By Barney Smith Back in the bad, old, coal-fired days, Drax produced more electricity than any other British power station - 1,326 MW or 4.59 per cent of British Grid Demand. Drax still produces more electricity than any other power station, but it now produces electricity by burning, not fossil fuels but biomass, in the [...]
By Barney Smith It is perhaps relevant to note that “De-carbonisation by 2050” took 25 pages of explanation (Greenbarrel: Part I of 12 April), whereas “the Energy Security Plan”(Part ll) took 84 pages. Could it be that the voters care more for security of supply today than for de-carbonisation by 2050? At all events, most [...]
By Barney Smith In 2019 the Government amended the Climate Change Act to commit the UK to achieving net zero by 2050, compared to the previous target of an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050. At the end of March 2023 they finally released twenty-five pages of ideas as to how the UK [...]
By Barney Smith On 20 March the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), delivered its latest report to the heads of Government, who set it up as long ago as 1988. Amid the hundreds of pages and annexes, the message was clear: act now or it will be too late. Echoing the thrust of the [...]
By Barney Smith Amidst all the excitement of last week’s Budget, there was, perhaps, one encouraging sign for the longer term. There does seem to be a growing realisation that the nuclear future is not all large plants, which are typically both over budget and way behind timetable: there may, indeed, ought to, be room [...]
By Barney Smith Up ‘til now, it has been possible to believe that the move to electric cars would occur relatively smoothly; the British Government had decided that no new cars could be sold after 2030 if they were powered by either petrol or diesel and a veritable barrage of advertising was unleashed, extoling the [...]
By Barney Smith Aviation is one of the hardest sectors to de-carbonise and without urgent action it could be one of the highest-emitting sectors for greenhouse gases by 2050. According to the Dept. of Transport, a British-led consortium comprising (at least) Virgin Atlantic, Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Imperial College, London, the University of Sheffield, the Rocky Mountain [...]
By Barney Smith As Cop 27 drains away, it becomes all too clear that nothing much has changed since Cop 26. Apart that is, from an “Historic” commitment at the very end of the meeting to establish a fund to help pay for adaptation. (to cope with the damage to the world already caused). This [...]
By Barney Smith On 17 October, BP announced that, subject to regulation, they have agreed to purchase Archaea, a top American producer of Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), which already has some fifty RNG and landfill gas-to-energy sites across the US. Under the agreement, BP will pay some three point three billion dollars for Archaea, together [...]
By Barney Smith Fracking is by no means a recently discovered technique: it has been used successfully in the US since 1947. It involves injecting water, sand and chemicals at very high speed to smash open shale rock underground and release the oil and gas it contains. Since 1947, over 1.7 million wells have been [...]