Europe

The company is currently working on the development of a hydrokinetic energy generation device and will be supported by a £100,000 award from Scottish Enterprise.

Samuel Lewinter, chief executive of ResHydro, said: "We are pleased to have the opportunity to open our Scottish subsidiary where we will have access to significant technical expertise and where market conditions will contribute to the most expeditious commercialisation of our technology."

Solar power is a great idea, but it is no good at night or when the sun does not shine – right? Wrong! In southern Spain there's now a solar power plant that can run constantly. We are used to seeing solar panels on houses and in solar arrays. These work by converting sunlight directly into electricity using photoelectric cells, but Torresol Energy was formed to introduce and test new technologies that make concentrated solar energy an economically competitive option and a real, viable, ecological and sustainable alternative to traditional energy sources.

In what is the latest in a series of announcements aimed at transforming the Atlantic’s role as an oil-producing region, the consortium, which also includes Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, has said that drilling has already begun on the first of five wells planned over the next two years. Up to 12 wells could be drilled, depending on initial results.

Clair, located to the west of Shetland, is already known as a "monster" field, holding eight billion barrels of oil. However, up until now it has been technically difficult to bring this ashore.

Cambridge Design Partnership (CDP) originally developed its Oxygen Concentratorin 2011 as a way of delivering life-saving oxygen to frontline battlefields. It works by cycling air pressure in chambers filled with a gas absorbing substance to concentrate atmospheric oxygen to 95 percent purity.

When we last spoke to Harry Anagnostaras-Adams, Managing Director of EMED Mining, it was late 2009 and he had been hoping to get the company’s flagship project, Rio Tinto open-pit copper mine near Seville in Spain into operation by 2010. That was at any rate the original objective of the company, which in 2005 had been floated on London’s AIM market by a group of Australian mining specialists who saw a real opportunity across Europe and the Middle East.

“The US alone,” managing director, Gordon Stove enthuses, “represents the single largest geophysics space in the world, with a revenue generation of over $2.4 billion a year from geophysical survey services alone. This is just one of the reasons why we are so keen to expand into that part of the world.”

The proposed £14 billion power plant, to be built at Hinkley Point in Somerset, would eventually be capable of powering some five million homes.

It is believed that EDF hopes to build two new reactors at Hinkley that would provide approximately seven percent of the UK’s electricity needs, while employing 25,000 people on the construction of the project alone. The energy giant says the project would generate taxes equivalent to a few percentage points of what the entire financial sector yields for the exchequer.

Ciner Group was put together by billionaire Turgay Ciner, who owns a diversified portfolio of companies including electric power plants, copper aluminium and soda ash mines, hotels and a media company in Turkey in addition to owning the Istanbul soccer team Kasimpasa Spor. Park Elektrik is the only quoted company in the group, with Ciner himself the majority shareholder but trading 35 percent of its shares on the Istanbul Stock Exchange (─░MKB) following an IPO in 1997.

Soda ash is perhaps better known as sodium bicarbonate, and it is a substance with a very large number of applications and uses. Far from being just an antacid that one can take to counteract dyspepsia after a night out, it can be used as a regular food additive, giving sherbet its fizz and noodles their texture. It is also used in baking, photography, as a degreaser, a water softener or a fixative for dyes.

The Turkish economy grew in a highly protectionist mould for more than half a century following the foundation of the modern republic after World War 1. However, in 1983 Prime Minister Turgut Özal initiated a series of reforms designed to shift the economy toward a more private sector, market-based model and since then many former state-owned enterprises have been privatised. One of Turkey’s largest integrated mining and beneficiation company’s is Eti, which has a number of subsidiary units responsible for several mining activities throughout Turkey.