UK Coal Share Discussion Threads

[jcpete5] 01/1/2012 09:15

This will bury UKC

[warrabish] 20/12/2011 11:58

Deal reached at Daw Mill ref the T&Cs, will have to see how it pans out for us at the sharp end.

[hvs] 10/12/2011 13:41

Its BANKRUPT, pure CITY play PUMP and then DUMP.

[apdi71] 10/12/2011 12:32

Hi Muckshifter, try "supercritical co2 tertiary recovery" as a search term, lots of relevant technical hits *. FWIW IMO CO2 is plant food, and warmer is better than cooler; however I also suspect that the various influences that drove climate in the past have continued and will continue into the future. Unless it turns an unsubsidised profit most of the green tech will disappear if the west's finances go badly awry. Geological carbon sequestration is a non starter, even the greens dont like it.

I read that the clever Germans have achieved greater savings in co2 than achieved by windmills etc here merely by building a new generation of coal stations that run at higher steam pressure and temperature and thus achieve higher carnot efficiencies.

My understanding is that the amount of coal taken from beneath low lying eastern England was limited to prevent the land falling so far as to risk flooding - I wonder how far shore based pits could chase seams under the north sea with modern deep mining technology?.

Incidentally, do you remember the acid rain scare of the 80s, that claimed sulphurous UK coal was killing Scandinavian lakes and forests (and was used to further beat up the industry Scargill helped wreck)?. Turns out it was not as open and shut as we were led to believe, the soil scientist commissioned to investigate the cause was sacked and blackballed for reaching the wrong conclusion in his reoprt to the epa:



*

[kalkanite] 09/12/2011 16:25

This share has been going down through a narrow range for a while now. I'm no chartist but seems that a break out (hopefully North) could be fairly soon. Hopefully todays rise could be a start.

Would be nice to know what is happening re the Daw Mill ultimatum, new hopefully soon of a deal struck with unions that all mparties will be happy with.

Regs

Kalkanite .... Not a chartist :-)

[muckshifter] 07/12/2011 10:24

Morning apdi71,
I haven't looked at shale gas extraction in detail yet, so my knowledge of any differences between the Petrobakken trial use of CO2 to drive more oil out of the multi fracced Bakken formation after the well output has suffered its main decline, and the possibility of achieving the same thing in shale gas formations, is limited at the moment.

The question you might address, with your science teachers head on, is would CO2 displace methane when both are present at depth?

I don't see the coal seam gas process as particularly different from extracting resources by fraccing. AIUI, the water removal for CSG extraction is not a universal case - some seams are dry, and some seams don't have enough naturally created fissures, so they perform better when fracced (all from distant fallible memory).

With apologies to UKC holders for the "nearly" off topic discussion. "Nearly", since it has long been my belief that without either a commercially viable use for CFPS CO2 emissions, or a cheap CCS method, coal fired generation will not survive this decade. The relevant point in the above discussion is, therefore, that gas fired power generation does not produce anything like the CO2 emissions of CFPower generation, which might mean that if something like my suggestion above turns out to be feasible, and if a multiple of the methane produced can be accommodated in terms of CO2, there might well be an on shore, relatively cheap and useful method of carbon capture and storage for at least some of the CFPS emissions. This could be a benefit to both the shale gas operator and the CFPS - ie cost/benefit sharing? Lot of "ifs" there though.
Regards.

[apdi71] 06/12/2011 22:49

Interesting thoughts Muckshifter. Your petrobank trade was one of the nicest timings of entry and exit I have seen reported in near real time. I believe that coal seam methane extraction and shale gas extraction are rather different processes, IIRC CBM production entails long horizontal drills and then de watering, with the natural cleats providing the methane drainage channels; shale gas requires a brittle rock that can be hydraulically fractured for drainage; generally (also IIRC) Shale extraction tends to be from greater depth as the pressure and gas volume is greater in a given amount of rock. Do some deep coal mines suffer from methane from shales as well as outgassing coal?. IGAS reported significant shale gas potential as well as CBM in their acreage ( but one always has to take 'potential' with a grain of salt, as long suffering Falcon shareholder's have discovered in Mako and elsewhere (Beetaloo- 'potentially bigger than Kuwait' (Bruner)). People kept mentioning tertiary oil recovery with CO2 /H2S sweeps when oil was last over 100USD a barrel, but I dont know if it is at all commonplace.

The present set of pols seem very negative on coal fired power and on shale gas; with conventional gas being in decline it is a good thing people wont need electricity when its dark and theres no wind (Not that they will be able to afford it if they do). ;-)

[muckshifter] 06/12/2011 06:56

Thanks for the technical input apdi71. Must admit, I find the shale gas companies interesting, basically because the quantities of recoverable gas they are talking about in these thick seams sound worthwhile.

Having been a long term follower of Petrobank / Petrobakken / Petrominerales gives me a bit of insight into fraccing etc. Petrobakken's recoverable "reserves" for each multi-fracced Bakken well have increased steadily each year as their technique has been modified. So if recoverable reserves are economic at the outset, the profitability of shale gas exploitation may well follow the same pattern, if objections to the fraccing can be overcome.

The other thing that strikes me about this, which unfortunately reinforces my opinion that UKC desperately need an economic value to be realised from the CFPS's CO2 discharge if they are to continue coal mining long term, is that these shale gas resources have the potential to be a "green" resource.

While researching Petrobank, probably 6 years ago, I'm fairly sure (but it's a long time to remember so just "fairly sure") that there had been considerable research by Alberta into the use of CO2, injected into coal seam gas wells to speed up methane release and thereby improve the commerciality of CSG. This had been technically successful, IIRC. Years later, Petrobakken reported on the experimental trial of CO2 injection into a Bakken oil well (about 18 months ago I think it was), which had an almost immediate and substantial beneficial effect on the rate of oil production and the reserves estimate for the well. Since then, unfortunately, Petrobakken have decided to continue the trials using natural gas, which they think will give a similar result but has the added benefit that it enables them to reinject their solution gas for eventual recovery, and costs them much less.

The other thing from memory is that coal seams (and presumably the same goes for shale) can absorb a volume of CO2 twice as large as the volume of methane removed. If this is correct, or even nearly correct, it could make the shale gas resources extremely "green". They could be recovered using wells designed to withstand CO2's corrosive effect on steel, used at an on site power station and the CO2 from the power station goes straight back down the hole to improve gas recovery.

Nice if it would work, but no help to UKC I'm afraid.
Regards.

[apdi71] 03/12/2011 12:40

Oxygen has an atomic mass of approximately 16, carbon of approximately 14, so take one carbon and add two oxygens and you have three grammes of CO2 going up the chimney for every gram of coal burned.... of course coal is not pure carbon, so this is a handwaving approximation. Also released from coal combustion is a far more potent infra red absorbing gas, the polar molecule oxygen dihydride.

From memory, the UK produced a vastly greater tonnage of CO2 a century ago (roughly a gigaton annually, compared to 600 or so million) than today, the CO2 output per person has plunged.

Is it time to invest in British coal?. Does the performance of companies such as crystalvox, torotrak and (to a lesser extent) pure wafer mean that the investing community thinks the gig is up for eco-tech companies?. The house builders share price falls preceded the housing market collapse, could smart investors be signaling that the state will ease up on its anti coal stance, its production and use for power?.

I've been out of UKC since they stopped paying the divi. Thinking out loud.. With so much apparently about to go wrong everywhere - banking and state insolvencies - where is one to invest one's limited savings/capital with the hope enabling someone to produce something useful profitably - and at a profit that is not dependent on the whims of politicians?.

Here is a US projection of generation costs- note that shale gas has crashed the price of gas in the US.


Europe (and the UK) also have big shale gas potential :


A critique of the PTB sponsored hatchet job on UK shale gas here:

[muckshifter] 03/12/2011 08:37

Morning warbaby43,
The 23 million tonne figure comes from distant memory - probably from a long conversation with the coal handling manager at Drax, when I was pricing some heap movements years ago. He incidentally was pessimistic about the future of Drax because at that time, IIRC, there were plans for new gas fired stations popping up everywhere and they do not have anything like the emissions of a CFPS to contend with.

The obvious answer to your query, straight off the top of my head - so by all means investigate it yourself, is that the carbon dioxide comes from the huge volume of air used to blast the coal dust into the furnaces when the combustion process changes the oxygen in it into CO2.
Regards.

[warbaby43] 02/12/2011 18:46

Muckshifter, I am intrigued by - "Drax emits something like 23 million tonnes of CO2/yr". Looking at stats for coal burn for 2010 I see that Drax burned 9.5 mt which was indeed far away the most of all coal stations with Cottam being next at 3.7mt. I am puzzled, though, as to how the CO2 tonnage can be two and half times greater than the weight of coal burned. Over to you.

[muckshifter] 02/12/2011 11:36

Looks like the big drop late in October was to do with union non acceptance of new working terms, as I suggested at the time.

Let's hope that sense prevails at Daw Mill in the end!

The trading update was encouraging in parts, to me, ie. it looks like we will get more than the £100m overall reduction in debt I suggested we should achieve this year, but dissapointing (up to the date of the update anyway) in that a lower proportion of the debt reduction than I expected is from coal operations, and we probably won't make the overall production target I expected (opencast perhaps 150K more, deep mines quite a bit less).

As previously stated, I'm convinced that carbon capture & storage will be a non starter in all but experimental terms, so I've spent some time looking into possible uses for the CO2 which is emitted from CF power stations, as I believe that without finding a use for the emitted CO2 CFP stations are doomed within the next few years.
Use in existing oil fields to boost recovery from near exhausted fields still looks marginal for all but coastal CF power stations near oilfields to me (Longannet and the other one near Edinburgh & perhaps the one in Kent spring to mind, but they are the furthest CFPSs from UKC mines and always have the easiest coal import alternatives). It also is the most difficult to assess, because there are too many questions / variables.
Use to produce oil/ oxygen / cattle feed using algae still looks the most promising, but the best I've seen (in places with much better sunlight than us) only uses 40 tonnes of CO2/acre/yr. It produces 6000 Gallons of fuel and produces 9000 gallons of fresh water from sea water, so in itself it is a viable process, but putting it into context Drax emits something like 23 million tonnes of CO2/yr, so even setting up such an operation covering their huge storage area for PFA would only make a tiny dent in their emissons.

There is also a process by which the CO2 is used to make cement, which is promising, but I've not yet seen enough to ascertain possible costs or CO2 useage.

One other use that vaguely sits in my mind from studying Petrobank in Canada years ago, was the use of CO2 to drive methane out of coal seams in coal seam gas projects. Although I'm not at all convinced that we have anything of any value in terms of coal gasification processes, it does occur to me that should Daw mill end up closing as a mine, the cost of following a seam with collection / delivery pipes from existing underground infrastructure in order to collect the methane from the whole area licensed to UKC, might well be a different story. DM has, after all, the thickest seam in UKC's inventory, and although it's thin in terms of this type of operation, having abundant CO2 from the nearby CFP stations, which they would probably pay to dispose of, might make all the difference in terms of speed of coal seam gas recovery thereby potentially making it viable, as it is normally such a slow process that it would be unlikely to be viable.

There are a few slightly ominous things I noticed recently, but I won't bore you with them.
Regards.

[jacks13] 30/11/2011 19:07

Found her cv a bit alarming.

'.... where she successfully played a leading role in its operational and financial re-structuring, and wind-down.'

[loafofbread] 30/11/2011 13:18

Any chance that's a 50k buy by the new NED?

[loafofbread] 18/11/2011 08:46

Looks like a good statement.

Shame about the share price reaction.

[ivancampo] 18/11/2011 08:32

Would be surprised if some of the new management team don't start buying at this price.....

[kalkanite] 18/11/2011 07:28

Also new senior appointments made.

" In September we agreed significant changes to the final salary pension schemes with the Trade Unions and Trustees. Current service cost of the two schemes will be reduced by 50% and the Trustees have agreed that future accrual will be reviewed each year in line with affordability. This has enabled UK Coal to agree markedly increased levels of deficit contribution."

Whilst the production figures are lower than last year, I think this was already anticipated by the market due to the well known problems at Daw Mill with the new face (potential face gap) I think "long term" there are quite a few positives.

Would like to know what prices are being achieved for Q3. All IMO

K

[kalkanite] 18/11/2011 07:16

IMS statement finally arrived



Total production for Q3 1.8mt (2010 2.2mt)

New Daw mill face to start after old one completed, I thought these were to be mined together?

Union leaders agree new deals, but members narrowly vote against, now going to concilliation.

Debt reduced down further

[jacks13] 17/11/2011 18:11

Pencilled in for Tuesday now. Best not hold our collective breaths though!

[warbaby43] 17/11/2011 17:19

DJ bound to be right sooner or later Jacks, and it could very well be tomorrow. Definitely summat going on down there. As usual, I guess, its expect and brace for the worst and hope and pray for the best - one day, one day!

[jacks13] 09/11/2011 20:52

DJ UK Calendar now showing Wednesday 16th November for the IMS. Still provisional and subject to confirmation.
edit: Friday 18th is now indicated. Yet to be confirmed. I wish I'd never started this!

[jacks13] 07/11/2011 20:27

warbaby - It was in the DJ UK Calendar of Corporate Events - Month Ahead report dated 4th Nov.
The date is not for definite as it has apparently yet to be confirmed.
There was an IMS on 28 Oct last year as you intimate so if not this Wednesday it should be out soon.