Third Update of May 2020 – An overview of last week’s Energy news

Below is this week’s summary. It should be a one minute read relevant to UK energy with links to documents for those who wish to read more.

(Click a bullet point to open the relevant article)

Monday – 11th May

• The record spell without coal contributing to UK power generation continues as UK reaches the 1 month ‘coal-free’ milestone.

Tuesday – 12th May

• Belgium will shut the 2 nuclear power plants that contribute 50% of the country’s electricity by 2025 and replace the generation capacity with natural gas and renewables.

Wednesday – 13th May

• UK All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Hydrogen has launched an inquiry into how the sector can help support UK economic recovery.

• The operations and maintenance headquarters for the world’s largest offshore wind farm (as measured by capacity) will be at Port of Tyne in north east England. The Dogger Wind Farm began construction in the north sea early in 2020 and will require £9 billion investment between 2020 and 2026.

Thursday – 14th May

• A group of UK MPs has called on government to build a town-wide pilot test for all buses to use hydrogen as fuel in a similar manner to the ‘all-electric bus town’ announced in February 2020 with £50 million of public funds.

• DNV-GL has announced results of its annual ‘Heading for Hydrogen’ survey. Results include that 1 in 5 senior oil and gas professionals (out of a sample of more than 1000) say their company is involved in a hydrogen project and over half expect hydrogen to play a major role in the UK energy mix in the coming decade.

Friday – 15th May

• A survey shows investment in renewable energy projects in the UK (also Germany and Japan) is becoming less attractive quoting “the lack of commercial incentives or economic benefits” as ranking high on the list of barriers.

• Energy companies in Norway have agreed to invest almost $700 million to develop a Carbon Capture and Storage plan. Using depleted north sea gas reservoirs to store CO2, 5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions will be removed from Norwegian and European industry each year when operations begin in 2024.

Saturday – 16th May

• China’s natural gas production continues to grow. In April 2020, production hit an average 540 million cubic metres per day (for context, UK total demand was about half of that in 2018 and production was about half of that again).

Sunday – 17th May

• FT reports that a combination of sunshine, wind and low electricity demand meant renewable electricity has set records recently in proportion of electricity from renewable sources; up to 30% of power generation over the previous 2 months compared with 23% for the same period in 2019.