Picture a postwar industrial building in a West Sussex town, between London and Brighton. It was 2013, the Conservative coalition government led by David Cameron asked colleagues to get rid of the ‘green crap’, three years after pledging to be the ‘greenest’ government ever. When chief executive Phil Caldwell joined Ceres Power (LON:CWR) that year, it was a £35 million-market cap company listed on the smaller AIM subsection of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Nearly two decades later, and the Horsham-based fuel cell company on Foundry Lane was admitted to the main market of the London Stock Exchange in June 2023. It made the index of top 250 mid-cap companies for six months before being nudged out, then readmitted in September 2024, holding its spot until last month. It is now nearly ten times larger than when it first listed, with a market capitalisation of £320.8m. Ceres was one of the first cleantech companies to achieve the prestigious FTSE 250 index. It remains one of four purely alternative energy companies on the LSE main market, excluding trusts. Today, it specialises in licensing electrolysers for green hydrogen power projects, which convert renewable electricity into the low-carbon gas. “Green hydrogen is zero carbon at production,” Caldwell said in an interview. “If you’re combusting hydrogen, the only byproduct’s water.” © Supplied by CeresCeres chief executive Phil Caldwell. Caldwell said Ceres is projecting revenue this year of between £50m and £60m; its market has grown ten-fold in 12 years. In 2021, it raised over £180m, “at a time where public markets were working really well” to plough into electrolysers. “We’ve grown a lot,” he said. “We originally focused on the fuel-cell side, which is where you take in hydrogen or natural gas, and convert that into electrons for power generation. In 2019, we started

Kinder Morgan’s SFPP West and CALNEV pipelines have returned to service, a Kinder Morgan representative revealed to Rigzone on Tuesday. “There are currently no significant impacts to our operations,” a media statement sent to Rigzone by the representative yesterday, which had a timestamp of 10:25am CT on January 13, noted. “We continue to actively monitor the California wildfires and will work with our customers on any potential impacts,” it added. A media statement sent to Rigzone by the representative yesterday, with a timestamp of 11:25am CT on January 8, said, “the fires are not directly impacting our operations” but added that “the SFPP West and CALNEV pipelines were shut down due to power outages in the area”. “We expect the lines to resume service once the power has been restored,” it added. A media statement sent to Rigzone by the representative on Tuesday, with a timestamp of 12:15pm  CT on January 9, stated that the SFPP West and CALNEV pipelines “remain shut down due to power outages in the area”. “We continue to monitor the situation and expect the lines to resume service once the power has been restored,” that statement added. Kinder Morgan’s SFPP system comprises the North Line, the San Diego Line, the Oregon Line, the West Line, and the East Line, the company’s website shows. The West Line “is approximately 515 miles of primary pipeline and currently transports products from the Los Angeles Basin to Colton and Imperial, California, and Phoenix, Arizona,” the site states. Kinder Morgan’s 566-mile CALNEV pipeline system transports gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from Los Angeles, California, refineries and marine terminals through parallel 14-inch and 8-inch diameter pipelines that originate in Colton, California, and extend to terminals in Barstow, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, the company’s site notes. The pipeline system also serves

Donald Trump’s choice for Energy secretary said the US must remove bureaucratic barriers and “unleash” production of nuclear power as well as liquified natural gas, according to written testimony before his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.  “The security of our nation begins with energy,” Chris Wright said in remarks prepared for the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Previous administrations have viewed energy as a liability instead of the immense national asset that it is.”  Wright, the founder of Liberty Energy Inc., an oil and natural gas fracking services company, said his priorities would also include a focus on innovation and technology breakthroughs. Testifying on his 60th birthday, he said his first priority was to “unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore energy dominance,” a term that resonated throughout the first Trump administration. As Liberty’s chief executive officer, Wright has been an unapologetic advocate for his industry, proclaiming the moral virtues of fossil fuels and even drank fracking fluid to refute opponents who questioned its safety.  The choice of Wright, who has no previous Washington experience, is indicative of the incoming president’s hard pivot toward fossil fuels after years of Biden administration policies that benefited renewable energy and sought to restrict global warming.  He has assailed subsidies for wind and solar power and said fossil fuels were crucial for spreading prosperity and lifting people from poverty. He has called the threat posed by climate change exaggerated. “There is no climate crisis. And we are not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said in a video posted on his LinkedIn page. “Life on earth is simply impossible without carbon dioxide — hence the term carbon pollution is outrageous.” While the Energy Department has little authority over oil and gas development, Wright, if confirmed, would oversee an organization with a vast,

An inter-agency study has found that federal lands in the contiguous United States could further support hundreds more gigawatts of renewable energy (RE) generation even when assuming limited siting. The study by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), conducted in cooperation with the agriculture, defense and interior departments, found there is technical potential for 5,750 gigawatts (GW) of utility photovoltaic (UPV) installations on 44 million acres of developable federal land across the contiguous U.S. The term refers to the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia and excludes Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. territories. For onshore wind, the technical potential — the maximum amount of available resource based on the amount of federal land administered, suitability of the land for RE development, and the energy resource availability — is 875 GW on 43 million acres. Meanwhile the technical potential for hydrothermal is 130 GW on 12 million acres while that for enhanced geothermal is 975 GW on 27 million acres. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has the highest technical potential of all federal land administrators, followed by the Forest Service and the Defense Department.  “DOE, FWS [Fish and Wildlife Service], and other federal land administrators have relatively modest RE technical potential”, stated the report published on NREL’s website. “When modeling a limited-siting case, we estimate the technical potential on federal lands to decline by 70 percent (to 1,750 GW) for UPV and by 96 percent (to 70 GW) for wind, compared to the reference siting case”, the report said. Out of seven scenarios presented in the report, the three central scenarios estimate 51–84 GW of solar, wind and geothermal capacity are deployed onshore the contiguous U.S. by 2035, when the country should have achieved 100 percent clean power as targeted. The scenarios are based on various factors including technology

Todd Snitchler is president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association. Alan Greenspan is quoted as saying in 1996 that the stock market experienced irrational exuberance around the dot com bubble when describing the disconnect between asset valuation and a stock’s value rising to prices that exceed their fundamentals. In many ways, the race to power our artificial intelligence-driven future is showing the same thing. There is no doubt that the growth of AI will be driven or limited by how quickly we can ensure sufficient power to enable the expansion and operation of data centers, but the magnitude of the energy needed is still much more in question than many seem to think. The recent announcements by PJM Interconnection of their load forecast indicate a significant increase in demand. For summer demand, they predict an increase of 42 GW between now and 2029 and, for winter demand, an increase of 43 GW by 2039. The incremental growth expected by 2034 is notable with a 27 GW and 30 GW increase in summer and winter peak demand.  The North American Electric Reliability Corp. also released its 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment which projects a 15% summer peak demand increase, and an 18% winter peak demand increase over the next decade. While these timelines and figures have some variance, they all suggest a consistent, meaningful level of load growth in all seasons of the year in large parts of the country. There is also a long history of overestimating load growth which can drive overbuilding and the addition of resources that may exceed the increased demand. A similar panic about load growth overwhelming the grid happened back in 1999, when worries about early data centers led to panicked media stories and rosy investor forecasts for utilities. It didn’t happen. Microprocessors, computers

Sherri Evers, Senior Vice President for Sustainability, Commercial Development, and Product Solutions at Imperial Oil Ltd., is departing the company for Exxon Mobil Corp. Imperial said in a media release that Evers will become North America Lubes General Manager for ExxonMobil effective March 1, 2025. “On behalf of Imperial, I would like to thank Sherri Evers for her contributions and strong leadership as part of the management team over the last four years”, Brad Corson, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, said. “Sherri successfully led a diverse portfolio contributing to Imperial’s business and strategic projects, including the Strathcona renewable diesel project in the Downstream and the development of our new Low Carbon Solutions business. In addition, her leadership was critical in plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at our operations, and she was instrumental in the formation of the Pathways Alliance to reduce emissions from oil sands operations and has been an active participant on the steering committee”. Evers holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing and General Business from the University of Saskatchewan. She began her career with Imperial in 1998 in Edmonton, Alberta, and held various assignments within the company’s downstream business, Imperial said in its media release. In 2012, Evers began a series of global assignments with ExxonMobil related to product optimization, planning, and supply network before returning to Canada as the Eastern Canada Fuels Manager for Downstream in 2018. Evers was appointed Vice President for Commercial and Corporate Development in 2021 before being appointed to her current role in 2023, Imperial said. Imperial has started the search for Evers’ replacement. To contact the author, email [email protected] WHAT DO YOU THINK? Generated by readers, the comments included herein do not reflect the views and opinions of Rigzone. All comments are subject to editorial review. Off-topic, inappropriate or