UK energy secretary Ed Miliband says the government will soon launch a consultation with industry on Labour’s North Sea oil and gas licensing policy. The government is also aiming to launch a prototype of the long-delayed offshore skills passport before the end of January, he said. Appearing before a Westminster committee hearing today, Miliband said the offshore industry and government share “common ground” on the future role of oil and gas. He also said the UK has a “heaven sent” opportunity to lead in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and said North Sea workers “will decarbonise Britain”. Miliband said the Labour government is focused on delivering its clean power by 2030 target, aiming to “plan and build, not neglect and delay”. He added that the British public “doesn’t want a culture war on climate”, in reference to a rising net zero scepticism amongst the Conservative and Reform UK parties. North Sea licensing and just transition Prior to the 2024 general election, Labour pledged in its manifesto to deliver “phased and responsible” transition in the North Sea. As part of this, Labour said it will not revoke existing North Sea licences and will work with operators to “manage our existing fields for the entirety of their lifespan”. The party pledged not to issue exploration licences for “new fields”, and said it will manage North Sea production “in a way that does not jeopardise jobs”. Since taking office, Labour increased the windfall tax on oil and gas firms and removed associated investment allowances, but has stopped short of banning new North Sea drilling. © Andrew Milligan/PA WireFile photo dated 15/02/16 of an oil platform standing amongst other rigs that have been left in the Cromarty Firth near Invergordon in the Highlands of Scotland. Miliband told the committee that the Department for Energy

EDF Group’s chief executive Luc Rémont has hit back at the national French auditor’s claims that the energy company should delay its investment in UK nuclear power project Sizewell C. He said the regulated asset base (RAB) model for financing the Suffolk nuclear power station, where the cost of development is shared with the consumer, should not be correlated with the refinancing of the Hinkley Point C project in Somerset. The French state-owned energy company has started a search for financiers to help refinance the delayed project at Hinkley Point C, following the French state auditor’s findings yesterday, according to Rémont. In October, the energy company issued £500m of senior bonds to help finance investments in two nuclear reactors at the site. Rémont said that the funding model for the Sizewell C nuclear power project on the Suffolk coast “limits” EDF’s capital exposure. “This [regulated asset base] model therefore limits EDF’s exposure to its capital and allows decision-making on the FID of the Sizewell C project to be decorrelated from the refinancing issues of the HPC [Hinkley Point C] project,” he said in a response to the auditor’s report. “For the latter, EDF has initiated an active search for financiers.” © Supplied by EEEGR / EDFAerial view of Sizewell C plans. By contrast to the Sizewell C RAB method of financing, Hinkley Point is financed through a contract-for-difference (CfD) scheme. The project secured a fixed price of power through the CfD mechanism guaranteed for 35 years in 2016. Hinkley Point C is majority-owned by EDF, which reported efficiency improvements of about 30% between the first and second reactor units at the Somerset site. French auditor Cour des Comptes concluded in a report released yesterday that state nuclear power company EDF should delay a final investment decision for the Sizewell nuclear

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