By Julian Singer Quaise Energy proposes to drill wells of up to 20 kilometres deep into the earth’s crust to find temperatures of up to 5000C. The heat will be brought to surface to produce electricity using a conventional steam generator. Quaise plans to start drilling its first well in 2024 and to be producing [...]
By Julian Singer At the end of June, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) submitted to Parliament its annual progress report on the reduction of carbon emissions, as it has done every year since 2009. Although it is doubtful if many members of parliament have read all 618 pages of the report, they would have found [...]
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 Julian Singer On 7 July, while the Prime Minister was busy resigning, another part of his government announced a small step towards fulfilling one of the many goals it had set itself. This was the result of the fourth Contract for Difference auction held by the DBEIS. The general structure had been announced last [...]
By Julian Singer We last looked at the performance of AIM-listed renewable energy stocks in April 2021. The plots below show the performance of the same stocks, plus some new ones, over the last two years. Clearly all stocks have been affected since the beginning of the year by fears of inflation and the invasion [...]
By Barney Smith In April 2022, the Prime Minister released a 31-page document entitled “British Energy Security strategy.” It perhaps makes most sense as a follow-on to the ten-point plan put forward in November 2020. It takes into account both the latest news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the most recent report on Climate Change by [...]
Dubai World Expo 2020 closes on 31 March. Delayed a year by Covid it has still managed to attract 20 million visitors, only slightly down on the 25m predicted. Spread over 1000 acres there are pavilions or exhibits from 237 countries and 28 organisations. Some attendees surprise. How can small countries like Palau (population 18000) [...]
By Barney Smith To try to isolate the problems of one sub-sector of agriculture is to realise how complicated are the inter-relationships in the overall biomass sector and how inadequate are the available data. The industrial North (broadly Europe and the US) is more concerned about the future climate of the planet and de-carbonisation, so [...]
By Barney Smith Lots of people have heard of the Eden Project, but far fewer have actually visited it. This is a record of some of our impressions as we joined the second, more restricted, group. The Eden project is a huge environmental and educational project, undertaken to show that humans have a good side [...]
By Barney Smith It is instructive to realise that “sustainable” now reaches into areas which would have been hard to imagine even five years ago. The other day I came across a circular about Potash, about which I was up to then ignorant (and not just about “sustainable” potash) Potash, as I am sure you [...]