PMQs is an opportunity for MPs to get into their local papers; so fair play to Andy McDonald (Lab, Middlesbrough) for bemoaning the demise of 'Five Quarter Energy', a company from his part of the world, whose goal he said "was the extraction of gas from coal deep under the North sea ... totally decarbonised"(!) To be fair, Cameron was poorly briefed and thought the question was about Carbon Capture & Storage, and he replied with a defence of the government's righteous decision to pull the plug on CCS. So McDonald was pissed off with the answer he got.
In short, they had no real idea what they wanted to do (except that it would be "totally decarbonised"), which is no way to raise money. But, according to McDonald, "the Government failed to provide a supporting statement to secure foreign direct investment".
Sorry Andy: even gullible foreign investors aren't taken in by pitches as scatter-gun as Five Quarter's. Price of oil = $36. Say no more.
Actually, right now there is no end of direct foreign investment prospecting going on in the UK. I can report that wherever there is a remotely plausible UK energy infrastructure project or asset in prospect, teams of Chinese and Korean would-be investors are crawling all over it. Whoever has been out selling the UK in the far east - Osborne, I suppose - has done a decent job. At the very least, a bunch of airlines, hotels, taxi drivers and *ahem* consultants are doing very nicely from it. Whether these orientals end up actually investing ... well, the jury is out. I see the French have just deferred their decision on Hinkley again - another project with Chinese interests.
Still, $36 puts the mockers on many an energy project. Today I heard an argument (from a sage and senior energy executive) that was new on me: the prospect of war in the Middle East speaks to an even lower oil price. Now traditional reasoning was that war would mean the price went up - disrupted supplies, etc. But yer man was arguing that wars cost money, so Saudi and Iran would need to keep pumping out ever more of the black gold.
Something similar is going on with some mining stocks - the worse the news from China gets and the closer we get to recession, the better RTZ seem to do in terms of share price.
You seem to be subtly implying that £=$. Not yet, old horse.
It's a curious point of view to suppose a proper full-on heavy metal kinetic shooting war would depress oil prices; I should have thought smashed pipelines, bombed refineries & ports and wellheads on fire would be more the order of the day. Remember the first gulf war?
You don't even need an expensive airforce to smash a pipeline. One mentalist Jhadi with a pipe bomb, boom-boom (pun fully and excruciatingly intended).
Dear God, where do they dig them up from - lav MPs that is, truly it is the 'Age of stupid' or 'the Age of brain dead = Socialists'.
What is glaringly obvious, whether it be; our nugget of a PM, his f***wit mate in the Treasury, the patsy senior girly minister of the DECC, National grid, energy utilities no one but no one can, would, could be ever able to make any sort of major decision.
In this age of stupid, where everyone is a manager but no one lays claim to be bosses, no one can be hung but then, nothing ever happens!
Thus, and the can is kicked further down the road.
What we also witness, is that, the green lobby has enormous pull, a small vociferous idiot claque of the green agitators who have no clue on anything least of all science and engineering get their way and Britain is being gradually forced out of business, no matter how the spot price of Brent crude meanders.
Yet.... FFS we are still wasting £billions on constructing less than useless archaic, ephemeral technology (bird mincers) which our forbears (mainly the Victorians) dismissed as soon as they found how to harness steam power.
Crude oil price /barrel going to $36, we should be cheering but we can't, it only brings into sharp focus the paucity of UK energy policy because it pushes into the future all prospects of building effective new build plant generation.
Stuffed are the turkeys - the consumer and industry goes off shore.
Desperation, it takes all the energy out of me.