Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 demand of oil from Saudi Arabia fell from ten million barrels per day (bpd) to three million bpd. As a result of the reduced production many small oil wells were closed down, including the Dammam oil field, home to Saudi Arabia’s oldest wells. Sadad al- Husseini, once the executive vice president for exploration and development at Saudi Aramco, said that, “we simply didn’t need small fields like Dammam, and in fact shut in fully or partially many other fields including Khurais, Khursaniya,…

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Biofuels are a clean, alternative energy that many are hoping will become the next source of liquid fuels for internal combustion engines; a clean substitute for polluting fossil fuels. The US is a huge supporter of biofuels, last year producing 1 billion gallons, and the EU has also stated its intentions for 10% of all transport fuel to be biofuel by 2020.

Wait a minute though, new data obtained from a leak by the European Commission provides evidence that not all biofuels are clean. In fact some are more polluting than fossil fuels.

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Following the recent agreement by the EU to impose trade sanctions against Iran the Iranian parliament will debate a law that could halt all oil exports to the continent.

“On Sunday, parliament will have to approve a ‘double emergency’ bill calling for a halt in the export of Iranian oil to Europe starting next week,” Hossein Ibrahimi, vice-chairman of parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, was quoted as saying.

The EU accounted for 18 per cent of Iranian crude oil sales in the first half of 2011,…

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It seems that more and more large, renewable energy projects are being announced each day. The most recent is a giant solar power plant that will be built by Top Oilfield Services, a Tunisian oil and gas engineering company, and Nur Energie, a British solar firm. The project, called TuNur, will consist of a two gigawatt concentrated solar power (CSP) park.

CSP works by thousands of heliostatic mirrors focussing the sun’s rays onto a central tower filled with fluid that then heats up and drives the turbines.  The plant will…

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The World Future Energy Summit has recently finished in Abu Dhabi and for me one of the highlights was the Turanor, an impressive solar powered yacht designed and built by Planet Solar. It is the largest boat of its kind to ever sail and the first to ever circumnavigate the globe powered entirely by the sun. It steadily cruises at an average speed of five knots, but is capable of reaching more than double that on clear, calm, sunny days.

The project was conceived by Raphaël Domjan of Switzerland as a method of demonstrating the possibilities…

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