Panic buying

[rockershovel]

I remember the Dash For Gas, worked on it at times. It's important to understand that governments don't dither, rather they fail to act because they have no competence or vision, and because they have priorities which the electorate don't actually care about very much (particularly, the survival of whichever clique has currently seized the levers of office). When confronted with an obvious, immediate problem (such as the actual consequences of shutting the coal industry very quickly, for ideological reasons, rather than allowing its inherent decline to proceed naturally) then they can act very quickly, especially in a case like that where most of the necessary groundwork had been done by those responsible (ie, the gas suppliers and power station operators). I'm actually fairly sanguine about the current COP brouhaha. Look at most of the other countries and you can see varying degrees of recognition of quite how utterly unworkable it all is. I also strongly suspect that we are heading into another 1970s-style energy price shock, and have been for some time, probably combined with another 1970s jolly, a strong dose of inflation to unwind the chronic debt entrenched in the system. If anyone knew how to resolve this any other way it would surely have been done, sometime since 2008? 

[hayfield]

13 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

It was the press that caused or at least contributed with the panic by their headlines which I posted here a few days ago.

 

Phil

 

I think the press whilst being partly to blame, it's far less important these days, firstly the Media (TV) reporting outside one of the "few" petrol stations which had no fuel, then magnified by social media. Whilst if the TV companies at the start broadcast from a station(s) without queues and having petrol, it may have lessened the effect. The real villains are the motorists

 

In some petrol stations as E5 was being rundown to be replaced by E3 stocks were lower than normal, thus less able to cope with a sudden rush. Still with many (not me) having full tanks the situation is easing

 

Coming back from a funeral yesterday close to Battle on the A21 one petrol station had unleaded at £1.45 a litre, its a great shame that the stations taking advantage like this cannot be fined, I topped up the day before at £1.34

[hayfield]

15 hours ago, Ron Ron Ron said:

 

It's not us that's relying on Russia.

45 - 50% of the UK's gas supply comes from our own N. Sea gas fields.

Most of the rest comes from Norway, with the balance coming from Belgium, the Netherlands and from imported LNG.

A small amount is said to come from Russia, but I'm not sure if that's via the Belgian pipeline or from LNG?

 

 

 

Its not where we get if from, but the effect of withholding output which increases the price to everyone, as far as our own supplies, its supplied to us at wholesale prices irrespective of where it comes, however it is traded on forward pricing in most cases by the big boys

[rockershovel]

19 minutes ago, hayfield said:

 

Its not where we get if from, but the effect of withholding output which increases the price to everyone, as far as our own supplies, its supplied to us at wholesale prices irrespective of where it comes, however it is traded on forward pricing in most cases by the big boys

Quite so. Energy prices fluctuate, shock horror, who knew? HIGNFY had a caricature of a Russian bear turning off a gas pipeline in its opening credit montage, at one time. When I worked on Nord Stream 1 in 2010-11, there were project t-shirts showing something similar. The Ceyhan-Tbilisi pipeline has the primary function of bringing Azeri gas to Europe without crossing territory controlled by Russia. The present "energy companies" collapsing are only speculative vehicles buying contracts forward; they will fail and be replaced, with nothing lost. 

Edited October 9, 2021 by rockershovel

[APOLLO]

Look again at the real time data. Right now a huge % of the UKs gas is being landed at Easington, and is coming direct from Norway's North Sea fields via the direct Langeled pipeline. Scroll down to the bar graphs.

 

https://mip-prd-web.azurewebsites.net/InstantaneousView/Index

 

That is in itself one hell of a risk. If that one pipeline goes down we are FUBAR as we have very little storage Note also Norway puts money received (from you and me) in it's countries sovereign wealth fund.

Isle of Grain LNG is currently zero, Milford Haven supplying a bit (from storage off a recent shipment). Interestingly gas from St Fergus Scotland is a shadow of its former self - but still significant.

 

No wonder they are demonising gas - it's not about green anymore, that is just a scapegoat. The UK North Sea is way past peak, declining fast, AND THEY KNOW IT.

 

Brit15

 

 

[rockershovel]

7 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

Look again at the real time data. Right now a huge % of the UKs gas is being landed at Easington, and is coming direct from Norway's North Sea fields via the direct Langeled pipeline. Scroll down to the bar graphs.

 

https://mip-prd-web.azurewebsites.net/InstantaneousView/Index

 

That is in itself one hell of a risk. If that one pipeline goes down we are FUBAR as we have very little storage Note also Norway puts money received (from you and me) in it's countries sovereign wealth fund.

Isle of Grain LNG is currently zero, Milford Haven supplying a bit (from storage off a recent shipment). Interestingly gas from St Fergus Scotland is a shadow of its former self - but still significant.

 

No wonder they are demonising gas - it's not about green anymore, that is just a scapegoat. The UK North Sea is way past peak, declining fast, AND THEY KNOW IT.

 

Brit15

 

 

Well, yes. You can see that clearly over time. No oil or gas field lasts forever. I worked at Easington in 2005, on the Langeled landfall and the construction of a small terminal hub adjacent to the Centrica terminal (not the big terminal constructed by Amec at the same time). There is, as you say, no storage capacity there since the Rough field storage was abandoned.

Edited October 9, 2021 by rockershovel

[rockershovel]

It hadn't occurred to me that the green madness was a cover for gas supply decline, but I take your point. That would also imply that the currently, highly unfavourable contracts for power from Hinkley were signed in the expectation of a price jump by the time they came on line? 

[APOLLO]

Was the Rough gas storage field abandoned due to geological faults ?  A major blow to lose that for sure.

 

Storage (or lack thereof) is now a major problem for the UK. As a gas engineering apprentice with "The North Western Gas Board" back around 1970 we went for a tour of the then brand new LNG storage facility at Partington near Manchester. A fantastic example of British engineering. It had a design life of 25 years, ran for quite a while longer,  but needed to be replaced a few years ago and was decommissioned and scrapped by its new operator, Centrica (British Gas) - cost was the reason and yet again accountants who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing held sway. The site is now housing sealing the fate of building a replacement facility there (which had all the necessary pipelines etc). So short sighted is the UK these days.

 

This is interesting re Partington LNG

 

http://www.oldflames.org.uk/Partington.pdf

 

Other LNG sites have also suffered the same fate, Avonmouth, Dyvenor Arms (Wales) and Glenmavis (Scotland).

 

This is interesting re Avonmouth - converted to LPG, China owned - nuff said. Chinese are not daft.

 

https://www.offshore-energy.biz/tge-scores-avonmouth-lng-conversion-job/

 

I am unsure about any remaining LNG storage in the UK apart from Isle of Grain and Milford Haven, which just store ships cargoes, regassifies and inject into the national gas transmission system.

 

A bit of storage has come onstream over the last few years, Cheshire salt cavity storage etc, but these just store gas under pressure and have nowhere near the capacity as LNG storage. Partington could supply the whole of the North West for a few days in mid winter.

 

Lets see what we all cop for at COP26 !!!!

 

Brit15

[Titan]

1 hour ago, rockershovel said:

It hadn't occurred to me that the green madness was a cover for gas supply decline, but I take your point. 

 

I have often wondered.  Natural gas is the most environmentally friendly hydro-carbon there is.  It has less carbon and more hydrogen in it than anything else you can burn, meaning the result of burning it is mostly water - you get 2xH2O and 1 x CO2 for every molecule burnt - it is why gas boiler exhausts are so "steamy" in cold weather. 

[phil_sutters]

Our town has begun to sprout signs along this theme -- the cobbler and key cutter's shop has a placard saying ' Key shortage - panic buy now!' and the wet fish shop has one which might be more likely at some point 'Fish shortage - panic buy now!' My son says he has seen more but he didn't specify where and what they were advertising. Perhaps this is a new craze that is already around, but it is the first instances I have seen.

Thinking about it, maybe there will be a key shortage, if the steel works shut down through fuel cost inflation and containers of steel from China take longer to arrive.

[APOLLO]

Shortage of oxygen soon - Breathe deeper and faster NOW !!!!!!

 

Brit15

[PhilJ W]

32 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

Shortage of oxygen soon - Breathe deeper and faster NOW !!!!!!

 

Brit15

That will sort itself out when the anti-vaxxers/covid-deniers start breathing deeply. They will contract covid and leave plenty of oxygen for the rest of us.

[rockershovel]

1 hour ago, phil_sutters said:

the wet fish shop has one which might be more likely at some point 'Fish shortage - panic buy now!' 

Is it in French?

[Steamport Southport]

Fish shortages used to happen all the time and was dependant on the weather.

 

The "Frying Tonight" signs they used to have outside the chippy meant they had fish. Very few chippies would have had fridges or freezers even in the 1980s. Remember the warm cans of Coke? 

[boxbrownie]

6 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

Fish shortages used to happen all the time and was dependant on the weather.

 

The "Frying Tonight" signs they used to have outside the chippy meant they had fish. Very few chippies would have had fridges or freezers even in the 1980s. Remember the warm cans of Coke? 

We have a little fish and chippy down here that just does fish and chips, and when asked what fish they have the answer is always “what we caught this morning” 

[Michael Hodgson]

2 hours ago, phil_sutters said:

Our town has begun to sprout signs along this theme -- the cobbler and key cutter's shop has a placard saying ' Key shortage - panic buy now!' and the wet fish shop has one which might be more likely at some point 'Fish shortage - panic buy now!'

When I ordered my haddock & chips yesterday, the proprietor told me me it would be my last haddock for a while.  He said he can't order them (other than smaller examples that weren't suitable) because the fishing fleet has already used the current quota.  When asked why that was, he said it was the Americans - they usually buy their fish from China but aren't doing so because of the political situation and had bought our instead.

 

Obviously I can't panic buy deep fried fish to hoard. 

[Steamport Southport]

41 minutes ago, boxbrownie said:

We have a little fish and chippy down here that just does fish and chips, and when asked what fish they have the answer is always “what we caught this morning” 

 

That will be a nice fresh fish "restaurant" selling a variety of quality fish and sea food.

 

Up here it would be what the local supplier got cheap from the fish market. They would just drop off a few at each chippy on his round.

 

Probably why no one goes to traditional chippies up here any more. Everyone has bad memories of the awful takeaway food from the 1970s and '80s.  

[Gareth Collier]

Although the finger of blame for panic buying can be pointed in many directions sometimes I just have to sigh when watching the BBC news. At breakfast they were talking to another expert about how the price of gas was impacting industry which will effect supply and he gave some examples; steel so they showed molten steel being poured, paper mills so they showed toilet rolls........ Hopefully all the hoarders are still fully stocked from the last frenzy!

[JohnDMJ]

For what it's worth (and probably, given previous posts) a waste of posting:

 

Jim Titheridge

17 September at 06:17  ·

said:

What HE said!

Edited October 10, 2021 by JohnDMJ

[woodenhead]

20 minutes ago, Gareth Collier said:

Although the finger of blame for panic buying can be pointed in many directions sometimes I just have to sigh when watching the BBC news. At breakfast they were talking to another expert about how the price of gas was impacting industry which will effect supply and he gave some examples; steel so they showed molten steel being poured, paper mills so they showed toilet rolls........ Hopefully all the hoarders are still fully stocked from the last frenzy!

MSM was reporting on the panic buying across the UK, kept showing people with piles of toilet rolls coming out of costco in Manchester.

 

Is it also possible MSM, that some people use Costco for business supplies and need a lot of toilet rolls and water.  I went to my local supermarket expecting the worst, but I did my normal weekly shop, nothing I couldn't get and when I popped over to Aldi for the rest of the shop I was faced with piles of fresh produce on a Saturday afternoon.  Plenty of tissues, toilet roll and kitchen roll to be seen.

 

The MSM is in it's absolute element at the moment reporting:

• Food shortages
• Panic buying
• Gas prices
• Petrol prices
• Wind - or lack of it impacting power generation across the world
• Migrant issues
• Chinese going to war

It's headlines are driving behaviours because it's web site is so popular, using celeb gossip to draw people in then generally sh*tting them up about the state of the world around them.

[ejstubbs]

22 hours ago, boxbrownie said:

Er…Martin Lewis has probably the most followed price comparison website

 

Not whether it is actually the most followed (does MoneySavingExpert.com publish details about the number of users it has?) but it notably does not indulge in annoying adverts mostly seeming to involve the inexplicable use of animated or CGI animals (comparethemarket.com and MoneySuperMarket.com, I'm looking at you).  And yes, I know that MSE has been a subsidiary of MSM since 2012 but the MSE brand is not mentioned anywhere in the MSM adverts (I am often surprised at apparently well-informed people who've never heard of MSE).

[Jol Wilkinson]

21 minutes ago, JohnDMJ said:

For what it's worth (and probably, given previous posts) a waste of posting:

 

Jim Titheridge

17 September at 06:17  ·

So, you are running out of food on the shelves, fuel in the garages, you can’t buy things you need, because the shops can’t get their supplies.

Why is that?

A shortage of goods? No

A shortage of money? No

A shortage of drivers to deliver the goods? Well, sort of.

There isn’t actually a shortage of drivers, what we have, is a shortage of people who can drive, that are willing to drive any more. You might wonder why that is. I can’t answer for all drivers, but I can give you the reason I no longer drive. Driving was something I always yearned to do as a young boy, and as soon as I could, I managed to get my driving licence, I even joined the army to get my HGV licence faster, I held my licence at the age of 17. It was all I ever wanted to do, drive trucks, I had that vision of being a knight of the roads, bringing the goods to everyone, providing a service everyone needed. What I didn’t take into account was the absolute abuse my profession would get over the years.

I have seen a massive decline in the respect this trade has, first, it was the erosion of truck parking and transport café’s, then it was the massive increase in restricting where I could stop, timed weight limits in just about every city and town, but not all the time, you can get there to do your delivery, but you can’t stay there, nobody wants an empty truck, nobody wants you there once they have what they did want.

Compare France to the UK. I can park in nearly every town or village, they have marked truck parking bays, and somewhere nearby, will be a small routier, where I can get a meal and a shower, the locals respect me, and have no problems with me or my truck being there for the night.

Go out onto the motorway services, and I can park for no cost, go into the service area, and get a shower for a minimal cost, and have freshly cooked food, I even get to jump the queues, because others know that my time is limited, and respect I am there because it is my job. Add to that, I even get a 20% discount of all I purchase. Compare that to the UK £25-£40 just to park overnight, dirty showers, and expensive, dried (under heat lamps) food that is overpriced, and I have no choice but to park there, because you don’t want me in your towns and cities.

Ask yourself how you would feel, if doing your job actually cost you money at the end of the day, just so you could rest.

But that isn’t the half of it. Not only have we been rejected from our towns and cities, but we have also suffered massive pay cuts, because of the influx of foreign drivers willing to work for a wage that is high where they come from, companies eagerly recruited from the eastern bloc, who can blame them, why pay good money when you can get cheap labour, and a never ending supply of it as well. Never mind that their own countries would suffer from a shortage themselves, that was never our problem, they could always get people from further afield if they needed drivers.

We were once seen as knights of the road, now we are seen as the lepers of society. Why would anyone want to go back to that?

If you are worried about not getting supplies on your supermarket shelves, ask your local council just how well they cater for trucks in your district.

I know Canterbury has the grand total of zero truck parking facilities, but does have a lot of restrictions, making it difficult for trucks to stop anywhere.

Do you want me to go back to driving trucks? Give me a good reason to do so. Give anyone a good reason to take it up as a profession.

Perhaps once you work out why you can’t, you will understand why your shelves are not as full as they could be.

I tried it for over 30 years, but will never go back, you just couldn't pay me enough.

Thank you to all those people who have shared this post. I never expected such a massive response, but am glad that this message is getting out there. I really hope that some people who are in a position to change just how bad it is for some drivers, can influence the powers that be to make changes for the better. Perhaps some city and town councillors have seen this, and are willing to bring up these issues at their council meetings. It surely cannot be too much to ask of a town/city to provide facilities for those who are doing so much to make sure their economies run and their shops and businesses are stocked with supplies. I never wanted any luxuries, just somewhere safe to park, and some basic ablutions that are maintained to a reasonable standard. I spent my nights away from my home and family for you, how much is it to ask that you at least give me access to some basic services.

There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of licence holders just like me, who will no longer tolerate the conditions. So the ball is firmly in the court of the councils to solve this problem.

WOW. 100,000 shares in a week.

I have been humbled by the number of people who have never been involved in transport expressing concern about just how badly truck drivers are treated. I don't think the general public have really ever given it a thought, but I have been pleased to see so many express their displeasure about how we have to live while just providing a service for all of them.

I have heard from a number of news outlets since posting this, but not a single councillor or politician has contacted me.

Not that I think anything will change. Trucks always have been an inconvenience for local governments, and the cost of catering for them is left to someone else, anyone else, yet there is no someone else out there.

I avoided another aspect of the job, that makes it bad even for those who try to get home every night.

We have many transport hubs where goods are collected and then distributed onwards to supermarkets and large retailers. Anyone who has delivered to any of these regional distribution centres will tell you the same story. You arrive there at a fixed time slot (don't be late or you will face serious delays), and you will be told where to park and then where to take your paper work, after that, you will be instructed to back onto a bay at some point, to be unloaded. it might take just 20 minutes to unload a truck, but you can bet that the time spent in this RDC will be much longer, waiting for a bay to tip, waiting for them to actually unload you, and then what is usually the longest wait. Waiting for your paper work, so you can carry on to the next job. It is no wonder there is a shortage of trucks on the roads, 1/2 of them are stuck inside these soulless places waiting for a piece of paper.!

The comparison with French facilities and attitudes to truck drivers is very informative. It isn't just about HGV facilities however, the French have a much more "socially aware" attitude to many things .

 

The UK population is much more "me, me, me", wanting more for less all the time while disparaging those who provide the services and products which provide what they want so badly.

 

However, commercial vehicle drivers from white van man to HGV pilots haven't done much to enhance their image in recent rears. HGVs tailgating cars, taking miles to overtake another truck, etc.etc. Delivery vans being driven without any respect for other road users, double parking while making deliveries and causing delays to other road users, etc.

 

It doesn't help that many motorists don't understand the need to keep an HGV rolling at the highest possible speed to keep delivery times down, etc., nor that internet shopping deliveries have increased dramatically, so the public could be blamed for exacerbating the problem. It'll take an injection of common sense to fix that, but a suitable vaccine has yet to be developed.

[APOLLO]

16 minutes ago, Jol Wilkinson said:

the public could be blamed for exacerbating the problem. It'll take an injection of common sense to fix that, but a suitable vaccine has yet to be developed.

 

We should eat more fish - Brain food !!!!!!!!!!

 

Remember the good old days oin the Great Central - Daily fish train from Grimsby, sometimes Britannia hauled.

 

 

Fish trains  - now history.

 

Brit15

[rockershovel]

Good luck with selling anything to the English, on the basis that the French do it, eat it or use it as a public urinal. 

[rockershovel]

2 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

Fish shortages used to happen all the time and was dependant on the weather.

 

The "Frying Tonight" signs they used to have outside the chippy meant they had fish. Very few chippies would have had fridges or freezers even in the 1980s. Remember the warm cans of Coke? 

Ambient-temperature coca-cola is still common in the ME. Absolutely foul.