I’m a huge environmentalist, but I’m also a pragmatist. There is no clean source of energy except for fusion energy. We might as well try and utilize our cheapest and most readily available energy source in the meantime.

Wind….a clean source

Wind…..requires the use of tens of kilos of neodymium. The world supply is overwhelming provided by the Chinese which are now stopping exports. Neodymium mining is the most dirty mining and refining process on earth.
So no, it’s not clean. And it’s not efficient. And then people complain about looking at them. I personally think they’re quite beautiful, but the manufacturing process isn’t.

Neodymium is also requires for hybrid car batteries, meaning that they are also incredibly environmentally unfriendly.

There is a myth being passed around that 7,000,000,000 people can live on a planet without leaving any pollution or lasting environmental effects at all. This is a fallacy. Cadmium and Tellerium are essential for photovoltaic cells (solar panels), two of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust. You can’t switch to solar full on because then you’ll have a resource war for a rare element.
Nuclear power has enormous environmental impacts, even assuming it’s 100% safe. The Samarium required for control rods is incredibly rare, just as dirty as neodymium and also mostly controlled by China. Uranium is also a very dirty refining process and very dangerous for miners.
Hydroelectric energy isn’t bad. But it completely obliterates ecosystems for kilometres around, look at Three Rivers.

There is an environmental cost for every energy source, we have to weigh up which is the lesser of many evils.

Exploration is a great thing. It shows you what we have.

Jack. True, and in our case it’s not a lot. Basically our hydrocarbons are gone because of a combination of poor sealing and overcooking. Norway and the UK won the lottery, we got the short end of the stick.
There’s every possibility that we may be a net hydrocarbon producer in the future but only if we reduce our need for fossil fuels and if the prices facilitate high risk, unconventional plays.
Fracking is a real prospect in the short term though.

Is there even any fracking gas available?
Or is that yet known?

Business Cat. Fracking is a very contentious public issue so there hasn’t been exploration. What is known though is that Ireland is covered in carboniferous limestones and black shales. Shales like we have would give a fracking exploration firm a boner. It has good prospects.
Fracking has a bad rap publically because of the failures in the US. I agree. But I think that’s more down to atrocious legislation and a complete deregulation of the industry. Fracking in Ireland would be much safer and more tightly controlled.

I’m of the mind that we definitely do have the resources, however they’re dramatically underexplored. Now that seismic goes deeper than before, and the advent of the PGS electromagnetic systems, we may well find what was previously missed. The same goes for onshore resources.

Ireland has really upped it’s game in the last decade with regard to responsible mining. It’s worth visiting the old tour mines to see what it was once like! Nowadays you could nearly walk over Europe’s biggest zinc mine and not know it’s there.

Although many prospects seem to be inevitably on the brink of closure, a few years of investment in regional exploration seems to pay off in decades of further production. We may as well find out what we have (though I’m evidently biased!)

I agree Charlie. The industry has definitely cleaned up it’s act in Ireland. We have one of the better mining regulations. It’s not overly burdensome but it’s also very responsible. Tara is a shining example of how to run a major mine.
I think there is a huge amount of public opposition to further exploration though, but most of those arguments stem from ignorance. Mineral and oil exploration are highly risky. People cry foul when they see that our royalty tax is lower than Norway’s without realising that Norway has a 1 in 3 strike rate, we have nowhere near that. So you have to have lower taxes to encourage exploration otherwise it’s not worth it.
We may very well find hidden resources that were previously undetectable, but I think if there were any conventional plays we’d have at least caught a whiff of them. But that’s just speculation.
It does look like the traditional lead/zinc mining is almost exhausted, but it was only last week that Conroy Gold are announcing a new round of investment to build their open pit mine in Clontibret. If you take them at their word, they could be sitting on a new European gold district. There’s hope yet for the industry in Ireland.

Charlie, quick question. Would you welcome the news if a large deposit of Cerium Earths were discovered in Ireland?

climate change

Gavin, climate change is a very real reason to get off fossil fuels. Unfortunately, they are too well integrated into the global economy and energy infrastructure to just get rid of over night. And like I said, all of the alternatives also cause environmental devestation and require fossil fuels to construct anyway.

nonsense. investing in exploring for expensive hard to get oil means you are not investing in urgently needed alternatives. This is all about private profit.

Nonsense Gavin? In fairness, Sean J has put across his points very well and I agree with him. He is a realist.

As for the alternatives… wind energy is a sham, the amount of subsidies it gets just to compete with “expensive” oil (reality: oil laden with carbon taxes, VAT and excise duty) even with a price-fixing-upwards-only regulator is a joke.

Every household is paying over €70 to subsidise wind energy this year… with 1.6m houses in the country this is a tidy sum for the charlatans of wind… no wonder they can bribe the farmers with thousands of €uro per windmill and a nice dolly-bird to sell them the deal.

Gavin and Hurler. Even notwithstanding the amount of subsidies wind gets and the inefficiency it provides, it still doesn’t get away from having to drill into the ground and dig out something rare and non renewable. Even if we could somehow switch to wind tomorrow, we wouldn’t have enough neodymium. It’s not feasable. I’ve already poked holes in all of the other supposed green alternatives. Every source of energy is fundamentally dirty in some sense with two notable exceptions: geothermal and fusion. Geothermal energy can only be harnessed in extremely isolated geological settings. Fusion is the only way forward. There would still doubtlessly be a requirement for exotic elements to construct reactors, but the fuel itself is just Hydrogen and the product is water. Cold fusion is also the most thermodynamically efficient power source permitted as far as we know. The NIL has already had some success and net output is near at hand.
The rollout will be difficult and expensive though and will take a while.

nonsense? oil is finite. no matter how many tiny fields you find it is a geological fact that demand will exceed supply in the next 50 years. according to the science, anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat to the survival of humanity. that is the reality.

i disagree his points are made well. oil exploration is a profiteering sham subsidised by tax incentives

If it were me? If I was Emperor Sean the Magnificent?
You have to tackle this problem on two fronts with a co-ordinated international effort:
1) You need to offer heavy incentives to the transportation industry to speed up hydrogen fuel cell development. They’re reluctant because they don’t want to roll out hydrogen cars only to find the infrastructure isn’t in place. That will have to be developed by governments. This isn’t permanent though because we still rely on fossil fuels to extract and refine hydrogen. The process consumes more energy than it produces (basic entropy) and so isn’t sustainable. Which leads me onto solution number two.
2) Allow big oil to do their thing. Seven out of ten of the world’s largest companies by revenue are oil companies. And the most valuable in the world is Saudi Aramco, which is worth almost as much as the entire European economy. Countries like Norway wisely put their oil money into trust funds for future generation. What’s to stop this being done on an international level? The EU or perhaps even the UN could implement a global tax on oil companies that could be used to invest in fusion projects such as the NIL or the LMJ. Big oil is taking in huge profits and so they should. But they know that they have less than a hundred years and should be made responsible for ensuring energy security for our kids and their kids. All it takes is political will to get it done because literally all parties would win.

@sean fusion doesn’t exist. the roll out would not only be difficult but you would need to invent it first at a scale necessary

By the way Gavin, if you look at my past comments on this website you’ll see that I’m a bit of a keyboard warrior when it comes to climate change. It’s one of my pet causes and it’s why I became a vegetarian. But you can’t fight big oil, it’s too important for our standard of living. But you can harness it to ensure that future living is more sustainable.

sean _– think you have been reading too many techno fantasy books!

Fusion is one of the only thing that 35 of the world’s governments are actually collaborating on – they see it as a distinct probability. See ITER (http://www.iter.org/factsfigures).

As for oil, sure there’s a possibility of replacing our low-density energy with other sources. But your plastic products, your rubber tyres, your formica tables, your elastic resins, your jet fuels – they’re not making the switch tomorrow.

As for not investing in future energy sources? I’m pretty sure there’s a bigger investment in alternative energy than there’s ever been before. If you really want to quit investment in fossil fuels then stop buying it and its’ products (keeps the prices down for the rest of us)

u cant be an advocate for climate change and support big or small oil. u cannot harness it for a more “sustainable” future

Charlie. as i said, fusion doesn’t exist. nor is it near existing

as for your ‘poison the well’ argument..cop on!

Gavin, I am an environmentalist. I don’t have a car, I don’t eat meat and I don’t want kids. I probably have as small a carbon footprint as I could possibly have. I’m doing all I can as one individual. Have you given up meat? It’s a very easy way to dramatically reduce your carbon emissions.
But as hurler said, I’m still a realist. You can not make the switch. Charlie is right when he added the petrochemical products that I neglected to mention. If you were conscientious, you would have to basically leave in a cave. You can’t replace plastics over night. Long chain hydrocarbons can be synthesized however, it’s just not energy efficient. Provided you had an infinite source of cheap energy like say, cold fusion, you could theoretically manufacture all of the petrochemical products that you need. Although these will doubtlessly be replaced by exotic materials like graphene.
Fusion is already possible, it’s how nuclear bombs work. The problem is trying to get it to work at room temperature under controlled conditions, nobody wants a Dr. Octopus incident from Spider-Man 2. But the Science is sound and it is fundamentally plausible.
Here again Charlie is right, there is a huge amount of international collaboration to produce a net gain fusion reactor. ITER is just one of them, but NIF is another that is working with high precision optics and there is a team in South Korea attempting to use a plasma reactor. There are real scientists a lot smarter than you and I who belive it’s possible and are trying to secure our energy supply of the future.
It’s not science fiction, here’s an update from NIF from just a year ago :
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24429621

Anyway, no harm can come from big oil funding it’s own replacement. Otherwise they’ll be dead as the dinosaurs they’re sucking out of the ground.

These kinds of moral blackmail/cave arguments are laughable. Nobody approaches a problem from the conditions of their own choosing .

As I said, fusion does not exist at scale nor is it likely in the time-frame needed.

I would counter that by saying that there is NO green source of energy that exists at the scale required in the next few years. Fusion is not unique in that. But it is our best possible solution.
You’re trying to convince me that the solution is to stop using hydrocarbons and trust wind, solar and other sources of energy. How is that better than me saying we should keep using hydrocarbons, tax it, and spend that tax on funding it’s inevitable replacement. Like it or not, if we can’t solve cold fusion then no amount of political will or tax subsidies will be able to solve our energy crisis. “Green” energy is not environmentally friendly and it’s not energy efficient. It’s useless except for highly specialized applications. Like calculators or sattelites.

We’re all waiting on tenterhooks for your solution, G…

Have you read any of what you said in any of my comments? you just wrote your own counter argument

As I said, fusion does not exist at scale nor is it likely in the time-frame needed. its experimental science and besides, even if we can scale it up, it wont solve our energy problems

Charlie, within a global capitalist system of the scale we have created, the problem is insoluble. unfortunately economic growth always requires ever more energy and resources, particularly liquid fuel for transport and trade. so the solution is not one of technology, but politics.

I’m agreeing with you, it is experimental at the moment. But it has twenty or thirty years to begin roll out and I have no doubt that alternative energy sources will help in the meantime, they’re just not green.
You’re still not tackling my argument that solar and wind fundamentally are not energy efficient, are environmentally harmful and require fossil fuels to manufacture in the first place. What would YOU do? My argument is a reasonable one and there are plenty of other Scientists who would share my view. You haven’t proposed your own solution.
We have to remember that all energy on Earth is ultimately driven by fusion energy with the exception of geothermal energy and maybe tidal energy. Solar energy is derived from the sun, the wind is driven by the sun’s heat, fossil fuels are the remains of dead organisms who also ultimately got their energy from the sun. The sun is a fusion reactor. The idea of using fusion is to cut out the inefficiencies of juggling energy from all of the intermediate sources of energy that we use today.
It would solve our energy problems, literally overnight. It would give us a huge and almost infinite source of cheap energy.

Gavin, it’s nothing to do with capitalism. It’s a problem related to creating our modern quality of life. Are you implying that a communist country would have no energy needs? Or are you saying that the capitalist system inhibits progress?
I would have to strongly disagree with you. Sad as it is, most advances in energy have been profit motivated. But that doesn’t mean that the benefits aren’t real. There is a real economic and profit motive for companies to come up with the next energy solution, it’s not the failure of capitalism that has lead to poor results so far.

Sean, sorry I completely disagree with you..and the opposite to capitalism is not communism. Your arguments are at best pollyannaish. I do not disagree with your arguments on solar and wind. As i said, the problem is insoluble within our current hegemonic economic system. Incidentally, that system creates a ‘modern quality of life’ for some but leaves billions of others in abject misery. Climate change and energy descent is the symptom of an economic system that structurally requires perpetual growth

I’m pretty sure the opposite of capitalism is communism. They are two ends of the ideological spectrum. I couldn’t agree more with you, I’m a socialist at heart as well and the excesses of capitalism have to be curbed. The US is a perfect example of capitalism gone wrong. However, you’re equating oil exploration with capitalism and that’s not strictly the case. Norway is far from a capitalist country in the way that you are characterizing it. They are exploiting their natural resources to benefit their own people, they are investing profits into social funding. This is a model that any liberal would want to emulate. I’m sure you would want Ireland to do the same if we had the oil (which we don’t).
The problem is solvable with our current system, all it takes is a bit of political will. What would you have us do? I think my system of tax and invest in a replacement is fairly logical. Like or not, the economy is the way it is but there are certainly ways we can solve problems within it.
Again, I agree that capitalism is fundamentally an unfair system which is why a mixed economic system is a much fairer model. But we’re not ultimately talking about economics.
Here’s a moral conundrum for you, the Ugandan government is about to go into production on Lake Albert. A very poor and destitute country is about to have it’s own source of cheap energy. Again, like it or not it’s currently the cheapest and most efficient way to generate economic prosperity and the high quality of life that comes with it.
Would you in the Ivory Tower of the West condemn them for repeating the mistakes that you made? After all, we have already seen the benefits. Should we tell them to magically come up with another energy source?
You STILL haven’t answered my question about what you would do. Let’s assume that you are Lord Emperor of the Earth and could order whatever you wanted by Imperial decree, what would you actually do? Rather than be down on my ideas which of course I encourage you to do (that’s how Science progresses) , what are yours?

As I said, if i was Lord Emperor would change the economic system. It is the only solution.

But as Slavoj Žižek says “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” – so there is no solution, it is insoluble.

As for the moral conundrum in Uganda, there is none. Nigeria is one of the largest oil producers in the world and most of the people live in abject misery. Oil production wherever it is just leads to more wealth in the Global North and immiserates most

You still haven’t answered my question. I’m not talking about economics, what would YOU do. Would you introduce massive subsidies for solar energy? Would you nationalise REE mines? Would you outlaw commercial oil drilling?

As Bill Maher said “Human behaviour is like a river. We are naturally greedy. Capitalism is letting that river flow freely, flooding everything and causing devastation at it’s most violent. Communism attempts to make the river go back uphill, it doesn’t work and violates basic human instinct. The best solution is to let the river flow, but put in locks and dams to contain and shape it”.
That’s not word for word, but it’s the basic gist.

Nigeria is horribly corrupt and has massive internal struggles with Boko Haram. Uganda is a bit more stable. If they had a source of cheap energy it would solve a lot of their social and economic woes.

i’ve been to Uganda many times. it will be the same as Nigeria. oil profits corrupt.

You would need to start with an escalating global tax on carbon to represent its true cost, at either end of the pipe. withdraw the one trillion annual subsidies to fossil fuel companies. massive government intervention in the economy to steer it towards human needs. that would ultimately result in the end of neoliberal global capitalism as we know it. of course, this could never happen so we will carry on fooling ourselves that we can overcome this problem with technology..the enlightenment spirit burns on

You could be right about Uganda, I don’t know either way. I know somebody working in Uganda and he said that the people are delighted to have an energy supply. I think big oil corrupts when it’s left unchecked. There’s no apology for oil subsidies, but these are mainly in the US. This is a country which tried to pass legislation that grants Monsanto legal immunity. That’s crony capitalism gone mad.
But again, I point to the example of Norway as a relatively poor nation tranformed into a prosperous, socialist country. They have the highest quality of life in the world. Again, utilizing oil doesn’t make you a careless capitalist like you portray. It can and has been harnessed for real good in the world.
That’s what having your own energy supply can give you.
I agree with carbon taxes. But it’s very punitive if you don’t offer an alternative. Battering Irish motorists and then providing a sub-standard transportation system is disingenuous. But I think petrol prices are about right, you have to offer alternative transport.
Again though, you’re offering a solution to economic inequality which I somewhat agree with.

But you still aren’t explaining where you will provide 474 exajoules on energy per annum. And rising. You still haven’t answered my question.

Sean, i have said in almost every one of my posts that the problem is insoluble

So you’re happy to throw your hands up and blame the economy?
Fair enough, at least you accept that green energy isn’t the answer.
I’m fundamentally an environmentalist and optimist at heart. There’s every reason to believe that fusion will be the primary source of energy before I die. I’m 22 now.
My Imperial edicts would go a long way to incentivise oil companies to invest in the real energy force of the future. The markets can’t solve every problem, but money can solve most. And they have the money. I go back to Bill Maher’s lock and dam analogy. You can’t make the river go up hill, but you can manipulate it.

yep, if our economic system doesn’t change then the problem is insoluble. technology cannot provide the solution without economic change as it is driving the problem. …the river doesn’t need to be manipulated, it needs to be redirected

I agree with you to some degree. My whole global tax on petroleum is a very big shift in economics. It would require an international tax which I don’t think has ever existed.
Either way, ITER or NIF will figure it out eventually. NIF have already produced net energy, they just need to streamline the process and make it more efficient. Granted, that’s a lot easier than it sounds but the point is that this is not science fiction and it can be solved technologicaly.
It’s funny actually, I was only reading a book a few weeks ago on the power war between Edison and Tesla. Edison was a capitalist who wanted to make a quick buck off his inventions, Tesla was a philanthropist and visionary who wanted to make electricity free. I think the men and women working on fusion are in the latter category.

Why should the Irish State get anything other than Corporation Tax. They are not producing oil or gas in Ireland

Exactly Des, too many people are quick to judge and immediately assume that there’s a giveaway when it comes to Irish oil and gas.
There IS no oil or gas, at least no conventional plays. Is it not quite telling that our own indigenous companies by and large explore in Africa? Why the hell would they pay royalties to the Irish state?

Capital gains tax… not corporation tax…. Corp tax is on trading profits.. CGT is on the gain on value of share price between purchase/incorporation and sale price

Does anyone bother to find out what an article is about before they comment on this site?