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UK Ministers – Lights will stay on this winter
Matthew Tempest, Guardian
The trade and industry secretary, Alan Johnson, today said energy supplies would not fail this winter “under any scenario whatsoever” – even though Tony Blair admitted forecasts of cold weather were causing “difficulties with gas prices”.
Rocketing wholesale gas prices and speculation about a possible new generation of nuclear reactors have sent the issue of energy supply shooting up the political agenda.
Mr Blair told MPs at his weekly question time that as far as the government was aware there would be no problems for domestic customers but there could be difficulties for heavy industrial users. He said the government was doing its” level best” to ensure the country gets additional infrastructure to import more energy but he stressed that the problem overall “does not lie within the remit of the government to resolve”.
With the issues of gas supply prices making the front pages rather than the business section, the trade and industry secretary, Alan Johnson, this morning said there was no threat to domestic users, and accused the media of scaremongering.
(23 November 2005)
Related story from the Guardian: Question-and-answer: Gas prices.
Was it Sir Humphrey Appleby who said, “Never believe anything until its been officially denied.”-LJ
Britain pays high price for dream of free energy market
Carl Mortished, Times Online
IT TOOK just a few days of frost to push the spot gas price to silly levels of
more than £1 per therm, three times that at the beginning of November. Such prices are not just too high for comfort, but too high for business.
Manufacturers who use gas as a feedstock or a primary fuel source are beginning to down tools.
…
Just as Lenin wanted to build socialism in one country, Britain sought to build a free deregulated energy market in a single European state. It was a less vainglorious ambition, but no less futile. The British daydream of a sheltered market of perfectly priced megawatt hours is ending as fast as the hydrocarbon molecules are sucked out of the depleting North Sea reservoirs. From the gas glut of the mid-1990s, we have moved to the tyranny of the marginal molecule.
(23 November 2005)
To supply Japan with oil, Putin promises pipeline to Pacific coast
James Brooke The New York Times via IHT
With Russia, China and Japan playing an increasingly high stakes game
for oil, Japan won a promise Monday from President Vladimir Putin of
Russia that a planned pipeline would bring Siberian oil to the Pacific.
“We plan to build the pipeline to the Pacific coast with eventual
supplies to the Asia-Pacific region including Japan,” the visiting
Russian president said at a forum for 400 Japanese business leaders
here. The construction calendar for the pipeline was set for the end of
next year.
Later, Putin and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan signed
preliminary accords on the pipeline, which could cost $11 billion, run
4,100 kilometers, or 2,550 miles, and carry 1.5 million barrels of oil a
day.
(21 November 2005)
The Blue Stream Gas Pipeline
Dr. Federico Bordonaro, Power and Interest News Report
On November 17, the Blue Stream gas pipeline between Turkey and Russia was officially inaugurated. Its construction, undertaken by Russia, Turkey and Italy — involving a joint venture between Russia’s gas giant Gazprom and Italy’s energy major ENI — began in 1997. At that time, it was sharply
criticized as technically flawed (it runs at a record depth of 2,150 meters
below the sea) and politically inopportune (since it was said to dangerously
increase Turkey’s dependence on Russia’s gas supply).
Blue Stream’s implementation confirms that Russia is using its vast oil and gas reserves as a geopolitical wildcard. …Turkey is emerging as the indispensable bridge to transfer Caspian and Black Sea resources to the West.
(22 November 2005)
Chavez pushes petro-diplomacy
High Oil Profit Leads to Venezuela’s Plan to Subsidize Heating in United States
Justin Blum, Washington Post
The plea came in a letter from a group of U.S. senators to nine big oil companies: With huge increases in winter heating bills expected, the letter read, we want you to donate some of your record profits to help low-income people cover those costs.
But the lawmakers received only one response. It came from Citgo Petroleum Corp., a company controlled by the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez, a nettlesome adversary of the United States who has accused the Bush administration of plotting to assassinate him and invade his oil-rich country.
The chief executive of Citgo wrote to the senators that the company is “studying potential plans for ongoing, sustained assistance programs in the United States with the goal of lifting our neighbors in need to an improved quality of life.” Citgo is planning to announce today that it will provide discounted heating oil this winter to many low-income residents of Massachusetts, Venezuelan officials said, adding that the plan was in the works before the senators sought help. The company also plans to offer similar aid in New York.
Citgo’s plan is the latest example of how Chavez is using a windfall created by soaring oil prices as a diplomatic tool, analysts said.
(22 November 2005)
Juan Gonzales writes in the NY Daily News: Oil For Bronx Poor is a Foreign Gift. Related article at CNN: Venezuela sending cheap oil to Massachusetts. And then theres..
Behind scenes, unlikely allies spurred oil deal
Delahunt-Chávez accord to be announced today
Susan Milligan, Boston Globe
WASHINGTON — While most of Congress was spending an August recess tending to local constituents, Representative William D. Delahunt was in Caracas, sitting down to a four-hour, one-on-one dinner conversation with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, one of the Bush administration’s most ardent critics.
That meeting — unusual for a sitting member of Congress and a head of state so critical of the White House — sparked negotiations that led to the official announcement scheduled for today: A US subsidiary of a Venezuelan-owned company will provide 12 million gallons of discounted home heating oil to Massachusetts consumers and organizations serving the poor.
Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat who is emerging as one of his party’s leading voices in Latin American affairs, said he was simply trying to smooth strained US-Venezuelan relations while helping low-income people in his home state.
(22 November 2005)
Isn’t it amazing how the same story can bounce so many different ways.-LJ
Supply woes send gas prices soaring
Reuters, Margaret Orgill
Gas prices shot up to eight-month highs on Monday as freezing weather
stoked demand and reignited worries about falling output from the
country’s ageing North Sea gas fields.
(21 November 2005)
Heating oil, gasoline and natural gas all expected to continue upward price trend
Energy volatility likely will remain order of the day
Shelly Strom, Portland Business Journal
Prices for home heating oil and gasoline have fallen from a peak reached earlier this month, but local fuel industry experts say the wild ride is anything but over.
Gasoline and home heating oil prices have fallen to around $2.45 a gallon after hitting peaks of more than $3.20 per gallon in September.
“We always have had fluctuations but they’ve gotten consistently worse,” said Steve O’Toole, executive director of Tigard -based Oregon Fuel Petroleum Association. “There is going to be so much more volatility.” …
(18 November 2005)
In suburbs, mansions are only getting bigger
Stephanie McCrummen, Washington Post
In the two years since they moved into their voluminous
8,000-square-footer on the edge of Virginia’s suburbs, the Bennett
family has not once used their formal dining room, where the table is
eternally set for eight with crystal, an empty tea set and two unlighted
candles.
(20 November 2005)
Could only find the cached 1st page.
The War Against the Car
Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal editorial, via reason.org
A few years ago, I made a presentation to my second-grader’s social
studies class, asking the kids what was the worst invention in history.
I was shocked when a number of them answered “the car.” When I asked
why, they replied that cars destroy the environment. Distressed by the
Green indoctrination already visited upon seven-year-olds, I was at
least reassured in knowing that once these youngsters got their drivers’
licenses, their attitudes would change. …
Similarly, there is now a nearly maniacal obsession among policy makers
and the Greens to conserve energy rather than to produce it. Even many
of the oil companies are running ad campaigns on the virtues of using
less energy (do the shareholders know about this?) — which would be
like McDonald’s advising Americans to eat fewer hamburgers because a cow
is a terrible thing to lose. …
There’s a perfectly good reason that the roads are crammed with tens of
millions of cars and that Americans drive eight billion miles a year
while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways. Americans are rugged
individualists who don’t want to cram aboard buses and subways. We want
more open roads and highways, and we want energy policies that will make
gas cheaper, not more expensive. We want to travel down the road from
serfdom and the car is what will take us there.
(11 November 2005)
A really shockingly bad editorial from the WSJ which reads almost
like parody. -AF
Senators are blowing smoke on gas
Joel Stein, LA Times
Unless they can repeal the law of supply and demand, they can’t do a thing about prices
————
I DON’T MIND all the whining about gas prices. That’s what you’re supposed to do at the end of an empire. “These lions aren’t crunching Christian bones loudly enough!” “This orgy is full of fat Spartans!” “My Escalade costs too much to drive to go hiking!”
But for the Senate to waste its time on this is another matter. Don’t our elected officials have fake Alaska bridges to build? The Senate, in a pathetic attempt to get attention, recently spent hours grilling oil executives about why their companies’ profits are so high and what they were going to do with the money. I think the lawmakers were hoping for “Free Gas for Senators Day.”
It’s not that I trust oil companies. These are people who are still trying to outsmart us with that 0.9 of a penny trick. But the idea that greedy oil execs are just taking our gas money and spending it on hunting trips with Dick Cheney isn’t true. The profits are going to the masses of people who own mutual funds that hold oil stocks, only a small portion of whom are rich enough to go on hunting trips with Dick Cheney.
…Today’s gas prices are startling partly because unlike food prices, which are hidden on those tiny misplaced stickers on supermarket shelves, gas stations are the only places run by people stupid enough to build the largest price tags in the world.
(22 November 2005)
Entertaining but very misleading rant.-LJ
World’s growing thirst for oil boosts global tensions
Peter Krouse, Cleveland Plain Dealer via Newhouse News Service
World’s Growing Thirst for Oil Boosts Global Tensions
Oil is a finite resource coveted not just by the industrial West but by growing economies around the world, most notably China. China used about 8.2 percent of the world’s daily oil production in 2004, but it’s going to need considerably more in years to come to power its economic expansion.
And here’s the rub: Most of it will have to be imported. Increased competition has already contributed to price spikes in the United States, where nearly 25 percent of the world’s oil is consumed. But the threat of production peaking and then declining in years or decades to come has even broader implications for economic and foreign policy.
The big question is how the world would embrace such a decline. By allowing market forces to peacefully allocate the dwindling resources until they’re not needed or not available? Or would countries, particularly the United States and China, go to war over access to oil fields around the globe? Friction points are already evident. …
(22 November 2005)
