The Payne Institute Earth Observation Group (EOG) at Colorado School of Mines has developed a new method for detecting flaring at industrial sites with the capability to produce worldwide data on steel mills.

Africa contains significant amounts of hydrocarbon reserves that contribute extensively to state revenue and facilitate social and economic development. The growth prospects for these African countries are however under threat as international financial institutions reduce their funding for hydrocarbon developments in response to global warming and its adverse effects. Given that Africa contributes less than 5 percent of global carbon emissions and has widespread energy poverty, the curtailment of funding for hydrocarbon development will create an inequitable burden on African economic development.

Energy poverty is widespread in African countries and power generation capacity has continued to lag population and economic growth. The prospects for adding generation capacity are currently diminished as global financial institutions reduce lending for carbon-based energy developments in response to the adverse effects of climate change. Concurrently, large population centers in Africa continue to generate waste that can be utilized for power generation on competitive terms using landfill gas. Power generation from landfills also has the benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with each landfill and displacing gasoline and diesel demand from use in transportation and backup power generation. Despite these attributes, the uptake of landfill gas power across Africa has been negligible. This paper highlights economic feasibility assessments of African landfill power generation projects from literature and develops options for policymakers to boost landfill gas power penetration on the continent. It concludes by proposing guidelines to enable policymakers to recognize political and market constraints and incorporate potential solutions to these constraints into future policies.

The oil and gas industry began injecting carbon dioxide into the ground in the 1970s as a technique to produce more oil (now called enhanced oil recovery), but today there is a renewed interest in CO2 injection for carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — this time as a way to address climate change. Despite CCS technology itself being decades-old, persistent regulatory and liability questions paired with limited economic viability threaten development, even as the industry appears to be gathering momentum for large-scale growth.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 should offer an immense boost to the carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) industry. With $369 billion allocated to energy security and climate change, the expectation is to "lower energy costs, increase cleaner energy production, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40% by 2030". These emission reduction targets will be met in part through enhancing and expanding existing incentives.

After about 20 years of slow and staggered progress, Nigeria's Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) was ratified into law in 2021 and became the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA). This paper examines the dynamic political context in which the bill finally came into being through the lens of the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF). It identifies the key interest groups in the context of the bill's passage and describes the changes in the preference enforcement power of these groups that opened the way for the passage of the bill. Finally, it sheds light on the PIA's survival prospects after the 2023 presidential elections based on the backgrounds of the top candidates and their likely policy inclinations.

Society bears many costs when consumers use transport fuels like gasoline and diesel. To name a few impacts, consumption of transport fuels adds to climate change, local pollution, traffic congestion, and traffic accidents. Fuel consumers do not directly bear the burden of those impacts. In addition, some countries (like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia) subsidize the consumption of gasoline to shield domestic consumers from volatile price changes. In short, the world market for transport fuels is highly distorted because consumers to not pay the full costs of fuel consumption.

When governments apply high tax rates targeted at natural resource rent, there must be generous deductions in order to avoid investment disincentives. How generous is disputed. Based on standard finance theory and recommendations from the OECD and the IMF, the value that firms attach to future deductions depends on the risks of these, and the companies' after-tax weighted-average cost of capital cannot be applied directly. As an example, a simple model quantifies the difference between pre-tax and post-tax systematic risk when tax deductions are less risky than pre-tax cash flows. Osmundsen et al. (2015) suggest that the difference must be ignored by oil companies, since they cannot find the separate market values of tax deductions. But companies operating in different jurisdictions cannot then appreciate differences in tax systems, not even approximately, which will lead to suboptimal decisions. Tax designers may instead assume that companies have gradually adopted more sophisticated methods of investment decision making.

One of the largest fires in Colorado history is now burning just outside of Grand Junction, Colorado. The fire has surpassed 50,000 acres in size, and is believed to be started by lighting, and now spread by high winds. Hundreds of firefighters are onsite.

As the sun set over the Mediterranean this weekend in Beirut, it plunged the 2.4 million person city into darkness. The Lebanese power grid shut down on Saturday due to depleted fuel resources, which comes after months of economic crisis in the country. Footage from BBC news shows families gathered at night under solar-powered streetlights, some of the only lights that remained on in the entire city, using the term "electricity refugees" to describe themselves. This most recent outage captured international attention, but the problem of electricity shortages in Lebanon has been ongoing for months.