The Republic of Cyprus’ aspirations for a gas bonanza presently hang with pending developments of their Aphrodite natural gas field and the exploratory drilling that will take place there shortly.  However the unknowns in the development path Cypriot gas will take to bring it ultimately to market appear as complex as the geopolitics of the region.   Professor Theodoros Tsakiris deconstructs the landscape for us with a view towards grounding the reader with a solid understanding of what ultimately is at stake for Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean  and the European Union in building a more robust and secure energy supply infrastructure.  

The issue of energy security is often cast with a rather narrow net inordinately focused on security of supply issues (with oil and gas typically at the forefront of this discussion).  This bias is readily understood in practical terms.  We understand simply and immediately an energy supply problem if we pull up to the gas pump and there is no product to put in the tank.  So while supply security is admittedly an essential component of the energy security genre, a singular focus on this aspect alone skews a broader and more profound understanding of how energy, and particularly power, if denied, is part of the larger energy-security and for that matter human landscape. 

Authors Michael Bruno and Graham Warwick in a recent article written for Aviation Week & Space Technology gave pause for reflection on just how broad and complex this landscape is when they wrote on the changing nature of ho...

Paradigm shifts in thinking and innovation may be brought about by design or disaster; remember the adage  ‘disaster is the mother of invention.’ In this article, contributor Michael Hallett calls on us to re-examine the panoply of threats and challenges to national electricity grids (the paradigm) and to make a pro-active paradigm shift today before disaster happens.  Specifically the paradigm shift Hallett asks the reader to consider is the utility of parallel compressed natural gas (CNG) networks-in a world increasingly awash in gas-for bolstering electricity supply security that concurrently could keep the lights on and provide fuel diversity in transportation markets.