SJB

@RenewableUKCEO @DouglasCarswell You will never know until you try.

Am not ideologically opposed to it nor proposing a ban, but I don't think it will make the difference here for the reasons above. Also forgot to say the US also has poor internal pipeline capacity from West to East which also creates energy islands even within the US with cheaper fuel

"Fracking wouldn't change that". This is why Brits are getting poor. Here in Mississippi electricity costs a third it does in Britain and household incomes surged last year

@Steven_Swinford @MarketBlondes @MaxKendix So it's not worth working then?

Exclusive from @MaxKendix Rachel Reeves is expected to limit an energy bill bailout to people on benefits after warning that giving support to every household because of the Iran war would be irresponsible and unaffordable The Times has been told that the planned support will be directed instead at about six million people who claim benefits such as universal credit and pension credit While Reeves has asked about a potential “income threshold” to support lower-earning households, officials have said they are unlikely to be able to develop the system in time. Treasury sources emphasised that several options were being looked at but that no decisions had been taken Officials have identified several barriers, including the fact that HM Revenue & Customs records the income of individuals, while an energy bailout would have to focus on households. A project to link up the information started in January and was due to take more than a year Reeves will therefore have little choice but to give support to people claiming benefits, using the warm home discount, which reduces electricity bills for poorer households by £150, as the model for the scheme “The methods of targeting are imperfect,” one government source said. But another said there was “a lot of defeatism” about what systems could realistically be introduced in time. thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

@RebelHQ And then there's all the coal we live above!

@RebelHQ Correct! There's a bonanza down there!

If there's so little oil left to extract from the North Sea, why not extract it ? I think the truth is Miliband is scared they find oil. Not a single new UK rig in the North Sea, 49 Norwegian rigs tho! A lot of these fields may be inter-connected - Miliband is sabotaging UK interests out of Zealotry so Norway can get the oil, not us. Treachery - I'm begging to think Ed Miliband is the world's first living brain donor.

@jitsegroen Energy abundance is required. Gas, oil, coal, nuclear, renewables. Europe needs to do this today.

1. Gasvoorraad op 6.2%. 2. Straat van Hormuz gesloten. 3. Irak, Qatar, Koeweit en Bahrein verklaarden force majeure. 4. Grote productieverlagingen in Saudi-Arabië en de VAE. 5. Één van de grootste raffinaderijen van de VS in brand. 6. VS wenst uitruil LNG met handelsakkoord. 7. Noorwegen produceert op maximale capaciteit. 8. Nederlandse benzine, gas (!) en elektriciteit zijn zo ongeveer de duurste in de wereld. 9. We gooien nog altijd onze gasputten dicht. Tijd voor Den Haag dit serieus te nemen.

@jitsegroen A takeaway.

What do you buy if one is fearful of both today and tomorrow?

@MerrynSW @mattwridley Energy abundance is tha answer. Coal is a big part of that

The U.K. has a lot of coal. How long before everyone starts complaining about how that awful Mrs Thatcher closed down the mines...

@Sacha_Lord @RachelReevesMP That's easy. She would say: *We need to pay higher energy costs to save the world *You need to pay higher rates and taxes so we can pay more benefits. *You serve alcohol which is bad for your health so I don't care. *We have too many pubs and places where you can have fun.

Dear Chancellor. You told me you were The Chancellor of Business and Growth. What would you say to Becky, who has had to close her pub after 20 years, due to soaring costs @RachelReevesMP.

@JChimirie66677 @brexitblog_info It should be illegal to make your people poorer.

Criminally Negligent. Andrew Neil's Words. Britain's Reality. Andrew Neil does not use language carelessly. Writing in the Daily Mail this morning, he describes Britain as stuck in an energy emergency with an oil and gas policy bordering on the criminally negligent, delivered by a bunch of clueless inadequates at the tiller. He is not reaching for effect. He is delivering a verdict. And the evidence he marshals is unanswerable. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for the first time in history. Oil is heading toward two hundred dollars a barrel. Britain is facing the worst energy crisis since the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The International Energy Agency has described the supply disruption as the largest in history. And the government overseeing this catastrophe has spent the past year doing everything in its power to ensure Britain would be maximally exposed when it arrived. It closed North Sea oil and gas production. It borrowed against already strained public finances. It built an economic strategy on OBR forecasts that the energy crisis has already rendered obsolete. And it put the man most responsible for Britain's energy vulnerability, Ed Miliband, in charge of the response. The Miliband contradiction has been hiding in plain sight for months. He stood at the despatch box during the energy debate last year and warned that Britain was a price taker not a price maker in international fossil fuel markets, leaving it exposed to their volatility. He was right. He was also the man who ensured that exposure would be as severe as possible by closing down the domestic production that could have cushioned the blow. The North Sea fields that could have been producing. The coal beds that remain untouched. The nuclear capacity that was decommissioned in pursuit of net zero targets that now look like a luxury policy designed for a world that no longer exists. Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences. The fiscal headroom she has been defending against every request for defence spending, every demand from the Treasury and every warning from military chiefs, is being wiped out not by defence costs alone but by the energy price shock her own government's choices made inevitable. Her foundations, as Neil puts it, are built on quicksand. The borrowing costs are rising at the fastest pace since the Liz Truss mini-budget. Foreign creditors are watching. The bond markets are watching. And the Chancellor is discovering that the numbers she has been citing as proof of fiscal responsibility were always dependent on a stable world that this government's foreign policy paralysis helped to destabilise. Neil makes one observation that connects the economic catastrophe to the political one with surgical precision. A stronger Prime Minister would have fired Miliband. He is right. The man who led the Cabinet revolt against supporting America, who blocked the use of Diego Garcia, who has spent a year dismantling Britain's energy independence and who stood at the despatch box admitting British households would pay the price, is still in his post. Still in the Cabinet. Still in the room. The reason Starmer has not fired him is the same reason he needed a drone on his own runway before he would act, the same reason he consulted his team on minesweepers and the same reason Britain is now a diminished, exposed and strategically paralysed country being described in its own press as a nation of clueless inadequates. He cannot afford to. The coalition that put him in power will not allow it. And so the inadequates remain at the tiller while Britain heads for the rocks. "Miliband diagnosed the disease and administered the poison. [...]. Rachel Reeves now faces the consequences."

@badger617873 @EdConwaySky Energy abundance. Exploit all forms of energy. Let the lowest cost (ex subsidy) win.

@RightWingSingh @EdConwaySky I mean the only real way we can develop energy independence is through renewables. The North Sea is too mature to be able to sustain our energy needs long-term, and clips like this outline the perils of reliance on global energy supply chains for things like oil, LNG etc.

📽️ There have been many scary, unnerving days in this latest Gulf war. But the past 24 hours was particularly bad. Why? Because both sides are now causing lasting damage to the world economy's life support system. Our latest primer on the econ consequences of this war👇

@faisalislam @NeilDotObrien This labour government will collapse by autumn on current trajectory. I work with petrochemicals, Joe Bloggs just doesn't know what's around the corner in the current circumstances.

BLIMEY. After disappointing borrowing numbers and the Bank of England’s hawkish tilt yesterday 10 year gilt yields reached highest levels since 2008 this morning above 4.9%… and possibly heading for 5%. This is rather delicate. The market judges the UK to be energy inflation prone, and somewhat political uncertainty prone too. UK political economy is sending messages right now… eg will the state always step in, in every circumstance now to stop energy bills rising for everyone, even in a generalised energy shock? See the Cornwall Energy projection of a possible £300 annual increase in energy cap typical bills. The IEA is about to advise the world on potential demand management solutions to help (of the sort Germany effected in 2022, which were deemed politically impossible in the UK). Across UK politics can there be reasoned conversations about these things? If the Gulf crisis continues all this will come to ahead in May, when the new energy price cap is set, in the middle of the aftermath of the May local elections, at a time when whispers emerge from leadership rivals of a looser relationship with fiscal prudence. As it happens, my sense is that the Treasury is firmly planning for a far more targeted offering for any support, IF needed, using data that was not available in 2022. The internal view is that many billions of pounds of Liz Truss’ universal £42 billion energy price guarantee scheme were wasted on rich households and on heating the air outside our badly insulated homes too. On top of that the market reaction to the Bank of England’s change of direction was somewhat overdone, as the Governor’s interview by me confirmed, as he told the MPC at the meeting, raising interest rates in the UK is not going to unblock the Strait of Hormuz… that said, some city economists are now saying we could get a rate rise next month, and markets imply three this year. Let’s see. These things could all change with one Truth Social post. There is some time here. We are less than a third of the way through the observation window on energy bills. Whatever the increase on bills summer is responsible for eg 7% of domestic gas consumption… so the immediate impact over summer would be around £10 a month. But there is an issue brewing at the crossover of political and geoeconomic uncertainty for the Autumn, and May is a key staging post. I can see why they keep saying they want a deescalation, both in the Gulf, and in gilts.

@KobeissiLetter They should have put two pipelines side by side!

Saudi Arabia is ramping up oil exports amid the Strait of Hormuz closure: Crude oil shipments from Yanbu, a port on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast, are up to 4.19 million barrels per day. This marks a +185% increase from the ~1.47 million barrels per day that moved through the port in February, before the Iran War. The surge is being powered by a 746-mile pipeline rerouting crude from the eastern oil fields to Yanbu, bypassing the blocked Strait of Hormuz entirely. Shipments have also more than doubled since January’s 1.29 million barrels per day. As a result, Saudi Arabia has already recovered more than half of its pre-war export capacity of ~7 million barrels per day. Furthermore, at least 32 large oil tankers are waiting near Yanbu to load, with more still heading to the port. Saudi Arabia is aggressively looking to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

@MarcherReborn I work/do business in petrochemicals. Talking to their reps, this is going to be much worse than previous spikes.

Fertiliser prices (historically 20-25% crop costs) have now doubled for farmers Diesel has doubled, while machinery and fuel costs were also historically 20-25% of crop costs. Imagine the cost of ALL food products in the next few months??

@jeremybear123 @ret_ward @vivamjm Yes, and they get taxed on their profits.

@ret_ward @vivamjm Compare this to Norway, which has a state-owned oil company and has the flexibility to charge anything it wishes.

This is wrong. There is a European international market on which gas from around the world is sold to the U.K. and other countries. North Sea gas is sold at this market price, not at a discount to British consumers.

@Frencheconomics @mr_james_c Won't happen until we get a truly business focused government. And I don't think I've seen one in my lifetime, so not getting my hopes up!

This is the right ambition from the Chancellor. Will only be realised by taking some difficult decisions to end the rationing of energy, land, and capital. The current reluctance to permit energy generation of all forms, and reluctance to use the existing tax system to incentivise UK capital deployment suggests the ambition is not matched by the policy levers.

@ret_ward Why do China and USA have lower electricity costs that us Bob?

Here we go again. Energy consumers need taxpayers’ support again to protect them from skyrocketing prices of oil and gas from the North Sea and overseas. And still the anti-net-zero lobby pretend that North Sea oil and gas protects the U.K. from high prices.

@rorysutherland There's a simpler question that needs to be answered. Why are USA and China electricity costs so much cheaper than the UK? It should be an in-depth on the @bbc Joe Bloggs should know the answer.

Help me out here, economists. Why is it okay to burn Norwegian gas but not British gas? It's a bit like saying it's okay to be a drug addict as long as you don't grow your own.

@ret_ward @Conservatives Please can you answer: why is Chinese and American costs so much lower than the UK? If you can't answer that, you should not be anywhere near the LSE.

The @Conservatives do not have a coherent strategy for sustainable, affordable and secure energy. North Sea oil and gas does not offer any of these.

@ret_ward Why do USA and China have lower electricity costs than us? I'm an LSE alma mater and I'll take it up with them why you can't answer that simple question.

Let’s be clear that Jackdaw and Rosebank would only make a very small difference to U.K. oil and gas production and no difference to international prices. At peak, Rosebank would produce the equivalent of less than 2% of current U.K. gas production.