The ground engineering specialist is expecting its UK turnover, which makes up 4 per cent of its global revenue, to be “adversely impacted” in Q4 due to a “Brexit-related slowdown”. Keller chief executive Alain Michaelis told Construction News the company had experienced delays on some projects – particularly in London – as investors assessed the impact of the EU referendum vote. “It seems foreign investors are trying to see exactly where their investments lie in the post-Brexit environment until they make any decisions [on whether to move forward],” Mr Michaelis said. However, the CEO was confident the schemes would not be cancelled and said tendering activity in recent weeks had been “ok”. The comments came as Keller posted global operating profit of £30.9m for the six months to 30 June 2016, down 6 per cent on the £35m posted for the same period of 2015. Despite the fall in profit, revenue hit a record £849.7m for the half-year, up 12 per cent on H1 2015’s £755.8m. The fall in profit was largely down to poor performance in the company’s Asia Pacific business, where project delays and “tough market conditions” saw it post losses of £9.6m. Keller’s Europe, Middle East and Africa business performed well, nearly doubling its operating profit to £13.6m in H1 2016 from £7m in H1 2015. Turnover for the division increased to £261.7m for the period, up 24 per cent from £210.3m. The UK market was one of its strongest European markets, with Mr Michaelis saying the firm felt “particularly good” about UK performance in the past 12 months. Keller had a steady order book over the coming months and is targeting work on High Speed 2 and Hinkley, Mr Michaelis said. He said the company was getting ready for the opportunities a new runway in the South-east could provide, adding that it should be “top of the list” when it comes UK infrastructure projects. It was now up to the government to make swift decisions on major infrastructure projects to give the sector greater certainty, he said. “The confidence of the nation is shaky given Brexit, and the industry is not clear on the outcomes of some of these negotiations, so the government should do anything it can to instil confidence through projects within its control.” The chief executive said that while the weakening of the sterling would likely add nearly £40m to Keller’s net debt compared with the end of 2015, it could also have a beneficial effect on Keller’s profit when translated into sterling over the coming years. Mr Michaelis said: “The interesting positive affect of Brexit on us will be in currency: we make the majority of our profit in dollars, so that is a good news item for Keller.”   Source link

21st November 2015 One of the big obstacles to the uptake of electric vehicles by the masses is the cost of batteries. They need to be big enough to store enough energy for hundreds of miles of driving between charges, yet light enough to not be a drain on the cars carrying them.   “For an electric car, the cost of a battery is crudely the same as the cost of the rest. That is quite the wrong proportion for it to take off. So people are desperate to find ways to supply cheaper batteries,” says Chris Wright, chairman of Faradion, the technology company researching low-cost energy storage solutions. In an interview with the Guardian, Wright explains that the motor industry needs to find a way to produce batteries that doesn’t rely on lithium, the base element of rechargeable batteries. His company’s answer is sodium – far cheaper to source and with similar energy-storing properties. It means electric vehicles could soon be a more viable option for many, including commuters and drivers who have just passed their test who are looking for an easy-to-use and affordable vehicle to put their skills to use with. “We set out to make sodium materials that worked in a simple electrochemical [battery] cell that behaved as well as if not better than some of the lithium systems,” Wright says in the interview. “We were able to produce material which outperformed lithium-ion phosphate, which has until recently been the workhorse in automotive batteries.” Although the sale of electric vehicles has risen sharply over the last year, traditionally-aspirated vehicle sales still far outweigh them. But as the cost of producing electric vehicles’ power plant drops, those savings will be passed onto the marketplace. Range anxiety – the fear of running out of power and being stranded in the middle of nowhere – is receding. Now motorists are realising how much cheaper it could be to run an electric vehicle, not to mention how much greener it is. Charging a car for a 250-mile journey could cost as little as £5. Bjӧrn Nykvist and Måns Nilsson, Swedish scientists at the Stockholm Environment Institute, predict a ‘potential paradigm shit in vehicle technology’ if the price of powering electric vehicles continues to fall at the same rate. A report on TechnologyReview.com highlights that the pair’s analysis suggests that battery pack prices are falling by about 8 per cent every year. That decline in cost could be accelerated if large-scale electric vehicle manufacturers such as Toyota, Tesla and Nissan follow through with their plans to ramp up battery pack production in the near future. In the same article, Luis Munuera, an International Energy Agency analyst, advised a note of caution with Nykvist and Nilsson’s research. The cost reductions predicted should be ‘taken with care’ he wrote in an email to TechnologyReview.com. This is because battery costs from different sources may not be directly comparable, and it is unclear exactly how far into the future such price predicting is accurate to. But he does admit: “We have seen events moving quicker than expected in lithium-ion battery technology.” Source link

An oil consortium led by ExxonMobil has been fined about $76bn by a court in Chad in a dispute over alleged unpaid royalties, in a sign of a breakdown in the company’s relations with the country. The court in N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, awarded the country’s finance ministry 480bn CFA francs ($816m) in royalties, and levied a record additional penalty of about $75bn. The fine is larger than the total cost to BP of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which has reached about $62bn. It is also almost seven times Chad’s 2015 gross domestic product of $10.9bn. Exxon said it disagreed with the court’s ruling and was “evaluating next steps”. It said that the dispute was over “commitments made by the government to the consortium, not the government’s ability to impose taxes”. Exxon added that it was vital for all sides to “abide by applicable law in order to achieve the desired long-term benefits envisioned when projects begin”. In Chad there was scepticism that the fine could be collected. The mood in N’Djamena has been tense at a time of increasing financial pressure on the government following the drop in oil prices since 2014. Civil servants’ salaries and student grants have not been paid since August or earlier, provoking strikes including essential health services and schools. In parts of the capital, youths have been throwing stones at cars this week. Chad produced 120,000 barrels of oil per day last year, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Exxon’s Chad/Cameroon project includes wells in Chad and a pipeline to take the oil from the landlocked central African country to a terminal on the Atlantic coast of Cameroon. The company said last year that since it came into production in 2003, it had contributed $12bn in revenues for Chad. Leading a consortium that included Chevron and Malaysia’s Petronas, Exxon supervised construction of the 650-mile pipeline starting in 2000. Chevron sold its 25 per cent stake to the government of Chad for $1.3bn in 2014, but Petronas remains an investor. The World Bank funded the Chadian and Cameroonian governments’ share in the development. Its involvement was condemned by human rights and environmental groups and local communities, which tried to halt the deal. Related article Financial watchdog investigates reserves and accounting for climate change After construction was finished and oil was flowing, Idriss Déby, Chad’s president, reneged on the terms of the deal, which included a law pledging 80 per cent of oil revenues for social spending. Despite its oil income, the central African country remains one of the world’s poorest. Like its neighbour, Nigeria, Chad is in economic crisis because of collapsed oil revenues amid the running costs of waging war against Boko Haram. Students have been striking this year over lost scholarships and other budget cuts. From 2000 to 2009, Chad boosted its military spending by more than 600 per cent, as the government fought internal battles and in Sudan’s war in the neighbouring Darfur region. Mr Déby came to power in a coup in 1990 and has weathered several military attempts to oust him. He won a fifth term in multi-party elections earlier this year. He is currently president of the African Union, and Chad’s army — one of the most capable in Africa — is playing a key role in the regional fight against both the Boko Haram insurgency and al-Qaeda-linked militants. Sample the FT’s top stories for a week You select the topic, we deliver the news. Source link

Ivor Sheppard, who has worked in Qatar with CH2M on the country’s World Cup programme and in the United Arab Emirates as bid manager with Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation, joined Horizon in September. He was also previously a director at Turner & Townsend, covering Heathrow Terminals 5 and 3, the London 2012 Olympics, and the Shard, according to his LinkedIn profile. Programme director Carl Devlin confirmed Mr Sheppard’s appointment at the CN Summit 2016, where he outlined Horizon’s plan for delivering Wylfa Newydd, a £10bn new nuclear project in North Wales. The delivery team for the project was confirmed in May, with engineers Bechtel and Japanese energy specialists JGC and Hitachi forming a consortium with client Menter Newydd. Mr Devlin said the scheme will bring £20bn of investment into the UK, 60 per cent of which “can be delivered by UK businesses”. He described the project as “a very, very complex jigsaw that we need to put together”, and said “at least 95 per cent” of the design will be completed before construction of the scheme begins. “People can be too keen to get started and it’s a mistake that costs you,” he said. The project’s timeline points to a final investment decision in 2019 with major earthworks getting underway in the same year, and the first nuclear concrete being poured on site in 2020. However, in July this year, the Welsh affairs committee said the project should be built only “if the strike price is below that agreed for Hinkley Point C and competitive with renewable sources”. Horizon is yet to decide a strike price with the government for the Wylfa Newydd project. However, Mr Devlin said the project’s focus would be “all about predictability” in terms of cost, particularly during the construction phase. He added that the firm would be “structuring EPC contracts that are incentivised to perform,” and that contracts would be “incentivised around the same objectives all from tier two supply chain downwards”. “We’ve built this plant four times before and we need to keep as true to our references points as we can to keep costs at an acceptable level,” he said. Source link

Category: Construction Industry Today | Subscribe to Construction Industry Today Feed Published Mon, Apr 18th 2016 Roof slates from Welsh Slate feature on a refurbished building at the heart of the regeneration of Kings Cross. Posted via Industry Today. Follow us on Twitter @IndustryToday Some 6,400 natural slates from Welsh Slate have helped restore to its former glory the roof of the first purpose-built gym in England, albeit now as a designer restaurant. More than 600m2 of Welsh Slate’s 500mm x 300mm Penrhyn Heather Blue County-grade slates have been used on the main and clerestory roofs and flank roofs of the dormer windows of the Grade ll listed German Gymnasium – a landmark in the King’s Cross regeneration masterplan. They were specified by architects Allies and Morrison to return the roof to its former appearance after the original Welsh Slate roof (which is an important early example of the use of laminated timber to enable broad spans) was removed and the building was left with only a bituminous felt covering across the structure. They also match the slate roofs of the adjacent St Pancras Station and Great Northern Hotels. The new roof over trusses up to 20m wide was installed over four winter/spring months by Attleys Roofing who were reliant on multiple, small deliveries due to the tight site, lack of storage and range of materials required to bring the roof up to today’s standards – insulation, vapour control layer, counter battens, felt, battens and Welsh slates. After a 17-month rebuild the renovated building was officially opened to the public by restaurant group D&D London in November (2015). Originally designed by Edward Gruning and built in the 1860s, the German Gymnasium was influential in the development of athletics in Britain. The building cost £6,000 and was funded solely by the German community in London with the intention of promoting strength-based gymnastics for men and women. The National Olympian Association held the indoor events of the first Olympic Games there in 1866 and they continued there annually until the White City games in 1908. After the First World War the building was taken over by the Great Northern Railway and converted to offices, being sub-divided into cellular offices, with first floor, staircase and internal partitions inserted to divide up the overall single volume. It remained in the ownership of the railway operators under various acronyms until it was drawn into the overall masterplan for the redevelopment of King’s Cross. The earlier demolition of the buildings around it and the emerging context have allowed the public realm surrounding it to become a more dynamic space, the building becoming both a way-finding landmark and a destination in its own right. Allies and Morrison were commissioned by developer Argent to restore and repair the fabric of the building to a shell and core finish to enable subsequent fit out by one of three shortlisted restaurant operators. Conran and Partners established the restaurant concept design and completed the fit-out which includes a new steel mezzanine and staircases. Andrew Rixson of Allies and Morrison said: “The design of the roof is complicated by the increased depth of the new roof build-up in that the additional thickness of the roof sets the new slate tiles above the level of the brickwork details of the existing gable parapets. “To resolve this, our design approach separates the slates from the brickwork by introducing hidden gutters, valleys and leadwork detailing around the perimeters of the roof. These details are adapted into various different forms due to the variety of conditions found within the existing roof and the deformation of the timber roof structure over time but reconcile the precisely constructed new roof elements with the unevenness of the Victorian brickwork.” He added: “Welsh Slate provided technical advice throughout the design phase through telephone consultation and product literature. The slates could be used in a consistent tile size with even colour and their fixings hidden by the overlapping of each tile. We were also able to resolve design problems using the integrated and unobtrusive service penetrations, which are pleasing architecturally and from a conservation perspective, by avoiding the need for a proprietary vent pipe protruding above the pitch of the roof.” Tina Attley of Attleys Roofing said: “The Welsh Slate has provided the aesthetics required by the client and the architect and at the same time has kept it in keeping with the area. Everyone is really pleased with the roof.” ENDS   Source link

Far from having years to work out how to curb the risks of climate change, we face a moment of truth ©Getty Beijing in December: People wear protective masks after pollutant PM 2.5 registered nearly 25 times the acceptable standard set by the World Health Organization Virtually all new fossil fuel-burning power-generation capacity will end up “stranded”. This is the argument of a paper by academics at Oxford university. We have grown used to the idea that it will be impossible to burn a large portion of estimated reserves of fossil fuels if the likely rise in global mean temperatures is to be kept below 2 degrees centigrade. But fuels are not the only assets that might be stranded. A similar logic can be applied to parts of the capital stock. February was the warmest month on record. The current El Niño — the warming of the global climate triggered by the Pacific Ocean — has boosted temperatures, just as it did in 1997-98. The recent supposed pause in rising temperature was relative to the sudden jump at that time. A comparison between 1998 and today shows that temperature continues to climb, together with atmospheric stocks of carbon dioxide. This reminds us of the realities of climate change. More On this topic Martin Wolf Moreover, two forms of inertia govern climate policy. First, infrastructure in power generation, which generates a quarter of all anthropogenic emissions, is extremely long-lived. In the EU, 29 per cent of thermal power plants is more than 30 years old and 61 per cent is more than 20 years old. Second, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries. Thus it is necessary to think not of annual flows but of cumulative emissions or of a global carbon budget. The Oxford paper assumes (optimistically) that emissions from all other sectors proceed in accordance with the emissions pathway judged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to give a 50 per cent chance of keeping the temperature increase below 2 degrees. It assumes, as well, that new generating plants are operated to the end of their normal economic lives. Under those assumptions, capital stock created after 2017 would break the global carbon budget. Yet, in the past decade alone, the emissions implied by the investment in power generation have been rising at 4 per cent a year. To shift suddenly to zero emissions would appear inconceivable. Accelerated declines in emissions from other activities would alleviate the pressing nature of this dilemma, but only modestly. Worse, the dependence of transport fossil fuels is likely to be harder to reduce sharply than that of power generation. Indeed, decarbonisation of power generation will have to make a vital contribution to decarbonisation of transport through growth in use of electric vehicles. Within power generation itself, there are four options. The first would be a more or less immediate shift to zero-emissions technologies. The second would be retrofitting of conventional capacity with carbon capture and storage. The third would be to replace new capital stock with zero-emissions capacity early in its life. The last would be early introduction of technologies to remove atmospheric stocks of carbon. Production costs of zero-carbon energy, including renewables, biomass, hydroelectricity and nuclear power, are falling rapidly. Challenges remain, notably grid integration and storage. The question is by now more when than whether. It is not going to be next year — not even if assisted by an accelerating rise in energy efficiency. Again, some form of carbon capture and storage seems a vital part of any solution. But these technologies remain largely untried and expensive. That is one reason why a rapid shift in investment patterns appears crucial. The option of proceeding with investment in a conventional plant only to then scrap it early would be wasteful and ineffective. Cutting the average life of generating plants by a decade would delay the “commitment year” — the point of no return — to no later than 2023. This leaves us with little time to transform the world’s investment path. It would seem wiser to install zero-emissions capacity faster now instead. That is likely to be particularly beneficial because the costs are falling with cumulative production. In the last resort, carbon removal or other forms of geoengineering might be employed. Yet all such technologies create technical, and even geopolitical, risks. If, for example, a country unilaterally intervened directly in the climate, the consequences for global relations would be unsettling or catastrophic. Far from having years to work out how to curb the risks of climate change, we face an imminent moment of truth. This also raises urgent policy questions. If carbon pricing were to deliver the desired shifts in investment, it would require credible commitment over the long term. But commitments for the long term can barely be credible. A novel approach would be imposition of cumulative emissions caps. Alas, their credibility would be low even if they could be agreed at all. An alternative might be licensing of new and existing power plants, to force shifts in technology and accelerate closure of capacity. But such licensing would again have to be imposed quickly: otherwise, a race to build soon-to-be grandfathered conventional capacity would ensue. It would also be possible either to subsidise or to tax specific technologies. But this has already proved vulnerable to capture by existing or newly created vested interests. Finally, it is possible — indeed, desirable — to invest in research and development. It is a long-time scandal how little is invested in such R&D relative to subsidies to fossil fuels by governments. After last year’s Paris climate conference, the world congratulated itself on having agreed a new process, even though real action was postponed. Yet, given the longevity of a large part of the capital stock, the time for decisive change is right now, not decades in future. But the world is not really serious about climate, is it? It prefers fiddling while the planet burns. martin.wolf@ft.com Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016.