Drillers Cut Expansion Plans as Oil Prices Drop
Erin Ailworth, Wall Street Journal
U.S. oil drillers from Texas to North Dakota are scaling back plans to drill new wells next year as crude prices tumble…
Predictions Of ‘Peak Oil’ Production Prove Slippery
Marilyn Geewax, NPR
The dustiest portion of my home library includes the 1980s books — about how Japan’s economy would dominate the world.
And then there are the 1990s books — about how the Y2K computer glitch would end the modern era.
Go up one more shelf for the late 2000s books — about oil "peaking." The authors claimed global oil production was reaching a peak and would soon decline, causing economic chaos…
So are the authors of "peaking" books now slapping themselves in the head and admitting they had it all wrong?…
Nine out of ten barrels in undeveloped oil sands projects at risk from eroding oil price
Carbon Tracker
Investors in Canadian oil sands are at a heightened risk of companies wasting $271 billion of capital on projects in the next decade that need high oil prices of more than $95 a barrel to give a decent return, the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI) revealed today.
The Catch-22 of Energy Storage
John Morgan, Energy Collective
Guest Post by John Morgan. John is Chief Scientist at a Sydney startup developing smart grid and grid scale energy storage technologies. He is Adjunct Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at RMIT, holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry, and is an experienced industrial R&D leader. You can follow John on twitter at @JohnDPMorgan. First published in Chemistry in Australia.
Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power. Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization.
The problem is analysed in an important paper by Weißbach et al.1 in terms of energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI – the ratio of the energy produced over the life of a power plant to the energy that was required to build it. It takes energy to make a power plant – to manufacture its components, mine the fuel, and so on. The power plant needs to make at least this much energy to break even. A break-even powerplant has an EROEI of 1. But such a plant would pointless, as there is no energy surplus to do the useful things we use energy for.
There is a minimum EROEI, greater than 1, that is required for an energy source to be able to run society. An energy system must produce a surplus large enough to sustain things like food production, hospitals, and universities to train the engineers to build the plant, transport, construction, and all the elements of the civilization in which it is embedded…
France arrests three men with drone near nuclear site
Staff, Al Jazeera
French police have arrested three men after they were found in possession of a drone near a French nuclear reactor. The arrests come amid a spate of mysterious drone flights over reactors that began in early October.
There have been at least 15 sightings of drones over nuclear reactors around France, raising security concerns in a country heavily dependent on atomic energy for electricity. The zone around nuclear plants is off limits…
"We don’t underestimate these incidents, we don’t overdramatize them either," Environment and Energy Minister Ségolène Royal told French news channel i-Télé earlier this month, adding that France’s nuclear sites have been prepared for possible earthquakes or plane crashes and suggesting drones were a lower risk…
Texas oil town makes history as residents say no to fracking
Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
The Texas town where America’s oil and natural gas boom began has voted to ban fracking, in a stunning rebuke to the industry.
Denton, a college town on the edge of the Barnett Shale, voted by 59% to ban fracking inside the city limits, a first for any locality in Texas.
Organisers said they hoped it would give a boost to anti-fracking activists in other states. More than 15 million Americans now live within a mile of an oil or gas well…
Liebreich: Nuclear the Thin End of a Failing Wedge
Michael Liebreich, Bloomberg
Just over a decade ago, Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton University published “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies”. They postulated that if sufficient investment was made in a number of technology “wedges”, a “stabilization triangle” could be created that would prevent damaging increases in CO2 emissions and therefore in world temperatures.
The authors have subsequently updated their work to take account of the sharp growth in emissions since 2004, but the principle remains the same. Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative website is currently showing the need for eight wedges, and suggesting that these could be any of 15 possible technology options. The 15 include doubling vehicle fuel efficiency, using best efficiency practices in all buildings, increasing wind generation 10-fold, increasing solar generation 100-fold, replacing 1,400 coal plants with gas power stations, capturing and storing the emissions from 800 coal plants, adding double the current global nuclear capacity to replace coal, and so on.
Some of these wedge candidates look as if they are on track to deliver. Vehicle fuel efficiency is advancing, helped by high oil prices over nearly a decade, tighter government regulations and the spread of hybrid and electric vehicles. Energy efficiency is making strides, particularly in developed economies, with LED lighting leading the way, and electricity use falling way behind the economic rebound as countries emerge from the post-2008 recession. Renewable energy continues against the odds to record GW installation figures: according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts it will make up two thirds of global investment in power generation between now and 2030, and is well on track to deliver one of the required “wedges”…
Remote infrastructure that doesn’t need fossil fuels any more
Giles Parkinson, Renew Economy
The developers of a ground-breaking solar plus storage installation for a large communications tower in NSW say the potential to take infrastructure off-grid in Australia is huge.
Michael Gartner, the head of Photon Energy Australia, which led the project, says interest in solar plus storage has surged in the last few months. And it’s not just for off-grid applications where the cost of diesel makes solar and storage a “no-brainer.
Installations on the grid, such as the BAI communications tower in Muswellbrook (in the heart of NSW coal country), are looking to use solar and storage to take their installations off grid because it will be cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable…
Sao Paulo Drought Leaves Brazil’s Biggest City Desperate For Water
Adrian Gomez, AP via Huffington Post
It’s been nearly a month since Diomar Pereira has had running water at his home in Itu, a commuter city outside Sao Paulo that is at the epicenter of the worst drought to hit southeastern Brazil in more than eight decades…
New York State Allows Water Grab
Peter Mantius, DC Bureau
Barely a football field away from John Marvin’s modest house, 42 black railcars full of water sit waiting for the signal to begin rolling south to supply fracking drill pads across the Pennsylvania border. When the water train lurches and clanks through the village — often at pre-dawn hours — it sounds ear-splitting whistles at each street crossing.
“How is everybody supposed to sleep at night?” asked Marvin, who tends his stroke -slowed wife in the family living room. “And what happens if they deplete our water supply? Do we go to water rationing?”
Painted Post siphons water from a shallow, rain-dependent aquifer it shares with several neighboring communities, including the town of Corning. In 2012 the village signed a five-year deal reportedly worth up to $20 million with a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell to sell up to 1 million gallons a day used to frack Shell’s natural gas wells in Pennsylvania. The village has called the sale a routine disposal of “surplus property.”
Marvin is the unlikely linchpin in one of a pair of lawsuits that seek to compel the state to enforce its tough environmental law amid a statewide scramble for water rights. Corporations and municipalities are now trying to lock in rights to withdraw water and in some cases sell water to the highest bidder, and they do not want environmental reviews to slow them down. So far, the state is complying…
Climate change puts bees and flowering plants out of sync
Robert McSweeney, Carbon Brief
Warmer spring temperatures are causing bees to hatch earlier, putting them out of sync with the flowers that they pollinate, a new study shows.
The researchers say the study is the first of its kind to show climate change affecting the sort of relationships between species that have evolved together over millions of years…
Long Beach’s First Bike Share for Women Experiencing Domestic Violence
Brian Addison, Long Beachize
As the City with a Capital C hops on the struggle bus that is implementing a bike share program in coordination with the seemingly unorganized operation that is Bike Nation, a group of local biking advocates decided to take matters into their own hands by focusing on the groups who need it most—in this case, the many women who face physical and mental abuse through poisonous, debilitating relationships.
It is not unknown that self-identified Jesus Chick Elizabeth Williams, whose bubbly behavior matches her lollipop pedals, is an advocate for underserved populations. Her project Bridging the Gap to Biking in Underserved Communities, announced in January of 2013, was geared toward bridging many inequities in regard to biking infrastructure and access—and out of that bridging, a gap was filled by way of Empact Long Beach, a six-month program and partnership with avid bicyclist, advocate, and Ghost Bike saint Danny Gamboa…
