Breaking news! We have signed a Technical Knowledge Partnership with the Methane Abatement in Maritime Innovation Initiative (MAMII) 🤝 MAMII joins our IMO delegation as a technical knowledge partner following our first successful IMO meetings as an NGO with consultative status. The agreement has been formalised through a Memorandum of Understanding. Under the four-year agreement, MAMII will provide expertise on methane emissions, measurement methodologies and abatement technologies, supporting our contribution to IMO discussions and technical workstreams. "MAMII has built a strong reputation for bringing together industry leaders, technology developers and maritime stakeholders to advance understanding of methane emissions and mitigation solutions," said @Steve Esau, COO of SEA-LNG. "Their expertise will strengthen our technical engagement at the IMO." With the MEPC meeting approaching in November, the partnership enables us to bring credible, evidence-based technical input to the discussions. Read more on the announcement here: sea-lng.org/2026/10/sea-lng-… #Maritime #Shipping #Methane #IMO

FOOL BRITANNIA by @EdConwaySky While many countries face higher energy costs due to the events in the Middle East and Russia, few have seen quite as big a spike as Britain has. Industrial power costs are comfortably higher than in most developed nations, with domestic costs not far behind. To some extent, this is a function of bad luck and geopolitics. Britain is particularly dependent on natural gas to provide the critical baseload power for its electricity, not to mention much of its domestic heating. But higher energy costs are also the product of policy. Britain pushed faster and further towards net zero (the goal of diminishing carbon emissions to close to nothing in net terms) than most of its peers. The ambition, held by Labour and Conservative governments, was that the UK should be the global leader in decarbonisation – the flag-bearer for net zero. In one respect, the enterprise was a stunning success – Britain is one of the fastest-decarbonising major economies in the world. The main catch in – and the cardinal sin of – the make-things-cheap economy is how it affects energy bills. For all that Boris Johnson and Ed Miliband insisted (and as far as I can tell, sincerely believed) that renewables would mean lower costs, the opposite has happened. Unlike solar power, the cost of which fell precipitously as the Chinese mastered the mass production of arrays, wind power has remained comparatively expensive. And so Britain’s ambitious offshore wind programme happened largely thanks to a complex web of subsidies and price guarantees. Those interventions will lock in higher power costs in this country for years. There is a point – most likely a decade and a half in the future – at which the savings from net zero (less spent on gas and fuels) should outweigh the costs of building all the necessary infrastructure. But for the time being, the policy is expensive – nearly £30bn a year for the next five years, which is the equivalent of an extra 5p on the basic rate of income tax. One of the main reasons net zero is becoming so controversial (and will likely get more controversial) is that the majority of those costs end up on consumer bills. The other problem is that much of this decarbonisation was achieved through deindustrialisation. In the face of higher energy costs and rising environmental taxes, many manufacturers relocated overseas. Indeed, more than half of Britain’s carbon footprint is now accounted for by imported goods. Paradoxically, the more steel mills and chemicals plants shut down, the better the UK’s environmental credentials, since net zero plans ignore the embedded carbon in our imports and focus solely on what is puffed out of domestic flues and chimneys. Cover art by Doug Chayka

I was having dinner last night with a friend working in the chicken industry and I learned something that blew my mind. Where do chicken farmers get their chickens? Most of us would say "from their existing chickens obviously, they breed and lay eggs." That's what I thought too, but turns out I was dead wrong. The reality is that the immense majority of meat chicken farmers in the world get their chickens from one of 2 companies: Cobb-Vantress, owned by Tyson Foods, or Aviagen, controlled by Germany's EW Group (the Wesjohann family). They have a concept specific to the industry called grandparent stock: what you buy from these 2 companies is - essentially - a bunch of chickens with planned obsolescence. The way it works is that each company keeps "pure" bloodlines on its own farms. Let's label them A, B, C and D. Those are the crown jewels - these companies' IP - and they never leave the building. What they sell you are the "grandparents": chicks from those four lines, but each line in only one sex. You get A roosters but no A hens, B hens but no B roosters, C roosters but no C hens, D hens but no D roosters. Which means you can never breed more A, B, C or D birds yourself. What you can do is cross them. A roosters with B hens give you the fathers, C roosters with D hens give you the mothers - these are the "parents". The parents then give you the chickens that actually end up on our plates, slaughtered at around 6 weeks. And that's the end of the road. If you tried breeding those chickens, their chicks would be a complete genetic lottery: still chickens, sure, but without the genetic properties that make them commercially viable. They'd grow slower and less evenly, you'd have to sell them for way more than your competitors, and your business would be dead. So you have to go back to Cobb or Aviagen for new grandparents. Forever. Why buy grandparents at all, and raise 2 generations just to sell the third? The answer is scale. If you buy say 100 grandparents, each of them gives you around 50 parents, and each parent hen then gives you around 150 chicks: from those 100 grandparents, you have yourself some 600,000 chickens whose meat you can sell. It makes no sense for these 2 companies to sell the final chickens directly. They'd have to hatch tens of billions of chicks a year and ship them all over the world. Much easier to simply sell the grandparents and let farmers do the multiplying and pay for the farms, the feed and the labor. And, you knew this was coming, there is also a China angle here: as you can imagine, China isn't too pleased to be dependent on foreign companies for such a basic food item as chicken. So China did what China does best: long-term planning. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs launched a plan for "national broiler genetic improvement" (2021-2035), which aims for domestically bred breeds to make up at least 60% of the domestic market by 2035 (globaltimes.cn/page/202307/1…). And, of course, they're ahead of the plan. As of 2025, homegrown breeds held more than 30% of the market: halfway to the 2035 goal in just four years (agripost.cn/2026/08/17/china…). Can you escape all this as a consumer? Sure, you can buy organic or Label Rouge chicken, from slower-growing breeds raised for at least 81 days instead of 6 weeks, for two to three times the price. Except, plot twist: the genetics behind most of those slow-growing birds come from a French company called Hubbard... which has belonged to Aviagen since 2018 (euromeatnews.com/aviagen-ann…)😅 And even if you could truly escape, you wouldn't want everyone to: we'd need vast new swathes of farmland, both for the chickens and their feed. Ironically, advocating for organic free-range chicken for everyone is one of the worst positions one can take for the planet's resources. If you want to minimize your environmental footprint, the counterintuitive answer is to buy the cheapest supermarket chicken - or eat less meat, of course. As my friend was saying last night, you may not like the way this industry works but, at the end of the day, it's what puts affordable protein on the plates of billions of people, using proportionally fewer resources than any other way of raising chicken.

A deep well has been completed at the northern edge of China's Taklimakan Desert, marking another breakthrough in the country's ultra-deep drilling capabilities. At 6 pm on Friday, the Zhentan-1 well, located in northwest China's Wensu County, reached a depth of 8,345 meters. It is the second ultra-deep well drilled using China's first domestically developed 12,000-meter drilling rig. The well is designed to explore the oil and gas potential of large structural traps in the deep northwestern Tarim Basin, particularly those dating back to the Sinian Period, and to identify new areas for expanding oil and gas reserves.

🛢️🌍 The countries with the most refining capacity spent this week deciding who gets their fuel. 🇨🇳 China has 18.1% of global refining capacity. 🇺🇸 The US has 17.5%. 🇷🇺 Russia has 6.5%. Together that's 42% of the world's refineries. Look at what each of them did this week: 🇺🇸 The White House put a diesel export ban on the table, with a 90-day blanket ban among the options. Washington then told 🇫🇷France and 🇩🇪Germany to release their diesel stocks or face that ban. 🇪🇺 The G7 agreed to release up to 100M barrels of oil and diesel over 4 months. 🇺🇸 A day later Trump took the ban off the table: "Europe has a lot of diesel and they're going to be making a major world contribution... we're not going to be doing the export ban." 🇨🇳 China paused fuel exports for October, and PetroChina cancelled gasoline and jet cargoes. 🇷🇺 Russia extended its diesel export ban. Now look at who is at the bottom of the chart. 🇩🇪 Germany has 1.9% of global refining capacity, 🇮🇹 Italy 1.6% and 🇪🇸 Spain 1.5%. Europe can't refine its way out of a shortage. It has to buy finished fuel from the countries at the top of this list, and those countries just showed they'll hold barrels back when it suits them. That's the mechanism behind the week. Refining capacity has become bargaining power. Whoever owns the refineries decides whether fuel gets exported, and on what terms. Read headline by headline, it looks like noise. Read together, it points one way: fuel security is now foreign policy, and Europe is the buyer with the least leverage. The open question: the G7 release buys four months. What does Europe use when the next exporter turns off the tap? themerchantsnews.substack.co…

For an example of UK net zero lunacy, take this new case.For the Lower Thames Crossing construction, National Highways has decided that the road is to be the “greenest road ever built” and has mandated that no diesel vehicles are to be used. As a former construction manager, I can state that sourcing non-diesel heavy equipment is going to push costs up massively. This project looks like it will go the way of HS2. nationalhighways.co.uk/roads…

Trump’s core error is that he confused America’s energy abundance with independence from the global energy system. America undoubtedly has far greater freedom to act in its own interests today than it did when it was a net importer, but even energy superpowers still rely on the stability of global energy markets. Source: War by Other Means (2018).

“The blunt tool of banning diesel exports definitely doesn't work,” Chris Wright said last month. “If you can't export the diesel that comes out of our refineries, you run out of places to store it, and you have to reduce US refining, which would put upward pressure on gasoline prices and jet fuel prices,” he added. #OOTT #US

China-developed VELLINK, the country’s first digital metro train equipped with embodied intelligence, was unveiled at the 2026 International Trade Fair for Transport Technology, which kicked off in Berlin, Germany on Tuesday. By integrating embodied AI, a comprehensive sensing network, proprietary AI algorithms and high-speed communications, the train can perceive, make decisions and interact intelligently, shifting from passively following commands to proactively optimizing operations. Lightweight materials and energy-efficient systems reduce the train’s weight by about 18%, while overall energy savings exceed 10% and full-life-cycle carbon emissions are reduced by about 15%.

Reuters - Nigeria's state oil firm NNPC Ltd said on Friday ​that a proposed $800 million offshore natural ‌gas project by local producer Amni International and TotalEnergies had reached a final investment ​decision, marking one of the biggest ​recent investments in Nigeria's upstream gas ⁠sector. reuters.com/business/energy/…

☢️ HUGE NUCLEAR POWER REVERSAL ☢️ Taiwan approved a preliminary plan to restart an idled atomic power plant, marking a reversal of the ruling party’s anti-nuclear stance. It closed its last reactor last year The earliest the plant may resume is 2028 bloomberg.com/news/articles/…