The Oil Drum: Canada

A Shore Thing? Why Offshore Wind Power Will Likely Struggle

Offshore wind power is the Holy Grail of renewable energy: It’s clean, abundant, and out of sight. Now that energy security is meshing with environmental concerns inside the White House, is offshore wind power ready to come of age?

Probably not as fast as wind-power boosters would hope. If the economics of onshore wind are tricky enough to give T. Boone Pickens pause, the challenges facing offshore wind are even greater.

Take the new proposal for the world’s biggest wind farm by another Texas oil man, peak oil prophet Matt Simmons. His Ocean Energy Institute proposes building a 5,000 megawatt deepwater wind farm in the Gulf of Maine, blessed with some of the world’s strongest sustained winds.

The problem is that, as envisioned, the Maine offshore wind farm would be very expensive—and that vision includes some very optimistic assumptions.

SMH: Clean energy needs investment: report

Creating a commercial-scale clean-energy industry in Australia will cost more than $5 billion annually over the next 10 years. That's the finding of a Climate Institute report that has costed what it will take to move to a low carbon economy. The report says $5.4 billion a year until 2020 will be needed to build a commercial-scale clean-energy industry. It will also create thousands of new jobs and enable Australia to cut emissions by 25 per cent below 1990 levels, the report says.

The Age: Any chance of delivery on transport promises, Premier?

FOR too long public transport has been the poor cousin to what the Government considered were more pressing policy areas, and commuters have suffered.

This has occurred at a time when train patronage has grown by more than 30 per cent in the past three years. Indeed, on one morning last October at the Caulfield station, most trains between 8am and 8.30am carried more than 900 passengers, with the 8.23 squeezing in 1035. Similarly at Clifton Hill, the 8.13am and 8.20am services averaged more than 1000 passengers. And this when the Government considers any more than 798 passengers in a six-carriage train "a load breach".

Oil majors eye $5-billion ships to cut costs

London — Oil and gas companies are racing to develop a new type of vessel they hope will revolutionize offshore gas production but even if the untested technology works, its deployment could be blocked by resource holders who fear it will undermine development goals.

The industry hopes to build a fleet of ships or barges that can sail or be towed to offshore gas discoveries, extract gas, freeze it to liquefied natural gas (LNG) and offload the LNG to tankers for shipping to lucrative Western and Asian markets.

OPEC freezes crude output quota

CAIRO (AFP) – OPEC decided on Saturday to leave its oil output quota unchanged and vowed to take any action necessary to balance the market next month, the cartel's president said after a consultative meet in Cairo.

"Ministers agreed to take any additional action on December 17th (in Oran, Algeria) to balance oil supply and demand and achieve market stability," said Chakib Khelil, who is also Algeria's energy minister.

The widely expected decision comes as oil prices are trading at lows not seen in nearly four years, sparking alarm among the cartel's members about plunging revenues.

SMH - Energy bills rising to help us keep our cool

THE average household electricity bill may be 15 per cent bigger next year, after the Australian Energy Regulator gave preliminary approval yesterday to another round of price rises. NSW electricity retailers had already received permission to raise prices by as much as 10 per cent next July. In a draft decision yesterday, the regulator said they could raise fees for the network component of the bill too.

The Age - Energy security vital: Alcoa head

AUSTRALIA must implement a long-term energy strategy or risk dire environmental and economic consequences, Alcoa chairman Alan Cransberg has warned. Mr Cransberg yesterday called for a national security strategy to guarantee the nation's energy requirements for the next 50 to 100 years.

"Energy security is absolutely critical in the issue of climate change and our capacity to meet the greenhouse challenge," he told yesterday's meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia. "For too long we have been focused on expanding and maximising energy exports, without proper protection for our own future generations."

SMH - A suburb for our times

Hard times, happy days. The former state MP John Hatton still talks fondly of his childhood growing up during the 1930s Depression in the new village of Hammondville.

David Strahan: Whatever happened to the hydrogen economy?

WHATEVER happened to the hydrogen economy? At the turn of the century it was the next big thing, promising a future of infinite clean energy and deliverance from climate change. Generate enough hydrogen, so the claim went, and we could use it to transform the entire energy infrastructure - it could supply power for cars, planes and boats, buildings and even portable gadgets, all without the need for dirty fossil fuels. Enthusiasts confidently predicted the breakthrough was just five to 10 years away. But today, despite ever-worsening news on global warming and with peak oil looming, the hydrogen economy seems as distant as ever.

Even in Iceland, whose grand ambitions for a renewable hydrogen economy once earned it the title Bahrain of the north, visible progress has been modest. After years of research, the country now boasts one hydrogen filling station, a handful of hydrogen cars, and one whale-watching boat with a fuel cell for auxiliary power. A trial of three hydrogen-powered buses ended in 2007, when two were scrapped and the third was consigned to a transport museum. More trials are planned, but that was before the meltdown of the country's banking system. In California, where governor Arnold Schwarzenegger promised a "hydrogen highway" with 200 hydrogen filling stations by 2010, there are just five open to the public. Ten hydrogen-fuelled buses are due to come into service in London by 2010, but a plan for 60 smaller hydrogen vehicles was recently scrapped.

Business Day NZ - Coal futures continue downward spiral

"The energy complex came off, natural gas prices came off, crude came off," said Larry LaCosta, senior vice president, coal derivatives for Vyapar Capital Market Partners.

"That coupled with a depressed global economy and people curtailing electricity demand has forced people to bring coal prices back to reality," LaCosta said.

Market veterans have said the price slide looks worse than it really is for producers, who have sold coal forward into 2009 at higher prices.

But analysts say new deals will be at lower price levels unless the economy turns up quickly.

The Australian - Banks, oil push European shares higher

"Everyone knows that we are in recession, it's a question of how much," said Jaime Ramos-Martin, investment director, European equities at Standard Life Investments.

OPEC to Consider Another Round of Cuts: Meeting Saturday, Cartel Will Again Try to Stem Oil-Price Fall

Having failed twice in two months to calm plunging oil markets, OPEC ministers are set to weigh another round of steep production cuts as the world's economic travails continue to drive crude prices to levels not seen in years.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has scrambled since September to stem the fall in oil prices, which is now putting pressure on OPEC budgets from Ecuador to Kuwait. Ineffective in blunting the price spike earlier this year, the cartel is proving similarly hapless in putting a floor under collapsing prices.

Russia’s Comeuppance

Any international economic crisis afflicts different countries in different ways, but an unfortunate few experience every painful dimension of it. In the current crisis, Russia is confronting virtually all the negatives at once--sharply declining export earnings from energy and metals, over-leveraged corporate balance sheets and a chorus of bailout appeals, a credit crunch and banking failures, a bursting real-estate bubble and mortgage defaults, accelerating capital flight, and unavoidable pressures for devaluation.

The Russian stock market is down 70 percent from late spring. The government has burned through more than 20 percent of its foreign-exchange reserves since August. The outflow of capital in October alone was $50 billion. Next year's budget is based on a projected average price for oil of $95 per barrel; now budget planners have to work with forecasts of $50 or lower. Since Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin has said that Russian government spending goes into deficit at $70 per barrel, pressures for spending cuts are starting to mount. Severe reductions have already been announced in housing and education programs.

In the wake of the recent interview with Jay Hanson posted at The Oil Drum, there was some discussion of Hubbert's role in the Technocracy movement.

I hadn't been aware that Hubbert was a Technocrat (or that the technocrats were an organised grouping, for that matter), so in this post I'll explore the Technocracy movement and Hubbert's role in it.

The knowledge essential to competent intellectual leadership in this situation is preeminently geological - a knowledge of the earth's mineral and energy resources. The importance of any science, socially, is its effect on what people think and what they do. It is time earth scientists again become a major force in how people think rather than how they live. - M King Hubbert