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 [...]
By Barney Smith It cannot have been much fun. The authoritative French newspaper, Le Monde, in the edition of 25 August had an editorial, as well as two pages inside and the front page headline, all saying essentially the same thing, TotalEnergies’ Gas is fueling Russian Bombers in Ukraine. The front page headline makes the [...]
By Barney Smith The world-wide price for Oil and Gas has gone up a lot in the last year. The almost inevitable effect on Shell, the largest European Oil and Gas producer, and BP, the other, slightly smaller, British major is huge, almost too huge, profits. For it is the world-wide price which has been [...]
By Barney Smith The 71st BP Annual Statistical Survey was released in mid-year, as last year. It is important to be clear that the BP Statistical Survey is not a single company’s forecast of how the situation might be, it is rather the best available cumulative “snapshot” of 2021 and how its prospects and challenges [...]
By Barney Smith On 29 June 2022, the Global Wind Energy Council(GWEC) released its latest Annual Offshore Wind Report. Inter-alia, it chronicles the growing disparity between the considerable improvements in off- shore wind during the year (2021 was actually the best year ever) and the demands of those who would rather measure the world’s reaction [...]
By Barney Smith We are told that electric vehicles form a greater and greater percentage of the motor fleet in the UK and that this “proves” that the electric revolution is unavoidable and inevitable. The electric revolution may indeed turn out to be inevitable. But the trend towards electric vehicles needs to be kept in [...]