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China’s Green Energy Gap
Keith Bradsher, New York Times
BOXING, China – By next autumn, a muddy construction site here in a rural part of eastern China will give way to a small power plant that burns corn stalks and cotton stalks to generate electricity for nearby villages and steam for a neighboring industrial complex.
The plant would be ready sooner, but only four companies in China make the specialized precision boilers that the biomass plant requires. And all those companies are plagued by backed-up orders and delivery delays. Similar problems bedevil the wind turbine industry in China.
The same big utility company building the green plant in Boxing, CLP, has just opened a coal-fired plant in southernmost China. On schedule and built for half what it would cost in the West, that plant will generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity – compared with 6 megawatts from the Boxing biomass plant. CLP is so impressed that it is bidding to build coal-fired plants in India with Chinese technology.
These are the realities faced by companies seeking to make themselves more environmentally friendly in China, where coal is king. Coal-fired plants are quick and cheap to build and easy to run. While the Chinese government has set goals for increasing the use of a long list of alternative energies – including wind, biomass, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear – they all face obstacles, from bureaucracy to bottlenecks in manufacturing. CLP’s differing energy choices are a case study in how one company grapples with the need to provide electricity to hundreds of millions of impoverished Asians even as it is under a self-imposed goal of trying to limit emissions of global warming gases.
(24 October 2007)
The U.S. needs a decisive federal strategy on energy, with greater research, ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva says
Original: The Trouble with Crude Oil
Moira Herbst, Business Week
Fretting about climate change, calling for conservation, and making fuel from animal fats-these days James Mulva might not sound like the chief executive of the third-largest U.S. oil company, ConocoPhillips (COP). With 34 years in the oil business, Mulva concedes that times for his industry have changed. As crude oil prices surge-hitting yet another record on Oct. 26-and worries about global warming and China’s oil thirst abound, Mulva and his peers at other energy giants are now pressing for a new federal energy policy.
“We don’t have a national energy policy,” says Mulva, who met with BusinessWeek editors and reporters on Oct. 25. While the U.S. lacks a consistent, forward-looking plan, competitors are amassing power in the marketplace, he says. “The Chinese have a very coordinated strategy that allows them to support economic growth and their standard of living.”
To ensure U.S. oil companies can compete, Mulva says, Washington must step forward with a robust new policy (BusinessWeek.com, 6/28/07) that guides energy production and consumption. He says it should consist of four main parts: developing new energy sources, conservation, increased government investment in energy technology, and federal regulation of carbon emissions.
(26 October 2007)
Rescuers comb Gulf for survivors after Mexican oil rig collision kills at least 19
E. Eduardo Castillo, Associated Press
MEXICO CITY – Rescuers were searching stormy Gulf of Mexico seas Thursday for four oil workers still missing after a drilling rig collided with an offshore platform. Two more survivors of Tuesday’s collision have been found, as well as another body, bringing the death toll in the mishap to 19, Mexico’s state oil company said. Most of the victims drowned after they had abandoned the rig and their life rafts were swamped by high seas.
…Pemex said a work crew was at the scene on Thursday evaluating ways to stop the leak at the platform, which the company said was mainly gas and some crude oil, without giving exact estimates.
Survivor Jesus Manuel Garcia was rescued after drifting at sea for 16 hours.
“All night long I was alone at sea, sad, and thinking of my family,” Garcia told the Televisa television network. “I saw a lot of my colleagues floating around. … Thank God I get a second chance.”
Another survivor, Eder Ortega Flores, 25, told Televisa that workers abandoned the rig and braved the raging seas only after fumes from leaking gas reached unbearable levels and air from emergency breathing devices ran out.
Flores said the force of the waves broke apart his covered life raft and “all my co-workers went into the sea.”
He was able to swim to shore early Wednesday after treading water through the night.
(25 October 2007)
Contributor corrientempe writes:
A sad enough tragedy in human terms; this accident is due to stormy seas, but the age and condition of the rig is not mentioned. I wonder how long this rig will be out of commission and how much shut-in oil that will represent?
