Malcom Wicks is back at the post of U.K. Minister of State for Energy on the appointment of U.K. Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Minister John Hutton, the government declared Tuesday. 
Statoil and Shell are pulling out of their large-scale carbon-dioxide injecton plan for the Draugen and Heidrun offshore fields offshore Norway, saying it’ll cost too much to capture and transport the globe-heating gas. 
Opinion appears to differ on where to deploy and concentrate technology to curtail global warming and begin earning from the trade in carbon, judging by a week of declarations on carbon capture and storage, or CCS, from the North Sea. 
ConocoPhillips has “passed the conceptual stage” and is in the early stages of engineering studies for a large-scale carbon-capture, “regassification” and offshore carbon-storage project for the industrial northeast of England at Immingham. 
Business and industry, climate experts and the authorities gather in Oslo today, 22 June, to discuss and share experiences about carbon capture and storage. Statoil is the seminar's co-organiser. 
Emissions of carbon-dioxide and nitrogen oxide were little changed offshore Norway last year, but the count of volatile organic compounds — often harmful carcenogens that persist in the environment — was falling, new numbers say. 
The United Kingdom will invite six consortia to bid in a November tender aimed at drawing the U.K. companies best able to make the mass capture, transport and storage of carbon offshore a reality. 
Hydro Technology Ventures has formed a joint venture company with Input-Output, Inc. and Reservoir Innovation to develop, pilot test, and commercialize a full-wave seismic system for the permanent monitoring of offshore reservoirs. 
Florida-based World Energy Solutions is about ready to file a patent for an alternator that uses electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen which will in turn replace a quarter of the gasoline used by an ordinary car. 
ABB in Norway has won a NOK430-million ($72-million) contract to electrify Statoil’s Gjoa platform by sub-sea cable from gas-fired power plant at Mongstad, it was announced late Friday. |
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BP has pulled out the Peterhead carbon storage and power project that would have used the fast-emptying Miller field as storage for carbon-dioxide separated from a coastal power-plant’s hydrogen. 
Just days after joining forces to “decarbonize energy projects”, BP and Rio Tinto have aired plans for a $2-billion coal-fired power generation project just south of Perth in Western Australia. 
U.K. supermajor BP and mining company Rio Tinto have formed a joint venture aimed at creating “de-carbonized” power plants wich couple carbon capture and storage techniques with hydrogen removed from gas and coal for fuel. 
A peculiar auction will be held this June in London where fuel-cell patents, exhaust-scrubbing technology and other green inventions will be offered all-comers, it was understood Thursday.
The new Democratic speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said late Tuesday that energy independence in the U.S. will lead to cheaper gasoline prices. 
Norway’s offshore sector will never allow the Nordic country an overall lowering of carbon-dioxide emissions, unless electricity supplied from land is zero-emissions, according to the head of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. 
Aker Kvaerner has joined at least three other companies bidding to provide Statoil and Shell with carbon-dioxide capture technology for process plant, although the Norwegian contractor reportedly promises “116-percent” effectiveness.
A mobile carbon-scrubbing construction will be tested in May at the Shell-Statoil carbon-dioxide project at Risavika, just outside Stavanger, it was learned Tuesday. 
For the next three years, Statoil will invest NOK 1 billion in environmental technology at the Mongstad refinery north of Bergen. 
Origin Energy has launched a new Carbon Reduction Scheme offering Australian businesses an effective, efficient and flexible approach to reduce their carbon footprint. The company sees this scheme as a proactive way of helping companies to focus on and effectively manage the reduction and offset of greenhouse gas emissions. |
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