . Yes that would fund lots of useful things but we took the ****heap over a year ago instead of letting it die !

None of that is reason not to have a holistic view of national resources and energy of course.

bauderline

Sponge Bob wrote: »

We have no proper national grid west of Athenry, how do we gets the lekky out to market .

Floating turbine, the first one went live off Norway last month .

Wave energy , early days and most variants will not make it to scale or market. We have been faffing around with wave energy since the 1960s and the Barrage de la Rance and Salters Duck....more so at times of high hydrocarbon prices of course .

I am impressed with the Ocean Energy bouy which stuck out Galway Bay for two winters but Galway Bay wave energy is a quarter of what it would be off the West Coast . Some more work required there.

I expect results in 10 years . Robust scalable and capable of surviving long periods of deployment between scheduled refurbs and Barnacle scrapes.

I don't think wave energy is ever going to get anywhere, for a multitude of different reasons. In fairness wind farms are the technology of the moment and we have made decent progress in that area in the last few years. Ireland has been doing a decent job of implementing renewables in recent years, not sure how much of it is down to goverment policy though...

puffdragon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak

Yeah I know this is beginning to dilute with time scale but bare with me,
Take the "peak oil theory and I've deliberately given a link to an article which proposes the theory is flawed as well as a more pessimistic view which brings events closer and although I have to cliché this post by saying maybe not in our lifetime but care for our children's future has become more of a political statement than a life aspiration unfortunately.

http://www.ihs.com/News/Press-Releases/2006/PeakOilTheory.htm

a bit more pessimistic;

http://www.oildecline.com/

Now this puts a greater value on future resources and although I wouldn't begrudge Europe of these resources neither do I subscribe to the view that we owe it to large nuclear electricity generating powers like France or Germany to reap our territory for free.Ok Ok that's alarmist but Im sitting looking at a pack of cards on my desk and If I was sitting with a full house I wouldn't be throwing it in for a pack of jokers(no offence intended)


Now if you add this to the mix and you had for instance more substantial evidence of global oil and gas reserve drought it changes the argument somewhat!

Quote;(some text from one of the links above)
At a current average global consumption growth rate of 2% annually (1995-2005), by 2025 the world will need 50% more oil (120 mbd), and the International Energy Agency (IEA) admits that Saudi will have to double oil production to achieve this. And that's not even taking into account that 80% of the world is only just starting to use oil & gas

Quote;
The public, business leaders and politicians are all under the false assumption that oil depletion is a straightforward engineering problem of exactly the kind that technology and human ingenuity have so successfully solved before. Technology itself has become a kind of supernatural force, although in reality it is just the hardware and programming for running that fuel, and governed by the basic laws of physics and thermodynamics. Much of our existing technology simply won't work without an abundant underlying fossil fuel base.

Quote;
"Let's look at it simply.� The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil." �

� "...for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction."� �

(Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy Defence Secretary, 2003) �

Perhaps there is a precedent set by America!
Quote;
The Iraq war is not hard to understand. It wasn't an attempt to steal Iraq's oil. If that was the case, it would have been an uneconomic venture spending hundreds of billions of dollars occupying the place, not to mention the lives lost. It was not a matter of stealing the oil; it simply was a desperate attempt to retain access to it. It was an attempt to stabilize the region of the world that holds two-thirds of the remaining oil, namely, the Middle East.
Quote;
It may come as a surprise to many that the world�s industrial food supply system is one of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels. Vast amounts of oil and gas are used as raw materials and energy in the manufacture of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides and as cheap and readily available energy at all stages of food production.

Ok so we don't have diesel for the four by four but what if the farmer had no diesel for the tractor? No crops no food!

And listen for gods sake don't take my word for it or on the other hand discount what I'm saying as alarmist, do some research, start here;http://www.peakoil.com/article2272.html,Im not scaremongering I'm only saying maybe!!

My own words from a previous post;
Far from helping us out and us thinking that we owe Europe for our very existence there could be an underlying agenda to reap our natural resources for the benefit of Europe to the cost of Ireland, If these results are accurate then Ireland holds the highest potential for "green energies" in Europe and if properly harnessed and managed our future wasn't as bleak as we were led to believe. Food for thought!!

Hydrosylator

It's either corruption or incompetence that got things this way.
It's been fairly well established that Fianna Fáil are capable of both.