With oil posing both geographical and political barriers, it is gas that is now attracting the attention of Western oil firms – as reflected in their recent portfolios. Seven out of eight Exxon Mobil projects completed last year were natural gas developments, as are two of the three scheduled this year. Royal Dutch Shell, meanwhile, expects half of its output to derive from gas by 2012. 

 

One reason for this is that gas is getting cheaper to develop – the cost of a floating LNG terminal has halved in the past two years – while the cost of oil projects have sky-rocketed. Perhaps most importantly, though, gas promises an in-route into national oil company owned projects. Foreign expertise and capital are often vital for these complex natural gas projects, and nowhere is this absence of Western money and know-how more evident than Iran – a country that boasts the world's second largest LNG reserves but that has nonetheless failed to make a viable export business of its resources. Qatar, on the other hand, has become the world’s largest exporter, down in no small part to a number of strategic technical partnerships. 

 

More than anything, the major’s new focus on gas looks like a savvy bet on demand (Exxon Mobil expects gas consumption to be a staggering 55 percent higher in 2030, from a 2005 baseline) and, not least, on climate change policy. The lion's share of this new demand will undoubtedly come from the emerging world – industrialisation and electrification requires power stations, and plenty of them. And if, as expected, governments start to come down heavily on those fuels that emit the most carbon dioxide, a good portion of that new energy will come from gas. 

 

In our oil and gas Industry Focus, Laurie Cuthbert explores some of the latest trends in both, and describes the exciting technological developments that have finally given US companies access to the gas trapped in shale rock scattered across large parts of the country. In Vietnam, meanwhile, demand for power is expected to grow by 16 percent per year until 2015 – and Gemma Carter reports on the challenges and opportunities faced by this rapidly emerging country, which makes significant global contributions to agriculture and IT. Eric Payne's Environmental report, meanwhile, takes a fresh look at how the innovative concept of vertical farming could herald a new era of high technology and ecologically sustainable agriculture. 

 

An ever growing e-waste crisis and issues of sustainability has pushed the concept of planned obsolescence into the spotlight recently, and Marius Goubert reports on how the controversial format has nonetheless helped drive innovation and feed mass-production. My report looks at the explosion of online retail in China, while Bob Combes investigates the science behind the Blue Brain Project (BBP).