Yet another so-called "study" about the impact of corn-based ethanol on the nation's food supply has been issued. Like the others, its authors choose facts that support their opinion, and disregard everything else. Once again we're told ethanol has little impact on the nation's dependence on foreign oil and is driving up food prices. "Impact," we guess, is a relative term. Ethanol is replacing 200 million barrels of imported oil per year. With the price of oil above $80/barrel, ethanol's impact on oil imports alone is more than $16 billion dollars. [More]

Labels: energy, ethanol

Since 2001, we and just about every other business publication have written stories on the coming nuclear renaissance. It’s a development that was seen as almost inevitable. The country needs more electricity. And with coal plants being blocked or cancelled because of concerns over global warming, nukes were looking more and more attractive. Sure, there are still lingering worries over waste disposal and nuclear proliferation, but the new generation of plants are safer and, the industry expected, cheaper to build. The question was, who would take the first leap? Now we have an answer. It’s a Princeton, NJ-based utility named NRG. On Sept. 24, the company and South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two new nuclear units at the site of two existing nukes in Texas. "We think the nuclear renaissance is finally upon us," says NRG CEO David Crane. [More]

NRG has chosen Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) technology for the new units to be built at the STP site. The 12,220-acre site and 7,000-acre cooling reservoir were originally designed for four units. The two new units will be built adjacent to the currently operating STP units 1 and 2. ABWR technology is certified by the NRC and has an impressive construction and operational track record. This includes setting world records for construction time and bringing the units in on budget. Four ABWR units have been successfully commissioned in Japan, with another three units under construction in Taiwan and Japan. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, Inc. has more than a decade of experience in ABWR operations and has provided their expertise to supporting STP’s planned two-unit expansion. [More]

Labels: energy, environment

Labels: energy

• The ever-mischievous French. We kinda expect it from farmers like the Danes, but...
  

France plans to present a "radical reform" of European agricultural subsidies when it takes over the presidency of the European Union next year, President Nicolas Sarkozy said Tuesday.

Sarkozy said a major overhaul of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was "indispensable to ensure that this policy once again enjoys legitimacy."

"The French presidency of the European Union will prepare a new political framework for our agriculture in Europe, based on fundamental principles," he said in a speech on agriculture delivered in the western city of Rennes.

France, Europe's agricultural powerhouse and the EU's top recipient of farm subsidies, will take over the rotating presidency of the 27-nation EU in July next year for a period of six months.

Sarkozy's call for reform of EU farm subsidies marked a major shift from his predecessor Jacques Chirac, who steadfastly opposed changes that would inevitably penalize French farmers. [ More]

• Eroding popular support for farmers in general - even surprisingly, the much beloved agrarian sector.

Michael Pollan's bestseller, The Omnivore's Dilemma, has gotten people all riled up about farmers again. The last time this happened was when the first Farm Aid concerts reminded America that we have strong feelings about the family farm and its economic viability. The new round of farmer feelings is more directly related to issues of trade and the impact of globalization. As Pollan writes:

"I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing your community, or country, can feed itself; the beauty of an agricultural landscape; the outlook and kinds of local knowledge the presence of farmers brings to a community; the satisfactions of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the locally inflected flavor of a raw-milk cheese or honey. All those things—all those pastoral values—free trade proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth."

My general feeling about farmers is that they can go f*** themselves. Perhaps this is strong. But farmers also come on strong in their own sort of farmer way. They take a homespun approach but they often wrap themselves up in a hell of a lot of self-righteousness. It all has to do with the land, I suppose, the importance and simplicity of the land. Americans love the simple even if we've been destroying it for generations. A few pithy sayings and we’re eating out of their hands. The farmers. [More]

• Brazilian lawyers - these guys have tasted victory in the cotton case and see a chance for lots more billable hours.

Brazil will ask the World Trade Organization for a formal investigation of U.S. farm subsidy programs, which it says includes payments for ethanol production, a senior Brazilian official said Wednesday.

The South American country, which has already won a series of WTO rulings over U.S. cotton subsidies, will make its request for an investigative panel soon, said Roberto Azevedo, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry's trade chief.

The dispute could become a major case for the global commerce body, which has largely steered clear of energy issues in its 12-year history. Brazil is a major ethanol producer.

It also could become a hot topic for U.S. presidential candidates as they gear up for primary contests, including voting in Iowa, the state that produces the most ethanol.

"Brazil will have to ask for a panel," Azevedo told The Associated Press.

The two countries held consultations last month after Brazil accused the United States of exceeding the $19.1 billion that it is permitted under WTO rules to spend on the most controversial forms of farm subsidies in six of the past eight years. Brazil also accuses the U.S. of giving illegal export credit guarantees, largely echoing an earlier complaint by Canada.

While most of the measures it questioned Washington about concerned farm produce, Brazil included in its complaint what it called "energy subsidies," which included tax exemptions on diesel fuel and gasoline.

"Ethanol results from agricultural subsidies," Azevedo said. "You don't produce ethanol from rocks or underground. It's derived from agricultural commodities." [More]

All these separate influences could be dissected on their own merits, but it appears to me to be the actions the Adam Smith's fabled invisible hand. Our farm policy impacts the whole world, and the whole world is reacting. Even our reliable domestic political "lovability" may soon be more constrained to smaller, quainter operations. Oddly enough, I think one reason global pushback is picking up steam is because their economies are more and more like ours - market responsive.

Besides, it's becoming obvious farm policy isn't where we need to be. We're now clients of energy policy.

The U.S.' ethanol production capacity will probably total 20.43 billion gallons as of August 2009, up sharply from 6.707 billion gallons as of August this year, due to high profit forecasts and government support, a U.S. commodity risk management consultancy firm said Wednesday.

That means corn consumption for ethanol will total 7.46 billion bushels in the 2009-10 crop year, more than double the 3.62 billion bushels in 2007-08, Bill Tierney, executive vice president of research and marketing for John Stewart & Associates, said during the International Corn Industry Conference in Dalian. [More]

In other words we could win a skirmish on the farm program and be waylaid by the energy bill.

Labels: culture, energy, farm bill, farm program, international

Power firm E.ON said the development five miles (8km) off the Humber estuary would be capable of providing electricity to almost 200,000 homes. [More]

Wind power plants, or wind farms as they are sometimes called, are clusters of wind machines used to produce electricity. A wind farm usually has dozens of wind machines scattered over a large area. The world's largest wind farm, the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Texas, has 421 wind turbines that generate enough electricity to power 230,000 homes per year. [More]

In 2005, wind machines in the United States generated a total of 17.8 billion kWh per year of electricity, enough to serve more than 1.6 million households. This is enough electricity to power a city the size of Chicago, but it is only a small fraction of the nation's total electricity production, about 0.4 percent. The amount of electricity generated from wind has been growing fast in recent years, tripling since 1998.

Reasonable people can disagree on the merits of putting turbines on Nantucket Sound, as proposed by a private company. Though costs have come down to 4.5 cents per kilowatt hour from 6.1 per KWH in 1999, the technology is still not balancing out as cost-effective for some areas. Last week, Long Island scratched its plans to build a wind energy center in the Atlantic when costs were running up toward $800 million. Projects in windy Texas have also been scrapped over cost considerations.

But advocates often tout renewable energy not for its economics, but because it's virtuous. Many of those who are willing to impose the costs of various environmental schemes on other Americans based on "ideals" suddenly have started looking more closely at the tradeoffs when something they hold dear would have to be sacrificed, like a nice view. Wind energy is never going to be anything but a bit player in meeting the world's energy needs. The Nantucket tempest is useful mainly as a real-world test of whether some of the world's most privileged liberals wear their ideals all the time, or only when it suits them. [More]

Labels: energy, fun

Labels: energy, fun, media

This fits with my intuition: We face such a huge looming problem with fossil fuels exhaustion that we should be thinking about moving away from fossil fuels due to rising costs and lowered production rather than because we might melt the polar ice caps. We need to embrace solar, nuclear, and wind because we just do not have as much fossil fuels left as the climate doomsters think we do.

If the Peak Oil, Peak Natural Gas, and Peak Coal folks are correct then why do the IPCC types spend so much time talking about climate catastrophe? My guess: Human-caused climate disaster makes for a far more dramatic moral story of human sin. Talk of using up all the coal and oil doesn't satisfy the need to see human action in such sinful terms. If we run out of oil then we suffer from the exhaustion of the oil but nature doesn't suffer as much as we do. We sin, but against ourselves. By contrast, if we heat up the planet the argument can be made for humans as massive sinners against nature. [More]

Labels: energy, global warming

At a Brazilian ethanol conference June 4-5, Brazilian government-funded researchers said they have perfected a method of producing cellulosic ethanol that drastically reduces the cost of processing. At this point, the assertion -- and many other similarly optimistic claims made at the conference -- is unconfirmed. But should it prove true, the world could well be peeking over the horizon at a massive geopolitical, not to mention economic, shift. [More]

More tricky is the problem of the ethanol production itself. Cellulosic biomass is bulky and materially complex, unfit for the same methods of ethanol extraction used with corn. In order to even get the stuff into manageable form, processors must soak it in a pre-treatment bath, followed by an acidic or enzymatic digestion that splits it into simple sugars. [More]

Labels: biofuel, energy, ethanol, technology

When President Vladimir Putin delivered a stinging critique of US foreign policy at a security conference in Munich in February, stunned politicians in the audience described it as the most anti-Western speech made by a Russian leader since the Cold War.

But Mr Putin was only just getting started.

In the past five months his fury over American plans to erect a missile defence shield in eastern Europe has become increasingly evident. [More]

Other dangers remain: corruption, the inefficiency of the state apparatus, high levels of social inequity. But generally Russia is in better shape today than seven years ago, when Putin assumed power. Russia now needs more than anything to strengthen law and order and to restore the institutional capacity of the state. Democracy is also needed, but only later, when the rule of law has been established. There is, of course, a danger that the leadership will use political centralization to line everyone up along the ‘vertical of power’ and eliminate opposition in order to live in serene comfort at the citizens’ expense—and perhaps also to embark on the occasional escapade. This has happened in Russia before. But one must choose the lesser of two evils. Strengthening law and order is only possible under a centralized system. Without centralization, there is no chance at all of it happening; unbounded chaos and lawlessness would rule. This seems to be the choice facing Russia today. [More]

But there's one place -- Russia -- where reserve estimates just seem to go up and up. In its annual statistical survey of world energy, BP PLC (BP ) has recently revised its estimates of Russia's total proven oil reserves to 69.1 billion barrels, 6% of the world's total, up from 45 billion bbl. in 2001. But according to auditors with a worm's-eye view of what's actually going on in the depths of Siberia, such estimates may just scratch the surface of Russia's real potential. According to a recent study by Dallas-based energy reserve auditors DeGolyer & MacNaughton, whose clients include leading Russian energy companies such as Gazprom and Yukos, Russia's true recoverable reserves are between 150 billion bbl. and 200 billion bbl. That's up from industry estimates of 100 billion bbl. a few years ago.

Why such a big gap in the estimates? Because it's one thing to be sitting on oil reserves, another to be able to exploit them commercially. In Russia's main oil-producing region in western Siberia, proven reserves represent just 18% to 24% of all oil in the ground, in contrast to about 45% in Western oil-producing regions such as Alaska and the North Sea. But as Russian oil companies adopt technologies, such as horizontal wells and computerized reservoir management systems, the estimated recovery rates are being revised. Thanks to new techniques, which make it possible to obtain oil even from apparently depleted fields, Russian oil companies already have managed to boost their output by 50% since 1998. "The biggest thing is the [new] technology being deployed in western Siberia. The results are beginning to show," says Martin Wiewiorowski, senior vice-president of DeGolyer & MacNaughton in Moscow. [More]

Labels: economics, energy, international, trade

Considering the hysteria that marks U.S. currency relationships with China and Japan, which stand accused of maintaining cheap currencies to boost exports, there should be widespread applause here for Canada. But as the Canadian dollar on Tuesday reached nearly a 30-year high against the U.S. dollar, trading at $1.07 Canadian per U.S. dollar, the Cassandras of international trade can't seem to find any words for our neighbors to the north. As far as I know, none of the financial pundits is saluting Canada's boon to U.S. exporters or, for that matter, complaining that the biggest U.S. trading partner is holding up U.S. consumers, who must pay more for Canadian goods. [More]

Labels: dollar, energy, trade

California's nearly 2 million cows, most living on industrial-scale dairies, create a huge and costly waste problem. According to the PUC order approving the BioEnergy deal, a single thousand-pound dairy cow each day produces 10 pounds of "volatile solids" - that's bureaucratese for poop - which can be transformed into 72 cubic feet of biogas. Dairy owners can dispose of that burden, clean up the environment and turn crap into cash by cutting deals with companies like BioEnergy. PG&E benefits as the biogas produced counts toward a state mandate that it obtain 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources b y 2010. Such projects typically produce some sort of green "credits" that can be used toward meeting emissions limits or can be sold on carbon trading markets. PG&E will retain some of those so-called environmental attributes produced by the cow power project though the PUC said it remains to be decided just how they might be applied when California's cap on greenhouse gas limits comes into force. [More]

Labels: dairy, energy, livestock

But for ethanol made from trees, grasses and other types of biomass which contain a lot of cellulose, the energy balance can be as high as 16, at least in theory. In practice the problem is that producing such “cellulosic” ethanol is much more difficult and expensive than producing it from other crops. But the science, technology and economics of treethanol are changing fast. Researchers are racing to develop ways to chip, ferment, distil and refine wood quickly and cheaply. [More]

The Southern California Biorefinery Project will turn green waste and wood residues at landfills into about 19 million gallons of fuel grade ethanol per year. Additional products that will also be sold include lignin, gypsum, and yeast. BlueFires's current production estimates for the project will be significantly lower that DOE's cellulosic ethanol goal of $1.07/gal in production costs by 2012, and DOE's current estimate of approximately $2.26/gal. [More]

Labels: energy, ethanol

"This bill creates a set of winners and losers," said Ray Clifton, executive director of the Colorado Rural Electric Association, representing the state's 22 rural electric co-ops. He said under the legislation, payments to renewable owners would be more expensive than the wholesale electricity that co-ops buy for the bulk of their power.

Stan Lewandowski, general manager of Intermountain Rural Electric Association, said the legislation would reward owners of solar systems that generate power during daytime nonpeak-demand periods, leaving co-ops responsible for acquiring more expensive power during morning and evening peak periods. [more

Labels: energy

Labels: energy, environment, population, science

Using corncob waste as a starting material, researchers at University of Missouri-Columbia (MU) and Midwest Research Institute (MRI) in Kansas City have created carbon briquettes with complex nanopores capable of storing natural gas at an unprecedented density of 180 times their own volume and at one seventh the pressure of conventional natural gas tanks. The technology has been incorporated into a test bed installed on a pickup truck used regularly by the Kansas City Office of Environmental Quality.

"We are very excited about this breakthrough because it may lead to a flat and compact tank that would fit under the floor of a passenger car, similar to current gasoline tanks," said principal project leader Peter Pfeifer of MU. "Such a technology would make natural gas a widely attractive alternative fuel for everyone." [More]

Labels: energy

Wind power capacity in the United States grew 27 percent last year and is projected to increase another 26 percent in 2007, according to a report released today by the trade group the American Wind Energy Association. The U.S. now has enough installed wind power capacity - 11,603 megawatts - to power between 3 million and 3.5 million homes, which reduces annual greenhouse gas emissions by 23 million tons of carbon dioxide. The number of homes relying on electricity produced by wind energy will rise to nearly 4.5 million by year's end if the AWEA's forecast is accurate. [More]

• Wind farm stories always include a "X million homes served" figure to impress how much energy they generate. These numbers are the equivalent of a "every US farmer feeding X people" - namely a useless average without any context. For a better idea of how much windpower contributes see this graph. Also keep in mind that there are about 130 million homes in the US and that residential energy demand is about half of total electricity consumption.
• Wind farms require backup "spinning reserve" to take up load when the wind fails. This continues to make wind power relatively expensive compared to other sources, especially coal. Unless a carbon tax priced in the environmental externalities of fossil fuels. (Gosh - where did I just see that?)
  
• Wind turbines are expensive and with demand growing, the prices have no reason to ease.
• You gotta have some way to hook all these generators to the electricity grid. And our grid is having trouble keeping up.

Labels: economics, energy

Labels: energy, pollution

Nobody will accuse ExxonMobil (XOM) of greenwashing. The world's largest oil company released its energy forecast for the year 2030 yesterday and, in contrast to the sunflowers-and-bears imagery promoted by competitors BP (BP) and Chevron (CVX), ExxonMobil predicted a fossil-fuel future marked by skyrocketing oil and gas consumption and soaring greenhouse gases emissions. Dependence on Middle East oil will grow. Not that there's anything wrong with that: "The progress of people around the world is driving demand for more energy," the report states. "We are a world on the move and liquid fuels are essential to meet those demands....By 2030, energy demand will increase by about 60 percent, compared to 2000. The global energy mix will look very similar 25 years from now. Oil, gas and coal will be predominant." [More]

Labels: energy, future

The Energy Policy Act signed by President Bush last year seeks to speed construction of transmission lines by preventing state and local officials from blocking lines, or even influencing where they are built.

A federal proposal to invoke these restrictions for a proposed high-voltage line through the Allegheny Mountains in Virginia has generated hundreds of complaints. Business owners, local officials and refugees from big cities said it would be irresponsible to mar their mountain vistas and small towns with a row of 17-story steel skeletons supporting the lines.

Protests are also expected against proposed transmission lines from two nuclear plants in Arizona to Southern California and against a 1,000-mile line that Arizona Public Service plans so it would be able to cool Phoenix with electricity from wind farms and coal-fired plants in Wyoming. [More - great article]

Labels: energy, regulation

It was a "damn the Canadian Wheat Board" (CWB) vote yesterday as members elected directors. The results resolved little on the dispute with the federal government over the board's monopoly. Full speed ahead.

The pro-monopoly forces remain clinging to power, so we can only expect the foot-dragging and defiance to continue. [More]

What is interesting about this political battle is the effort by the government to dismantle a popular farmer monopoly. Although some larger farms want to have selling options, the vast majority of small farms apparently like the "single desk" powers of the CWB.

Labels: economics, energy, ethanol, production, trade

So where will the extra energy come from? Relying on figures from the World Energy Assessment by the United Nations Development Program, Nocera looks at the maximum amounts of power that various non-fossil fuel sources might supply. Biomass could supply 7-10 TW of energy, but that is the equivalent of harvesting all current crops solely for energy. Nuclear could produce 8 TW which implies building 8000 new reactors over the 45 years at a rate of one new plant every two days. Wind would generate 2.1 TW if every site on the globe with class 3 winds or greater were occupied with windmills. Winds at a class 3 site blow at 11.5 miles per hour at 33 feet above the ground. And hydro-power could produce 0.7-2 TW if dams were placed on every untapped river on the earth. Nocera concludes, "The message is clear. The additional energy we need in 2050 over the current 13.5 TW base, is simply not attainable from long discussed sources—the global appetite for energy is simply too great." [More]

Labels: energy

Top Suppliers of U.S. Crude Oil 2004
(Thousand barrels/day)

Rank	Country of Origin	Thousand Barrels/day
1	Canada	1,616
2	Mexico	1,598
3	Saudi Arabia	1,495
4	Venezuela	1,297
5	Nigeria	1,078
6	Iraq	655
7	Angola	306
8	Kuwait	241
9	United Kingdom	238
10	Ecuador	232
11	Algeria	215
12	Russia	158
13	Norway	143
14	Colombia	142
15	Gabon	142
16	Argentina	59
17	Brazil	51
18	Trinidad and Tobago	49
19	Indonesia	34
20	Australia	21
21	Libya	18
22	Cameroon	18
23	Guatemala	18
24	Malaysia	18
25	Brunei	15
26	China, People’s Republic of	14
27	Congo (Kinshasa) *	14
28	Oman	10
29	Congo (Brazzaville)	8
30	United Arab Emirates	5
31	Ivory Coast	5
32	Qatar	4
33	Yemen	4
34	Denmark	2
35	Peru	1
36	Syria	1
37	Thailand	1
	Other	158
	Total	10,088
	Persian Gulf **	2,400

Includes crude oil imported for storage in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Source: EIA.doe.gov