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 [...]
By Barney Smith Greenbarrel of 6 October reported the opening gambits by Veolia, the world’s largest environmental services company, to take over Suez, another large French environmental services company, and closed with the observation “This one may run and run”. That verdict on the final prospects still looks good; but at least the initial game [...]
By Barney Smith Like so many of the other big oil companies, including BP, Shell started the year in reasonable shape, with the share price at 2,290.50. As the various crises (not just the corona virus) hit the world of oil, Shell’s share price, like that of the other oil majors, followed the oil price [...]
By Barney Smith Many years ago, when the world was young, we managed Oilbarrel, a successful website and conference business. Oil and gas were flavour of the month and the world’s largest company by market cap was ExxonMobil. How times have changed. Now, according to the Economist and the Financial Times, Nextera, a renewables company based [...]
By Barney Smith One of the most interesting facets of the French Television since early September 2020, (aka the “rentree”) is the sheer number of advertisements for electric cars. Now it would be possible to argue that what we are seeing is merely the usual number of adverts for new cars, which this year happen to [...]
By Barney Smith In the midst of his otherwise vacuous speech to the Conservative party conference Boris Johnson made an important policy pledge on electricity generation from renewables, saying that by 2030 off-shore wind would be providing electricity for every house in the country, with the target being raised from 30GW to 40 GW by [...]
By Barney Smith In France, things are different, though not necessarily better. The authoritative French newspaper, Le Monde, has reported that on Sunday 30th August Veolia, a large French environmental services company, had made an offer for 29.9 percent of the shares of Suez, another large French environmental conglomerate and an ancient rival. The 29.9 [...]
By Barney Smith It is becoming clearer that one of the industries which will be most affected by COVID 19 is the bottled water industry. Yet the industry was already under consumer pressure following the by-now famous Blue Planet II episode in early 2018. That broadcast focused minds on the damage done by non-recyclable plastic [...]