The perfect spill: solutions for averting the next Deepwater Horizon

“If we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction—if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs—we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.”

–President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010

Oilwatch Monthly June 2010

Conventional crude production – Latest figures from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that crude oil production including lease condensates decreased by 107,000 b/d from February to March 2010, resulting in total production of crude oil including lease condensates of 73.41 million b/d.

A tepid plea for unspecified change

Last night’s presidential speech on the Gulf oil spill had been pre-billed by the Washington Post as Barack Obama’s “Jimmy Carter moment.” But reading any of Carter’s speeches (a good one to start with is that of April 18, 1977) side by side with last night’s bromide is an invitation to nostalgia and bitter disappointment.

Getting at a tiny portion of the truth in Obama’s speech

In 2006 when I first met Julian Darley, author of _High Noon for Natural Gas_ and the founder of the Post-Carbon Institute, the world was excited by then-famous “Jack” oil field find in the Gulf of Mexico. Both of us were watching the way the world was interpreting the data – people were claiming that there might be 10, 12, 15 billion barrels of oil – five miles down underneath the ocean…Darley, framing the issue brilliantly, observed that “this isn’t salvation, this is digging around in the couch cushions for loose change.”

More accidents await with President Obama’s errant energy policies

President Obama triumphantly entered office with the popular promise of moving the United States to a cleaner energy basis, but his actions to date, along with those of the Congress, have promoted two types of dangerous energy developments: off-shore oil drilling and nuclear reactors. Nuclear expert Harvey Wasserman highlighted the dual dangers by noting, “As BP’s ghastly gusher assaults the Gulf of Mexico, a tornado has forced a shutdown of the Fermi 2 atomic reactor at the site of a 1966 melt-down that nearly irradiated the entire Great Lakes Region.”

The other half of the geyser

Crude oil in the gulf yields good TV images, but BP and its contractors have untapped a geyser not only of oil, but of methane–more than 20 time as effective as CO2 at holding heat. The percentage of the gush that’s methane is roughly estimated at 40-50%, subject to verification.

ODAC Newsletter – June 11

It is now 8 weeks since the Deepwater Horizon Explosion, and while BP claims to be capturing around 15,000 barrels of oil a day, there are still widely varying estimates of the amount of oil still escaping into the ocean. As public and political anger against the company increase, the knock on effects of the disaster for the company and the industry are growing.