The oil majors are increasingly becoming the gas majors as they lose their dominance in world oil reserves and face challenges in refining and marketing. In an interview with Fortune late last year the President of Shell Oil Company, Marvin Odum, said that Shell will produce more gas than oil by 2012. This may be […]

In 2010 the journal, Foreign Policy, named Vaclav Smil, one of the top 100 global thinkers of 2010. Smil is a prolific and stimulating writer on energy issues. I read two of his books over the summer break, “Energy Myths and Realities” and “Prime Movers of Globalisation”. Smil is no propagandist and takes a hard-headed, fact-based […]

The elegant young woman in the tailored grey suit slips on industrial gloves. She picks up a canister of freezing liquid. The digital display says -163°C. She slowly pours the liquid into a goldfish bowl. Will the goldfish live or die? And what is this? Some bizarre circus act? No, just another day at the Kogas […]

China has just passed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy after the US and while there is some debate about whether it has passed the US in energy consumption, it uses more than four times the energy of Japan. China’s thirst for energy is playing an important part in underwriting LNG development in Australia. The […]