Scotland is “punching above its weight” in the fight against climate change, environment minister Aileen McLeod said as a new report showed how reusing and repairing more products could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Scottish Government has failed to meet its emissions targets for four years in a row but Ms McLeod insisted the country was on track to cut these by 42% before the 2020 target.
Reusing, repairing and re-manufacturing products and materials could cut emissions by up to 11 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) by 2050, a new report from Zero Waste Scotland has concluded.
Engineering product and service provider Sparrows Group has expanded its senior management team.
Steve Bertone joins the firm, of which he will he head operations in the US, Brazil, Mexico and the Caribbean, with more than 30 years' experience in the industry.
The US military has launched air strikes targeting an al Qaida-linked militant leader in eastern Libya who has been charged with leading the attack on a gas plant in Algeria in 2013 that killed at least 35 hostages, including three Americans.
Tethys Petroleum has agreed to enter into a short extension with AGR Energy Limited.
The company announced last month it had entered into a limited period of exclusivity with AGR Energy to negotiate a potential larger financing.
The previous exclusivity period had been set to run through to June 12th.
Colombian officials are blaming rebels for an attack on the country’s energy infrastructure that left hundreds of thousands of people without power.
President Juan Manuel Santos said the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) blew up an energy pylon and blacked out much of the southern region of Caqueta.
The blackout affected more than 300,000 people. Mr Santos called it an irrational terrorist act that was counter to the peace process.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner asserted their countries rights to the Falkland Islands as they traded diplomatic barbs across the Atlantic Ocean.
Cameron said he had “robustly defended” Britain’s ownership of the islands at an EU-Latin America summit in Brussels, while Fernandez used a speech in Buenos Aires to accuse the British premier of being “almost rude” when he interrupted her foreign minister during a dinner in Brussels on Wednesday.
“The prime minister robustly defended the Falklands and the islanders’ right to self-determination in response to the Argentine foreign minister raising the issue,” Cameron’s office said in an e-mailed statement.
An islands MP has pledged to probe the country’s electricity market after being chosen to take charge of one of the most influential committees at Westminster.
It was announced yesterday that Angus MacNeil, who represents the Western Isles, will be the first SNP chairman of the energy and climate change select committee.
His appointment raised hopes in the north and north-east last night that the powerful group would continue to put pressure on the UK Government over the high cost of power in the area.
Islamic State strengthened its hold in central Libya, taking territory near Libya’s largest oil terminal and repelling efforts by militias to halt its advance.
The jihadist group had been tightening its grip on Sirte over recent months. It claimed on Tuesday to have finally succeeded in taking Muammar Qaddafi’s hometown, after overrunning a nearby power station.
Islamic State already controls the desert town of Naufaliya, about 30 miles from Libya’s largest export terminal of Es Sider and neighboring Ras Lanuf, the third-largest. Controlling Sirte helps cement those positions on the west side of the so-called Sirte Basin, which is home to about 70 percent of the country’s crude reserves.
A leading union is raising safety and job concerns over the technology to be used in a possible new nuclear power station.
The GMB has written to the Government and safety bodies saying it feared the Bradwell nuclear site in Essex could be handed over “lock, stock and barrel“ to China’s national nuclear corporation.
The Chinese could then use their own technology, and possibly bring thousands of workers to the UK, dealing a blow to this country’s own nuclear industry, the union claimed.
National officer Gary Smith said in a letter to Energy Secretary Amber Rudd: “The idea that a Chinese state company will be given a site in the UK, not far from London, where they can use Chinese labour to construct a reactor to be made in China and using Chinese components would in our view constitute economic madness and raises serious safety issues.
Statoil has made a number of appointments to its board of directors after two of its board members chose not to stand for re-election.
Øystein Løseth has been elected as new chair and Roy Franklin as a new member and deputy chair.
It comes after the outgoing chair of the board Svein Rennemo and board member Jim Mulva informed the board in advance of their decision not to stand.
Bjørn Tore Godal, Jakob Stausholm and Marjan Oudeman were re-elected as members of the board of directors.
British oil explorer Soco International Plc defended paying $42,250 to an army major in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a security measure, after an anti-corruption group accused the officer of demanding bribes.
London-based Global Witness said in a statement on Wednesday that it obtained documents showing Soco’s payments to the Congolese major.
Global Witness and other human rights groups have accused the officer of trying to bribe and intimidate campaigners who opposed efforts by Soco to search for oil in Congo’s Virunga National Park.
Over 140 companies are already working directly in sensor system technologies in Scotland, with quite a number in offshore oil & gas.
Read the website blurb and it says that the Innovation Centre for Sensor and Imaging Systems (CENSIS) was described as a game changer for Scotland in April 2013.
One of a family of eight technology innovation centres set up around that time by the Scottish Funding Council, CENSIS was to be a catalyst to an apparently “already rapidly growing technology market”.
More than $426billion is forecast to be spent over the next five years on offshore oil and gas maintenance, modifications and operations (MMO).
However, analysts at Douglas-Westwood warn in a new study of the MMO market that a 12% decline in expenditure is expected this year.
This is due to the delay of some major modifications by operators and a reduction as some aspects of MMO that are not directly associated to production are cut and further pricing pressures are applied by oil & gas operators.
“Despite this, the long-term outlook for MMO expenditure is positive and expected to reach 2014 levels by 2017,” says DW.
Statoil has entered into an agreement with Colony Capital for the sale of its head office building in Norway.
The company will also sign a 15-year lease agreement with an extension option at the same time.
Statoil's head office building is at Forus in Stavanger.
Gazprom has been given more time to respond to charges by European Union antitrust regulators after it was alleged the company levies excessive prices and blocks rivals in Eastern Europe.
The European Commission announced in April that the Russian oil giant had been given 12 weeks to reply to the charges.
Antitrust regulators had brought the charges after more than two years of investigation.
Swire Oilfield Services has made an appointment to its executive team.
Roy Shearer will join the company as its chief financial officer and will be based at the offices in Aberdeen.
He will be responsible for the finance function across the group, including accounting and reporting, planning, tax and treasury.
The Scottish Government has missed its climate-change targets for the fourth year in a row, even though there has been a fall in greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmental campaigners called for action after figures show an estimated 53 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) was produced in 2013.
When that total is adjusted to take into account trading in the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), that falls to 49.725 MtCO2e.
But it is still above the target set by Scotland’s climate-change laws of 47.976 MtCO2e for that year.
Environment minister Aileen McLeod is due to make a statement to Holyrood this afternoon on the failure to meet the target - but stressed Scotland was on course to meet the target of cutting emissions by 42% by 2020.
Some of the world’s richest nations threw their weight behind a plan to stamp out fossil-fuel emissions by the end of the century in an unprecedented show of unity on climate change.
The Group of Seven is pushing to “decarbonize,” meaning any polluting gases from burning oil, gas or coal must be canceled out by carbon-capture or other technologies by 2100. Nations should aim for emission cuts near 70 percent of 2010 levels by mid-century, the G-7 said Monday in a statement.
“Deep cuts in global greenhouse-gas emissions are required with a decarbonization of the global economy over the course of this century,” the group said following a summit in Germany hosted by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
An audit by the PSA (Petroleum Safety Authority) Norway has criticised Statoil over an alleged failure to monitor the condition of safety-critical blowout preventer equipment on a pair of North Sea platforms.
Between October 2014 and January 2015 the PSA conducted the audits at Oseberg B and Gullfaks C.
The authority said the findings were applied primarily to the BOP (Blowout Preventer) system which had been chosen as a particular object of verification during the audit.
A union has pledged to represent workers if the shale gas industry develops, stressing the importance of securing decent pay and conditions in the fledgling sector.
The GMB said it should be ready to organise workers if the so-called fracking process ever gets started.
National officer Gary Smith told the union’s annual conference in Dublin it would be wrong to oppose fracking, as other unions have done.
He said: “Jumping on bandwagons is easy, but doing the easy thing does not mean you are doing the right thing. It would be easy to come out against fracking, but it would be wrong for the union, and for the country.”
A lost racing pigeon was airlifted to safety by helicopter after it crash landed on a North Sea oil rig.
The exhausted bird was found by workers on the Clyde platform, 100 miles offshore earlier this month.
The pigeon, named Pedro by workers on the rig, was flown by helicopter to Aberdeen a few days later and taken to the National Wildlife Rescue Centre in Fishcross, Alloa.
The IWCF (International Well Control Forum) has appointed its first chief financial officer.
David Conroy will be based at the UK's headquarters in Montrose where he will be developing the role to lead changes to the technical aspects of IWCF's services.
This will include exam quality, programme development, curriculum and training.
A former BP executive has been acquitted of lying about how much oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion five years ago.
David Rainet had been facing up to five years in prison if he had been found guilty of wilfully making a fraudulent statement to federal law enforcement agents.
The case had been brought by the government regarding statements Rainey made to agents from the FBI and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) nearly a year after the spill.
A storage and inspection company is set to make an investment of up to £10million to develop a site at Peterhead on a former World War II aerodrome.
Independent Oilfield Services (IOS) has secured planning permission to develop a further 30 acres of its 80 acre supply base at the former Longside airfield to create secure warehouse facilities for the oil and gas and renewables industry.
This week members of the Buchan area planning committee unanimously approved three linked planning applications allowing IOS to revamp the site.
The firm, which also has an office in Aberdeen’s Golden Square, currently uses 30 acres of the site for pipe storage and inspection services. The planning permission granted by Aberdeenshire Council this week has given the green light for one 60,000 sq ft warehouse and a further two 30,000sq ft warehouses, including office accommodation, car parking for around 60 vehicles and yard space.
The highest-ranking BP Plc employee charged in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill denied lying to the US government over how fast oil was gushing out of the company’s doomed Macondo well.
David Rainey, BP’s former vice president of Gulf of Mexico exploration, was asked at trial Thursday if he “reverse engineered” his estimates to match a low initial government assessment.
“No, I did not,” Rainey replied.
