Russia Rations Electricity
Nick Paton Walsh, The Guardian
…In a city normally paralysed by traffic, up to 400,000 Muscovites found their cars would not start and took the metro to work instead. The 9 million people who use the system routinely just grimaced and bore the extra load.
The city’s electricity network was more troubled. The government made large businesses pledge yesterday to put out their lights while they still had a choice, though between 3pm and 9pm, the city authorities introduced electricity rationing. Some businesses reached agreements to keep functioning at a basic level.
An editor at the business daily newspaper Vedomosti said the lights were off and only the computers were working in the newsroom. “It looks a bit like an orchestra at the moment, with only the players’ music stands alight,” he said.
But when life is hard in Moscow, it is intolerable in the regions, where Russia’s remaining 131 million people live. It’s an unexpected crisis in a country that prides itself on being an energy power – the biggest exporter of oil after Saudi Arabia and the leading supplier of gas to Europe. But among Russians, where the Kremlin’s geopolitical ambitions have nearly always taken precedence over ordinary folk, it came as little surprise. To top it all, they are also facing a record rise in utility prices.
(18 January 2006)
Italy hit by Russian gas shortage
BBC
Italy has had to dip into its gas reserves to make up for a shortfall in supplies from Russia, Italian energy group ENI has said.
It says it had to use four million cubic metres of gas from reserves because supplies were 5% below demand. Russia has denied reports that it is holding back gas for its domestic market because of freezing conditions.
Italy’s Industry Minister Claudio Scajola has called a crisis meeting with energy firms to discuss the issue. The announcement by ENI came after news agencies reported that Russia’s state-owned Gazprom had cut supplies by 20% to parts of Europe because of cold weather.
(18 Jan 2006)
Castro Announces Major Overhaul & decentralisation of Cuba’s Electrical Grid
Anita Snow, Associated Press via ENN
HAVANA — President Fidel Castro announced a long-awaited renovation of Cuba’s energy system to combat blackouts that have afflicted the island nation for two summers running.
In a Tuesday night speech published the next day in state newspapers, Castro said Cuba would decentralize its power system, gradually replacing five massive thermoelectric plants with smaller, regional plants supplemented by solar and wind power.
In the wake of technical problems at the huge plants that caused severe blackouts across the island beginning in 2004, “new ideas about the development of a more efficient and secure national electrical system have been put into practice,” Castro said in a speech of more than two hours.
The president also said Cuba had ordered more than 4,000 diesel and oil generators, with more than 3,000 already delivered.
Generators have been installed to maintain power during emergencies at critical sites such as hospitals, schools, meteorological stations and tourist hotels, Castro said. …
(19 January 2006)
Oil-Stung Caribbean Looks at Energy Alternatives
Linda Hutchinson-Jafar, Reuters via ENN
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad — Caribbean countries, vulnerable to oil shocks and worried rising global oil prices could drag their economies, are exploring renewable energy to ease high oil-import bills.
Solar energy is already used widely in Barbados and some Eastern Caribbean islands, while Jamaica has invested in wind farming and is pursuing other initiatives toward getting a 15 percent contribution from ethanol and other renewable sources to its electricity mix by 2015. Jamaica’s state-owned refinery, Petrojam, partnered with the Brazilian company Coimex to build a 40-million-gallon ethanol plant that should increase the ethanol content of gasoline from 5 percent to 10 percent.
Jamaicans “have everything to gain and nothing to lose as the cost of fossil fuels will continue to climb, whereas the wind, the sun, and the water are by definition free,” said Philip Paulwell, minister of commerce, science and technology. …
In the Caribbean, petroleum products account for an estimated 93 percent of commercial-energy use. Average electricity prices in the Caribbean are as much as seven times higher than those in the United States and Europe. …
(18 January 2006)
Energy prices boost inflation
Nell Henderson, Washington Post via Houston Chronicle
WASHINGTON – Surging energy prices pushed consumer inflation to a five-year high in 2005, outpacing average wage gains for most American workers, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.
The department’s consumer price index, a widely followed inflation gauge, rose 3.4 percent last year, the fastest rate since 2000, largely reflecting climbing prices for fuel oil, gasoline, natural gas and electricity, the department said.
However, workers’ average pay rose more slowly. Average hourly wages fell 0.5 percent and average weekly earnings declined 0.4 percent, after adjusting for inflation, in the 12 months that ended in December, the department said in a separate report.
Last year was the third year in a row in which real weekly wages fell, according to department data for the nation’s 92 million private production and nonmanagerial service workers, who account for more than 80 percent of the work force. …
(19 January 2006)
Forget Cheaper Oil in 2006?
BusinessWeek
Political turmoil in Iran and Nigeria, with the possibility — however unlikely — of U.S. intervention with Tehran, has traders back on edge
Only a month ago chances seemed good that 2006 would break the streak of five consecutive years of rising oil prices. But not anymore. Less than three weeks into the new year, the prospect that the average price per barrel for light, sweet U.S. crude in 2006 would fall below last year’s nearly $57 per barrel look considerably diminished.
…
FEAR AND LOATHING. The calculus is very simple. The world’s spare capacity is about 2 million barrels per day, nearly all of it in Saudi Arabia. The loss of Iran’s 2.5 million barrels in daily exports would breach that limit in one shot, sending prices who knows where.
(18 Jan 2005)
No mention of depletion as a concern. -AF
BHP swaps oil rights for shonky debt in Iraq oil for food scam
Sydney Morning Herald
FUNDS owned by Australian wheat farmers were used to provide nearly $US8 million ($10.6 million) to a BHP joint venture partner under an agreement branded a “sham”, the inquiry into bribes paid to Saddam Hussein’s regime has heard.
Counsel assisting the inquiry, John Agius, SC, yesterday revealed the secret agreement between Australia’s wheat exporter AWB and BHP partner Tigris Petroleum, but said the agreement was deliberately misleading.
Under the agreement, Tigris received $US7. 8 million from AWB, ostensibly for “recovering” wheat sales to Iraq threatened by Australia’s poor relations with Saddam’s regime in the lead-up to the war.
Mr Agius had earlier told the inquiry the money was, in reality, repayment with interest of $US5 million BHP sent to pay for wheat for Iraq in 1996. It later assigned repayment rights to Tigris, a company run by two former BHP executives.
The agreement, called a sham by both Mr Agius and the head of the inquiry, Terence Cole, saw Tigris pay $US500,000 of the money to AWB as a “success fee”. The inquiry has heard AWB artificially inflated the price of a million-tonne wheat deal to enable Tigris to recoup BHP’s $7.8 million.(19 January 2006)
