Lucy Wallwork

Lucy is a UK-based urban and environmental planner, with a background in Open Data policy and energy policy. She is fascinated by how we grow our cities and towns, and how we can learn from place, as well as how apparently dull policy details can transform the experience of our everyday built and natural environment. She writes here about urban spaces in the U.S. and beyond from all kinds of perspective — from the busker to the policy maker.

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Articles by Lucy Wallwork

• Rethinking the ‘placemaking’ agenda

  Tuesday, January 07, 2020

  If modern politics has shown us anything, it is that even in the era of the supposed "global citizen," issues of place and identity remain connected in powerful ways. The recent election campaign in my home country of the U.K. was testament to this, as in similar ways is the recent political history of the U.S. "Placemaking" is all the rage in urbanist circles today. But it seems to me that the concept of "place" needs rescuing from its current status as either meaningless buzzword or tool of a divisive nationalism to be a much more progressive guiding principle for what comes next in our neighborhoods.

• Master planning: A trellis to grow a city on

  Thursday, December 05, 2019

  We have all likely come across master plans, the "placemaker's" new tool of choice. They mostly take the form of differently colored polygons within a site outline to delineate what uses will be allowed where and how an area of new development might take shape. But until recently, master plans have been quite unfashionable. In an age of speculative anything-goes urbanism, development has resisted attempts to grow itself along a "trellis" drawn up by the planners. Here we look at what master planning means as a process and what challenges it faces for the future.

• Fortress America: Why is the US still building gated communities?

  Tuesday, November 12, 2019

  Gated communities go against most of what is currently in vogue in progressive urbanist thought. They turn their backs on an inclusive public realm, starving public streets of their vibrancy and withdraw a whole community from the theatre of our streets. But still, by the year 2009 almost 11 million people in the U.S. were reported to be living in gated communities. We might be familiar with super-elite gated communities, but gated communities now span the whole spectrum of housing across the U.S. So, what is driving this broader process of "residential fortification?"

• Malls without walls: The stealth privatization of public space in the US

  Thursday, September 26, 2019

  To architects and urban designers, the "public realm" has become sacred in planning systems and urban visions over the last two decades. The space between buildings has become seen as equally consequential as the buildings themselves. This often results in captivating sketches and visualizations of new development or transformed town centers. But the creeping privatization of the land rights and management regimes that underlie those sketches is provoking questions about how the ownership of the public realm impacts our experience of it.

• The problem with heritage railroads

  Thursday, August 29, 2019

  I have always thought of heritage railways, or "preserved railways," as a peculiarly British phenomenon. But they are perhaps an affection that has come to America, too. These nostalgic locomotives might seem harmless, but might they be encouraging an image of railways as a ghost from the past rather than as the future of sustainable transport? Heritage railways may make a fun family day out. But here is the problem. In the U.K., heritage railways are booming, while investment in new rail infrastructure has crippled key transport routes and caused the country to fall far behind the rest of Europe.

• Are we witnessing the death of Main Street, or its rebirth?

  Wednesday, July 31, 2019

  The decline of America’s downtown "Main Streets" is nothing new. First, the rise of the automobile meant they were displaced as the nexus of community and commercial life by out-of-town malls. More recently, even the malls have fallen victim to the rise of online shopping, with 1 in 4 expected to be closed by 2022. The outlook for Main Street doesn’t look good, as the headlines tracking empty frontages keep telling us. But are we giving in to nostalgia too much? Perhaps the rebirth of Main Street might not look to the past at all, but to the future.

• Why the electric bike deserves our attention more than the electric car

  Monday, July 01, 2019

  While the electric car craze has filled pages of newspapers and magazines, our attention has been distracted from where the real momentum should be building — electric bikes. China, where e-bike sales have been outstripping car sales, has its eye on the ball. The regulatory framework has some catching up to do, but faced with mass urbanization and an environmental crisis, it is e-bikes that really have the potential to reshape our cities.

• Urban farming in the US: Breaching the urban-rural divide

  Tuesday, June 04, 2019

  Farming is one of the oldest professions there is. But as society has urbanized, we have gradually lost our connection with the industry that puts food on our plates. One jarring survey in the U.K. found that nearly 1 in 10 elementary school children think that tomatoes grow under the ground. In parallel with urbanization has come the severing of our relationship with the people and land that grows our food. But now we are hearing that a new urban revolution in food is apparently sweeping through our city centers… so, can urban farming change our relationship with food?

• Housing America part 6: Cohousing

  Wednesday, May 01, 2019

  Speculative housing development and the single-family home have been the norm for a large part of the last century. It’s all many of us know about housing works. But a new wave of cohousing communities across the U.S. features experimenting with a new model of living that places the emphasis back on shared space and shared prosperity. In this final part in the "Housing America" series of articles, I look at why these communities set up, whether the planning system is equipped to help them thrive, and whether their lessons can be applied more widely to how we build communities.

• Housing America part 5: Cooperatives — taking the profit out of shelter

  Tuesday, April 02, 2019

  Housing cooperatives essentially represent the "third way" between renting and owning a property. This model once formed part of the bedrock of affordable shelter provisions in New York, but more recently has been rapidly disappearing. Often famed more for the celebrity interest they attract than their role in combating the housing crisis, some are now turning to housing cooperatives as part of the solution to the housing affordability crisis hitting many U.S. cities. However, while cities like New York have a rich history of cooperatives, they are often both misunderstood and overlooked.

• Housing America part 4: The ambiguous role of design

  Wednesday, March 06, 2019

  One architect I heard speak at an event last year described those working in her profession as "agents of expensiveness." It can certainly seem that way. One sector that doesn't come to mind when we think of architectural flair is that of public housing. There certainly has not been much cash to flash about recently. But it has not always been that way, and some are making steps to raise our expectations of the design of affordable and public housing. Can design really save the day?

• Housing America part 3: Housing and race

  Tuesday, February 19, 2019

  No discussion of the state of housing in the U.S. can be discussed without addressing the constant thread of race that has been woven through the debate from day one. Housing is only one component in the persistent racial divide in the U.S., but because shelter and wealth have become so intrinsically linked, housing is an area that has an outsized impact on inequalities. Explicit segregation laws have not determined the legal basis for housing allocation for more than 70 years. Today, you are breaking the law if you display explicit racial prejudice in the housing sector. But one look at America’s public housing estates will reveal a starkly divided country. Indeed, the housing divide in over 20 metropolitan areas today is so stark that they have been qualified as "hyper-segregated."

• Housing America part 2: The tale of St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe

  Thursday, February 07, 2019

  The tale of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing estate is perhaps the most widely told tale of public housing in the U.S. It has become part of the country’s urban mythology and serves as a pivotal vignette in the longer history of the evolution of housing policy in the U.S. That story did not have a happy ending. A colossal project that dominated the city of St Louis when it was built in 1954, it stood for less than three decades. Its demolition live on television in 1972 became a pop-culture moment that marked a watershed in what was seen as a failed experiment in public housing. Perhaps that makes it a good place to start.

• Housing America part 1: The decline of public housing

  Thursday, January 24, 2019

  Just as in other parts of the world hit by the shockwaves of the Industrial Revolution, the call for public housing in the U.S. was born in the late 19th century out of an urgent attempt to put an end to the urban misery faced by factory workers. With rising levels of homelessness in the U.S. today another crisis is looming but the response this time around is a more ambiguous one. This first part in a series on housing in America tells the story of how public housing began in the U.S. and how it got where it is today. Future articles will look at other aspects of housing in the U.S. in more detail.

• Portland, Oregon’s Urban Growth Boundary: Smart growth or a stranglehold on the city?

  Tuesday, January 15, 2019

  When it is not being sent up for its bike karaoke and ironic mustaches, Portland, Oregon, is being held up as the city that threw out the rule book for conventional city growth patterns in the U.S. It is distinctly more walkable, bike-able and compact than other cities in the country and has become the poster child of "smart growth" in the U.S. Some of that is down to a not particularly glamorous land use policy introduced in the 1970s that essentially drew a circle around the city to stop sprawl in its tracks, and to reflect development back toward the downtown area.

• Bursting the bubble of driverless cars

  Tuesday, January 08, 2019

  Sorry to rain on the parade. Each of us is as susceptible to the romance of science-fiction visions of cities as the next person. These visions sell magazines, they provoke debate at the water cooler. They are a ubiquitous part of the visuals surrounding any "smart city" vision. The latest seductive images of our urban future is that of the driverless car. This is not to decry technological advances. However, there are good reasons to be suspicious about some of the claims about how driverless vehicles are going to transform our towns and cities.

• Would you live in an airport city?

  Wednesday, December 12, 2018

  The Polish winner of the Man Booker International Prize wrote in her winning novel, on the subject of airports, that "soon we well may say that it’s the cities that supplement the airport, as workplaces and places to sleep. It is widely known, after all, that real life takes place in movement." Indeed, settlements have, through the history of civilization, sprung up around transport nodes — whether that is early settlers along the edges of a river, the Victorian-era railroad cities in the U.K., or port cities like New York. However, the more ambitious concept of the airport city, or "aerotropolis," is now gaining momentum.

• Unlocking opportunities for ‘intergenerational living’ in our cities

  Monday, November 26, 2018

  At a recent Housing Festival held in my hometown of Bristol, England, it was not the glossy new building technologies on show that stuck in my mind the most. Instead, it was a presentation by U.S.-based architect Jonathan Davis. Presenting a photo of the allotment in his own Grow Community on Bainbridge Island in Seattle, he described his elderly yoga-loving neighbor as a "wise soul," but so, too, his young daughter digging around in the vegetable patch. He didn’t see any reason these two "wise souls" should not be brought together more often.

• ‘Lego building’: Can modular housing disrupt the US housing market?

  Monday, November 12, 2018

  Daily headlines carry news of technologies "disrupting the market." One of the latest stories is that of pre-fabricated, "modular housing" and what it could do to transform the way the construction industry operates. If there was ever an industry in need of disruption, it is homebuilding. Modular housing promises to take much of the risk and complication out of that process by performing most of the construction work in a weathertight plant. Panels are manufactured in a factory and slotted together on site, often in a matter of hours — a true "plug and play" model.

• Land assembly: Solving the land puzzle in American cities

  Tuesday, October 30, 2018

  We see lots of seductive grand visions for how our cities might look, laid out on master plans that make anything seem possible. But the reality is that these plans generally do not start with a blank canvas. Indeed, the largest obstacle to the reshaping of our cities — whether that is for economic development, smart growth or housing delivery goals — is something much less sexy. The not-so-simple task of land assembly. Land assembly is the process of taking on a plot of land with high potential but highly fragmented ownership, and making it work as a whole.

• Advertising and the city: Are billboards a threat to public space?

  Thursday, October 18, 2018

  Places like Times Square in New York and the Shibuya in Tokyo are home to some of the most iconic scenes of urban space on the planet. We cannot imagine them without their iconic billboards and digital displays, which have become part of their visual identity. But the spilling out of corporate advertising into increasing areas of our public space is being resisted. Advertisers argue that billboards can bring a number of benefits to a city, but some activists and reformers are pushing their local governments to make their neighborhoods ad-free.

• The power of the pop-up: ‘Temporary use’ strategies in US cities

  Friday, September 28, 2018

  ​The concept of "temporary" or "meanwhile use" goes back to long before the term slipped into the narrative of urban policy agendas. The first time an enterprising trader rolled a food truck into an empty square, they were practicing temporary urbanism. But today the "temporary use" movement is taking on a new light and even becoming a mainstream strategy. The approach fits with the new, more flexible approach to urban planning we are increasingly seeing currently. Approaches vary, but the philosophy is one that views empty lots not as an urban problem or eyesore, but instead as opportunities.

• Can the US do ‘slow’ urban development?

  Monday, September 17, 2018

  The Cittaslow ("Slow City") movement, launched by a group of small Italian towns in the late 1990s, professes to "do for urban planning what the Slow Food movement has done for agriculture." It calls for a slower form of city- and town-making based on values of environmental sustainability, craft, seasonality, and the revaluing of local history and heritage. As their manifesto states, the movement strives for "towns where men are still curious of the old times."

• Urban regeneration: The takeover of ‘cappuccino urbanism’

  Tuesday, September 04, 2018

  Citizens of "regenerated" districts will find the sight of yet another boutique café opening up on their local main street familiar. But as the pavements in the "thriving" cities of the West fill up simultaneously with cappuccino vendors and a growing homeless population, the cognitive dissonance becomes hard to ignore. Some are starting to ask if what has become known as "cappuccino urbanism" papers over a shallow approach to urban regeneration and belies a crucial lack of imagination.

• The politics of bringing bullet trains to the US

  Wednesday, August 15, 2018

  The Shinkansen "bullet trains" in Japan and France’s extensive TGV network are testament to the commitment of some countries to high-speed rail. The U.K. has recently realized it is falling behind and is trying to catch up, but is causing a furor in the process. Even Uzbekistan is in on the game. The U.S., meanwhile, is still making baby steps. Now, investors who have built on experience on other international projects are now rushing into the U.S. to try their changes. But who is willing to pay for these pricey projects?

• Wolves, transport infrastructure and ‘trophic cascades’

  Monday, August 06, 2018

  What have wolves got to do with railway lines? A video that has gone viral on YouTube tells the story of so-called "trophic cascades" through the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park — a small-scale change that set off a chain reaction of responses in the park’s complex ecosystem. Yellowstone Park may seem a far cry from the transport infrastructure of our biggest cities. However, the same processes set in action by the wolves can help to better understand how we should approach planning our highways, railways and streets.

• Will the days of ‘going for a drive’ come to an end?

  Thursday, July 19, 2018

  "Autotelic travel" is undirected travel. In contrast with directed travel, this is travel for the sake of enjoyment, not in order to reach a destination. In the United States, this has manifested culturally as the tradition of "going for a drive." But with the new sustainability agenda, and the urgent need to reduce automobile trips for environmental and societal reasons, is this a luxury we can still afford?

• Cathedrals to consumption: The mall as public space

  Thursday, July 05, 2018

  Malls have been around for centuries, from Trajan’s Market in ancient Rome through to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. But the mall in its massive, "out-of-town" reincarnation came into its own in the late 20th century, as cars allowed more of us the mobility to make the weekend pilgrimage to these new temples of the capitalist age. The U.S., with more mall space per person than any other country in the world, has been at the epicenter of this love affair.

• Shelter or asset class? The financialization of housing

  Friday, June 22, 2018

  Several years ago, a picture was taken at night of the One Hyde Park development in London. The building is home to some of the world’s most expensive real estate, reaping in up to $180 million for a single apartment. In the photo, there was not a single light on in the gleaming tower. Because no one lives there. As real estate prices continue to steadily rise, seemingly endlessly, we have seen the concept of a "home" become divorced from its original purpose as shelter, and becoming instead a financial asset class in built form.

• Why are our houses so bland?

  Friday, June 08, 2018

  Who designs our houses? Not always architects, it turns out. Looking at modern housing developments, we can see a wave of monotony overtaking the places we live, as row upon row of "pattern book" houses roll off the production line and onto our pavements. Why are our housing estates becoming so soulless? What lies behind these “identikit” rows of faux-traditional executive homes on the outskirts of our cities?

• Urban design gone wrong: Parks

  Thursday, May 24, 2018

  Ever since someone described parks as the "lungs of the city," cities have been competing to declare themselves as "green" by allocating space for public parks in urban redevelopment initiatives. This race to boost the percentage of green space for city brochures is typical of this age of "competitive cities." In many ways it is welcome — parks have even been shown to not only make us healthier but even make us smarter. But parks should not be judged on quantity, but quality.

• Urban design gone wrong: Density

  Tuesday, May 15, 2018

  There is perhaps no more divisive term in our cities than that of urban density. Often measured in "dwellings per hectare" or "people per hectare," for some it can evoke our greatest fears about what our neighborhoods might become. For others, higher density is an environmental imperative to manage the environmental crisis. For yet others, higher densities hold the key to "happier cities." But there is less consensus than we might think about density. Where does "density" end and "overcrowding" begin?

• Urban design gone wrong: Lazy frontages

  Thursday, May 03, 2018

  With a generation of city planners brought up reading Jane Jacobs, another term you are likely to find peppering their documents today is "active frontages." However, walking in the shadow of blank walls in many of our cities today, it becomes clear that we are not always living up to Jacobs’ aspirations. Active frontages are designed to make a street more visually engaging. That does not necessarily mean the bohemian café-lined streets of Paris or Brooklyn but can be much more prosaic — it might be a handyman’s store, a gym or even a house frontage.

• Urban design gone wrong: Cul‑de‑sacs

  Friday, April 20, 2018

  This is the second part of a series on urban design gone wrong. In this series of articles, we will be looking at a few of the things we have been getting badly wrong when designing our cities, and that we are now scrambling to rectify. This week: cul-de-sacs.

• Urban design gone wrong: Setbacks

  Friday, April 06, 2018

  ​Woe the fate of the poor urban designer. Forced to wander the streets of our cities, painfully alive to all of the errors of our design history, the sort of things that most of us walk past with barely a glance.

• Cities and power: The space between buildings

  Thursday, March 22, 2018

  While cities used to be planned at the stroke of an architect's pen, a new era of "participative planning" is being sold to us as giving more power over decisions to ordinary people, to disperse more widely the power once held in the hands of "experts" and bureaucrats. But is the role of power missing from this conversation?

• Cities and power: Might is set in stone

  Friday, March 02, 2018

  Those in power have throughout history understood the visceral psychological and emotional impact that the built environment has on us. We all feel this as we pass under the shadow of a corporate skyscraper or across a windswept military parade ground. Only those in the most remote locations do not have their lives interrupted daily by buildings.

• The modelers are coming: How will urban planners respond?

  Monday, February 19, 2018

  ​Planning our cities is a fundamentally future-oriented endeavor. To work out which train lines, apartment blocks and zoning policies to put in place today, we need to do our best to anticipate what the consequences will be for the future.

• Transit-oriented development: Beyond the hype

  Monday, February 05, 2018

  Transit-oriented development is a concept that chimes with trendy "New Urbanist" ideals of vibrant, walkable neighborhoods. First uttered by San Francisco-based urbanist Peter Calthorpe in the 1980s, it may not yet be a household term, but it is rapidly gaining prominence in cities across the U.S. and beyond its borders. The TOD concept revolves around making transit hubs into hubs for not only switching from bus to train to bike, but also for land-use intensification.

• Does the US have slums?

  Friday, January 19, 2018

  It has long been a policy goal of developed countries to become "slum-free." In fact, the town-planning movement in the U.K. was born out of the desire to combat the severe public health problems caused by the densely-packed slum communities that grew up around centers of industry as the Industrial Revolution took hold.

• Community severance: How the ‘barrier effect’ works

  Friday, January 05, 2018

  A widely accepted definition of community severance is how the process by which the way a city is shaped leads to reduced access to goods, services and people. These obstacles are typically transportation infrastructure — notoriously highways, but also rail lines and even parking lots.

• Demystifying mobility as a service

  Monday, December 11, 2017

  Mobility as a service (MaaS) could have emerged with a catchier name. But behind the obscure acronym, there lies an intriguing proposal. Projections for the future of transportation often focus on innovative new modes — whether that is driverless cars, Elon Musk's Hyperloop, futuristic hoverboards or personal jet packs. But the excitement around MaaS is the possibility it offers for integrating those modes — splicing public and private modes together into a personalized intermodal route for the individual user.

• A new generation of ‘counterfeit cities’

  Monday, November 27, 2017

  The history of the last century, and the beginning of this one, has been one of urbanization. That means that not only do we live in cities, but also that we fight in cities. The future of warfare lies in the gutters of the “broken cities of our world,” and one of the most surreal byproducts of this shift is the growing network of "mock-up" Arab cities built by the U.S. and other militaries to simulate arenas of war. The simple logic is that it is better to make mistakes in a replica than in the genuine battlefield.

• The era of talking highways: Do we need ‘smart’ infrastructure?

  Friday, November 10, 2017

  The term "smart" can cause a lot of confusion these days — the prefix is used liberally to make any new product sound cutting edge. But "smart" infrastructure is about interaction and communication, based on the logic of the Internet of Things (IoT), the fashionable concept of a network of devices connected to the internet, and the relationship between them. It's what happens when even your toaster is connected to the internet. But what does it mean for ordinary citizens?

• Infrastructure still needs help, but can the US afford it?

  Friday, October 27, 2017

  Cities are not defined by a collection of buildings but rather by a deep web of movements, people, products or ideas. And it is infrastructure that knits together the different components of a city — where we live, work and play. It is also what links cities to each other globally.

• The messy problem with global city rankings

  Friday, October 13, 2017

  For those of us looking to see how our home city stacks up against the rest of the world, there is now no shortage of places to find comparisons — the "Quality of ​Living" index made global headlines, as did the Economist Intelligence Unit's widely cited ranking of the "world's most livable cities."

• Sao Paolo: Can a bold urban vision survive political changes?

  Friday, September 29, 2017

  The transformational power of urbanism has captured the imagination of policymakers around the world in recent years. In particular, the people-centered wave of "new urbanists" have proved seductive.

• Thinking spatially: How GIS changes the way we plan cities

  Friday, September 15, 2017

  "Data is the new oil." That goes for how our cities work as much as any other industry. GIS data adds a new spatial dimension to data sets, helping us understand the importance of location in the meaning of the data around us. And it is set to become a key source of data for city planners.

• Houston floods: Exclamation points in the debate over urban resilience

  Tuesday, September 05, 2017

  ​While climate change is a global topic, events like the catastrophic floods we have seen in Houston after Hurricane Harvey remind us that the consequences can be very local.

• Tactical urbanism: Tweaking the source code of cities

  Friday, August 18, 2017

  Strategic documents like master plans have long guided the direction of our cities. But now tactical interventions into city life are becoming increasingly popular.

• The secret life of cities: Buskers

  Friday, August 04, 2017

  For each person who sees buskers as a nuisance and noise pollutant, many more see them instead as a welcome interruption from urban routine. Whichever position we take, buskers have a powerful impact on our day-to-day experience of a city — from the half-hearted accordion players on bridges across Europe, to the exquisite performances in New Orleans' French Quarter.

• How to retro-fit a post-Soviet city

  Friday, July 21, 2017

  As any visitor to the former Soviet Union will notice, every city touched by the Soviet authorities has an unmistakable flavor. The Soviets did not seek to incrementally change cities but to entirely reinvent them, making for dramatic transformations. The period of wild, laissez faire urbanism that followed independence in the 1990s injected chaos into the Soviet blueprint, leaving a further layer of challenges for planners today.

• ‘Urbanism Without Effort’ — Are urban designers trying too hard?

  Friday, July 07, 2017

  Attempts at "placemaking" have been at the center of attention for urbanists for some time now. But is it really possible to "make" places? How successfully can architects and urban planners design strong communities into existence?

• Sensory urbanism: Designing cities for our neglected senses

  Friday, June 23, 2017

  Urbanist circles are awash with new buzzwords — "everyday urbanism," "post-urbanism," "tactical urbanism," "urbanism without effort," and so on. Here, I introduce an intriguing one that is only slowly gathering popularity. This is "sensory urbanism." But what exactly does it mean? Sensory urbanism is a reaction against ways of thinking about and designing cities that are overdependent on our sense of sight.

• Hostile architecture and America’s homeless

  Friday, June 09, 2017

  A spate of mayors across the globe have spent the night sleeping rough in solidarity with their rising number of homeless constituents. Simultaneously, the built environment we occupy has been transforming to become more and more hostile to these very people.

• Co-building the city: The draw of participative planning

  Friday, May 26, 2017

  The dominant role once occupied by the city planner is under threat. A new paradigm of participative planning is challenging the "business as usual" top-down process for shaping our urban spaces. Participative planning — whereby members of the community work with designers, architects and planners to decide on the future of cities — is fast becoming the norm.

• The Disneyfication of American cities

  Friday, May 12, 2017

  Disneyland is every child's dream and an escape from the messy reality of daily life. But if you look closely, you will notice that American cities (and increasingly other cities around the world) are being remade in the image of Walt Disney's famous fantasy theme parks. Places like the Mall of America, where every move is engineered, draw on the Disney rule book and have co-opted public spaces.

• Participatory planning: ‘Co-producing’ the neighborhood

  Friday, April 28, 2017

  Once upon a time in the 1960s, the "master plan" was king in urban planning circles. The modernist approach to designing cities at the time saw the urban designer as supreme — utopian plans were designed in an architect's office and imposed upon unsuspecting residents.

• ‘Rebel cities’ are fighting back across the US

  Friday, April 14, 2017

  In last year's U.S. presidential election, the countryside revolted and made their voices heard with the election of Donald Trump. But the cities are starting to fight back. The experience of "rebel cities" across Europe — and their demands for the "right to the city" — is inspiring a similar spirit of defiance in cities across the U.S.

• Female mayors taking the chance to shape global cities

  Friday, March 31, 2017

  When we talk about shaping the cities of the future to be more inclusive, the question remains of whether those cities should be led by the people whose concerns their policies should reflect. London Mayor Sadiq Khan's outspoken support for feminism has led people to ask whether and how cities themselves can be feminist. But it is a new wave of female mayors, both globally and in the U.S., who are testing out the idea that for diverse citizen needs to be reflected in how are cities are designed and run, city government itself must reflect that diversity.

• Urban challenge: How can cities manage diversity?

  Friday, March 17, 2017

  To return to the much-quoted doyenne of urbanism Jane Jacobs, "cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." Faced with unprecedented levels of globalization and integration, urban planners and city managers are now under pressure to take into account a much broader range of perspectives and priorities as they refashion our urban spaces. Thus, managing diversity is our fifth and final urban challenge.

• Urban challenge: Cities and climate change

  Thursday, March 02, 2017

  When it comes to climate change, cities occupy the role of both hero and villain. On the one hand, cities consume over two-thirds of global energy and are responsible for 37-49 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. On the other, cities are also a key part of the solution. Even when it must happen without support at the federal level, cities are taking action on climate change.

• Urban challenge: How cities are making the most of Big Data

  Thursday, February 16, 2017

  Data has been described as the "new oil" powering our economies. It is also increasingly powering our cities. A handful of U.S. cities are starting to reap the dividends of using data to help their cities flourish, replacing filing cabinets with complex data infrastructure. In the third article in this "urban challenges" series, let's look at some of the early pioneers and how we can expect data to influence the future of cities.

• Urban challenge: What should be done about gentrification?

  Friday, February 03, 2017

  Gentrification is the process in which an influx of wealthy residents into an urban district causes rents to rise and the neighborhood to be reshaped in line with middle-class (usually white) characteristics. And it's becoming an growing headache for policymakers and the mayors of some of America's hippest cities.

• Urban challenge: Rethinking America’s love affair with suburbia

  Friday, January 20, 2017

  To kick off this series on U.S. cities, we looked at the rise of the metropolitan mayor. In the next few pieces, we will look at a few of the major challenges facing those mayors in shaping their cities for the demands and opportunities of the 21st century.

• Cities: Welcoming the era of the American mayor

  Thursday, January 05, 2017

  As Donald Trump's inauguration approaches, I will begin this series on cities by looking at the rising power of city mayors in the U.S., and why their emergence may calm the nerves of liberals contemplating life under President Trump. Political theorist Benjamin Barber thinks that "mayors should rule the world." Urban think tank the City Mayor Foundation agrees, boldly stating that "in this century, metropolitan areas, rather than nation states, will shape the world's social, cultural, technological and economic agendas."

• Trump, Russia and OPEC’s latest production cut

  Monday, December 12, 2016

  While Donald Trump's transition headquarters is still trying to identify someone to fill the coveted Secretary of State position — ​likely Exxon ​Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson — the wheels of global energy geopolitics outside of Washington keep spinning.

• ‘Energy poverty’ in the Trump era

  Monday, November 28, 2016

  "Energy poverty" should be a crisis we are used to seeing on television screens, featuring images of the poor in developing countries studying by candlelight and cooking on dung fires. It shouldn't be found on U.S. soil. But as winter sets in, activists are raising concerns that low-income U.S. citizens are being forced to make "third-world choices" between paying for food or utility bills, despite declining energy prices.

• Trump’s chance to make his mark on the energy industry

  Monday, November 14, 2016

  What else to write about this week than President-elect Donald Trump? Just hours after one of the biggest electoral upsets in political history, analysts were scrambling to decipher what it might mean for the energy industry. Writing back in June, all I was able to conclude from the Republican candidate's ill-defined statements was that under a Trump presidency, "something is going to change ... we just don't know what." Now it is time, in this brave new world, to work out the "what."

• The oil industry is on the big screen again with ‘Deepwater Horizon’

  Thursday, October 27, 2016

  Another month, another oil industry story breaking through into popular culture. The oil industry has long served as good fodder for filmmakers and entertainers. However, unlike the strip-club glamour of recent TV series "Blood and Oil", newly released film "Deepwater Horizon" tells a much more serious story about negligence, sacrifice and the road to environmental catastrophe when BP's rig suffered a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

• Will OPEC’s new game of production cuts actually work?

  Friday, October 14, 2016

  In September, the dysfunctional family that is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) seems to have managed to put differences aside during negotiations in Algiers, striking a deal to cut output for the first time since 2008. But how the deal will develop is under more doubt.

• Statoil’s headquarters: Sending a message through office design

  Friday, September 30, 2016

  After a quick-fire 20-month construction period, the Oslo headquarters of Norwegian state oil and gas company Statoil opened in 2012. It has been described as the "office of the future" and potentially one of the world's best offices. What message does it send about the future at the cutting edge of national oil companies (NOCs) and energy corporations?

• Green utopias: What happened to the ‘cities of the future’?

  Friday, September 23, 2016

  Utopias have always had a strong hold on the imagination. Given the exponential growth and development in renewable technologies, we have seen cities trying to transform their infrastructure and built environment to accommodate new ways of making, accessing and using energy. Others have decided to break loose and design grand "green city" utopic visions, setting a new standard for the "cities of the future."

• Palace drama in Uzbekistan leaves questions about energy stability

  Friday, September 02, 2016

  ​Uzbekistan — if known at all — is known as one of the most repressive of the "-stans," stretching across the Central Asian land mass. Earlier this week, local news outlets reported that longtime President Islam Karimov had died.

• The missing revolution in solar infrastructure

  Friday, August 19, 2016

  Reading the solar industry news, industry watchers can be found giddily talking about transformations in how we fuel our households and industries. As the cost of solar power nears what is known as "grid parity" — when solar can generate power at a lower or equal cost to that purchased from the grid — forecasters are predicting that solar is set to grow exponentially over the next five years.

• All eyes on Brazil: Can energy sector overcome its troubles?

  Friday, August 05, 2016

  It has been one hell of a year for Brazil. Not long ago, the South American country was the darling of the global oil and gas industry — center stage thanks to its large presalt oil reserves, which technological developments made economically viable. The engine of that optimism was Petrobras, the state oil company that employs 80,000 Brazilians but has been mired in one of the largest corruption crises in the recent history of the industry.

• The failed coup in Turkey and the future of energy flow into Europe

  Friday, July 22, 2016

  ​Oil and gas exports do not always flow through the fastest routes from producer nations to consumer markets. If they did, much Azerbaijani oil would likely be exported via Iran rather than across the Anatolian steppe via Turkey and Southeast Europe. Political risk and security considerations are a key factor in these decisions, which are as much about politics as economic efficiency.

• Brexit: The outlook for European renewables and UK’s energy mix

  Friday, July 15, 2016

  The energy industry must cope with multibillion-dollar projects and long lead times. If there is one thing the industry hates, it is uncertainty. The political tremors that followed the Brexit vote June 23 has left commentators in all sectors speculating as to the precise impact of the decision by UK voters to leave the European Union.

• Energy intensity in the US: Which states are the worst offenders?

  Friday, June 24, 2016

  I have written before of the quiet progress the U.S. has made on energy efficiency — dubbed by some as America's "hidden fuel." I have also tried to parse from the speeches of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump what U.S. energy policy might look like under their presidencies, although most of what has been said so far concerns production rather than consumption.

• Trump takes the complexity out of energy for voters

  Friday, June 10, 2016

  Energy market watchers had been eagerly awaiting Republican candidate Donald Trump's appearance May 26 at a North Dakota oil and gas conference. Until then, his campaign had been hazy on the details of any energy policies a Trump presidency might bring, other than generic endorsements and calls for support of America's fracking and coal industries. Analysts were left to dig among scattered tweets.

• The global oil industry: The hybrid case of Statoil

  Friday, May 27, 2016

  Statoil is certainly not among the "Seven Sisters," nor is it even an IOC. However, I will end this series on how international oil companies are coping with the oil price crisis by zooming in on an interesting "hybrid."

• The global oil industry: France’s Total weathering the storm

  Friday, May 13, 2016

  France's Total may not be a bona fide member of the "Seven Sisters," but operating in more than 130 countries, it is certainly global. And with annual revenues higher than the GDP of Hungary, it is certainly a supermajor.

• The global oil industry: Shell’s post-merger future

  Friday, April 29, 2016

  Anglo-Dutch Shell, now the world's third-largest private oil and gas company by output, was left out of the series of mergers in the early 2000s that created the supermajors of today. But prior to the industry restructuring, Royal Dutch Shell was the largest oil company in the world. The recently completed merger with BG Group, against a tough oil price backdrop, aims to keep the company among the list of the biggest global players.

• The global oil industry: Chevron pivots to ‘small oil’

  Friday, April 15, 2016

  Like ExxonMobil, Chevron Corporation was formed out of the ashes of the breakup of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company into 34 companies in 1911. However, the California-based major has not positioned itself as well as its larger competitor to face the current crisis, following years of heavy investments and cost overruns on massive projects like the Gorgon and Wheatstone LNG projects in Australia.

• The global oil industry: ExxonMobil maintains investor trust

  Friday, April 01, 2016

  This week I am tackling the giant of the giants, ExxonMobil. With a market capitalization hovering around $400 billion, Exxon until recently vied with Apple for the title of largest company in the world by valuation. Its annual revenues are frequently larger than entire countries, including Serbia and Tanzania.

• The global oil industry: Where does struggling BP go from here?

  Friday, March 18, 2016

  The new year for BP has started with reports of thousands more job cuts, and the axing of a high-profile art sponsorship deal as the London-based major rushes to cut both operating and capital costs in the wake of historic losses for 2015 that surprised markets.

• The global oil industry: How the oil majors are adapting to a new era

  Friday, March 04, 2016

  In 1998, the Asian economic crisis plunged the world closer and closer toward global crisis. Benchmark oil prices soon plunged from $24 to $12. The future of the industry looked gloomy. This transformation in the oil price environment sparked the most comprehensive reshaping and restructuring of the oil and gas industry since trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt broke up Standard Oil in 1911.

• Russia and Saudi Arabia’s oil deal: Tactics, strategy or the end of OPEC?

  Friday, February 19, 2016

  Imagine, if you will, a fantasy world free from the meddling of anti-trust agencies. The titans of the smartphone world — Apple and Samsung — meet in a Silicon Valley board room to strike a historic price-fixing deal amid a cycle of depressed smartphone prices.

• Boutique fuels and America’s gas supply

  Friday, February 05, 2016

  In this new ear of cheap fuel, resistance to the EPA's "boutique fuel" requirements — which stipulate a unique recipe for fuel sold in a particular state — has quieted. The regulators can breathe a sigh of relief for now. But what are these "boutique fuel" requirements? What is their purpose? And are they more hassle than they are worth?

• Oil-dependent Saudi Arabia forced into reform

  Friday, January 22, 2016

  Starting this year, Saudi Arabian citizens will have to get used to paying more at the pump, signaling the end of an era. As 2015 closed out, the Saudi government started putting into action a raft of apparent reforms, chief among them a 40 percent hike in retail fuel prices.

• No end to volatility in oil markets at the outset of 2016

  Friday, January 08, 2016

  The market may have become the new "swing producer" since the shale revolution. But the 3 percent jump in oil prices in the opening days of the new year — on the back of an execution in Saudi Arabia that inflamed sectarian tensions — reminded us of the repercussions that instability in the Middle East continues to have for global oil markets.

• Post-Paris picture: How gloomy is the outlook for oil majors?

  Monday, January 04, 2016

  I reported in my last piece on how Barack Obama was preparing the ground for the United Nations climate change talks in Paris with his symbolic decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. The bold move seems to have worked — the deal struck Dec. 12 by the 195 nations was recognized as a major feat of diplomacy, albeit lacking on specifics and legally binding commitments.

• The demise of Keystone XL redefines America’s ‘national interest’

  Friday, December 04, 2015

  After five years of breath-holding, President Barack Obama finally sounded the death knell for the Keystone XL project last month. In doing so he made clear that "the national interest of the United States would be best served by denying TransCanada a presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline."

• IEA report is ‘arrow in the quiver’ for climate change opposition

  Friday, November 20, 2015

  In October, amid dramatic reports of plane crashes and stranded migrants across Europe, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report keenly awaited by the environmental crowd — its Energy Efficiency Market Report 2015.

• The stories told by BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy for 2014

  Friday, October 23, 2015

  BP's Statistical Review of World Energy for 2014 — for which analysts, policymakers and anyone trying to make sense of an extraordinary year on world oil markets had been impatiently awaiting — was released in June. 2014 was certainly a remarkable year. BP described it as one of "tectonic shifts," after what chief economist Spencer Dale called a period of "eerie calm" in recent years. While the supply-and-demand dynamics that have led to the collapsing prices are broadly understood, the statistics provided in this year's review add much flesh to the bones of those theories.

• ABC’s ‘Blood and Oil’ misses the mark on the shale boom

  Friday, October 09, 2015

  "Sometimes you have to play dirty to get filthy rich," announces the trailer for the new primetime show "Blood & Oil," which premiered Sept. 27 on ABC. But "Blood & Oil" is a somewhat-mistimed pop culture take on the boom towns springing up as the shale revolution has gained speed.

• What would a Clinton presidency mean for the oil and gas industry?

  Friday, September 25, 2015

  ​In July, Hillary Clinton released a climate change "fact sheet" that set out ambitious goals for a makeover of the North American economy in the name of solar power. She also has set a more aggressive target for carbon emissions reduction than her former boss Barack Obama.

• China’s cozy ties with Venezuela complicates US oil picture

  Friday, September 18, 2015

  Earlier this month, a beaming Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro announced on his weekly television show "En contacto con Maduro" that he had secured a $5 billion loan from the Chinese government. This adds to the estimated $56 billion the country has loaned to Venezuela since 2007 — funds that are designed to reverse the decline in output from Venezuelan oil fields.

• Oil slumps below $40 per barrel: The story behind the prolonged pain

  Friday, August 28, 2015

  On Aug. 24, U.S. benchmark light crude West Texas Intermediate (WTI) closed at $38.24 a barrel — the lowest price level since February 2009. Brent crude was trading only a few dollars higher. Revisiting global oil prices six months on from las​t time, I find no new narratives rocking the market.

• Escalating conflict in Syria spells trouble for Turkish oil pipelines

  Friday, August 21, 2015

  Since World War II, Turkey has become increasingly important ally to the West, and energy is at the heart of the alliance. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline has carried Azerbaijani oil across Turkish territory into Europe since 2005, and the Trans-Anatolian pipeline (TANAP) is due to start piping gas from the Turkish-Georgian border to the Turkish-Greek border in 2018. Both are key nodes in Europe's strategic Southern Corridor vision to break Russia's chokehold on European gas supplies.

• What can Nicaragua’s new Gran Canal do for global LNG trade?

  Friday, July 17, 2015

  When it opened to great fanfare in 1914, the Panama Canal revolutionized the global trade of oil, raw materials and manufactured goods by allowing ships to cross between the Atlantic and the Pacific without navigating round the "sailors' graveyard" of Cape Horn.

• What to make of the EPA’s fracking report?

  Friday, June 19, 2015

  The U.S. fracking lobby had all of its birthdays at once earlier this month when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft of a 1000-page report that throws into doubt the contribution of fracking practices to groundwater contamination in states like North Dakota and Pennsylvania. The headline of the report, several years in the making, is that fracking has "not led to widespread, systematic impacts to drinking water resources." This is the latest contribution in a series of highly politicized and heavily contested reports on the impact of the chemicals injected into fracking wells on public health.

• Stanford’s Oil-Climate Index: Not all oils are created equal

  Friday, May 22, 2015

  This December in Paris, 196 countries will meet to try to overcome the gridlock over 2030 carbon emissions targets. Could the impasse over global climate change policy be partly the result of the stark choice we are presented between "clean" renewable sources and the "dirty" oil industry?

• With sanctions lifted, will Iran further damage global oil prices?

  Friday, April 24, 2015

  The last thing the global oil industry needs now is more supply. The negotiations concluded this month between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the P5+1 countries (China, France, Russia, U.K. and the U.S., plus Germany) were a victory for global nuclear nonproliferation, but have been billed as yet more bad news for oil companies worldwide.

• Open data in the oil and gas industry — How far have we come?

  Friday, March 27, 2015

  The oil and gas industry, more than most, has a reputation for opacity and secrecy — deals made on a handshake behind closed doors, secretive contract negotiations and revenues moving in complicated cross-streams among hundreds of corporate subsidiaries.

• Governor tells Alaskans ‘don’t panic’ as state looks beyond oil

  Friday, February 27, 2015

  In his 2015 State of the State speech just a month after taking office last December, incoming Alaska Gov. Bill Walker told how he learned a key lesson from the devastating impact the state's 1964 earthquake on his family's construction business: "Don't panic." This time around the shock therapy has come from the collapse of global oil prices in a state that draws 90 percent of its revenues from oil and gas.

• Emerging markets: Winners and losers from the oil price drop

  Friday, February 13, 2015

  Last time I wrote in these pages, I talked about the worrying long-term implications of the halving of global oil prices for oil-exporting countries. However, today I want to look at the flip side — the implications for those commodity-importing and manufacturing powers for whom the stars seem to be aligning. In particular, the emerging markets.

• An end to fragile stability: The political cost of falling oil prices

  Friday, January 30, 2015

  Falling global oil prices, which have not risen above $50 since early January, continue to defy pundits. Now oil-producing countries are bracing themselves for an extended low-price scenario. The dramatically changed outlook is boosting growth forecasts across much of the industrialized world, but in other corners — where states have become increasingly dependent on oil revenues — the good times are over.

• US shale industry will survive new era of lower oil prices

  Friday, January 16, 2015

  It's no secret that global oil prices have fallen dramatically from $115 last June to settle around $50 this month, a downward trajectory spurred on by oil cartel OPEC's November decision to maintain its own output. But is this the beginning of the end of the U.S. shale revolution, or just a bump in the road?

• Turkey reaps the rewards in the cancellation of South Stream

  Monday, January 05, 2015

  On Dec. 1, the latest round in the European gas wars kicked off. The battle began in May when Russia snubbed European gas markets by signing away much of Siberian gas eastward toward China. A month later, Russia threatened Ukraine with shutting off its gas over this winter.

• The shale revolution and the American dream

  Friday, December 05, 2014

  Last week Americans sat down to celebrate Thanksgiving, an homage to core American values — of which personal freedom is one of the foremost. As some European countries rush to emulate what the U.S. "shale revolution" has achieved, I suggest that it is the very foundations of America that allowed it to happen at all. Even if the geology is right, those foundations will not be easily imitated in other parts of the world.

• Despite setback, approval of Keystone XL looks likely in 2015

  Thursday, November 20, 2014

  Ten months ago, I described 2014 as "decision time" for the Keystone XL pipeline. Now it looks like the change in political winds following the resounding Republican victory in the midterm elections will bring that decision closer. The bill may have narrowly failed in the Senate on Nov. 18, but Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper — Keystone XL's greatest champion — is about to gain some friends in Congress.

• Will the Trans-Caspian pipeline ever be built?

  Friday, November 07, 2014

  ​Turkmenistan is home to the world's fourth-largest reserves of natural gas, making it an enticing source of gas for Europeans in an increasingly desperate quest to find alternative supplies to Russian gas.

• Asian LNG: Demands for an end to oil‑indexed contracts moves east

  Friday, October 24, 2014

  Gas prices in Asia now stand 50 percent higher than those in Europe and three times those in the U.S. A wave of enthusiasm for market-led, hub-indexed pricing models for natural gas has been sweeping eastward from the U.S. since the 1990s, as more traditional oil indexation becomes unfashionable. Now, it is taking hold in the Asia-Pacific region.

• Why Iran won’t displace Russia as top gas supplier to Europe

  Friday, October 10, 2014

  Ever since the unfolding of the Ukrainian crisis in February, there have been regular news reports suggesting various gas sources that might "displace" Russia as the supplier of two-thirds of Europe's natural gas. Buoyed by steadily progressing negotiations over nuclear power and the prospect of an easing of sanctions, the latest candidate has been Iran.

• The end of era: Venezuela’s latest attempt to offload Citgo

  Monday, September 29, 2014

  The Citgo sign overlooking Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, is something of a local icon. But many Americans may be unaware of the Venezuelan owners of Citgo, which refines and distributes crude oil through 7,000 U.S. service stations.

• North Sea oil and Scotland’s independence referendum

  Friday, September 12, 2014

  ​Scotland, which has formed part of the United Kingdom since 1707, will vote Sept. 18 in a referendum on whether it wants to become an independent nation. The debate has captured imaginations far beyond U.K. borders, whether due to the draw of the Scots' notoriously fiery and romantic spirit, or due to concerns over the precedent it sets for other separatist nations.

• The top 5 emerging technologies in oil and gas

  Friday, September 05, 2014

  Despite the common misconception, innovative technologies are not confined to renewable energy. They are driving changes in dirty hydrocarbons, too, indeed often making them far less dirty and far more efficient ways of supplying our energy needs. The pace of technological change is quickening. This is in part because the low-hanging fruit in the oil and gas sector, the so-called era of easy oil, is gone. Many of the newest technologies are focused on getting every last drop out of mature fields, or on accessing hydrocarbons in hostile and complex environments.

• Israel’s conflict with Gaza may leave Israeli gas stranded

  Friday, August 15, 2014

  As long as "Operation Protective Edge" continues, Israel is losing the grudging support of neighbors — and with them viable export routes for its newfound gas reserves. This is not only an economic threat, but it could also deny Israel the basis for a sustainable peace based on regional trade and economic links.

• Mexico tries to play shale catch-up with ambitious energy reforms

  Friday, August 01, 2014

  Mexicans have been looking jealously across the border at U.S. states like Texas, which have found themselves in the middle of an energy boom as Mexico's oil industry falters. The great irony, of course, is that the Mexican land mass hosts the same geological structures that have made Texas and oil-producing states on the East Coast so prosperous.

• The market failure of gas flaring

  Friday, July 18, 2014

  Historically, low natural gas prices in the U.S. have created both winners and losers. Although the extent of the environmental damage caused by hydrocarbon development has been disputed, the environment is certainly one of the losers.

• Oil, the Kurds and the end of Iraq

  Thursday, July 03, 2014

  ​In a country where 90 percent of the budget comes from oil, whoever controls the oil controls the state. That explains why the takeover by Islamic extremists ISIS of Baiji refinery, Iraq's largest, was seen as a watershed moment for Iraq's future.

• Can natural gas help Greece find its place in Europe again?

  Friday, June 20, 2014

  Like so many other words, we have the Greeks to thank for the origins of the word petroleum; 'petro' means rock in ancient Greek. In fact, today there is little petroleum to extract from Greek rock formations; contemporary Greece has a negligible oil production and no exports. Instead it is natural gas, and its transport – rather than production – that some are hyping as the savior of the Greek recovery.

• No need to fear the Russia-China gas deal

  Friday, June 06, 2014

  The announcement of a 30-year, $400 million gas contract between the Russians and the Chinese is the news that Western policymakers had been dreading. During the final hours of Vladimir Putin's visit to Shanghai on May 21, the two countries came to a historic agreement that has been a decade in the making. It appears the "greater diplomatic effort" I prescribed before the deal was summoned.

• Could Venezuela open the door once again for Big Oil?

  Friday, May 23, 2014

  ​While international eyes have been glued to the Ukraine, the increasingly violent trajectory of the protest movement farther south in Venezuela has suggested that President Nicolás Maduro may finally be losing his legitimacy as leader. Discussion of sanctions against the Venezuelan regime make the West's discontent clear, but even at home Maduro's approval ratings are reaching historic lows.

• Can BP redeem itself with a second chance in the Gulf of Mexico?

  Friday, May 09, 2014

  In March, the ban imposed on BP and its subsidiaries on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was lifted for the first time since the disastrous Deepwater Horizon blowout flooded U.S. waters with 4.9 million barrels of crude in April 2010.

• Can Russian gas go west? China’s role in Europe’s energy standoff

  Friday, April 25, 2014

  ​Speculation rumbles on over the implications of targeted sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union on key figures in Russian President Vladimir Putin's administration. In response, Russia has been playing the China card.

• Women in oil and gas: Why the US may be lagging behind

  Monday, April 14, 2014

  Numerous studies reaffirm the contribution of women to the workplace across all industries. But in the oil and gas sector — an industry with a lingering reputation of an "old boys' club" — it somehow still seems more of an uphill struggle to achieve meaningful participation by women.

• The role of American gas in the US-Russia sanctions dance

  Monday, March 31, 2014

  Many doubt that the tit-for-tat sanctions against Russia seen so far will expand to anything more meaningful, given the billions invested by Russian oligarchs and businesses in Europe. But market sentiment suggests otherwise.

• Managing bribery risk as the FCPA bares its teeth

  Friday, March 14, 2014

  In the first few months of 2014, the SEC has already brought as many enforcement actions under the Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) as through all of 2013. These enforcements span a range of business sectors, but there are a number of reasons why the global oil and gas sector is specifically exposed to bribery risk.

• Energy and revolution in the Ukraine

  Thursday, February 27, 2014

  If we look a little deeper in the Ukraine, the question of energy has played no small role in the eruption of violence on the streets of Kiev, where Ukrainians rely on Russian gas for over 50 percent of their energy needs. Where revolution comes, energy never lies far beneath the surface.

• The truth about the ‘water-energy nexus’

  Friday, February 14, 2014

  ​Environmentalists campaigning against the accelerating development of U.S. shale will not be heartened by the latest State Department study suggesting a minimal environmental impact for the Keystone XL pipeline. But in a world of highly-politicized studies on the unpredictable consequences of hydraulic fracturing technologies, the issue of water use during production is an increasingly contentious one, particularly in arid southern states such as Texas.

• US natural gas exports revisited: A real debate emerges

  Monday, February 03, 2014

  I have summarized both sid​es of the debate previously on whether the U.S. should start exporting its natural gas internationally. Now on the back of a Senate hearing in January, the debate over the wisdom of a continued ban on U.S. oil and gas exports has intensified.

• Azerbaijan and the Shah Deniz project: A small country playing a big game

  Friday, January 17, 2014

  Azerbaijan is a piece of the post-Soviet jigsaw roughly the size of Minnesota, home to a population of 9 million that gained independence in 1991. Few feel confident pointing out the country on a map (it's located on the northwest corner of Iran, right on the Caspian Sea). But just before 2013 closed out, Azerbaijan's policymakers finalized a $45 billion deal that will make them a key link in the European Union's and United States' play to secure Europe's energy independence, and to reduce Russian influence. This is a small country playing a big game.

• 2014 means decision time for the Keystone XL pipeline

  Friday, January 03, 2014

  A decision on the approval of the $5.4 billion northern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline (linking oil sands production in Canada with refining on the U.S. Gulf Coast) is expected in the first quarter of 2014. And a new survey has revealed strong support for the project among Americans.

• Beyond CSR reports: The real value of multistakeholder engagement

  Friday, December 06, 2013

  The oil and gas industry has a new buzzword: multistakeholder engagement. It regularly adorns the pages of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, and companies such as Tullow Oil are holding forums in its name. But what exactly does it mean? And can — and should — it go beyond the pages of those reports and make a meaningful difference to how firms do business?

• Deciphering M&A activity in the US oil and gas sector

  Friday, November 22, 2013

  Mergers and acquisitions hit the headlines daily in the financial pages, often making it all the way onto the front pages. Someone has swallowed a struggling target company; someone divested assets to focus on others. In the oil and gas sector, the level of M&A activity is used as a weather bell for the broader health of the sector, making investors nervous when things slowed down earlier this year. Now indicators seem to have picked up, but what does it all mean beyond those headlines?

• America’s hidden fuel: How does the US stack up on energy efficiency?

  Friday, November 08, 2013

  The rapid ramping up of oil and gas production is only half the story in North America's transformed energy security outlook. The other half is energy efficiency, dubbed the "hidden fuel" by industry watchers. In the past, the "gas-guzzling" U.S. was criticized by its European counterparts for its addiction to SUVs and a poor record on energy efficiency, but recent years have seen something of a turnaround. Concerns still remain that the realities of lobby politics and downward pressure on domestic gas prices could set this impressive progress into reverse.

• US shutdown brings long-term concerns for oil and gas industry

  Friday, October 25, 2013

  ​The oil and gas industry is one of the most heavily regulated there is, and is becoming more so. The prospect of the federal government agencies grinding to a halt for un unspecified period of time must surely mean grave implications for an industry witnessing an unprecedented boom. Or does it? In fact in the short term, it appears more of a nuisance than a serious threat. But it is in the long term that the prospect of further deadlocks could have a more pernicious impact.

• Neighborhood watch: Syrian conflict’s effect on oil prices

  Thursday, October 10, 2013

  The recent agreement brokered between the U.S. and Russia on Syria's chemical weapons saved Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria from the threat of military strikes — for now. It also seemed to settle some nervy oil markets.

• Exporting the revolution: Shale gas goes global. Or does it?

  Friday, September 27, 2013

  By now there are few who doubt the transformative impact of U.S.-produced unconventional resources on both the domestic and international markets. But there is little consensus on the odds of the so-called 'shale revolution' going global.

• The other boom: Update on the Arctic Basin and its role in global energy

  Friday, September 13, 2013

  All eyes are currently on the U.S. energy boom, led by the unprecedented exploitation of unconventional reserves. But what progress has there been on exploration of the vast reserves lying under the Arctic Ocean? And how have they been adapting to the transformed market realities?

• RIP Nabucco: What the Southern Corridor gas route decision means for the US

  Friday, August 16, 2013

  Nabucco is dead. Long live TAP. The Nabucco pipeline, a highly political piece of gas transportation infrastructure, was designed to carry natural gas from Azerbaijani gas fields and neighboring suppliers to gas-hungry European customers. That was the logistical agenda, at least.

• What Chinese investment in Latin America means for the US energy sector

  Thursday, May 23, 2013

  The rise of China in Latin America's resource-rich nations is already having an impact on U.S. crude imports.

• America’s natural gas dilemma: To export or not to export?

  Thursday, May 09, 2013

  The United States is facing a problem it couldn't have envisioned in its wildest dreams a few years ago as liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminals were being hurriedly thrown up along the coast to plug the nation's energy deficit.