Energy News
Governor Paterson Releases State Energy Plan
Gov. David Paterson wants New York to explore tapping a massive but environmentally sensitive natural gas resource as part of a long-term energy policy released Monday.
Paterson is releasing a draft energy report that includes many initiatives he previously announced, including the development of new energy supplies and spending state money to build a “clean energy economy.”
The draft plan seeks to encourage development of the Marcellus shale natural gas formation in the Southern Tier.
The plan aims to cut electricity use by 15 percent and increase renewable fuels such as wind power by 30 percent by 2015.
( read more )
East Asia set to win “green” race
As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:
As Congress debates climate and energy legislation, Asian challengers are moving rapidly to win the clean-energy race. China alone is reportedly investing $440 billion to $660 billion in its clean-energy industries over 10 years. South Korea is investing a full 2 percent of its gross domestic product in a Green New Deal. And Japan is redoubling incentives for solar, aiming for a 20-fold expansion in installed solar energy by 2020.
In contrast, the United States would invest only about $1.2 billion annually in energy research and development and roughly $10 billion in the clean energy sector as a whole under the Waxman-Markey bill – less than 0.1 percent of U.S. GDP. A group of 34 Nobel laureates recently wrote a letter to President Obama decrying the lack of investment and calling on him to uphold his promise to invest $15 billion annually in clean-energy R&D.
( read more )
Can natural gas sustain us?
Can natural gas sustain us?
That’s the question that Robert Rapier asked this morning when he posted How Much Natural Gas Do We Have to Replace Gasoline? on The Oil Drum– a forward-thinking, clean, green, truth-finding blogsite.
Like us in our search for understanding of the discovery of the Haynesville Shale in northwest Louisiana, The Oil Drum tends to look at all sides of the discussion to ascertain reasonable and surprising results.
As we similarly explore in the energy portion of our film Haynesville, Rapier tries to mathematically understand our nation’s reserves of natural gas (and other resources) to gague what we really are dealing with when it comes to new finds and increasingly efficient recovery technology. Here is an excerpt from his article:
“A number of people have rightly pointed out that a 100-year supply implies usage at current rates. But it got me to thinking about how much natural gas it would take to displace all U.S. gasoline consumption. So in the spirit of my year-ago essay Replacing Gasoline with Solar Power, I will do the same calculation for replacing gasoline with natural gas. The big difference between this calculation and the earlier one is that solar power still has some technical issues to resolve (e.g., storage) and electric vehicles are not yet ready for prime time. On the other hand we are perfectly capable, today, of displacing large numbers of gasoline-fueled vehicles with natural gas.”
Even if CNG (that’s compressed natural gas) cars are a point of contention for those thinking of the ultimate clean energy transportation picture, it certainly is interesting to see the energy potential stored in natural gas- for whatever purpose.
-Chris Lyon, Editor of Haynesville
Read “How Much Natural Gas Do We Have to Replace Gasoline?” on The Oil Drum
( read more )
Can We Meet Our Energy Needs with Solar?
Stephen Lacey, the editor at “Inside Renewable Energy,” did a fascinating podcast on solar energy and the possibility of fulfilling all of our energy needs with power from the sun. Lacey is one of the more interesting voices out there exploring the energy future.
The Podcast’s Description: Theoretically, we could get all of our energy from the sun. But is it realistically feasible? And if so, what are the technical, economic and political barriers to reaching that lofty goal? In this podcast, we’ll look at the challenges and implications of such a heavy reliance on solar.
( read more )
Wind energy exacts its own cost
Though some may find a clean energy future something worth bending over backwards for, residents of the communities surrounding wind farms are singing to the tune of “It ain’t easy being green.” In this article found on USAToday.com, journalist Kate Galbraith explores the social impact of constructing wind turbines near Seasport, Maine. The citizens of a town along the delivery route feel like they need the large, wind blade-bearing trucks like Amity Island needs another shark. And though I don’t live in a small town in Maine as the subjects of the article do, I can’t help but wonder if the bigger picture is being missed here. Someone, somewhere is going to have heavy equipment in their back yard whether it be a coal dredge, an oil refinery, or a natural gas drill like we see in Louisiana with the Haynesville Shale. Does the moving of this equipment through a peaceful town exact enough negativity to warrant stopping altogether?
-Chris Lyon, Editor of Haynesville
( read more )
How to end America’s deadly coal addiction, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
How to end America’s deadly coal addiction
Converting rapidly from coal-generated energy to gas is President Barack Obama’s most obvious first step towards saving our planet and jump-starting our economy. A revolution in natural gas production over the past two years has left America awash with natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight – and without the expense of building new power plants.
Whatever the slick campaign financed by the powerful coal barons might claim, coal is neither cheap nor clean. Ozone and particulates from coal plants kill tens of thousands of Americans each year and cause widespread illnesses and disease. Acid rain has destroyed millions of acres of valuable forests and sterilised one in five Adirondack lakes. Neurotoxic mercury raining from these plants has contaminated fish in every state and poisons over a million American women and children annually. Coal industry strip mines have already destroyed 500 mountains in Appalachia, buried 2,000 miles of rivers and streams and will soon have flattened an area the size of Delaware. Finally, coal, which supplies 46 per cent of our electric power, is the most important source of America’s greenhouse gases.
( read more )
Windscapes: American Vistas Where Energy Is in the Air
Mitch Epstein from his book "American Power"
Article by Adam Goodheart, Photos by Mitch Epstein
Infinite power from the wind is an American dream almost as old as the country itself, an idea that has entranced generations of scientists, artists and visionaries. In the early 19th century, when most labor was still done by human hands, an immigrant inventor named John Adolphus Etzler, pondering the windmills of his native Europe, sat down to scribble out some calculations. When he finished, he declared that wind power could be harnessed to liberate mankind from toil, providing as much energy as 40 trillion workers, or about 40,000 times earth’s population at that time. Imagine the glorious — and languorous — future that awaited!
All that Etzler’s plan required was a grid of 200-foot windmills crisscrossing every continent and ocean of the globe, in hedgelike rows set a mile apart. The perfect place to begin was in the wide-open spaces of the United States.
Perhaps fortunately, Etzler’s dream hasn’t come to pass, at least not yet. But recently, wind turbines — the modern equivalents of his miracle contraptions — have become ever-more-familiar features of the American landscape. From upstate New York to the Iowa prairies to the mountain passes of California, they sprout like pale and slender flowers.
Political leaders, too, cherish plans for a future liberated by the wind: President Obama speaks of doubling alternative energy by the end of his first term, while Mayor Michael Bloomberg conjures visions of a Manhattan whose skyscrapers bristle with turbines, like the windmills that once dominated the skyline of Dutch New Amsterdam. (Last year alone, according to industry figures, the nation’s wind-power capacity increased by 50 percent, although the recession and lower oil and natural-gas prices have slowed growth significantly since then.)
But will the spreading fields of giant pinwheels help safeguard the environment — as their advocates maintain — or mar it, aesthetically at least, for posterity? In many areas where wind farms are built or planned, neighbors rally against them, warning that America’s majestic vistas are being spoiled by high-tech eyesores.
(Read entire article and see the photos)
( read more )
Game changer 4: Tim Wirth delivers must-read “extreme words” to natural gas execs
Tim Wirth’s Speech to Natural Gas Execs – ClimateProgress.org
I have been running a multipart series on how new unconventional natural gas supplies may be a game changer for low-cost climate action over the next two decades. But natural gas may be a game changer for climate politics much sooner. In fact, if a serious climate bill passes the Senate in the next several months — and I believe it will — then activism by the natural gas industry may prove decisive.
If so, the speech former Colorado senator Tim Wirth gave last week at the Colorado Oil and Gas Association’s huge annual meeting my turn out to have been the turning point. Wirth, now head of the UN Foundation, sent me the entire speech, which I reprint below. But you can get the key message from the Denver Business Journal piece, “Wirth delivers ‘extreme words’ on climate change to energy execs at COGA conference [2].”
The key point of this series is that There appears to be a lot more natural gas than previously thought (Part 1) [3] and therefore unconventional gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet (Part 2) [4], which is great for low-cost climate action, bad for coal (Part 3) [5]. And it always bears repeating, as Part 3 discusses, that natural gas is the critical low-carbon “firming” resource that can enable deep penetration of both windpower and concentrated solar thermal power.
So far, the coal industry has had its way with the climate bill, in part because the single biggest near-term, low-cost, low-carbon baseload alternative to coal power — natural gas (in existing, underutilized natural gas plants) — has sat on the sidelines. But the fact is many of the key fence-sitting Senators [6] come from states with major unconventional gas reserves, including Arkansas, Louisiana, and the Dakotas.
( read more )
Environmentalists Sue Over Energy Transmission Across Federal Lands
Environmentalists Sue Over Energy Transmission Across Federal Lands
By KATE GALBRAITH
A coalition of environmental groups is suing federal agencies in an effort to change the location of corridors to transmit energy across Western lands.
The environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Wilderness Society, as well as several Western environmental groups — say that the corridors, which were designated in January by the Bush administration, are convenient for moving electricity generated by coal plants and other fossil fuels, but do little to facilitate the production of renewable energy on public lands.
( read more )
U.S. Considers Curbs on Speculative Trading of Oil
U.S. Considers Curbs on Speculative Trading of Oil
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS, New York Times
WASHINGTON — Reacting to the violent swings in oil prices in recent months, federal regulators announced on Tuesday that they were considering new restrictions on “speculative” traders in markets for oil, natural gas and other energy products.
The move is a big departure from the hands-off approach to market regulation of the last two decades. It also highlights a broader shift toward tougher government oversight under President Obama.
Since Mr. Obama took office, the Justice Department has stepped up antitrust enforcement activities, abandoning many legal doctrines adopted by the Bush administration.
The Obama administration is also proposing an overhaul of financial regulation that would include tougher capital requirements for big banks, tighter regulation of hedge funds and a new consumer protection agency with broad power to regulate credit cards, mortgages and other consumer lending.
In the case of oil and gas trading, regulators made it clear that they were willing to move, without waiting for Congress to act on Mr. Obama’s overhaul, invoking their existing powers.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission said it would consider imposing volume limits on trading of energy futures by purely financial investors and that it already has adopted tougher information requirements aimed at identifying the role of hedge funds and traders who swap contracts outside of regulated exchanges like the New York Mercantile Exchange.
“My firm belief is that we must aggressively use all existing authorities to ensure market integrity,” said Gary Gensler, chairman of the commission, in a statement. He said regulators would also examine whether to impose federal “speculative limits” on futures contracts for energy products.
( read more )