Shell Plc and its South African partner are close to ending a valuation dispute, paving the way for the sale of the oil giant’s local downstream assets for as much as $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The London-based company has a network of 600 service stations across the country, and Thebe Investment Corp. — owned by Black investors — has a 28% stake in the local retail operation, bought in 2002 for about $70 million. The dispute arose in 2022, when Thebe wanted to exit its stake and the parties couldn’t settle on the value of the holding. They are now close to agreeing on ending the impasse, said the people, who asked to remain unidentified because the information is private. Shell said it doesn’t comment on commercial matters, while Thebe was unavailable for comment. A potential deal could also fetch Thebe more than the initial $200 million at which the company valued its stake in 2022, said the people. At the time, Shell estimated it was worth less.  The agreement by both parties to sell — a process that Rothschild and Co. is running — would also give potential buyers certainty about the size of the deal as they place binding offers in the coming weeks, said the people.  The assets have attracted interest from Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and trading firm Trafigura, among others, Bloomberg reported in September. Shell and BP Plc jointly owned Sapref, South Africa’s largest oil refinery, and sold it for a symbolic 1 rand (five US cents) to the state-owned Central Energy Fund after the oil majors stopped processing there in 2022. A deal for Shell’s downstream assets would follow the sale of Petroliam Nasional Bhd’s 74% stake in Engen Ltd., South Africa’s biggest gas-station chain, to

Tesla Megapack and Powerwall battery storage deployments jumped to 31.4 GWh last year, up from 14.7 GWh in 2023, the company said in an earnings presentation Wednesday. The company expects storage deployments will grow at least 50% this year. “We’re trying to ramp output of the stationary battery storage as quickly as possible,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during an analyst conference call. Gross profit at Tesla’s energy generation and storage segment increased to $2.6 billion in 2024 from $1.1 billion the year before as revenue climbed 67% to $10.1 billion from $6 billion in the same period, according to Tesla. The segment’s profit margin grew to 26.2% in 2024, up from 18.9% in 2023, driven by cost reductions, including benefits from Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, Tesla said. Revenue from the tax credits soared to $756 million last year from $115 million in 2023. Musk is bullish on energy storage. “It is something that enables far greater energy output to the grid than is currently possible,” Musk said. “This will drive the demand of stationary battery packs, and especially the grid scale ones, to insane [levels], basically as much demand as we could possibly make.” However, Tesla said its Powerwall and Megapack production is supply constrained as the company enters new markets and demand for energy storage products continues to grow. As part of its market risk disclosures, Tesla warned investors that its solar and storage business faces risks from changes in governmental rebates, tax credits and other financial incentives.  “These incentives may expire when the allocated funding is exhausted, reduced or terminated as renewable energy adoption rates increase, sometimes without warning,” Tesla said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday. “Likewise, in jurisdictions where net metering is currently available, our customers receive bill credits from

Independent North Sea producer Serica Energy (AIM: SQZ) has been served with an improvement notice by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) over the release of fuel gas at its Bruce platform. According to the HSE, Serica allowed the release of 196kg of hydrocarbons for over two and a half hours. In addition, the HSE said that Serica’s workers were put at risk due to the presence of gas. However, a spokesperson for Serica Energy said that nobody was injured due to the release. The HSE blamed the release on Serica’s maintenance arrangements for one the platform’s low-pressure booster compressors (LPBC A), which “failed such that the gas fuel supply system and joints were inadequately reinstated and tested” before the compressor was returned to service. The spokesperson added: “Safety remains Serica’s highest priority, and the company is working closely with the HSE to ensure lessons are learned from the incident and updated procedures are put in place to prevent a reoccurrence.” Serica has until 31 July to improve its processes. The Bruce platform is based 211 miles (340km) northeast of Aberdeen where it connects to Serica’s Bruce field. The platform is responsible for processing nearly 5% of the UK’s gas production and hosts a community of over 300 people, of whom 160 are offshore at any one time. The platform saw a short period of unscheduled downtime in 2024 due to a subsea intervention to ensure enhanced production reliability on the Rhum field. Serica chief executive Chris Cox has previously said that the company is looking to take advantage of the “untapped potential around the Bruce hub”. The group has committed to extend Bruce’s lifespan by an extra four years through to 2030, with Cox hinting that a drilling campaign around the field is likely in coming years. The group

Aberdeen’s Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC) said “it’s not good enough” that UK decommissioning technology is tested overseas when “we are meant to be the leaders in this space”. At an event in the Granite City’s Union Kirk, NZTC programme manager Lewis Harper argued that technology brought about by the “genius” in the domestic supply chain should have more opportunity to test in UK waters, rather than going to places like the US. Harper said technology developers often have seek opportunities to trial it: “I have to go on a flight to go 4,000 miles into a place where PPE is a shirt and Levi’s to get this technology into the well.” The not-for-profit organisation currently runs on funding from industry and the government, however, its decade of public funding is set to come to an end. In 2017, the NZTC was set up as part of the Aberdeen City Region Deal with £180 million from the UK and Scottish Governments. The organisation is readying an application for the next tranche of funding once this period ends and is set to deliver this to government in the coming weeks. This week the NZTC £500,000 in grant funding across the 11 firms that form the next cohort of its accelerator program for emerging companies in the clean energy sector. © Supplied by NSTAAn NZTC and NSTA decommissioning event in Aberdeen. “We’re not short of genius, just take a look around the room, 22 technologies on display here today and many more asking if there was space for them,” Harper added. However, he said that the “hard truth” is that “a breakthrough in the lab is not a breakthrough for our industry”. Harper argued that “proof” is what’s needed as the industry does not have a “gap of ideas”. He said: “Decades

A UK court ruled that two North Sea oil and gas fields must re-apply for environmental permits while allowing the developments to continue, setting up a crucial test of whether the new Labour government will prioritize economic growth or climate action.  The Court of Session in Edinburgh quashed the approvals for the Rosebank and Jackdaw projects — led by Equinor ASA and Shell Plc, respectively — which were unlawful because they hadn’t considered the climate impact of burning oil and gas pumped from the fields, according to a statement from the court on Thursday.  The fate of these projects has big implications for the UK North Sea, an aging oil and gas province where major new developments are dwindling. While the ruling was a victory for Greenpeace and Uplift, environmental groups that brought the legal action, it left open the possibility that the two fields could one day still come into production.  Shell and Equinor can continue working on the projects while the government considers their new environmental applications, although they will not be allowed to pump any oil and gas before a final decision is reached, according to the ruling.  It was unclear how long this decision could take. The UK government is still discussing how exactly to assess so-called Scope 3 emissions from burning a field’s oil and gas, a process that must be completed before the environmental impact assessments for Rosebank and Jackdaw can be reconsidered, according to the court ruling. “The government has already consulted on revised environmental guidance to take into account emissions from burning extracted oil and gas,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero. “We will respond to this consultation as soon as possible and developers will be able to apply for consents under this revised regime.” In

Dive Brief: Almost every major independent system operator in the U.S. has reformed its capacity accreditation process, or has started to in the wake of more frequent severe weather and the growing adoption of intermittent energy resources, Wood Mackenzie Senior Analyst Patrick Huang said during a Wednesday panel discussion. As a result of these reforms, most types of energy resources — from renewables and energy storage to thermal generation — have seen, or will see, their capacity accreditation downgraded, Huang said. The reforms have made resource planning more complicated, increasing demand for more flexible generation resources, according to Karl Meeusen, Wärtsilä’s director of markets, legislative and regulatory policy for North America. Dive Insight: Beyond rewarding utilities that adopt an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy resources, capacity accreditation reforms at U.S. ISOs could also spur utilities to take a closer look at more novel generation technologies previously considered too expensive, Meeusen said during Wednesday’s discussion, hosted by consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. Reciprocating internal combustion engines have not been adopted in large numbers by utilities in the past due to the relatively high upfront capital cost. But they could offer a greater return on investment within ISOs that have adopted capacity accreditation reforms, Meeusen said. The reciprocating engines can ramp up or down more quickly than gas turbines, which allows them to better complement intermittent resources like wind and solar, and their modular design comes with potential reliability benefits, he said. For example, a utility might choose to add 100 MW of capacity to its portfolio by deploying five reciprocating engines, or two peaker gas turbines. If one of the turbines goes down, the resulting outage will be significantly larger than if one of the five reciprocating engines goes offline, Meeusen explained. And that odds of all five engines going down at the same time are significantly