India and Bangladesh signed a USD1.6 billion joint venture agreement to build a 1,320-MW coal-fired power plant which is expected to be operational within five years.
The rapid expansion of renewable technologies is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak assessment of global progress towards low-carbon energy, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in an annual report to the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM).
“The drive to clean up the world’s energy system has stalled,” IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven told the CEM, which brings together ministers representing countries responsible for four-fifths of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
In a bid to meet China’s rising demand for natural gas, state energy giant Sinopec Group is to invest up to USD11.3 billion (70 billion yuan) to build the country's largest coal-to-gas project.
China's regulatory authority has given the green light on preparatory work for a huge coal gasification project in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to Xinhua.
China’s top five power companies are facing a hefty bill and a potential loss of capacity in order to fit in with the country’s plan to cap total water consumption by 2030, according to a new report.
The implication is that, despite plans to build hundreds of new coal-fired power plants, there is simply not enough water to accommodate them in the China’s most populated and economically developed regions.
According to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), Huaneng, Datang, Huadian, Guodian, and China Power Investment are heavily exposed to water supply disruptions due to the concentration of their portfolios in moderately to severely water-scarce regions, in particular the dry and industrial northeast.
The Indian government, which believes the road to energy security lies in shale gas and coal bed methane, is looking at policy initiatives to smooth the way for exploration of both within its boundaries.
Amid all the news about coal and pollution problems in China you might have missed this one: According to new statistics from the China Electricity Council, China’s wind power production actually increased more than coal power production for the first time ever in 2012.
Thermal power use, which is predominantly coal, grew by only about 0.3 percent in China during 2012, an addition of roughly 12 terawatt hours (TWh) more electricity. In contrast, wind power production expanded by about 26 TWh.
China’s Tangshan Iron and Steel Group yesterday announced a cooperation framework agreement with US company Harsco Corp to produce ethanol from converted coal gas.
Following on from the publication of a draft Japanese Government plan for the commercialization of methane hydrate deposits 10 years from now, Japan Oil, Gas & Metals National Corp (JOGMEC) announced yesterday that it has it produced gas in the world’s first offshore test to extract the fuel from the frozen depths.
The experimental gas field is in the Nankai Trough, about 50-km off the coast of Honshu, Japan's main island. JOGMEC estimates that the surrounding area holds at least 1.1 trillion cubic meters of methane hydrate, the equivalent of 11 years’ of Japanese natural gas imports.
A somewhat sobering new report from Pike Research says annual installations of diesel generator sets (gensets) will reach 82-GW of capacity by 2018. To put this in perspective, this is nearly twice as much new wind-powered generating capacity installed in 2012 and more than two-and-a-half times last year’s solar installations worldwide.
China is looking optimistically at taking a bigger role in America’s booming shale gas industry as the Asian country’s biggest players shop for opportunities in the US market, despite almost certain push back from the US government and other stakeholders.
Armed with a wheel barrow full of government cash, China’s largest oil company, China National Petroleum Corp, is seeking to take a prominent seat at the high-stakes energy table in North America.
Ciris Energy, a US company that uses naturally occurring microbes to convert coal to natural gas, is to use some of the USD25 million it has just received from a Hong Kong-based investor to fund expansion into Asia.
China National Petroleum Corp, is the latest Chinese oil company to announce plans to invest billions of yuan to upgrade its fuel quality after air pollution in the Chinese capital Beijing hit hazardous levels on 20 days in January.
China's inexorable demand for energy has seen it sign a slew of multi-billion deals in the past in the past week or so, reflecting the new complexities of the international energy market. They add to new calculations by analysts that China is set to produce enough crude oil outside its borders to rival OPEC members such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol said last year's USD35 billion foreign energy company buying spree by Chinese companies will produce the equivalent of Kuwait's output by 2015.
The concept of clean coal doesn’t get a lot of respect from environmentalists who tend to describe it as an oxymoron (like “military intelligence”). A research team at Ohio State University in the US has, however, pioneered a new combustion technology which is now ready for larger scale testing, having successfully produced heat from coal while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction over 203 hours of continuous operation.
Asia is expected to become the world's second-largest natural gas market by 2015, even though it is dominated by long-term contracts in which prices are linked to that of oil which keeps prices much higher than those in other parts of the world, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
In the report the IEA shows how the Asia-Pacific region's natural-gas market can evolve from one oil-linked prices, which has raised serious questions about the sustainability of the system and its effects on Asian competitiveness, to one featuring a more competitive and dynamic network of trading hubs in which prices better reflect local gas demand and supply.
China’s CNOOC announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Canada’s Nexen Inc in the long-fought USD15.1 billion battle that required approval by a large group of stakeholders including both the Canadian and US governments.
This report by the World Bank spells out what the world would be like if it warmed by 4 degrees Celsius, which is what scientists are nearly unanimously predicting by the end of the century, without serious policy changes.
Companies in Asia reveal expectations that regulations that could lead to rising costs for reporting and reducing GHG emissions will also be the main sources of climate-related business opportunities.
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