Greener energy
Greener energy in transport, industry, and our electricity networks - plus all that goes with this
The refinery of the future
Refineries are important parts of the current industrial complex as they process crude oil into useful products such as fuels and feedstocks for various important chemical processes. Of course we know that burning fossil fuels is a major contributor to man-made greenhouse gas emissions so cutting down our use of
Sunday Brunch: Does Europe want cheaper green steel?
What if green steel could be produced cheaply outside of Europe? If that meant putting domestic industry jobs at risk, would governments be keen?
China to end new coal power additions before 2030?
Are we near peak coal in China? We frequently hear that 'it's pointless trying to cut carbon emissions in the West, when other countries continue to build new coal fired power stations'. And the country that gets the most attention is China. But what if this
Where we end up with battery technology matters.
does battery technology matter, and are we worrying about the wrong raw material issues?
How important are public chargers?
If cheaper EVs start to become the norm soon, will the absence of fast public EV chargers hold back adoption? Sadly yes.
EV sales growing - but where this is happening matters
Will this be the decade of cheaper Chinese EV's as they push into the mass market?
If we cannot connect new renewables to the grid ...
New renewable electricity generation is only useful if it's actually connected to the grid. Without that 'simple action' none of us can use the electricity.
Heating and the importance of systems thinking.
The Heat Pump Summit took place at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford on 10th April. Despite a long history of heat pump innovation and usage - the first large scale heat pump in the UK was in operation in 1945 in Norwich - household installed heat pumps
Industrial decarbonisation - it's not just about cheesemaking
The US Biden administration has recently announced up to $6 billion in funding for 33 projects intended to curb carbon pollution from industrial facilities, including steel mills, cement plants and an Illinois factory where Kraft Heinz makes its well known, at least in the US, Mac & Cheese (for some
Coal's (very) long goodbye
Bloomberg (republished in various newspapers) recently highlighted coal's recent period of resurgence, on the back of China's energy insecurity, rising Indian demand, the fallout of the Ukraine war, and "faltering international programs to wean developing economies off fossil fuels". If we go back a
Temperature control is a key electricity demand driver
In Hannah Ritchie's recent Sustainability by numbers blog, she asks the question "what do American households use electricity for?" As many of you will know, Hannah is a data scientist and deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data. She dives into data from
Economic shutdown in the energy transition
It's not just the total cost of the alternatives that we need to consider, it's the operating cost advantage. Much of what we read about transition technologies, such as EVs, heat pumps and renewable electricity generation, focuses on new capacity being added. So new EV sales