Playing the Trump Card

Donald, thanks for the great new golf course.  I look forward to playing it one day soon.  It will remind me of playing at the European Golf club in Brittas Bay in Co Wicklow, where for all of the 18 holes golfers have a splendid view of the wind turbines I built offshore in 2003.  The Arklow Bank wind farm, built with GE, was the first offshore windfarm in these islands. It was built without a subsidy from ...

Shale gas and fracking. A level playing field?

Shale gas and fracking: And so the debate heats up.  Actually alot like the planet as a result of fracked gas leaking into the environment. The fundamental objection that I have to fracking natural gas is as follows:  they never have to carry out an environmental impact assessment on the work they propose to do. This might seem a trivial point.  The oil industry will argue ...

Business meets Academia at Hull University

Last week it was my honour to speak at a conference where business meets the academic staff at Hull University.  The speech is available here on the Mainstream website and as usual is a collaborative effort between Brendan Halligan and myself.  Hull University proclaims on its website that it is “open for business” and that it wishes to serve the community of its locality in Yorkshire. The Vice Chancellor Pistorius opened the meeting ...

Are households paying more for green energy?

Believe it or not we welcome the kind of headline that appeared over the name of journalist Sean Poulter in the Mail on the 7th March. Households will pay “ten times more for green energy....” Why not 100 times more? Or even 1000?  When no facts are presented to back up the headline why not get really aggressive and fully enter the Matrix world of virtual ...

The state of energy in the world

Oil is trading at $117 per barrel of Brent crude.  It is reliably reported that capacity utilisation in the oil industry stands at over 99% and furthermore that stocks have been run down to half in the previous 6 months (Barclays commodities). These issues have been brought together in a recent article in Nature which concluded that the global oil industry has been unable to respond to increases in demand, and ...

Europe: Why it needs political harmony

There has been much debate about what is wrong and it has taken me time to internalise all the sometimes conflicting theories. Groucho Marx said “I would not want to be a member of a club that had somebody like me as a member”. The crisis in the Euro is affecting every European country.  Unlike the previous downturn in 2009, when the world relied on emerging markets to create growth there appears ...

Electricity generation subsidies

All forms of electricity generation involve an economic subsidy for the generator. Think coal fired generation for instance:

• Sulphur oxides and nitrogen oxides are almost always produced. They are put up into the atmosphere whence they fall in dissolved acidic form in rain. They deteriorate surface water by acidifying it. Most coal fired plant owners do not pay for the pollution damage.
• Cadmium, chromium, and other heavy

Thriving on controversy

Mr Booker wrote a mighty long article in the Daily Mail on February 28th. The subject was wind energy and how inefficient it was. One of the big questions has to be “why was Mr. Booker given so much space in a daily paper?” Mr Booker’s record gives a clue as to why he should write on wind energy: he is the one who denies the theory of evolution, the one who says global warming is a lie, he ...

More on carbon capture and storage

It is always useful to review options when new evidence presents itself. This is particularly true in energy where the commercial options are so few. On a recent visit to Norway I was told that the Ecofisk field was engaged in CCS. Actually what happens is that CO2 comes up with oil. The platform operator is able to easily separate the pure CO2 from the oil. The CO2 is re-injected into the well. This technique allows more oil ...

Supergrid: Why it is not a series of point to point connections

The original high voltage direct current (HVDC) cables and transformation stations were national grid to other national grid connections. The HVDC arrangements were invented by the entrepreneurial ASEA company to carry Scandinavian hydroelectricity from where it was generated to where it could be consumed by customers. The HVDC link presupposed that the structure of the transmission grids was a permanent feature. In this regard, and at this time in the mid 1950s this was a good assumption to make. ...