Energy

One of the reasons fracking took off in the USA is that landowners also own the mineral rights beneath their land.  So when energy companies decided that oil and gas prices were high enough to make fracking possible, they had to pay landowners directly for the rights. The UK is …

Britain’s energy industry is dying.  That’s the stark conclusion reached by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph: “We have let matters drift for so long that half of our nuclear reactors will be phased out over the next nine years with nothing ready to replace them. North Sea oil and gas …

Tony Lodge from the right wing think-tank the Centre for Policy Studies has urged Teresa May to wake up to the desperate state of the British energy industry: “I spoke alongside [the new Secretary of State, Greg] Clark in 2009 at the Conservative Party Conference on a platform appropriately titled …

Heineken Chief Executive Jean-Francois van Boxmeer has told MSM Money that he is “praying for higher oil prices”.  But why should a brewery – albeit the third largest in the world – desire an increase in the price of a commodity that appears to have little to do with its …

Optimism that oil prices would rise above $50 per barrel has been dashed in recent weeks.  Supply disruptions in Canada, Nigeria and Libya have come to an end, while OPEC has increased its output.  The earlier glut in crude oil has now translated into a global oversupply of refined products.  …

Nintendo’s augmented reality (AR) game Pokemon-GO has become something of a craze around the world.  The game involves players using their smartphones to find and capture virtual creatures (Pokemon) that appear on screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player. While much of the media …

The price of energy is at rock bottom in the face of global oversupply in oil.  However, despite oil and coal prices falling below the break-even price for many energy companies, the price of renewables is falling faster. Ed Crooks at the Financial Times provides several recent examples, including: “The …

Despite widespread public opposition, Teresa May’s new UK government looks set to be even more pro-fracking than her pro-fracking predecessor, according to Kelly Gilblom at Bloomberg: “While May hasn’t directly addressed U.K. shale gas in any major speeches, she heads a government stacked with fracking supporters. Rudd, who was appointed …

Faced with a glut of oil and prices well below the break-even point for many companies, the oil industry has been disinvesting, closing drilling operations, prematurely decommissioning wells, and severely curtailing exploration.  What this adds up to is some serious oil shortages in a year or so, together with an …

In 2010, the incoming ConDem coalition government chose to end the older system of grants for home insulation and renewable energy generation in favour of the so-called Green Deal loan scheme in which households could pay for insulation and solar systems out of the savings on their household energy bills. …