Naturewatch

A better day today. Meteorologically and psychologically. Yesterday a house (I kid you not) came up on the market called Ferguslie at the curiously named hamlet of Chance Inn in the parish of Ceres (pronounced ‘series’ my Fifer sources tell me) in the Kingdom of Fife. If it had only been called the Last Chance Inn.

Apparently, the Chance Inn was a change place for horses. Change/chance?

There was an inn in the Kingdom of Fife
Where horse-changing was allegedly rife
It so happened by chance
That the horses would dance
At full moon with crossed swords and a knife.

Boom boom.

Anyway I took myself off to walk at South Queensferry again. Coming back along the beach on the tideline I saw a couple of these beautiful jelly fish (‘Medusa’s’ in Italian). The sun was so bright I couldn’t see what I was doing but I got lucky as the Medusa was wafted by the wavelets.

There was another tanker (extra) pulled up at the Hound (not Hounds) Point North Sea oil pipeline.

I’m always slightly amazed (and to be honest, a bit thrilled) to see such big ships being filled up with oil from producing fields I naively thought were more or less exhausted.

In fact, in 2021 it was mid-range estimated that current North Sea wells had reserves of 1.8 billion oil equivalent barrels of which 1.1 billion were oil. (A House of Lords report).

By my very crude (geddit) calculation the Sola TS pictured here and bound for Gdansk has a cargo capacity of 792,515 barrels of oil. To exhaust the oil reserve in active wells estimated in 2021 it would require this ship to transport 1,388 full capacity loads.

Somehow, that makes the reserve seem smaller than I thought.

Say it takes a day to load and a day to offload and 10 days to makes a round trip to Gdansk. By my even cruder calculation it would take the Sola TS working flat out 45 years to transport to Gdansk the estimated 2021 in-production North Sea crude oil reserve of 1.1 billion barrels.