U.S. – June 10

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

An Alaskan village asks a scary question:
What happens when oil is too expensive to use?
Russel Gold, Wall Street Journal
“We have a very fragile economy in most of these villages already and then you add the jolt of high fuel-oil prices. It’s my guess that many of these communities will not find themselves viable if fuel prices stay here,” says Mike Black, director of community advocacy at Alaska’s Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development. The villages, he says, “are begging, borrowing and stealing to get enough fuel.”

The extreme costs of fuel in rural Alaska have led to numerous energy experiments. But various efforts to reduce rural Alaska’s dependence on petroleum-based energy have struggled. Petroleum is easy to store, handle and transport, says Brent Sheets, head of the federal government’s Arctic Energy Office in Fairbanks. “It is hard to beat diesel fuel,” he says.

A proposal to build a small nuclear power plant for one small town was shelved when a study concluded that the federal security requirements made the project uneconomic. Solar isn’t a good fit for Alaska, because fuel demand goes up in the winter when the state gets little sunlight. The Energy Department office even looked at turbines designed to harness river energy, dodging logs and car-sized icebergs, but plans never made it past the theoretical stage.

One alternative-energy success stories is in Kotzebue, the hub community to the west of Shungnak on the Chukchi Sea. On the tundra outside of Kotzebue, where the only sign of life is paw prints from an Arctic fox, are 17 windmills capable of generating one megawatt of electricity. The windmills “are a hedge against rising fuel costs,” says Brad Reeve, a Minnesotan who came to the town 30 years ago to run the public-radio station and now heads up the electric cooperative.

As the cost of bringing in diesel has grown, electricity from the windmills has looked better and better. But the windmills have a high upfront cost — they sit on special pilings with chemicals that ensure the tundra remains frozen to hold the windmills steady. And on a recent morning, as a computer in the coop’s offices showed 2.8 megawatts of demand, the wind wasn’t blowing. All of the electricity came from distillate-burning generators, a reminder that Kotzebue needs to keep a steady supply of oil.

In Shungnak, Mr. Woods, the tribal-government official, says he expects the oil will keep on flowing. Eskimos are accustomed to adapting to extreme conditions, he says. But there is little effort being made to teach children how to hunt the old way. “Their lifestyle now is so convenient,” he says.
(9 June 2007)
At the moment, this article is viewable at the WSJ website. This excerpt is from Westexas at The Oil Drum.

America got spoiled that energy ought to be free.

Repowering Montana: A Blueprint for Homegrown Energy Self-Reliance
Alternative Energy Resources Organization (AERO)
How all of Montana’s power needs can be met using conservation and clean, renewable energy while creating jobs, saving money, and revitalizing rural and urban communities.

[The book-length document is available online as a series of PDFs. The first part has the Table of Contents, Authors, and an Executive Summary, which begins as follows:]

Montana can meet all its energy needs in the future through effective conservation measures and clean renewable energy. The more rapidly Montanans move toward that future, the better off we will be.

Otherwise, our prospects appear bleak: ongoing degradation of our air, water, land, health and economic well being; greenhouse gases continuing to pour into our atmosphere; centralized production and distribution systems becoming more and more vulnerable to natural or human-caused disasters; and Montanans remaining at the mercy of escalating energy prices governed by larger forces beyond our borders and beyond our control.

The basis of the Blueprint is making smart, aggressive energy efficiency, coupled with conservation, our highest priority. This will reduce demand for both fuels and electricity without diminishing our quality of life. And this can and must happen in all sectors of our economy: residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural, and transportation. Sun, wind, flowing water, growing plants, and Earth’s own internal heat-combined with the ingenuity of our citizens-can then provide more and more of the energy this state requires, and eventually all of it.

Steadily phasing into diverse sources of renewable energy means that we can steadily phase out of extracting and burning fossil fuels. This includes proposals to gasify and liquefy coal and to sequester carbon, technologies which at best are very expensive and many of which are unproven.

In this Blueprint AERO not only details strategies for investing in energy efficiency, in sustainable production of biofuels (both biodiesel and ethanol), and in dispersed wind, small hydro, and solar power systems, but also advocates localizing ownership and control of these energy systems as much as possible. This will keep dollars circulating in our communities (instead of exporting them elsewhere) and will create useful and fulfilling work for our citizens, in both the countryside and in cities.
(X June 2007)
About Us:

AERO is a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to solutions that promote resource conservation and local economic vitality. AERO nurtures individual and community self reliance through programs that support sustainable agriculture, renewable energy and environmental quality. AERO was founded during the energy crisis of the 1970s to promote local alternatives to non-renewable energy sources.

Time to shift gears, step on gas myths
Lisa Margonelli, Albany NY Times Union
Whew, gas prices are high. Higher than they’ve ever been. During the week of May 21, the Lundberg Survey, a biweekly gas price tracking service, put the average cost of a gallon of unleaded at $3.18. Adjusted for inflation, that topped the 1981 price spike that had held the record for 26 years. Prices have since slipped a bit, but many predict they’ll stay up near the stratosphere all summer. Wondering why? The answers may not be what you think. Here are five common myths about why we’re paying so much at the pump.

Those evil oil companies are gouging us.

Whenever gas prices soar, Republicans and Democrats join hands to virtuously denounce “gas gouging” by greedy oil companies. Last month, the House passed legislation against this supposed scourge of the pump. Too bad it’s so hard to find evidence that gouging is jacking up prices.

Today’s high prices are the result of a collision among consumers’ increasing demand for gas, a shortage of oil-refining capacity and 50 states with different regulations that make it hard to trade gas across state lines. …

Here’s the solution to our pricing problems: ethanol.

Corn ethanol will neither replace gasoline nor lower its price. It may even raise gas prices. …

Blame China, whose growing demand for oil is hurting U.S. consumers.

…You’ve probably noticed that China is making scads of plastic. As the world’s second-largest plastic producer, it is furiously turning oil and petrochemicals into everything from lobster souvenirs to sneaker soles. By embedding oil in products, China is, in effect, importing oil on behalf of U.S. consumers — as much as 1 million barrels per day.

While China’s demand for energy is driving up oil prices worldwide, its cheap goods are having the opposite effect on the U.S. cost of living. …

We need more refineries and more oil wells.

Since 1970, the United States has met 75 percent of its new energy needs through greater energy efficiency rather than new energy supplies, economist Skip Laitner says. … A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute says that Americans could reduce the amount of energy we use between now and 2020 relatively easily.

When gas prices get high enough, people will drive less. (And the corollary: What this country needs is a big, fat gas tax.)

According to some conservatives, when gas prices are high enough, people will drive less and buy more efficient cars. According to some liberals, nothing but high gas prices or taxes will pry the rich from their fancy sport-utility vehicles and the rest of us from our wasteful routines.

But when conservatives and liberals climb into their cars, they ignore these supposed market forces. Gas prices have doubled in the past five years, and American drivers have hardly blinked.

…We can’t afford to continue blathering about gouging, ethanol and China. It’s time policymakers abandoned the theater and started the hard work of remodeling the U.S. economy to get more bang out of that $3.18 gallon.

Lisa Margonelli is a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “Oil On the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline.”
(8 June 2007)