Just as warned, the Melkøya project is on the verge of spiralling further out of financial control. The project, which has been given the trendy, embellished name ‘Snøhvit Future’, already has a grim financial and political history, and now the main shareholder, Equinor, reports that it is set to become even more expensive: The cost is rising by 6.5 billion kroner, to 26.5 billion. All so that politicians can boast to their EU counterparts about their self-imposed “climate targets”, which are of significance only to the politicians themselves.
The project is being carried out at an operational facility, and Equinor now says it has become “more complex than anticipated”. This does not inspire confidence in the expertise behind the project. It has also been affected by “unforeseen events and challenges”, according to Equinor’s Director of Project Development, Trond Bokn. The press release also claims that Equinor “takes the cost developments on Snøhvit Future seriously”, but this is not because taxpayers’ money is being squandered: they are terrified that the Storting and the political parties will finally come to their senses.
Snøhvit Future is a two-part project
The aim of the Snøhvit Future project is both to build a new onshore compression plant, powered by the electricity grid, and to remove the gas-fired power station from Melkøya, so that this plant too can be powered by electricity from the mainland. Together, this is set to cut a whopping 850,000 tonnes of emissions annually from the ‘climate accounts’ of the Norwegian government. The aim of this is to extract even more Norwegian gas, which will be shipped to the EU to be burnt there, resulting in enormous emissions. It is worth highlighting the sheer madness into which the Storting has waded, in all its technological incompetence:
The new onshore compression plant is due to be completed in 2029 and is intended to maintain pressure in the reservoir and ensure gas production as the field is depleted. This is hardly a wise move if one is concerned about the climate. In addition, the gas-fired power station that powers the Hammerfest LNG plant on Melkøya is to be decommissioned. Everything is to be powered by electricity from the mainland from 2030, regardless of costs or power shortages. After all, no one can explain where all this electricity is supposed to come from. The plant will consume 3.6 TWh per year, which is equivalent to the consumption of all households in Troms and Finnmark.
Grand visions – zero results
This is not going to succeed, regardless of the money spent or climate hysteria: the electricity simply isn’t there, no new power stations are being built that can match the output of a gas-fired power station, and in any case the gas-fired power station will have to remain in place as a ‘backup’. In that sense, the Storting and the government are in the process of making the same blunder they made on Svalbard: destroying the existing power supply to replace it with fantasies.
‘Electrification’ is also a ridiculous and misleading term, as Melkøya has always been electrified. Everything runs on electricity already. The correct term would rather be ‘gas-power-eliminated’, because it is the gas-fired power station that they want to get rid of. The gas-fired power station, which, sensibly enough, is fuelled by some of the gas that Melkøya processes. And that gas will, in any case, be sent to the EU and burnt there, so the «climate cuts» are 100 per cent fiction, driven by primitive mass hysteria, obsessive thoughts, groupthink and incompetence.
Your money is flowing out of control
The project is now around 60 per cent complete, but has encountered new operational challenges at the Hammerfest LNG plant. Bad weather and difficult rock conditions in the power cable tunnel have also affected progress. In addition, the fuel crisis is driving up the prices of absolutely everything in Norway. Nevertheless, Trond Bokn, Director of Project Development at Equinor, has the audacity to call Snøhvit Future a “profitable project” in his press release.
This climate madness may well be profitable for the contractors sending out invoices, but it is a disaster for society: if you divide 26.5 billion by 2,672,051 households in Norway, each household contributes just under 10,000 kroner to this political pipe dream – in exchange for nothing more than slightly lower emissions of plant nutrients, increased power shortages and higher electricity prices, particularly in vulnerable and freezing-cold Northern Norway.
It is party politics that keeps this charade going, and even the FrP has let down its voters and Northern Norway on this issue. Now even more good money is being thrown after bad, and all this for a project that was completely unnecessary, based on wild guesswork, and which brings no benefits whatsoever to anyone or anything – except for the cynics who are building this prestige project on the orders of politicians.
The gas-fired power station at Melkøya worked perfectly, just as it has done on Norwegian drilling platforms for 50 years. But it is no longer engineers who are steering development in Norway. Now it is politicians who are shaping the future. Admittedly, they cannot explain how a simple toaster works, yet they still feel competent enough to create the ‘energy system of the future’. What could possibly go wrong?
