Environment

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6 per cent in 2021 to 36.3 billion tonnes, their highest ever, as the world economy rebounded strongly from the COVID-19 crisis and relied heavily on coal to power that growth, according to a new analysis by France-based International Energy Agency (IEA). Thus, …

Despite pledges to contribute to global efforts of reducing emissions, China will continue to maximize the use of coal in coming years as it caters to its energy security, the top Chinese policymakers said this week. Chinese President Xi Jinping has told representatives from its biggest coal-producing region, Inner Mongolia, …

European utilities are getting increasingly reliant on coal for power as the region tries to reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas. Even with prices for the dirtiest fossil fuel surging with most other commodities, it’s still much cheaper for power plants to burn coal than gas to make electricity. …

With the latest events unfolding in Ukraine, the topic of natural gas dependence and its implications has once again taken center stage. Natural gas is the least polluting fossil fuel, which has made it a preferred “bridge” to net zero. The dependence element, however, has cast a shadow over the …

India has unveiled the first part of a drive to attempt to turn the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases into a “hub” for green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is produced using non-fossil fuel power and is then used in carbon-heavy industrial processes like making steel and concrete, and for transportation. …

About a tenth of the global oil and gas industry’s methane emissions have been found to come from a group of “ultra-emitter” sites located mostly in Turkmenistan, Russia and the US. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that governments recently agreed to slash by 2030, New Scientist reported. While huge …

Having banned oil exploration in its territorial waters, Denmark is investing $2.4 billion into a plan to capture CO2 from the energy and industrial sectors and inject it into the seabed in geological formations that previously held oil and gas deposits. Reuters reported that the subsidies for carbon capture and …

The European Union will need to invest 500 billion euros ($568 billion) in new generation nuclear power stations from now until 2050, the bloc’s internal market commissioner said in an interview published over the weekend. “Existing nuclear plants alone will need 50 billion euros of investment from now until 2030. …

In the EIA’s January Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), it is forecasted that rising electricity generation from renewable energy resources such as solar and wind will reduce generation from fossil fuel-fired power plants over the next two years. The forecast share of generation for US non-hydropower renewable sources, including solar and …

The new German government unveiled plans last week to massively increase the ambition of its national hydrogen strategy. There is just one caveat: fossil gas-based hydrogen likely won’t be included in subsidy schemes, despite demands from the oil and gas industry. Clean hydrogen is seen as a potential silver bullet …