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Ever since John Browne vowed to turn BP green some 25 years ago, the British oil giant has experienced a series of embarrassing mishaps. That includes major safety lapses, such as a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the departure of several bosses. Yet its biggest blunder has been the bungled attempts to profitably decarbonise its business, which were made all the worse by its premature promise to go “beyond petroleum”. More
ON A DRIVE around the vast production site of SKW Stickstoffwerke Piesteritz, Germany’s largest producer of ammonia, near Wittenberg, a spokesman for the firm points at a giant yellow valve. “Normally around 2% of Germany’s industrial consumption of natural gas comes out of this thing,” he says. Last month, however, SKW shut one of the two ammonia plants at the site and slashed its production of fertiliser. More
DONALD TRUMP likes oil—and oilmen. He gushes about “liquid gold” with as much ferocity as Spindletop, an oil well that spat out perhaps 1m barrels over nine days in 1901 and turned nearby Houston into a boomtown. In his first administration he named Rex Tillerson, former chief executive of ExxonMobil, America’s mightiest hydrocarbon firm, as secretary of state. On February 3rd the Senate blessed Chris Wright, who founded an oil-services firm called Liberty Energy, as head of the Department of Energy. Mr Trump promises that on his watch big oil can “drill, baby, drill” to its heart’s content. More
For American consumers, online shopping has just got dearer. On February 1st Donald Trump did away with a decades-old provision, known as the de minimis waiver, that exempted goods under a certain value (lately $800) from customs duties. With the same stroke he raised tariffs on Chinese goods by 10%. Then on February 5th the United States Postal Service announced that it had temporarily suspended inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong, before abruptly reversing, causing all manner of confusion. More
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If investment in data centres is about to slow, nobody told Mark Zuckerberg. On January 29th, during an earnings call, Meta’s boss boasted that the social-media giant had plans to build an artificial-intelligence (AI) data centre “so big that it’ll cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there”. More
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