Energy

The global research and advisory firm Cleantech Group has released its 2010 US Smart Grid Vendor Ecosystem Report, which explores the key market dynamics shaping the emerging smart grid landscape.

Commissioned and funded by the Department of Energy, the study highlights $2.75 billion in annual product sales in three key smart grid categories: advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), demand response, and distribution grid management.

The world's biggest offshore wind farm off the UK’s Kent coast is being officially opened later today.

Built at a cost of £800 million, the 100 turbines will be able to produce 300 megawatts of electricity—enough energy per year to power the equivalent of more than 200,000 homes. The 380 foot-tall turbines are spread over an area of more than 35 square kilometres.

Up to 341 turbines will be installed at the wind farm over a four-year period.

GDF Suez and its partners have secured $1.3 billion in financing for the Barka 3 and Sohar 2 independent power projects in Oman.

The greenfield natural gas-fired power plants, which will each have a capacity of 744 MW when operational, carry a total investment cost of $1.7 billion.

Together the plants will add almost 1,500 MW to Oman’s existing capacity of around 3,600 MW. Their power output will be sold under two separate 15-year power purchase contracts to the Oman Power and Water Procurement Company, who will be the sole off-taker.

Centrica, the owner of British Gas, is to almost double its stake in the Norwegian Stratfjord field in a deal that will boost its expansion efforts in the North Sea.

The acquisition, worth £144 million, will increase Centrica’s oil and gas reserves by 29 million barrels of oil equivalent. It will provide the UK-based company with an additional 172 billion cubic feet equivalent of gas and oil reserves, and an incremental 70 million cubic feet per day of natural gas and oil production in 2010.

The founder and chairman of the Hashoo Group Sadruddin Hashwani speaks to John O’Hanlon about the purchase of Shell’s LPG marketing assets in Pakistan and the continuing growth of Orient Petroleum International Inc (OPII).

Tarun Kapoor, managing director of Himachal Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (HPPCL), talks to Jayne Flannery about the social and environmental imperatives of sustainable power generation within the state.

Russia and Norway ended a 40-year dispute yesterday when they signed an Arctic border treaty, opening up the region to offshore oil and gas development.

Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev and Jens Stoltenberg, the premier of Norway, attended the signing in Murmansk, a Russian Barents Sea port near the Norwegian border.

The disputed territory in the Barents Sea covered 175,000 square kilometres—roughly half the size of Germany—between the Novaya Zemlya archipelago on the Russian side and the Svlabard archipelago on the Norwegian side.

French industrial gases company Air Liquide has said it will invest $450 million in two global-scale hydrogen production units to supply Saudi Aramco with hydrogen for its planned Yanbu refinery.

Saudi Aramco's refinery will be located in Yanbu Industrial City, on the west coast of the kingdom. The new incorporated Red Sea Refining Company will process 400,000 barrels of heavy crude per day when the facility is completed in 2014.

The two hydrogen production units will have a total production capacity of 262 million cubic feet per day.

Tullow Oil has today announced a key new oil discovery in its Owo-1 exploration sidetrack in the Deepwater Tano licence offshore Ghana which confirms that its Owo well is now a "major new oil field."

Tullow said that the sidetrack showed a "very substantial" 200 metre gross oil column in the heart of the Owo oil field, with new condensate and gas accumulations below.

Illinois River Energy’s favorable cost structure, yields, profitability and management of supply chain and commodities combine to guarantee that the company won’t be going away anytime soon, Pam Derringer learns.