wells

squeeze out wells in the North Sea that had been abandoned for 30 years

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Norway is, on paper, the green Eden of the planet. Nine out of every ten new cars sold on its streets are electric and 98% of its electrical system is powered by renewable sources. However, its main economic engine is exporting what it internally rejects: fossil fuels. The official figures are conclusive: in 2025, the value of Norwegian exports of crude oil, condensate and natural gas will be around one trillion crowns, which represents 57% of its total exports of goods. An unprecedented geopolitical trigger has been added to this Norwegian paradox. The war in the Middle East and the resulting blockade in the Strait of Hormuz have turned the country into “a European gas station.” Resurrecting ghosts of the North Sea. To address this demand, the Norwegian government has made a historic decision. As confirmed by the Ministry of Energy in an official press releasethe country is going to reopen three gas fields in the Ekofisk area (Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk and Tommeliten Gamma). These wells were discovered in the 1970s, produced between 1977 and 1988, and had been closed since 1998. A consortium operated by ConocoPhillips (along with Vår Energi, ORLEN and Petoro) will invest around 19 billion Norwegian crowns (about 1.5 billion pounds) to reactivate these facilities through four new subsea systems. They are expected to pump again at the end of 2028, operate until 2048 and extract between 90 and 120 million barrels equivalent. This operation will not only generate some 7,600 direct jobs during its useful life, but the extracted gas will go directly to Emden (Germany), while the condensate will travel to Teesside (United Kingdom). It’s not just about reliving the past. Oslo has also offered 70 new exploration licenses, most in extremely sensitive areas such as the icy Barents Sea, getting closer to the coast than ever. According to Norwegian government dataonly about half of the country’s estimated gas resources have been produced, so the remaining 52% is yet to be extracted. In 2025 alone, the country exported approximately 122 billion standard cubic meters of gas. International responsibility. Terje Aasland, Minister of Energy, argues that Norwegian production It is “an important contribution to energy security in Europe.” The data support this extreme dependence: In 2024, Norway exported a volume of gas equivalent to more than 30% of the total consumption of the European Union and the United Kingdom. Furthermore, the government wields an environmental argument: Globally, replacing coal with natural gas in electricity generation reduces CO2 emissions by half. They also argue that gas is the perfect backup for intermittent renewables, providing flexible power when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. However, not everything is purely altruistic. While the state oil company Equinor registers historic profits, the country’s famous sovereign fund accumulates assets worth 1.9 trillion dollars. The voice of discord. According to Guardianleft-wing parties and environmental associations accuse the government of greenwashing (ecopostureo) and warn of the catastrophic risk that an oil spill near the coastline would pose. The contrast is also evident in the region itself. As Norway turns on the tap, the UK Labor government bans new drilling licenses on climate grounds. The result, just as it is revealed The Telegraphis that British production falls by 15% annually, forcing London to spend 20 billion pounds buying from Norway the energy that it refuses to extract from its own waters. The European dilemma of Oslo. Norway is fully aware of its hypocrisy and is trying to compensate for it with cutting-edge technology. The country inaugurated Northern Lightsthe first large commercial underwater warehouse in Europe. This project injects liquefied CO2 from European industries into the Aurora reservoir, 2,600 meters below the seabed. It is their way of showing that they can extract fossil fuels and, at the same time, lead the way in decarbonization technology. However, Norway has the resources and technology, but lacks direct political decision-making power. as he prays the maximum in Brussels: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” The umbilical cord that unites Norway with Europe It is physical and politicalsince it has a vast network of underwater gas pipelines. This mutual dependence has reopened a debate that seemed settled: Should Norway enter the European Union? Although the population rejected accession in 1972 and 1994, the current geopolitical isolation in the face of giants such as China, the United States and Russia is forcing both Norway and its neighbors (Iceland and Switzerland) to reconsider whether they should sacrifice sovereignty in exchange for sitting at the table where their main market is governed. The fossil sunset. Norway has perfected the art of looking to the future with pockets full of the past. The country has become the giant that heats the homes of a scared and war-torn Europe, squeezing an outdated energy model to finance an ultra-developed and clean welfare state. As the financial analyst Thina Saltvedt stated: for the BBC: “More and more people realize that there is a sunset on the horizon. But it’s going to be painful.” For now, while that climatic sunset arrives, Europe has decided to postpone the cold by turning on, once again, the old Norwegian boilers in the North Sea. Image | Norskpetroleum Xataka | No more greeting the driver: Norway launches the first bus where there is not a single human in control

The US is doing a lot of damage to Iran with the Hormuz counterblockade. So much so that he is already considering closing oil wells

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Oil has an unbreakable physical law: once it leaves the ground, it has to go somewhere. If ships can’t transport it and storage tanks fill up, the only option is to shut down the wells. Today, the war of attrition between the United States and Iran has ceased to be a mere diplomatic conflict and has become a geological and logistical time bomb. According to data from the analysis firm KplerIran has just 12 to 22 days left before its crude oil storage capacity is completely saturated. The US naval blockade has suffocated its exports by 70%, plummeting shipments from 1.85 million barrels per day to a meager 567,000. A lethal limit. As explained Al Jazeera, Stopping production at an oil well is not like turning off a light switch. When pumping is stopped, the pressure in the underground reservoirs drops sharply, allowing water or gas to seep into the production layers. The potential damage is immense: The Wall Street Journal warns that almost half of the Iranian oil fields are old and low pressure. An abrupt shutdown threatens to permanently destroy part of this aging infrastructure, making recovering that crude oil in the future technically and financially unfeasible. In Washington, the narrative is one of imminent victory. The US administration is confident that this collapse will force Tehran to surrender. According to statements collected by Foreign Policythe US Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessentand President Donald Trump himself predict that the drowning will cause an imminent internal shortage of gasoline, increasing social pressure on the regime until it is forced to give in. However, experts urge caution against Western triumphalism. A rigorous analysis of the Center on Global Energy Policy from Columbia University dismantles part of the myth of catastrophic damage dividing the problem into two fronts: Crude oil can breathe: Specialists detail that the historic oil fields of Khuzestan operate through a “gravity drainage” system. Paradoxically, a temporary stoppage could allow these specific reservoirs to recharge naturally. Natural gas, the true Achilles’ heel: The real risk, the institution explains, lies in the natural gas fields, such as the gigantic South Pars. If these become blocked as they cannot release the associated liquids, Iran will be forced to drastically ration energy for industry and homes in the coming months. Tehran does not plan to give up. According to NDTV, The Islamic Republic will maintain its “diplomacy of patience.” Furthermore, the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) already survived to severe production cuts in 2012 and 2019, and has a robust smuggling network that makes it very resistant to conventional economic pressure. Added to this is the time factor: according to the calculations of Kplerthe real financial blow will take between three and four months to be felt in Iranian coffers, since China – its main client – ​​operates with long delays in payments. The flight forward. To buy time, Iran is resorting to extreme measures. As revealed The Wall Street Journal, The country is reactivating dilapidated infrastructure, known in the sector as “junk storage”, in areas such as Ahvaz and Asaluyeh, and is even trying to export crude oil by train to China; a very slow and very expensive route that shows the level of stress in the system. and in the sea activation of the Nashaa 30-year-old supertanker rescued from scrapping to serve as an emergency floating warehouse. But the most fascinating and opaque strategy is unfolding thousands of miles from the Persian Gulf. As my colleague Miguel Jorge has developed for Xataka, There is a “secret gas station” in the middle of the ocean. This is an area off the coast of Malaysia, known as EOPL, which functions as a huge ghost car park. There, a shadow fleet of aging ships with their tracking systems (AIS) turned off conduct dangerous ship-to-ship crude transfers. With this maneuver they launder the origin of the oil, passing it off as Malaysian to sell it to independent Chinese refineries and evade the radar of US sanctions. The global earthquake. As Iran searches for oxygen, the collateral damage of this blockade is fracturing the global economy and geopolitics. Behind closed doors, the Iranian social collapse is advancing at a steady pace. A crude report of the Financial Times details that real inflation is already close to 50% and the national currency (the rial) sinks to historic lows. The price of basic products such as cheese and chicken has skyrocketed, and the government admits that more than 191,000 workers have applied for unemployment benefits since the start of the war. Globally, the Straits crisis has shattered the mirage of modern logistics. The collapse of Hormuz It’s not a temporary traffic jam.but a tectonic fault that has broken the “just in time” system and is threatening the hegemony of the petrodollar. Markets, panicking over a prolonged disruption, have pushed a barrel of Brent crude above $120, its highest level since 2022. But the most seismic geopolitical consequence of this war has erupted within the oil cartel: the United Arab Emirates (UAE). will leave OPEC+ May 1st. Fed up with production quotas that limited their income and feeling deeply abandoned by their Arab neighbors in the face of direct attacks from Iran, the Emiratis have decided to fly alone. This breakup leaves Saudi Arabia alone bearing the cost of stabilizing the market, greatly weakens OPEC and gives Donald Trump a diplomatic coup that he had been seeking for years. The final pulse. In the end, this conflict has become a drag race in which no one emerges unscathed. The big question that will decide the outcome of the war is who will go bankrupt first: the fragile and antiquated oil wells of Iran and its exhausted population, or the global consumers and the great Western powers, unable to withstand the skyrocketing fuel prices and the collapse of world shipping routes for much longer. And all this happens under inescapable pressure. While political leaders debate and move their chips thousands of kilometers away, the valves of Kharg Island … Read more

It is widely known that Orson Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ caused a social panic. It is less known that it is a lie

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In my years of training as a journalist I remember how they told us to study the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. My Radio and Television Information teacher told us that it was an exemplary event that could help us in the future practice of the profession to evaluate the responsibility of the media and to understand the mechanisms by which the so-called “fourth estate” could influence the social reality we serve. What perhaps the teachers who transmitted that information to me did not think is that they were right in what they had told me, but for a twofold and partially wrong reason. The legend of War of the Worlds The story is well known: HG Wells, a widely known science fiction writer at the time, had a story titled The War of the Worldsthrough which aliens would come to Earth to conquer humanity. A beginner but ambitious young man named Orson Welles decided to adapt the script to the radio format, giving it a newsreel structure for his television program. Mercury Theater on the Air on CBS and that he would read with other colleagues on the night of October 30, 1938, on Halloween Eve. The broadcast, the reading of this work, lasted an hour in which the aura of truthfulness was maintained except in three momentsone at the very beginning, another 40 minutes into the recording and another at 55. They indicated that it was a dramatization. For the rest, the fiction of that Martian invasion that was taking place in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, remained live. The myth, the documentaries and reports about the case and the journalism classes I attended said that Welles, the hired actors and the sound montages were so believable (and the audiences so naive) that within minutes of them starting to simulate a supposed alien attack the streets of the country were filled with hysterical and shocked masses. Panic attacks, people stockpiling supplies, collapsed police services and who knows what else. We assume that the people who did not hear those warnings were able to connect to the program after the warning and listened to the program without knowing that it was fake. And why wouldn’t we think like that? The newspapers of October 31 had carried the story to the foreground: “False war bulletin spreads terror throughout the country”, “Radio play terrifies the nation”, “Radio listeners panic, they confuse a war drama as a real chronicle”. These are some of the headlines that could be read about an event that, as it was said later, caused rivers of ink to flow in the form of more than 12,000 articles in newspapers throughout the United States. The reality is that, as a series of experts have reflected on different occasions, this interpretation largely falls into the realm of fake news. To support it here we use, above all, the study of professionals and experts from Princeton University, from the work of scholar David Miller in his essay Introduction to Collective Behaviorfrom the book Getting it Wrong by W Joseph Campbellfrom the work of sociologist Robert E. Bartholomew and from what journalists Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow have collected for Slate. What events did occur The broadcast did cause some effects. We know that some Grover’s Mill locals, believing their town’s water tower had been transformed into a “giant Martian war machine,” fired guns at the water tank. There was at least one woman who sued Welles and his team for causing her a panic attack and one man received direct compensation from the future film director who paid for the shoes that a listener said he had given up to pay for the train ticket he needed to escape the alien catastrophe. It is also true that calls to hospitals increased from people telling them where they could go to get donate bloodand police stations in the New Jersey area were also called, but most who did this were looking to find out if it was a false alarm. They wanted confirmation that it was a joke, but they also called to protest about this program that could be deceiving people or to congratulate them on that great special on that Night of the Dead. But nothing more. All of them came together to serve the approach that the written press wanted to give: that the CBS program had caused mass hysteria, that the radio was lying and deceiving its listeners and that they had created a major problem. And the lies that were published The rumor that people were being treated for shock in New Jersey hospitals was false, as the Princeton Radio office later revealed. The news that a man had died of a heart attack because of the program, as reported by the Washington Post, was also not true. People didn’t jump out of the windows either. In general, hundreds of articlesmany with supposed witness accounts, witnessed chaos that, in truth, had not been such. I remembered Some time later in his memoirs Ben Gross, radio director of the New York Daily News, that in truth the streets of New York They were half empty. It would also later be known that CBS had disconnected the Welles broadcast in different local affiliates in the country to show regional bulletins that, they assumed, would interest their audience more than a little play by Martians. The biggest scandal of all, the audience figures. It was said that more than a million people had listened to the program, when it could not be true. In fact, most people were listening to the NBC rival to ventriloquist Edgar Bergin’s popular radio show. And with most people we are talking about a 2% audience for the NBC show, as demonstrated by an independent survey that was done simultaneously with the broadcast. There is no doubt that in popular culture the idea that The War of the Worlds was a a before and afterthat the phenomenon must have been … Read more

wells, drought and the hidden side of the avocado

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Avocado is undoubtedly a very delicious food and also in high demand for its good macros, which has led to an increase in its production. This proliferation in its cultivation seems to bring good news for our land (especially because it sells well), but on the Costa del Sol and the Tropical Coast of Malaga and Granada the great environmental impacts are already seen which is generating such as the plowing of the slopes and a large water consumption that aggravates the drought already typical of southern Spain. A great consumption. To put figures, More than 20,000 hectares are now dedicated to avocados in these provinceswith some 5,000 hectares converted from dry land to irrigated land, with dubious legality behind it, which has also caused the appearance up to 250 illegal wells in 2023. This expansion, which represents 30% of the Andalusian avocado area (about 9,400 hectares in total), has replaced traditional crops with hypertensive tropical crops despite the climate crisis. All to opt for a crop that can undoubtedly give a great economic return. Environmentalism. A recent complaint made through Along with this complaint, which points to the serious environmental problems that are being experienced, different images are shown that undoubtedly speak for themselves to understand how this crop is affecting the geography. Publication in X by Santiago M. Barajas | Via X What we are seeing is not just agriculture; It is an industrial transformation of the landscape that is pushing the water and geological resources of Malaga and Granada to the limit. This is how avocado and mango have gone from being “green gold” to becoming an environmental time bomb. Destruction engineering. Traditionally, agriculture in these areas was adapted to the natural orography of the land. But now, the model that has been imposed, driven by the very high profitability of the tropical fruit, does the opposite: adapt the orography to the crop by force. According to Ecologists in Action and confirm various edaphic studiesthe implementation of these crops requires heavy machinery to break slopes. The process eliminates the original vegetation cover to create artificial terraces. The result? A severe degradation of the soil in its surface horizons. A problem with storms. With this degradation, what is caused is the elimination of natural vegetation, which produces a “sealing” of the soil and consequently the appearance of cracks that nullify its biological functions. The problem arises when torrential rains appear (increasingly more frequent in the Mediterranean), which causes the water to not filter and run away, dragging nutrients and causing massive erosion. This is something that translates into the use of more fertilizers by farmers, which end up contaminating the subsoil. In short, we are facing a vicious cycle of chemical and physical degradation. An infinite thirst. The avocado is a fruit that fits perfectly in the rainforest, but has now been transplanted in an area with a semi-arid Mediterranean climate. An ideal place for traditional dryland crops such as olive or almond trees that can survive on what falls from the sky. But avocado or mango in a hypertensive model demand about 7,500 cubic meters of water per hectare per year. These demands Added to the large number of plantations that exist, as we have commented previously, it leads to great water tension that we have seen reflected in the La Viñuela reservoir, which has reached only 7% of its capacity in 2023, and which has reached La Axarquía in Malaga. to a critical situation. And this deficit is not solved with rain, but with drilling machines that open wells in the area. In this way, the direct consequence is clear: overexploitation of aquifers and their salinization due to marine intrusion. An escalated problem. This avocado bubble does not stop increasing in our country. Given the collapse that has been experienced in Malagathe model has been replicated in Cádiz, Hueva or Murcia, which in the end are regions that already suffer their own water stress due to not receiving much rainfall throughout the year. But not only has he been emigrating from the provinces, but he has also escalated to the judicial field, where the prosecution points it is already being investigated a possible environmental crime with damage to the public water domain valued at 10 million euros and the illegal theft of up to 26 cubic hectometers of water. And in many of these regions citizens have had to suffer supply cuts due to this shortage, while this agricultural model continued to demand A solution. What is proposed In this case it is the ordered de-escalation of these crops. To achieve this, the goal is to stop new irrigation talks and close illegal wells. The problem is that it faces a very important leg of the economy of some of these provinces, against the change in the landscapes of the region. In Xataka | Andalusia has become a hostile land for the avocado. So an unexpected region is taking over: Galicia

IA consumes so much energy that the United States is building data centers directly in natural gas wells

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What makes a startup dedicated to building data centers get 11.6 billion dollars in financing. In the case of Crusoe Energy Systems, it all started with an idea as disturbing as profitable: build data centers with natural gas wells. Crusoe Energy’s idea Journalist Emily Chang de Bloomberg visited a few weeks ago The city of Abilene, in Texas, where Crusoe is building the monstrous Stargate data centers, The 500.00 billion project OpenAi, SoftBank and Oracle to develop general artificial intelligence. Stargate arrived at Crusoe Energy thanks to the demonstrated efficiency of the startup in the construction of specialized data centers in AI. Chase Lochmiller, the CEO of Crusoe, explained to Chang how the company was born: “When an oil company opens an oil well, one of the associated by -products is natural gas. And when they do not have access to an pipeline, all this associated gas simply burns in situ. So we had an idea: instead of trying to take that gas to a market where you can sell, we could create a market for gas. We could build mobile and modular data centers, take them direct data”. Crusoe was born in the best possible place to materialize this idea: the country of fracking. But maybe not at the best time to do it. Initially, they chose to build GPUS farms to undermine Bitcoin. When the cryptocurrency market collapsed, they ended up pivoting artificial intelligence. Like crypto mining, AI data centers are not based on CPUS but depend on the parallel processing capacity of thousands of GPUS, mainly Nvidia specialized chips. These new data centers consume much more energy than traditional data centers, so Crusoe started from a key advantage: their direct access to fossil fuels that obtained at the price of bargain. A booming business Oil giants are not oblivious to this trend. Exxonmobil is developing Off-Grid gas plants specifically for data centers with carbon capture technology to reduce emissions. Chevron, meanwhile, It has been associated With Engine No. 1 and Ge Vernova to mount similar facilities. The first will open in 2026, also in Texas. The figures are eloquent: the demand for natural gas for data centers will be increased by 47 GW from here to 2030. Currently, natural gas already feeds about 40% of the loading of data centers in the United States and is expected to continue being the main source of supply up to at least 2030. It is not the preferred energy source, but There are not enough renewable to feed artificial intelligence and Not all data centers They can be connected to a nuclear power plant, another common occurrence in the United States. As for Crusoe, thanks to the initial push of natural gas that were going to burn oil companies they developed their own technologies, such as a closed cooling system that does not need to renew The water evaporating the serversor own gas turbines, such as 360 MWs that are installing in the Stargate project as a backup energy source. Stargate data centers will feed mainly solar panels and wind turbines, which abound in Abilene for the confluence of wind and sunny hours. It is one of the reasons why data centers are being built in this Texas area, in addition to the tax exemptions that local governments are willing to yield in exchange for employment generation. It remains to be seen how many employees have everything built. Image | W.Carter (CCO) In Xataka | Microsoft will reopen a nuclear power plant that has been closed since 2019. It needs it for its artificial intelligence

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