OIL
ConocoPhillips Makes Large Oil Discovery Offshore Norway
Oil & Gas 360, December 22, 2020
ConocoPhillips has made a large oil discovery in the Norwegian Sea close to a producing oilfield, the U.S. oil and gas company said on Tuesday.
Preliminary estimates point to the field containing between 75 million barrels and 200 million barrels of recoverable oil equivalent, ConocoPhillips said, adding that additional appraisal would determine the flow rates and the ultimate resource discovery, as well as a potential plan for development.
GAS
Mardi Gras calls at Rotterdam for LNG bunkering
Adnan Bajic, Clean Energy, December 23, 2020
Carnival Cruise Line, the world’s largest cruise ship operator, informed that its newly built LNG-powered cruise ship Mardi Gras has made its first port call in Rotterdam. The vessel will complete its first LNG bunkering operation since being delivered from the Finnish shipbuilder Meyer Turku.
Mardi Gras is scheduled to depart Rotterdam on Wednesday and then sail to Barcelona, Spain, before making its eventual arrival in the U.S.
The ship’s inaugural voyage from Port Canaveral is scheduled for April 24, 2021. The vessel will be sailing from Port Canaveral in Florida and will be the first cruise ship in the Americas to be powered by LNG.
MINING
Iron fuels the fires of carbon free energy – Latest clean energy metal already brewing low-carbon beer
A.J. Roan, Metal Tech News, December 23, 2020
University researchers working in tandem with the European Space Agency, have tested the use of a new, smokeless, carbon-free energy by burning iron powder. And what better way to assess the potential of this new type of fuel than by brewing beer with all the flavor and less carbon emissions than traditional brews?
First tested in microgravity aboard European Space Agency sounding rockets, a team at McGill University in Canada and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands have discovered the recipe for igniting iron powder to produce fire.
“The basic idea of burning metal is hardly new, especially in the space field, because solid rockets rely on aluminum particles as fuel – burning many tons within a few minutes,” explains Antonio Verga, an ESA engineer who worked on the team’s experiments. “But aluminum only burns with very tiny particles – iron is a more practical fuel for controlled combustion, while having a comparable energy density to gasoline.”
The combustion process for metal works differently from “conventional” carbon fires, with the burning process transferred between adjacent metal particles by heat radiation, akin to the way neighboring trees can burst into flames during a forest fire.
Known as discrete burning, this occurs when a piece of fuel ignites and burns completely due to the ambient heat radiated by nearby fuel elements.
POLITICS
From the Washington Examiner, Daily on Energy:
CRUZ SEEKS SENATE VOTE ON PARIS DEAL: Sen. Ted Cruz, in a letter earlier this week to Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said Trump should fix the “great damage” done to the separation of powers by former President Barack Obama not sending the Paris climate deal to the Senate for a ratification vote.
“The only reason the Obama Administration refused to submit these agreements to the Senate as treaties was that it knew that the agreements were deeply unpopular and doomed for defeat,” Cruz wrote of the Paris Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal.
Cruz’s letter is the latest in a push from conservative groups and lawmakers to get Trump to send the Paris climate deal to the Senate for a vote, where it would face fierce Republican opposition. Sen. Lindsey Graham also called for Trump to take such a step in a tweet last week.
If the Senate voted down the Paris Agreement, conservatives hope it could make it more difficult for Biden to rejoin the climate deal, which he has said he will begin the process to do on day one.
CLIMATE CHANGE CONVERSATIONS
Norway says “no” to Greenpeace, “yes” to Arctic oil exploration.
Reuters, December 22, 2020
Norway’s supreme court on Tuesday approved government plans for oil exploration in the Barents Sea off the country’s northern coast, rejecting a lawsuit by environmental groups.
The groups, including Greenpeace, had claimed the oil licenses breached an article in the Norwegian constitution which guarantees the right to a healthy and viable environment.
“The supreme court is rejecting the appeal,” Chief Justice Toril Marie Oeie said as she announced the verdict on Tuesday.
The Nature and Youth advocacy group denounced the ruling in a tweet: “This means today’s youth lacks fundamental legal protection from environmental damage jeopardizing our future… This is shocking and we are furious.”
Norway ‘must be held accountable’
The verdict upheld rulings made by two lower courts, dismissing the arguments by Greenpeace and the Nature and Youth group that a 2015-2016 oil licensing round giving awards to Equinor and others had violated the constitution.