By Barney Smith Thursday 25 March 2021 saw the release of the sixteenth annual report by the Global World Energy Council (GWEC) . The title “Wind Energy’s role on the road to Net Zero” shows that Climate Change is back on the agenda, and the report also notes the trend for countries to announce net [...]
By Barney Smith Big Oil is under unprecedented pressure. Accelerating global action on climate change is forcing powerful companies to move into new and unfamiliar energy markets. In addition, the Covid pandemic has hammered oil prices and catalysed the move towards renewable energy in many parts of the world. Greenbarrel has outlined the rather different [...]
By Barney Smith For BP, as for Shell, the objective is to gradually move to become a different sort of energy company while preserving the more immediate returns from oil and gas which will still be needed by consumers for years, if not decades, to come. But BP, unlike Shell, has so far received a [...]
By Barney Smith Last year was a tough year for all oil companies as is testified by the rash of results just issued. Shell, BP (and Exxon Mobil) have each admitted losses of around US$20 billion, caused directly, or indirectly, by Covid and the collapse of the oil price. They all know that the good [...]
By Barney Smith The bottled water industry is relatively new and has “Come from nowhere”. Who would have thought that we could be made to pay for bottles containing what used to be free from the tap? Yet some simple statistics would suggest that the sale of bottled water became big business. Apparently, in 2017 [...]
By Barney Smith Following the thoughts on Oil and Gas in Greenbarrel of 19 January 2021, it is now clear how crucial future governmental policy on Buildings will be. As the beginning of Chapter 4 of the Energy White Paper (WP) makes it explicit that for the UK to reach the net-zero target by 2050 [...]
By Barney Smith On second thoughts, it seemed only sensible for Greenbarrel to devote a bit more coverage to Oil and Gas in the context of the Energy White Paper, as a whole chapter (one of six) was devoted to this subject by the Government. Furthermore, Greenbarrel has already commented on the so-far somewhat limited [...]
By Barney Smith As a result of the combined news-appeal of the new strain of the Corona Virus and Christmas, the Government’s launch of a massive Energy White Paper on 18 December 2020 did not attract the attention which it would otherwise perhaps have merited. The Paper is long, but worth reading in full. This [...]
By Barney Smith On Tuesday afternoons, some of us have been tuning in to a series of interesting webinars hosted by Oxford University about different facets of climate change and decarbonisation (www.energy.ox.ac.uk). This has given rise to a set of rather random thoughts stimulated by, but not directly related to, the Oxford webinars. One early [...]
By Barney Smith On 19 November the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, spoke to, and formally released, plans for a ten-point “green” industrial revolution, the details of which had previously been widely leaked. Overall the plan “will mobilise £12 billion of government investment to create and support up to 250,000 highly-skilled green jobs in the [...]
