Month: August 2023

Calling on Ironside Farrar to cut ties with the Aberdeen ETZ

Yesterday (9th August) campaigners from Climate Camp, This is Rigged and Scot.E3 were outside the office of Environmental Consultants Ironside Farrar in Edinburgh. Ironside Farrar have been commissioned to produce a masterplan as part of the rezoning of St Fitticks Park in Torry into an industrial Energy Transition Zone (ETZ). The protest is part of an ongoing campaign to persuade the workers at Ironside Farrar to direct their skills towards projects that contribute to a socially just transition. Mike Downham spoke at the protest. There will be another protest at the Ironside Farrar office next Wednesday 16th August from 8.30am.

St Fitticks campaigners at the Scottish Parliament earlier this year

SPEECH OUTSIDE IRONSIDE FARRAR OFFICE 9TH AUGUST 2023

Welcome – and thanks for joining us this morning.I thought I would tell you why we’re here. This is the head office of Environmental Consultants Ironside Farrar – though the door doesn’t say that. We’re here to call on the employees of Ironside Farrar to boycott all further work for ETZ, the company oil tycoon Ian Wood set up to industrialise a large part of St. Fittick’s Park in Torry as an “Energy Transition Zone”. He then commissioned Ironside Farrar to get Planning Permission.

Torry is a suburb of Aberdeen, though it used to be a fishing and boat-building village just across the Dee from Aberdeen City. Then with the discovery of North Sea oil and gas in the 70s most of the village was bulldozed to make space for a Shell oil and gas terminal.

Since then Torry has been dumped time after time with the industrial development that other parts of Aberdeen don’t want – a landfill site, an industrial harbour where the Park used to come down to the beach at Niggs Bay, an incinerator close to the school, and now this threat to the Park which the Torry community cherish as their last green space. The threat to their community is huge. Ian Wood’s money persuaded Aberdeen City Council, who had previously invested much public money in improving the Park, to do a U-turn and re-zone it for industrial development. And Ian Wood’s money persuaded the Scottish Government not to intervene.

Ian Wood says the ETZ will contribute massively to bringing down carbon emissions, but much of the vague talk about what he wants to do is about developing Carbon Capture and Hydrogen technologies both of which are scams. This is in fact an attempt at a land-grab to justify continuing to extract oil and gas from the North Sea and fill the pockets of share-holders and directors in the Oil and Gas Industry.

Torry is about as disadvantaged a community as it gets, with appalling health statistics, appalling air quality and few employment opportunities. Despite this they are rising up and fighting for their lives against this plan to industrialise their Park.

Saving St. Fittick’s Park is exceptionally important, for three reasons:

  1. If it’s industrialised it will represent a huge win for the Oil and Gas Industry and delay phasing out oil and gas extraction from the North Sea
  2. It will destroy the significant biodiversity which has developed in the Park as a result of a lot of hard work and fundraising by the Torry community over the past 20 years.
  3. And it will further sicken and impoverish the people who live in Torry. It’s this last which is arguably the most important of the three. Because if we don’t protect and prioritise the poorer communities up the north east coast of Scotland we’re done for. It’s these communities who can force significant change.

Two big things have happened in the six weeks since we started this campaign, which make Saving St. Fittick’s Park even more important.  Climate has broken down across the world at a speed which wasn’t anticipated. Southern Europe and North Africa are on fire, and unprecedented floods in central China have displaced 100,000 people. The second thing is that the Westminster Government has decided to grant at least 100 new drilling licences in the North Sea. That these things can happen at the same time shows just how strong our governments are committed to fossil capital.

I’ll end by quoting a few things from the booklet The Declaration of Torry, a product of The Torry Peoples Assembly in May: on the back of this booklet they commit themselves to six actions:

  1. We will do everything to stop the land grab
  2. We will continue to use our Park and increase its already immeasurable value
  3. We demand the incinerator be decommissioned
  4. We will seek support to set up a Torry Retrofit Project to insulate our homes
  5. We insist on a just and fair energy transition
  6. We will strengthen collaboration within our community and with others in Scotland and beyond

 And inside the front cover of the booklet, most powerfully:

 THIS IS OUR LAND AND NO ONE ELSE’S

 THIS LAND BELONGS TO THOSE WHO CARE FOR IT

Just one thing to leave you with. The people arriving for work this morning are highly trained and have knowledge and skills which will be essential when we’ve made the transition to clean energy. They know about tipping points in global heating, and about the complex relationships which underpin biodiversity. Ever since we started this campaign, we’ve been respectful to these workers, seeing them as part of the solution, not part of the problem.

At the same time they must surely understand the enormity of what Ian Wood is planning in Torry. They have the power between them to Save St. Fittick’s Park, by boycotting further work for ETZ. Even if they aren’t in the team working for ETZ, they can bring Ironside Farrar to a standstill by collectively withdrawing their labour.

Sunak fiddles while Rhodes burns

Pete Cannell and Brian Parkin take a critical look at Sunak’s recent oil and gas announcement.

On Monday Rishi Sunak flew to Aberdeenshire by private jet to announce that at least one hundred new North Sea drilling licenses will be granted in the autumn.  A policy described by junior energy minister Alex Bowie as “maxing out our oil and gas reserves”.  At the same time Sunak gave the go ahead to the Acorn Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project to be based at St Fergus near Peterhead.  Acorn will be one of four CCS projects in the UK – the other three are in England.

St Fergus Gas Terminal © Ken Fitlike CC-BY-SA/2.0

At a time when fires rage across Europe, and North America and floods wreak havoc in China and elsewhere, the new oil and gas licenses have received widespread criticism from climate campaigners, climate scientists, the Scottish Government and even some Tory MPs.  Reactions to the CCS announcement are more mixed.  SNP politicians have welcomed the announcement.   Carbon Capture is prominent in the Scottish Government’s draft energy plans and Sunak argues that CCS will mean that the net zero by 2050 target is still in scope.  

In our view both strands of Monday’s announcement represent Sunak paying his dues to the big oil and gas companies.  In the rest of this article, we’ll explain why.  

For months the Tories have argued that the cost-of-living crisis is the result of a crisis of energy sovereignty caused by the war in Ukraine.  In fact, the price of gas had rocketed upwards before the war. There was no shortage of supply, since most of the gas used in the UK is piped from the North Sea.  Compared with the rest of Europe the UK is unusually reliant on gas for home heating and cooking.  There is a real problem here – the North Sea gas fields are nearing the end of their lifespan.  So given there is an overwhelming need to reduce carbon emissions the obvious answer is to start now, planning for the future by electrifying the domestic heating system and insulating homes alongside a planned phase out of the use of gas.  The Tories are doing none of this.  On paper they still say they want to replace natural gas by hydrogen.  But the weight of evidence that this would phenomenally expensive and a hugely inefficient use of electricity to generate the hydrogen means that they are rapidly backtracking.

So is Sunak’s plan to license more oil and gas fields going to keep people warm.  Not at all.  First the new fields contain more than 85% oil, not gas (see technical note below).  That oil would be exported on the world market.  Much of the gas is ‘sour’ – it has a high sulphur content – and is unsuitable for home heating.  So, we have the worst of all possible worlds – continuing use of fossil fuels at large scale when the climate science says that the use must stop and the likelihood of very high fuel bills and insecurity of supply.   Only big oil and their shareholders come well out of this – the rest of us and future generations pay the price.

A close look at Sunak’s plans for Carbon Capture and Storage is equally disturbing.  The technology proposed for CCS is untested at scale.  Even if the most optimistic targets for carbon sequestration are met, they represent a tiny fraction of the total carbon emissions from the North Sea.  At present the only source of carbon dioxide at St Fergus is the gas stabilising plant.  In the long-term Carbon Capture may be able to play a role in helping reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – but right now the priority must be to cut emissions rapidly.  The £20 billion allocated by Westminster to the 4 CCS projects could be spent on expanding the production of renewable energy, home insulation and developing the electricity grid.  

The parallels with the Cumbria Coalmine project are powerful.  There we have the Tories supporting the exploitation of a fossil fuel, coal, which is not wanted by the steel industry.  With the new licenses and CCS, we have a plan for energy security and net zero which delivers neither.  Quite simply both represent political statements by the Tory Government that affirm their unswerving commitment to fossil capital.

Technical note:

The proposed Acorn (St Fergus) (and other) CCS plants are designed to be emissions source dedicated- i.e. they are intended to sequestrate carbon from say, a power station or chemical plant flue stack- not the ‘general’ atmosphere, and as such they are demonstration installations.

Apart from the Peterhead sour gas power station, the other nearby CO2 source is the St Fergus gas terminal which adds about 3-4% carbon to the overall gas/carbon penalty.

Total North Sea reserve gas content is about 27% (73% oil). The new blocks have a much lower gas composition c.12%. 

The carbon contents of the different fuels (compared with coal) is:

Coal   97%

Oil       89%

Gas    35% max inc process penalty