By Julian Singer Geothermal Engineering Ltd (GEL) has finally produced steam from its United Downs production well near Redruth in Cornwall. It has been a long story. The project was initially announced in October 2009 followed shortly by funding of £1.5m from the then Department of Energy and Climate Change. Planning permission was granted in [...]

By Julian Singer Last October we wrote about the performance of AIM-listed renewable energy stocks (Greenbarrel, Oct 2020). The most striking feature was that most of these stocks had shown a sharp increase in price around the beginning of June. Now, six months later we look at how they have performed since then. As before [...]

By Barney Smith In October and November 2020 Greenbarrel duly recorded the opening salvoes in the fight between Veolia and Suez, the world’s two largest environmental services companies (both French).  The battle was joined in the summer of 2020 after Veolia purchased 29.9 per cent of Suez from another French company, Engie, which decided to [...]

By Julian Singer In March the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (DBEIS) issued its Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy as promised in the Energy White Paper of last November. The UK industrial sector contributes 9 per cent of the UK’s GDP and provides 2.6 million jobs directly, but emits 16 per cent of UK emissions, [...]

By Julian Singer Although it is accepted that hydrogen will be a key component of future energy systems, it is unclear exactly where it will be used and how it will be produced. This uncertainty has made governments and companies hesitate about committing huge investments. According to the International Energy Agency the production of hydrogen [...]

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 [...]