Siberia has traditionally conjured up images of fearsome cold and death, first as a place of exile under the Russian Tsars and later under the murderous regime of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. A great appeal of eastern Siberia for political exile was its extreme remoteness. Originally only reachable by ship, eastern Siberia’s isolation was only somewhat alleviated by the opening of the single-track Trans-Siberian railroad in 1916. Russia’s Pacific coast city Vladivostok is closer to Tokyo and Beijing than Moscow. Russia’s…

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The Environmental Protection Agency this week proposed measures that it said would cut emissions for new power plants. Critics are lining up to say this marks the end of coal-fired power generation in the United States and in some ways they may be right. Despite the fervor over things like the Keystone XL oil pipeline and the fracking of natural gas, coal still dominates the energy sector and has been since at least the 1960s. While critics of the EPA’s proposals may have a point, is that necessarily a bad thing? The Supreme Court in 2007…

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Gasoline prices remain high, and Reuters recently noted that there are enough countries with civil unrest, technical problems and bad weather that there are around a million barrels a day of possible supply that are not getting to the market. Yet with Saudi Arabia continuing to reassure that it is willing to pump more oil, if needed, there appears to be, superficially, little cause for supply concerns this year. By the same token, in the longer term, concerns over supply also seem to be increasingly discounted. For example Citigroup has just released…

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It may be small by global standards, but Britain’s oil and gas industry has far greater significance than its size suggests. Apart from providing a global oil price benchmark — Brent Crude — derived from a blend of sweet North Sea crude types, exploration techniques and production technologies pioneered in the North Sea are used around the world to extract oil from hostile environments. Whatever is done in offshore oil and gas fields around the world, the chances are it was probably done first in the North Sea. The oil and gas…

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Turkey has adopted a new strategy in its bid to solve its Kurdish “issue.” Ankara’s outreach initiative has enormous energy implications, as Turkey currently imports 90 percent of its energy supplies and many pipelines run through Turkey’s eastern Kurdish regions, a tempting target which Kurdish militants have attacked in the past. Under the new plan of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his government will not attempt negotiations with Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the outlawed separatist Marxist Kurdistan…

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The UK has announced that its greenhouse gas emissions fell by seven percent in comparison to 2010. This was due to a higher average temperature, reducing demand of energy to heat houses, and an increase in the amount of electricity produced from renewable sources. Emissions of the six greenhouse gases laid out by the Kyoto Protocol were down to 549 million tonnes from 590 million tonnes in 2010. Carbon dioxide, which makes up nearly 84 percent of UK emissions, was down by eight percent. Renewable energy now accounts for 9.5 percent of the UK’s…

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Germany has set the bold emissions target of reducing its greenhouse gas levels by 40% by 2020, and then 80% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels. Other countries have set similarly ambitious targets but Germany is the largest economy to aim to produce so much of their energy from renewable sources. They have led the world in solar installations, and now are concentrating on wind power as well. Germany will be a test case to show whether industrialised nations can still compete whilst relying on renewable energy. Keeping energy costs low whilst moving…

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