Europe

The Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum is a Greenlandic government agency, working under the Ministry for Industry and Minerals and responsible for overseeing the growth of the nation’s resources. This is a burning issue in this volatile nation, which has just appointed its first female Prime Minister who is clearly keen to encourage the country’s emergent mining industry and has taken the initiative to lift the existing ban on the extraction of uranium.

“There are a number of motivations for our company to be here in Greenland,” explains Nicholas Rose, Chief Executive Officer of Avannaa Resources, “the primary one being the geological map of the country that shows a large variety of geotectonic environments that have high potential for hosting giant ore deposits.”

It was in 2009 that two senior geologists with the Greenlandic exploration company NunaMinerals decided that there was no question that Greenland was on the verge of transforming from a fisheries-based economy to a major player in key minerals. An exploration company, they reasoned, that really understood the regional geology as well as the most advanced technologies available would be urgently needed.

While Neil Armstrong’s and Edwin Aldrin’s first footsteps on the moon in July, 1969, to this day remains one of the most iconic moments in human history, mankind’s fascination with space dates back to centuries beforehand.

For centuries Gibraltar, with its strategic location at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, was used as a naval fortress. Today the Rock, located at a crossroads of Mediterranean and Atlantic shipping lanes, is recognised for its ability to provide a wide range of services to vessels of all sizes and types, and for being a Maritime Centre of Excellence.

Brian Nixon has spent most of his career working for major engineering contractors. Around 25 years of his career to be exact, roughly half of those years spent in the upstream, offshore sector, with the rest in the downstream, onshore market.

This is according to the latest report by the Wood Mackenzie energy consultancy, which says that the UK continental shelf remains one of the world's top ten areas for investment around 40 years after production started.

Describing the UK North Sea as a remarkable success story, Wood Mackenzie said spending on new projects had returned to levels last seen in the 1970s after allowing for inflation.

The deal has seen the budget airline agree to purchase 135 new aircraft from Airbus, 35 of which will be its A320 aircraft and 100 its new-generation A320neo jets. At list price said order would cost Easyjet more than $11 billion, however the company claims to have negotiated a substantial discount.

What makes this particular deal all the more significant is the fact that both Airbus and Boeing were competing to win it.

It was in July 1887 that Scottish academic James Blyth installed the world’s first electricity-generating wind turbine. Although at the time considered uneconomical in the UK, electricity generating wind turbines proved to be far more cost effective in countries with widely scattered populations, a fact that saw American inventor Charles F Brush follow up Blyth’s work some months later by building the first automatically operated wind turbine for electricity production in Cleveland, Ohio.

The event, which falls several weeks ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster than resulted in the death of 167 men, is designed to further encourage people working offshore to think about the lessons that have been learnt since the tragedy.

The keynote speaker is Lord Cullen, whose report into the tragedy led to major safety changes.