Energy

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. …

Scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed a new green energy technology based on osmosis.  The idea itself is nothing new, and is the basis of electricity generation in hydrogen fuel cells: “The concept is fairly simple. A semipermeable membrane separates two fluids with different salt concentrations. Salt …

Energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie says that US shale oil is now the most economically viable source of the planet’s remaining oil. According to Ed Crooks in the Financial Times the consultancy claims that: “About 60 per cent of the oil production that is economically viable at a crude price of $60 …

There is a green energy revolution taking place across the developed world… but it isn’t the one you were thinking of.  More or less quietly, the corporate world has given up hope of governments solving either the short-term energy crunch (caused by rising fossil fuel extraction costs combining with stunted …

News that on several occasions Germany has produced more energy from renewables than the country actually needs is not necessarily a good thing.  In the absence of viable storage capacity and a lack of demand for exported energy, Germany has been obliged to pay fossil fuel generators to shut down …

Whatever the industry, get the regulations wrong and you have a recipe for disaster.  We all know this to our cost following the banking crash of 2008, which stems from round after round of deregulation since Thatcher and Reagan.  When regulators establish a framework that allows fraud, fraud is precisely …

With oil prices still struggling to reach $50 per barrel after two years of unsustainably low prices, energy companies are filing for bankruptcy, hundreds of thousands of workers are being laid off, and governments are struggling to make up for the lost tax revenue.  If this were not bad enough …

A few years ago, eye-wateringly high oil prices combined with concern about climate change gave impetus to the manufacture of electric vehicles.  Several companies were already producing hybrid cars that switch between electric and petroleum motors.  But rising oil prices paved the way for entirely electric vehicles.  These are now …