News in Brief 2023

Kommunale Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG (KSBG) has sold its stake in the energy company STEAG GmbH, Essen/Germany, to the Spanish infrastructure investor Asterion Industrial Partners. The boards of the owners have given their mutual consent to this and the contract has been signed and notarised accordingly (signing). The transaction volume amounts to approximately 2.6 bn €. This amount corresponds to the ...

SENS – Iqony Solar Energy Solutions Ibérica starts the construction of two photovoltaic (PV) parks in Pepino in the Spanish province of Toledo. Both parks, known as Pepino 20 and Pepino 3, will consist of 40,000 modules that will avoid the emission of more than 24 t/a of CO2 into the atmosphere, which will considerably reduce the carbon footprint of the ...

Energy consumption in Germany in the first six months of the current year was around 7 % lower than in the same period last year. According to preliminary calculations by the Working Group on Energy Balances (AG Energiebilanzen), domestic primary energy consumption reached 5,561 PJ or 189.7 mtce in the first half of 2023. This was 7.1 % less than in the first ...

The “De Re Metallica Libri XI” from the pen of the polymath Georg Agricola is rightly called the “Bible” of the miners of Europe and America. Now this special literary-scientific synthesis of the arts of the 16th century has been translated into Ukrainian. The TH Georg Agricola University (THGA), Bochum/Germany, which itself bears the name of the Chemnitz native, who ...

Dumbeck, G. (2023): Agricultural recultivation in the Rhenish lignite mining area. 1st edition. 391 pages, 104 tables, 161 figures and 18 tables. GDMB Gesellschaft der Metallurgen und Bergleute e. V., Clausthal-Zellerfeld/Germany (Figure 1). Lignite mining in the Rhenish mining area represents a serious intervention in the cultural landscape of this region. While the sites were initially mainly used for forestry ...

The year 2022, which was marked by the ongoing consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and additionally by the war in Ukraine, went well for the RAG-Stiftung, Essen/Germany, in spite of all the challenges. The Board of Executives of the RAG-Stiftung (Figure 1) published the figures for financial year 2022 and gave an outlook for the current year at its annual ...

The STEAG Group, Essen/Germany, which since the beginning of the year has been divided into two separately operating companies, Iqony GmbH and STEAG Power GmbH, has presented its current Group sustainability report. In it, the energy company documents its commitment and guidelines in the areas of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). Under the keyword “ESG”, a comprehensive set of ...

“The Federal Government’s strategy on the subject of the energy transition overestimates the willingness to invest in new gas-fired power plants on the one hand and the technical possibilities of being able to convert hydrogen into electricity at 100 % on the other. Moreover, green hydrogen will not be available in the required quantities for the foreseeable future.” This is ...

The approval process for a potash plant in northern Thuringia has been initiated by the junior mining company Südharz Kali GmbH, Erfurt/Germany. A so-called scoping document for the subsequent spatial planning procedure has been submitted to the Thuringian State Administration Office (Thüringer Landesverwaltungsamt – TLVwA). It outlines two different development paths with various options. On the one hand, the project ...

European Lithium, West Leederville/Australia, is expanding its portfolio in Austria: The Wolfsberg lithium project in Carinthia, which is already well advanced, will be joined by three further exploration projects in Styria (Figure 1). The company is thus taking into account the increasing demand for lithium in the coming years. European Lithium has signed a binding contract with the Canadian company ...