Coal

How long will the Chinese put up with coal?

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Exxon Mobil today issued an impressive second-quarter earnings report, with much of the good news again involving a surge in liquid natural gas production from Qatar. It’s further proof that Exxon — along with the rest of Big Oil — has made a big bet that natural gas will be a growth engine for the company in the absence of opportunities in oil. Fast-growing Asia is the big market, with China leading the way.

UK Gov’t Department of Energy and Climate Change Pathways 2050 report – July 30

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-2050 Pathways Analysis
-UK energy scenarios: working with a flawed model
-DECC publishes plans for achieving 2050 targets
-DECC lays out six possible futures for low-carbon energy

What else?

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For more than 100 years the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky have been dependent on the coal industry, which has dominated them politically and, submitting only to the limits of technology, has come near to ruining them. The legacy of the coal economy in the Kentucky mountains will be immense and lasting damage to the land and to the people. Much of the damage to the land and the streams, and to water quality downstream, will be irreparable within historical time. The lastingness of the damage to the people will, to a considerable extent, be determined by the people.

A cooperative approach to renewing east Kentucky

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Models of transition in eastern Kentucky must simultaneously address a host of interrelated regional challenges in order to bring sustainable success. The region’s economy is under-developed, with extremely high poverty and unemployment rates; housing stock is inadequate and energy-inefficient; and rural electric cooperatives are more than 90 percent dependent on coal, increasing the vulnerability of their customers in the face of rising prices.

Projection of world fossil fuel production with supply and demand interactions (paper excerpt)

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Fossil fuels are currently an essential component in the global economy and the growth of the human population. The fossil fuel production projections from this study suggest that many of the IPCC fossil fuel projections appear overly optimistic. Based on the assumed URR values, it is predicted that global fossil fuel production will peak before 2030. For this reason, it is imperative that appropriate action be taken as early as possible to mitigate the effects of fossil fuel decline, to avoid energy shortages in the near future.

Naresh Giangrande, Co-Founder of the World’s First Transition Town

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Naresh Giangrande is the co-founder of the world’s first Transition Town, in Totnes, UK. The goal of Transition Towns is to transition from oil dependence to community resilience. He was visiting in Vermont last week, and we’ll here what he had to say about how the project is going back in England, plus what he’s learned from other Transition Towns around the world.

Planning for Europe’s energy future: My submission to the Commission’s 2010 Consultation on Energy

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Europe is finally starting to think about its longer-term energy issues, and how they affect transportation plans. To try to deal with these issues, a new European Energy Consultation was set up, specifically to look into these issues. The European Energy Consultation asked for interested individuals to provide their input.

Optimism, harsh realism, and blind spots—10 years later

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Ten years ago, energy analyst Steve Andrews challenged widely respected energy guru Amory Lovins via email for what Andrews thought was an overly optimistic vision—about coal consumption trends, evolution in the auto industry, future world oil production, etc.—articulated in the Rocky Mountain Institute‘s Spring 2000 newsletter. …Ten years later, read it for the blind spots everyone had.