Author: Arnes Biogradlija

Between 2018 and 2023, Shell’s trading subsidiary in the Bahamas, Shell Western Supply and Trading Limited, posted profits of $6.2 billion. The office employs 37 people. That works out to $28 million in profit per employee per year, compared to a group-wide average of $270,000. The ratio of 104 to 1 is not the product of exceptional individual productivity. It is the output of a transfer pricing structure in which a subsidiary classified as a “risk-taking entrepreneur” under OECD guidelines captures the margin on oil trading flows from West Africa and Latin America to the UK and Singapore, in a…

Ammonia has become the consensus carrier molecule for long-distance green hydrogen transport, but the cracking step at the destination, extracting hydrogen from ammonia at the point of use, remains a genuine technical constraint that is not resolved by simply scaling existing thermocatalytic pyrolysis systems. AES Tech, a Korean company operating under the AASTEC brand, is pursuing a proprietary electrochemical route to ammonia decomposition that targets a specific application: supplying hydrogen in real time to gas turbines operating under variable load, where the hydrogen supply system must ramp up and down in minutes or less in response to grid conditions. The…

In the four weeks following Europe’s record June heatwave, grain production forecasts for the EU and UK were revised down by almost nine million tonnes, with the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit valuing the lost production at approximately €2.1 billion at current farm-gate prices for wheat, barley, maize, and other grains. That figure represents roughly 5% of the 2025 production value estimate across the affected crops, concentrated in the single growing period when extreme heat inflicted the most damage. France and Hungary absorbed the largest losses. France’s forecast was cut by 4.1 million tonnes, valued at around €891 million, with…

In April 2026, CATL signed a 60 GWh sodium-ion supply agreement with integrator HyperStrong, the largest sodium order ever placed, and declared the chemistry mainstream-ready. The 2 GWh agreement with Solarpro for deployment across Central and Eastern Europe, announced this week using CATL’s Tener Sodium platform, is smaller in absolute volume but more significant in geographic reach: it represents the first large-scale sodium-ion battery energy storage project in a region where the technology’s core performance advantage, cold-weather retention, is directly relevant to grid operating conditions. CATL’s CTO of its domestic energy storage solutions division stated that the company’s goal is…

The proposed €133.4 million subsidy to Repsol for the Atlas electrolyser project at its A Coruña refinery complex is structured around a production premium of €2.20 per kilogram of renewable hydrogen, more than four times the premium that winning projects secured in both the first and second European Hydrogen Bank auctions, where clearing prices ranged between €0.20 and €0.60 per kilogram for the general project category. That gap raises a specific question: whether the Spanish national funding framework, channelled through IDAE and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, is pricing industrial green hydrogen support at levels that reflect a fundamentally different…

In 2022, 14.4 million tonnes of electrical and electronic equipment were placed on the EU market, while Member States collected only 5 million tonnes of e-waste, equivalent to 11.2 kilograms per person. The gap between what enters the market and what is recovered for recycling represents one of the most tangible expressions of Europe’s critical materials supply problem: an enormous volume of copper, rare earths, precious metals, and other strategic inputs is leaving the productive economy through inadequate collection and processing, even as the clean energy transition drives demand for exactly those materials sharply higher. Copper illustrates the scale of…

The UK government’s decision to extend the operational life of Sizewell B by 20 years from 2035, contracting its 1.2 GW output under a contract for difference at £70.50 per MWh in 2025 prices, provides the clearest public benchmark yet for what nuclear lifetime extension actually costs in the British market. The figure is simultaneously useful as a policy instrument, instructive as a market reference point, and uncomfortable for an industry that has long suggested existing plants can continue running at marginal cost. Indexed to inflation and applicable to production beginning several years hence, the price lands very close to…

Contracted offers in the UK electricity demand connection queue rose from 41 GW in November 2024 to 125 GW by June 2025, against Great Britain’s peak electricity demand of 45 GW on 11 February 2026. Approximately 50 GW of that queue is attributable to data centre projects, making them the single largest driver of the connection backlog. Some developers are being offered connection dates in 2037 and beyond. In that context, a study published in Energy and Climate Change by researchers from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business proposes reframing how data centres are assessed and connected, arguing that…

Curtailment in Portugal rose to 182 GWh in 2024 and could triple by 2027 if storage deployment lags the pace of solar commissioning. Against that trajectory, the Portuguese government published its National Energy Storage Strategy on 29 June 2026, setting targets of 3.9 GW of pumped storage by 2030 and 5.26 GW by 2040, starting from a current base of approximately 3.5 GW. The strategy covers battery storage alongside pumped hydro and reflects an explicit government acknowledgment that record levels of renewable curtailment and negative electricity pricing, driven by the rapid build-out of wind and solar without matching investment in…

Since 2013, EU Member States have generated approximately €176 billion in ETS auction revenues, rising from €5 billion in 2017 to nearly €30 billion at the 2022 peak. Over the same period, the explicit allocation to industry decarbonisation from those revenues amounted to around €1.7 billion, less than 1% of the total collected. The contrast with what the power sector, buildings, and transport received is stark, and it sits at the centre of a detailed policy brief published by Agora Energiewende in July 2026 that frames the upcoming EU ETS review as the most consequential carbon market reform since the…