The recent Committee on Climate Change report on Scotland’s record in reducing carbon emissions confirmed that the country was still leading the UK, and most other countries, in meeting the 2015 target to reduce emissions and is on track to hit the interim aim of reducing emissions by 42% by 2020. This is to be applauded but the momentum of year-on- year reduction is going to slow. The Committee urged the Scottish Government to reduce emissions across the total economy, particularly heating and transport.
The solar sector is reeling from confusion, and stock prices are reeling right along with it. The time it has taken investors and traders to wrap their heads around Trump's industry tariffs and the pyrrhic victory of two solar companies in a case against cheap Chinese imports has seen stocks rally in a big way, and then fall just as hard.
It's happy days for OPEC, but once the whoops and hollers die down, the group should take a long hard look at itself. Because it's lost its crown as the world's top oil player.
A recent survey by EY highlighted the importance of diversity during this challenging time within the oil and gas sector. More than ever, there is an awareness of the importance of adapting to new industry norms, pricing/business models and retaining talent. Gender diversity is a topic that impacts on the sector, we operate in, as well as hitting the headlines in salary gender gap news.
North Korea may not have proved petroleum reserves, but it's estimated that the secluded belligerent nation sits on reserves of more than 200 minerals—including rare earth minerals—worth an estimated up to US$10 trillion.
Energy Voice ran two articles last week highlighting onshore decommissioning plans for the Port of Dundee and Dales Voe. Once again this left me questioning where all this onshore decommissioning activity is going to coming from. Where is the business case that supports the large number of ports claiming decommissioning is a significant opportunity?
How should poor countries which find themselves rich in oil and gas use their wealth in order to build a sustainable future for their people? There is a wide range of options and plenty examples of how to get it wrong.
Following in the footsteps of Norway, France and others the UK Government has recently decided it will ban the sale of all diesel and petrol vehicles by 2040. The logic of doing this is primarily based on the need to clean up the air we breathe and of course to cut back on overall emission levels of climate warming gases.
The prolonged downturn in commodity price that started in the summer of 2014 has seen more than 350,000 people globally lose their jobs in the oil and gas industry to date. However, as BP’s mantra ‘lower for longer’ evolves into Shell’s phrase ‘lower forever’ and we adapt to the reality of working with an oil price around $50 per barrel, signs of recovery are beginning to occur.
The box chart below shows the average drilling difficulty (on a P50 basis) of offshore wells drilled in the North Sea basin from 2000 to 2016. The data suggests that the average drilling difficulty hasn’t changed very much over the last 2 decades – it has been relatively flat. The Rushmore Drilling Index (RDI) is a measure of the difficulty of drilling a well and is used for normalisation purposes. The numbers in parenthesis represent the number of wells that were drilled to Total Depth in a given year.
I rather think that Offshore Europe last week was good for the Oil & Gas Technology Centre Initiative and its CEO Colette Cohen. Given its scale, I certain that the OGTC eclipsed the UK North Sea’s other technology-related initiatives.
Composite materials, or composites in short, have existed in many different forms throughout history, from the ancient brick-making documented by Egyptian tomb paintings, to the use of fiberglass in the 1940s for military aircraft.
Kenya's mountains of plastic bags might not seem central to oil's grand narrative, but they are. Last week, the East African country banned almost everything about them: making them, importing them, selling them, using them, with penalties of up to four years in jail or fines up to $38,000.
Any industrial or societal endeavor should be subject to a sustainability assessment and decommissioning is no different. The key metrics for the UK’s sustainable future are contained within the Government’s Sustainability Indicator reports published by the Department of Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). There are 35 topics. They are categorised under the three pillars of sustainability; people, planet and profit.
How should poor countries which find themselves rich in oil and gas use their wealth to build a sustainable future for their people? There is a wide range of options and plenty of examples of how to get it wrong.
The EIA has once again undercut its previous estimates for U.S. oil production, offering further evidence that the U.S. shale industry is not producing as much as everyone thinks.
Since the 2014 Wood Review, Maximising Economic Recovery has been the remit of the Oil and Gas Authority. To achieve this, data transparency was a key aim, and in late 2016 the OGA delivered a 'Small Pools' dataset. Here, free data packages were provided for undeveloped resource on the UKCS.
There’s rarely a dull day in the upstream energy world though things did get rather quiet for a time as a result of the 2014 collapse in oil prices followed by the partial recovery that drives the industry today.
