Energy Policy

Drill baby drill – a second reality check

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Last week President Obama announced that he would open [some] federal waters to oil and gas exploration and development… A stated objective of this move is to reduce United States dependence on foreign oil. Implied within the objective is that opening these offshore areas to oil drilling will lead to a long-term increase in the U.S. oil production rate. The possibility of that happening is zero. The best that can be hoped for is a slight decrease in the annual decline rate of U.S. oil production.

Transition Training and Consulting: a day with Norfolk County Council

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It was with some fear and trepidation that Alexis Rowell, a Camden Borough councillor and the author of the upcoming Transition Guide to Local Authorities (LA), and I arrived in a deeply conservative part of the country, Norfolk, to do a day with them on peak oil, climate change and the Transition town model and practice.

ODAC Newsletter – Apr 2

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World Energy ministers met this week in Cancun for the latest session of the International Energy Forum. The meeting resulted in a declaration committing its 66 signatories to an “enhanced global producer-consumer energy dialogue”. As if on cue, the oil price reached its highest point in 2010 on Wednesday at over $83/barrel…

China’s global shopping spree

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Think of it as a tale of two countries. When it comes to procuring the resources that make industrial societies run, China is now the shopaholic of planet Earth, while the United States is staying at home. Hard-hit by the global recession, the United States has experienced a marked decline in the consumption of oil and other key industrial materials. Not so China.

 

‘Britain’s Appalachia’ engineers a brighter post-coal future

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The sparkling, sanitized waterfront of Cardiff, Wales, reveals barely a hint of the country’s grimy industrial past. Where one of the busiest ports anywhere once shipped Welsh coal out into the world, a complex of upscale shops, pubs, and restaurants now dominates the area. Out are the sailors, brothels, and seedy watering holes. In are tourist-friendly pubs, fusion restaurants with names like ffresh, and a circus carousel. The locally favored Brains brewery (“People who know beer have Brains”) has survived nearby.

Shale Gas Shenanigans

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In the years leading up to the crash of the Housing Bubble in 2006 and the subsequent financial meltdown in 2008, there was no shortage of people telling us America’s continued prosperity was not in jeopardy. All that talk was nonsense, of course. In 2010, the situation is eerily similar in the natural gas business. We are told that we have 100 years of supply, implying that we will still be producing cheap shale gas long after the oceans are devoid of fish. As in the pre-Housing Bubble days, a few skeptics are crying foul. There are underground rumblings that things are not on the up & up with shale gas.

Gazprom trifecta of woes a potential boon to Europe, the Caspian Sea

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Gazprom, the largest natural gas company in the world, is experiencing a moment of truth. And so, by extension, is Russia, which has relied on the behemoth for a large part of its tax revenue, and as a spearpoint of its foreign policy. The main ramifications are a shakeup in security presumptions in Europe and on the Caspian Sea, both of which until recently have seemed to be under Gazprom’s thumb.