The gas reserves in shale rocks in the UK have been “hyped”, a geology professor has warned. Prof John Underhill from Heriot-Watt University said UK shale deposits were formed 55 million years too late to trap substantial amounts of gas. He said the government would be wise to formulate a Plan B to fracking for future gas supplies. But the fracking firm Cuadrilla said it would determine how much gas was present from its test drilling.
BBC 17th Aug 2017 read more »
BBC 17th Aug 2017 read more »
Guardian 17th Aug 2017 read more »
Scotsman 17th Aug 2017 read more »
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Telegraph 16th Aug 2017 read more »
At a rally in West Virginia earlier this month, President Donald Trump brought on stage Jim Justice, the state’s governor, to announce that he was quitting the Democratic party to become a Republican. A few days later, Mr Justice revealed one of the potential rewards for his defection: a plan for a $15 per ton subsidy for burning coal from West Virginia and other Appalachian states. If the world is to be serious about curbing the threat of climate change, the tentative pullback from coal will have to become a full-scale retreat. Coal “keeps the lights on in our country”, Mr Justice said, and that goes for other countries, too. The share of the world’s heat and power generated from coal has remained steady at about 40 per cent for the past 40 years. But as technologies for renewable energy and grid management advance, the special position that coal has held since Thomas Edison’s first power plants in the 1880s has become much harder to defend. The call to subsidise coal is a sign of how the economics of power generation have been transformed. Just five years ago, it was renewable sources that needed subsidies to compete, but their costs have been plummeting. Now the US is phasing out its federal tax breaks for renewable energy, and it is coal producers that are pleading for help.
FT 16th Aug 2017 read more »
