Richard Lyon

I come at energy the way an engineer does: measure first, argue second. I’m an electrical engineer, a petroleum engineer and an energy economist, and I spent thirty years in the oil and gas industry before I started writing about it. None of that makes me right. It does mean I read the meters before I reach for the opinion.

I began as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, then spent more than twenty-five years in oil and gas, in senior operational and commercial roles in the UK, Norway, Azerbaijan, the Republic of the Congo and Cameroon. Somewhere in the middle of that a manager asked me for a memo on something called Peak Oil. The memo turned into a master’s degree in energy economics, and a research project quantifying how optimistic institutional estimates of remaining oil reserves really are.

Electrical engineering gave me the maths, physics and chemistry. Petroleum engineering showed me what it takes to keep the energy flowing. Energy economics revealed the central error: the assumption that low-quality energy — diffuse, intermittent, hard to concentrate — can simply replace high-quality energy because the price is right.

What this site is for

Most of my energy writing goes out through my newsletter, The State of Britain, which checks the arithmetic behind Britain’s energy bet. This site is for the writing that doesn’t belong there — longer or stranger pieces, notes too short to be essays, and the instruments I build when a number turns out to be harder to find than it should be.

The method is the same wherever it appears. I reference what I can, and I take care over the references, so you can check me rather than trust me. If I’ve got something wrong, say so, and I’ll correct it in public.

The book

The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can is published by Swift Press on 24 September 2026. It grew from a conviction, formed over three decades of producing, managing and studying energy, that the gap between energy policy and physical reality has become dangerous — and that the public are perfectly able to acquire and apply the knowledge needed to challenge the policies being made in their name.

You can read the argument, see the chapter breakdown and pre-order it at theenergytrap.org.