Energy

Among the various announcements in tomorrow’s UK Budget is likely to be an apparently innocuous change to the North Sea tax regime.  The BBC carried the story in about as bland a manner as possible: “The oil industry has asked the Chancellor to consider a tax break which they claimed …

The arrival of President Trump’s official delegation to last week’s COP23 conference in Bonn was – in the immortal words of Billy Connolly – “as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit.”  The presence of Holly Krutka, an executive from Peabody Energy (the biggest coal miner in the USA) among …

The cost of policing the anti-fracking demonstrations at Kirby Misperton in North Yorkshire rose dramatically in October according to the latest information from Julia Mulligan, Police and Crime Commissioner for North Yorkshire. In the period up to 31 August, prior to Third Energy starting work, policing had cost just £80,238.  This …

A dramatic fall in the cost of green energy technology has eaten into the profitability of green energy companies.  According to By Anna Hirtenstein at Bloomberg Businessweek: “Green technology such as solar panels and wind turbines are increasingly mass-produced, so basic supply-and-demand economics dictate that they get cheaper. There’s also …

The UK government is putting the final touches to the new national Shale Wealth Fund which is intended to share up to 10 percent of the profits from fracking among the communities affected. According to the Yorkshire Post: “The Shale Wealth Fund will see communities near ‘significant shale gas reserves’ …

The “energy death spiral” is the process in which increasing numbers of business and domestic consumers disconnect themselves from the centralised electricity grid system.  The result is that the cost of maintaining the existing infrastructure and investing in new projects (like offshore wind and new nuclear) fall onto a shrinking …

Public support for fracking is at an all-time low according to the UK Government’s Wave 23 Energy and Climate Change Public Attitude Tracker: “Support for fracking is at its lowest point since the tracker began asking respondents about their opinions on the subject…  The most common reason for opposing fracking …

The big surprise in the Government’s Cost of Energy review by energy economist Dieter Helm is that fracking gets just one mention; and only then in a global rather than UK context: “Technological change within the energy sector is profound. Fracking and shale oil and shale gas have already changed …

According to figures released by  Julia Mulligan, North Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner the policing costs at just a single fracking well in Kirby Misperton added an additional £80,238 up to 31 August 2017.  However, once Third Energy’s operations began, the policing costs increased dramatically, adding a further £101,476 during …

There is a school of thought (Neoliberalism) that holds that it does not matter if domestic jobs are exported to, say, China.  Other jobs will be created elsewhere in the economy, and we will all benefit from cheaper imported goods.  There is another school of thought that holds that if you …