The first Carbon Capture systems were built in the 1930’s but there are still very few examples of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) being applied to coal or gas power stations for the purpose of reducing CO2 emissions. The earliest systems were used to purify streams of natural gas that contained significant amounts of CO2. [...]
At a conference hosted jointly with the International Energy Agency in Edinburgh on 28 November the government announced new plans for evaluating and introducing Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) in the UK. The main goals are to have the first large-scale plants operating by the mid-2020’s and for it to be introduced “at scale” [...]
On Monday 15 October Cuadrilla, having weathered a last-minute legal appeal, finally started fracking operations in the shale basin below their Preston New Road site. Fracking involves injecting liquid underground at high pressure to force open fissures and allow access to oil and gas. Experts do not yet know whether fracking in the UK is [...]
Amidst all the current excitement about possible imminent fracking by Cuadrilla, an interesting wrinkle in the legal position in Scotland has been exposed over the summer. In the first week of May 2018, INEOS applied for a judicial review of the apparent ban on fracking in Scotland announced by Ministers from the Scottish National Party [...]
In spite of the government’s stated enthusiasm to exploit Britain’s shale gas potential the pace of development has been slow. In February Third Energy received permission to frack an existing vertical well in North Yorkshire but released the equipment in March pending a review of its financial resilience by the Oil & Gas Authority. IGas [...]
Alkane Energy describes itself as a “gas to power” company, with 40 employees managing a capacity of 160MW, the size of a small power station, and producing about 300GWh per year of electricity from gas at 31 sites mainly in the Midlands and Yorkshire. In spite of the dependence on gas, the company is keen [...]
Fracking has become the object of intense opposition which has unfortunately deflected attention away from the real issues concerning the exploitation of shale gas in the UK. The main arguments against exploitation are, of course, that burning it emits CO2 and it is not renewable, but we know that gas will be needed for many [...]
There are purists who would like to believe that gas has no long-term future, that it will serve only to help fuel the transition to a renewables future. Others believe that gas has a long term role as a fuel, cleaner than coal or oil, which can help us to meet our decarbonisation targets and [...]
The BP Statistical Review of World Energy for June 2017 states that “….there is no such thing as the behaviour of ‘US tight oil’; the Permian is very different to Eagle Ford which is different to Bakken. So beware of generalizations”. Note the use of the term “tight oil”. Outside the oil industry and in [...]
The Committee on Climate Change and the Parliamentary Advisory Group on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) both released reports on CCS during the summer. They were spurred into action by the lack of any government plan following the cancellation last autumn of the CCS competition and the associated £1 billion budget. Although the two reports [...]