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The wind regime in Colombia has been rated among the best in South America. However, under the current circumstances, and on its own, the interconnected system would not likely promote wind power. This report is targeted to analysts, planners, operators, generators and decision makers in Colombia and other countries in the region and provides a set of policy options to promote the use of wind power. The potential instruments assessed in this study include financial instruments, government fiscal mechanisms, and adjustments to the regulatory system. The single most effective policy instrument to promote wind power in Colombia consists on valuing the firm energy offered by wind, its potential complementarity to the hydrological regime and enabling wind power an access to reliability payments.

Natural gas is considered a helpful transition fuel in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of other conventional power plants burning coal or liquid fossil fuels. Natural Gas Hydrates (NGHs) constitute the largest reservoir of natural gas in the world. Methane contained within the crystalline structure can be replaced by carbon dioxide to enhance gas recovery from hydrates. This technical review presents a techno-economic analysis of the full pathway, which begins with the capture of CO2 from power and process industries and ends with its transportation to a geological sequestration site consisting of clathrate hydrates. Since extracted methane is still rich in CO2, on-site separation is required. Focus is thus placed on membrane-based gas separation technologies widely used for gas purification and CO2 removal from raw natural gas and exhaust gas. Nevertheless, the other carbon capture processes (i.e., oxy-fuel combustion, pre-combustion and post-combustion) are briefly discussed and their carbon capture costs are compared with membrane separation technology. Since a large-scale Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) facility requires CO2 transportation and storage infrastructure, a technical, cost and safety assessment of CO2 transportation over long distances is carried out. Finally, this paper provides an overview of the storage solutions developed around the world, principally studying the geological NGH formation for CO2 sinks.

This article presents the value-added production-sharing contract (VAPSC), an extension of traditional production-sharing contracts (PSCs), which encompasses raw materials production, subsequent processing, and the final ‘sharing’ of goods. Developing countries often face challenges in oil and gas exploration, production, and sector development, necessitating new collaborative frameworks between governments, industries, and international companies. The study justifies the economic terms of VAPSC that align with Lebanon’s national regulations, focusing on offshore gas production and the subsequent production and sale of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The research evaluates VAPSC application in Lebanon through a case study involving offshore gas field development, LNG plant construction, and consequent LNG-sharing. Results demonstrate the VAPSC potential to promote petroleum sector development by generating added value for both the state and society, as well as economic efficiency for the contractor. The research contributes to contract theory by introducing VAPSC as a novel framework for integrating hydrocarbon extraction, subsequent processing, and value-added product distribution, offering a replicable model for other resource-rich developing nations. The main findings include the design of a new type of contract—VAPSC—along with an economic-mathematical model for optimizing government-investor partnerships and the definition of key contractual terms.

In 2022, the Lancet Countdown warned that people's health is at the mercy of fossil fuels and stressed the transformative opportunity of jointly tackling the concurrent climate change, energy, cost-of-living, and health crises for human health and wellbeing. Harnessing the rapidly advancing science of detection and attribution, new analysis shows that over 60% of the days that reached health-threatening high temperatures in 2020 were made more than twice as likely to occur due to anthropogenic climate change (indicator 1.1.5); and heat-related deaths of people older than 65 years increased by 85% compared with 1990–2000, substantially higher than the 38% increase that would have been expected had temperatures not changed (indicator 1.1.5). [...]those countries that have historically contributed the least to climate change are bearing the brunt of its health impacts—both a reflection and a direct consequence of the structural inequities that lie within the root causes of climate change. The 2022 Lancet Countdown report highlighted the opportunity to accelerate the transition away from health-harming fossil fuels in response to the global energy crisis.

Currently, the Russian oil and gas industry is characterized by significant reserves depletion and the late stage of development of most fields. At the same time, new fields that are brought into industrial development, in the majority of cases, have hard-to-recover reserves. Furthermore, most prospective oil and gas deposits are located in the Arctic and its offshore territories and their development is much more complicated due to regional peculiarities. This substantiates the necessity of a special approach to the development of the oil and gas potential of the Arctic, based on innovation. The goal of the paper is to reveal the role of innovation activity in the sustainable development of the oil and gas potential in the Arctic and its offshore zone. The paper briefly presents the main urgent factors of Arctic development, which highlight the necessity of innovation for its sustainability. Then, it introduces the methods used for the research: the Innovation Policy Road mapping (IPRM) method in accordance with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) concept for clarifying how innovations will lead to sustainable development. In terms of results, this paper presents an innovation policy roadmap for the sustainable development of oil and gas resources of the Russian Arctic and its shelf zone and identifies the role of innovation within this development.

With the most underserved communities most affected, these economic impacts further reduce their capacity to cope with and recover from the growing impacts of climate change, thereby amplifying global inequities. Concerningly, multiple hazards revealed by individual indicators are likely to have simultaneous compounding and cascading impacts on the complex and interconnected human systems that sustain good health, disproportionately threatening people's health and survival with every fraction of a degree of increase in global mean temperature. Only 68% of countries reported high-to-very-high implementation of legally mandated health emergency management capacities in 2023, of which just 11% were low HDI countries (indicator 2.2.5). [...]only 35% of countries reported having health early warning systems for heat-related illness, whereas 10% did so for mental and psychosocial conditions (indicator 2.2.1). [...]their strategies are pushing the world further off track from meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, further threatening people's health and survival.

Power systems for South and Central America based on 100% renewable energy (RE) in the year 2030 were calculated for the first time using an hourly resolved energy model. The region was subdivided into 15 sub-regions. Four different scenarios were considered: three according to different high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission grid development levels (region, country, area-wide) and one integrated scenario that considers water desalination and industrial gas demand supplied by synthetic natural gas via power-to-gas (PtG). RE is not only able to cover 1813 TWh of estimated electricity demand of the area in 2030 but also able to generate the electricity needed to fulfil 3.9 billion m3 of water desalination and 640 TWhLHV of synthetic natural gas demand. Existing hydro dams can be used as virtual batteries for solar and wind electricity storage, diminishing the role of storage technologies. The results for total levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) are decreased from 62 €/MWh for a highly decentralized to 56 €/MWh for a highly centralized grid scenario (currency value of the year 2015). For the integrated scenario, the levelized cost of gas (LCOG) and the levelized cost of water (LCOW) are 95 €/MWhLHV and 0.91 €/m3, respectively. A reduction of 8% in total cost and 5% in electricity generation was achieved when integrating desalination and power-to-gas into the system.

Extensive development of shale gas has generated some concerns about environmental impacts such as the migration of natural gas into water resources. We studied high gas concentrations in waters at a site near Marcellus Shale gas wells to determine the geological explanations and geochemical implications. The local geology may explain why methane has discharged for 7 years into groundwater, a stream, and the atmosphere. Gas may migrate easily near the gas wells in this location where the Marcellus Shale dips significantly, is shallow (∼1 km), and is more fractured. Methane and ethane concentrations in local water wells increased after gas development compared with predrilling concentrations reported in the region. Noble gas and isotopic evidence are consistent with the upward migration of gas from the Marcellus Formation in a free-gas phase. This upflow results in microbially mediated oxidation near the surface. Iron concentrations also increased following the increase of natural gas concentrations in domestic water wells. After several months, both iron and SO₄2− concentrations dropped. These observations are attributed to iron and SO₄2− reduction associated with newly elevated concentrations of methane. These temporal trends, as well as data from other areas with reported leaks, document a way to distinguish newly migrated methane from preexisting sources of gas. This study thus documents both geologically risky areas and geochemical signatures of iron and SO₄2− that could distinguish newly leaked methane from older methane sources in aquifers.

Nitrogen oxides (NOx=NO+NO2), produced in urban areas and industrial facilities (particularly in fossil-fuel-fired power plants), are major sources of air pollutants, with implications for human health, leading local and national authorities to estimate their emissions using inventories. In Qatar, these inventories are not regularly updated, while the country is experiencing fast economic growth. Here, we use spaceborne retrievals of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) columns at high spatial resolution from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) to estimate NOx emissions in Qatar from 2019 to 2022 with a flux-divergence scheme, according to which emissions are calculated as the sum of a transport term and a sink term representing the three-body reaction comprising NO2 and hydroxyl radical (OH). Our results highlight emissions from gas power plants in the northeast of the country and from the urban area of the capital, Doha. The emissions from cement plants in the west and different industrial facilities in the southeast are underestimated due to frequent low-quality measurements of NO2 columns in these areas. Our top-down model estimates a weekly cycle, with lower emissions on Fridays compared to the rest of the week, which is consistent with social norms in the country, and an annual cycle, with mean emissions of 9.56 kt per month for the 4-year period. These monthly emissions differ from the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service global anthropogenic emissions (CAMS-GLOB-ANT_v5.3) and the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGARv6.1) global inventories, for which the annual cycle is less marked and the average emissions are respectively 1.67 and 1.68 times higher. Our emission estimates are correlated with local electricity generation and allow us to infer a mean NOx emission factor of 0.557 tNOx GWh−1 for the three gas power plants in the Ras Laffan area.