Günther Oettinger, the EU energy commissioner, said new targets were needed for 2030 to enable businesses to plan ahead, as the current targets to produce 20% of Europe’s energy from renewable sources run out in 2020. Oettinger was introducing a new EU energy roadmap to 2050, which showed that opting for a very high renewables component to the energy mix would be no more expensive than opting for alternative scenarios that placed more emphasis on nuclear power or coal and gas with carbon capture and storage.

He said that he expected binding renewable energy targets for 2030 to be in place by 2014: “With our roadmap we want to ensure that, for all participants, there should be an interesting discussion on binding targets for renewables by 2030. This should begin now and lead to a decision in two years’ time.”

It is the first time Oettinger has set out a clear timetrable for new targets. It follows an agreement reached at UN climate talks in Durban on Sunday by which all developed and developing countries agreed to negotiate an international agreement on emissions reductions “with legal force” that would be written and signed by the end of 2015 and would come into force from 2020.

By ensuring that Europe has its own post-2020 emissions and renewable targets decided in 2014, the EU will be in a better place to negotiate as a bloc and to meet the timetable set out in Durban. But the wrangling among member states over what the targets should be is likely to be fierce.

The UK is ahead of the rest in having set a “fourth carbon budget” for emissions reductions in the 2020s, under which plan emissions would be roughly halved by 2025 compared with 1990 levels. Even that has become less certain, however, as the chancellor, George Osborne, wants a review of the targets in 2014.

There is no agreement among other member states on what future targets should be, and several, such as Poland and other east European countries, want weaker targets while some Scandinavian countries want to be tough. Negotiating on targets was hard enough three years ago when the EU’s 2020 targets were set. Reopening the discussions in the midst of the worst financial crisis and recession since the war, and with the eurozone looking precarious, will be triply difficult.

Oettinger has also supported weaker targets for 2020 than the climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard.

Launching the 2050 energy roadmap, Oettinger said: “Only a new energy model will make our system secure, competitive and sustainable in the long-run. We now have a European framework for the necessary policy measures to be taken in order to secure the right investments.”

The roadmap puts the share of renewables in total energy use by 2050 at between 55% (in the lowest scenario) and 75% (in the highest scenario) – up to 97% in the share of electricity consumption.

Christian Kjaer, chief executive officer of the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) in Brussels said: “The commission’s communication could have been clearer in its commitment to binding renewable energy targets for 2030. However, with his strong statement today, Oettinger has provided European industry and citizens with that clarity. The European parliament and council must now give the commission a clear mandate to come forward with ambitious binding 2030 targets for renewable energy.”

Greenpeace’s EU energy policy director, Frauke Thies, said: “The roadmap shows that getting clean energy from renewables will cost taxpayers no more than getting dirty and dangerous energy from coal or nuclear power. The commission will be tempted to overplay the role of coal and nuclear energy to appease the likes of Poland and France, but the numbers in the roadmap are unequivocal. It proves that a modern energy system can’t do without renewables and efficiency, but can easily consign coal and nuclear power to the past.”

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

The reason for this dramatic turnround? Shale gas. It has been known for decades that gas exists in shale rock, says Andy Steinhubl, co-head of the North American oil and gas practice at Bain, but it was only recently with advances in the technology of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling – and an increase in energy prices – that it became viable to extract it.

The shift in the US market, where gas prices have fallen from $10-$13 per million cubic feet to $4-$5/mcf, has led to great excitement in other parts of the world as governments savour the prospect of reducing their energy dependence and perhaps building an export industry of their own.

Significant shale reserves have been discovered in Europe, Australia and China, among others. In Europe, the biggest reserves are believed to be in Poland, Ukraine and France, and a significant source has also been discovered in the UK.

It has also led to fears that the discovery of this new source of gas will hit investment in other, cleaner forms of energy such as nuclear and renewables.

However, there are a number of reasons to be cautious about the likely impact of shale outside the US, where a number of factors combined to help the industry take off.

The country had 2,000 land rigs involved in drilling in declining oil fields and thus readily available to switch to shale gas exploration, a dense service sector and a highly skilled workforce, along with supportive economics, says Luis Barallat, head of gas and LNG at Boston Consulting. “Almost none of this applies in Europe,” he adds. “There are fewer than 50 rigs operating in Europe today. The amount of resources in terms of drilling rigs, human capital and know-how are not comparable with the US.” Similar considerations apply in Asia and Australia.

Another stumbling block is property rights. “In the EU, landowners do not generally own rights to the subsurface so the willingness for landowners to permit the carrying on continuous drilling could well prove an impediment as compared to the US, where the landowners share in the financial benefits of the development through royalty payments and similar arrangements,” says Martin Stewart-Smith, a partner at law firm Morgan Lewis.

In addition, the geology of most reserves outside North America is less conducive to development because deeper drilling is required. Drilling for shale gas requires a large number of wells, which is more problematic in densely populated Europe than in the US.

“And if anyone thinks China is suddenly going to emerge as a major shale gas producer, just look at where their shale gas basins are,” points out Ben Caldecott, head of European policy at Climate Change Capital. “They are in the most water constrained parts of the country. The Tarim basin, for example, is literally underneath a desert.”

Finally, environmental fears over drilling may also hold back the development of the industry. There have been concerns about fracking fluid getting into the water table and France, for example, has imposed a moratorium on shale gas exploration. However, this stance may have more to do with the preponderance of nuclear power in its energy mix than safety concerns.

The safety concerns have been overstated, suggests Elizabeth Shepherd, head of environment at law firm Eversheds. “Hydraulic fracturing has been conducted in developed countries since the late 1940s and it has never been found to contaminate underground sources of drinking water. The technology has been safely applied so far to more than 1.2m individual wells, mostly in North America, but also in thousands of wells (including geothermal energy wells) across Europe.”

Nonetheless, Europe is still some years away from developing shale gas at significant scale, says Ronan O’Regan, a director at PwC. “Most of the work happening at the moment is around drilling to establish the size of the resource and there has been no real confirmation of the quality or quantity of resources.”

But if the growth of the industry will not be as rapid as in the US, it will develop in time into a significant source of supply with implications for energy markets. However, its main impact will be on other fossil fuel sources such as LNG, Russian gas and coal rather than on renewable energy and it will largely hit individual markets.

“We think Poland will be among the countries with the best opportunities for shale gas development,” says Rafa? Dudzinski, vice-president of PGNIG, the Polish oil and gas group. Poland is keen to develop shale gas both to move it away from dependency on Russian gas and to help it shift its power sector, which is 95 per cent coal-powered, to less polluting gas. It has the additional advantage that in the areas where its shale reserves are located, population density is much lower than in western Europe.

Spending on clean energy is unlikely to be affected because it is so linked to national and EU climate targets, backed up by incentives such as feed-in tariffs. “At an EU level I don’t think shale gas will have a negative impact on renewable investment as the primary drivers for renewable investment is government commitment to renewable energy as a means to achieving carbon reduction,” Mr O’Regan says.

But if it brings down gas prices, shale gas will compete directly with nuclear as a supplier of baseload power, that is generation capacity that runs continuously, and at an expected lower cost, so it may add to the pressures on the nuclear industry.

The bigger danger from the point of view of meeting emissions targets is that fossil fuel production gets “locked in” for another 20-30 years because of the advent of this new source of supply.

“In Europe there is a real risk that we lock in more gas infrastructure than is desirable” on the basis that gas prices will be permanently low, warns Mr Caldecott, even though it is more likely that lower prices in the near term will give way to rising prices in the longer term “given global demand and supply fundamentals”, he says.

However, Mr O’Regan says shale gas supplies could help the transition from fossil fuels to low carbon energy by switching from the provision of baseload power to being used as back up for intermittent power sources such as solar and wind as these sources make up a larger part of the energy mix. “If gas plants built in the 2015-2020 period are designed to run baseload and convert to more flexible operation in later life, this will minimise the risk of lock in,” he says.

Source: www.ft.com

The country holds an estimated 111.9 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves, ranking it 11th largest worldwide, according to the BP statistical review of energy.

The Shell-led Basrah Gas Company (BGC), a joint venture between the South Gas Company (51 per cent), Shell (44 per cent) and Mitsubishi, was established in 2008, and will be responsible for the collection and processing of associated gas from the Rumaila, West Qurna-1 and Zubair oilfields.

Currently, the fields collectively flare up to 700 million cubic feet a day (cfd), a figure that will increase in line with rising oil production.

Yet Iraq’s natural gas activities this year have not been confined to the huge oilfields in the south.

In June 2005, the government inked a deal with a group headed by Kuwait Energy to develop the Siba gasfield, also in southern Iraq, with capacity expected to reach 100 million cfd. A consortium around Turkey’s national oil and gas company was contracted to develop the Mansuriya gasfield in the east of the country.

In the same month, the government initialled an agreement with South Korea’s Kogas for the development of the Akkas field in the western Anbar province.

Kogas will have sole responsibility for the project after the Kazakh company KazMunaiGas pulled out of the deal.

The government is also looking at the export market. Apart from the liquefied natural gas export plans mooted in the agreement with Shell, it is looking at exports through pipelines.

In May, Iraq entered into a strategic energy partnership with the EU, in which the government agreed to explore possible exports of natural gas to Europe in return for a guaranteed market for an anticipated surplus of natural gas in the coming decades.

Negotiations between the two sides are expected to start before the year is over.

Source: www.thenational.ae

In a memorandum of understanding, the ten ministers agreed to explore how best regulatory, legal, planning and technical challenges can be resolved to make the grid a reality.

One of the aims of the grid would be to link up the 140 Gigawatt windfarm being built in the North Sea to Europe. This grid would enable Europe to help meet its emission targets.

The grid would act as an “inter-connector” between the United Kingdom, Ireland and mainland Europe enabling sharing of electricit.

The grid would help the UK export electricity to Europe and Scotland is well placed to gain from it said Scottish Government Energy Minister Jim Mather.#

“Scotland is playing a key role in the development and deployment of an interconnected offshore grid in the North Sea, recently highlighted as a European Union priority project,” he said.

The cost of the grid is expected to reach around £170 Billion and those backing the offshore grid believe it would be operational by 2020. The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the governments of the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

www.egovmonitor.com

The three countries which had the highest share of renewable energy compared to total energy consumption were Sweden, Finland and Latvia, with 44.4 percent, 30.5 percent and 29.9 percent of renewable energy sources in total consumption respectively.

The countries with the lowest share of renewable energy compared to total energy consumption in 2008 were Belgium (3.3 percent), the Netherlands (3.2 percent), the United Kingdom (2.2 percent), Luxembourg (2.1 percent) and finally Malta, where only 0.2 percent of total energy consumption comes from renewable energy.

Almost all member states of the European Union increased their share of renewable energy from 2006-2008. The top three countries with the largest increases in their share of renewable energy compared to total energy consumption were, Austria (24.8 percent in 2006 to 28.5 percent in 2008), Estonia (16.1 percent in 2006 to 19.1 percent in 2008) and Romania (17.5 percent in 2006 to 20.4 percent in 2008).

In a 2009 directive renewable energy targets were set for each of the member states, so that by 2020 the EU, as a whole, will reach a 20 percent share of total energy consumption form renewable sources. The United Kingdom plans to produce 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, France 23 percent, Italy 17 percent, Germany 18 percent and Sweden, which produced 44.4 percent of its energy from renewable sources in 2008, plans to increase that figure to 49 percent by 2020.

Renewable energy is becoming an increasingly important issue around the world as countries search for viable alternatives to oil. Websites such as worldometers count down, in real time, the number of days left until fossil fuel supplies run out; as of July 13, it is estimated that there are 152,082 days to the end of coal, 60,912 days to the end of gas and 15,485 days until the end of oil.

Renewable energy sources include solar, thermal, photovoltaic, hydro and wind power as well as geothermal energy and biomass.

http://www.worldometers.info/

The top ten countries with the largest share of renewable energy as a percentage of final energy consumption are;

Sweden 44.4%

Finland 30.5%

Latvia 29.9%

Austria 28.5%

Portugal 23.2%

Romania 20.4%

Estonia 19.1%

Denmark 18.8%

Lithuania 15.3%

Slovenia 15.1%

Source: www.independent.co.uk