Energy pinch?

[PJ]

You will never make a politician. How many football pitches is that? ;-)

[Adrian C]

The resistance of these standing structures to the wind pushes against the revolution of the planet and everyones clocks lose a second or so of time. Allegedly.

[Andrew Gabriel]

We don't get to choose, nature does. We do have some opencast mining, but mostly our coal has to be deep mined.

The Wikipedia article "History of coal mining" says: "There are proposals to re-open several deep pits with Russian capital, owing to the soaring price of the conmmodity." This was added on 14 April 2008, but no reference is given.

[The Natural Philosopher]

,

It would be, if there was anywhere left in the UK with coal near the surface.

[Dave Liquorice]

Good, slimy toads the lot of 'em.

How big is a "football pitch"? They are all different, length is between 100 to 130 yards and width 50 to 100 yards. Though since 2008 the IFAB has set a pitch size of 105m x 68m (115 x 74 yds) for A internationals.

So a 1400 x 1400m area is 274 and 1/2 "standard" football pitches.

[Adam Aglionby]

Is the replacement for gasholders not pressurising it in the new plastic mains?

Cheers Adam

[Bruce]

Not true. We have huge reserves that could be much more cheaply extracted by opencast methods, in south Wales, Northumberland and Yorkshire.

Alas, successive governments have always taken note of public and NUM opposition to opencast mining - the latter because the NUM was not the union of choice for opencast workers.

[Dave]

No. It was down to one misguided man. Even other union leaders disagreed with what he was doing.

Dave

[js.b1]

Eh? We do have LNG storage, massive tanks insulated with polystyrene at the terminals.

That might actually be the bulk (50%+) of our storage in which case it is nearly a single point of failure to a Buncastle-II.

[Bruce]

I thought that most of the storage was in an underground cavern at Killingholme, on the Humber Estuary. But a little research has shown that this cavern stores LPG, not natural gas.

In 2007, the news agency Reuters published a survey of existing and proposed natural gas storage schemes - see link below.

would be very useful indeed if updated to 2010, but I couldn't find an update.

[Bruce]

Is that safe?

[dennis]

They didn't have to do what scargill told them to do. He may have provided the plan to destroy the coal industry but he didn't carry it out on his own.

[Dave]

And your point was?

Dave

[Dave]

Mmmmmm

Dave

[Dave]

If the government says yes, how can we argue any different. It isn't like we live in democracy any more :-((

Dave

[andrew]

No it's in the steel 1m mains which IIRC run at 500psi+-

AJH

[Adam Aglionby]

Guess as long as it dosen`t leak....

Unlikely to I guess section of 450mm yellow pipe they buried in front street was settled in pea gravel and then a foot of ready mix before tarmac on top, going to be a pain to get to again. Plastic pipe has expected life of 80 years apparently.

Gasometers replaced by kilometers of highly pressurised pipe below your feet so been told.

Cheers Adam

[F]

No, it's what happens when you flog off the contents of North Sea oil and gas fields just as fast as you can rather than leave them where they are for as long as possible.

Bit like Gordon (bless!) flogging off all the gold at the bottom of the market...

[Matty F]

We've got loads of coal here in New Zealand - more than we can use in thousands of years. Would you like some? P.S. what happened to Global Warming?

[Jules]

It's taking a rest while the journos have something else to be sensationalist about :-)