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Gene Ellis

Utilities Switch Off Investment in Fossil Fuel Plants - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ent-in-fossil-fuel-plants.html

utilities switch investment fossil fossil fuel fuel plants

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14
       
      Note:  a LARGE power station =s 40 direct jobs.
  • workers at the large power station known as Keadby 1 are preparing to shut it down at the end of the summer, with the loss of about 40 jobs.
  • fluctuations in global energy markets have made the natural gas power plant unprofitable
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  • It has also delayed new energy investments and is planning to close almost a quarter of its fossil fuel power plants,
  • European energy companies, struggling to respond to weak demand in a flatlining economy, say they need guaranteed pricing to keep open unprofitable plants or to invest in new ones.
  • Their revenue is being hit by dwindling demand for electricity and by new wind and solar projects that undercut the price of the energy produced from many fossil fuel plants.
  • At the same time, record-low prices on carbon emissions trading markets, which were introduced to encourage clean and efficient energy production and use, have perversely become a disincentive to investment.
  • Many of the Continent’s aging power stations, particularly those that burn highly polluting coal, are earmarked for closure by 2020 to meet stringent local environment regulations.
  • Without these investments, industrial companies in Europe may face higher energy prices when local economies eventually recover,
  • “Energy utilities are facing a perfect storm,”
  • In a bid to generate 20 percent of the European Union’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020, Germany, Spain and other E.U. countries have provided hefty subsidies to wind and solar farms, which now constitute a sizable minority of daily electricity generation, often surpassing the 20 percent target.
    • Gene Ellis
      Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14
       
      In effect, a cheaper overall form of energy (non-renewables) had to compete with heavy subsidies to renewables, which, once built, had low operating costs.  They cannot compete and do not invest, and there are major problems w/investing more in renewables (they are overall more expensive, and they have built-in faults, producing electricity erratically, or during the wrong times.)  The high costs of energy also lie with government, who cemented long-term deals with the ex-USSR linking other energy prices to the price of oil.  In short, they shot themselves in the foot.  Several times.
  • European utilities like E.On of Germany have announced plans to shut down less-polluting natural gas-fired plants that have been undercut by dirtier coal-burning generators benefiting from a flood of low-cost coal imports and low carbon emissions prices.
  • Despite the upfront costs associated with green energy projects, they are inexpensive to run. In contrast, Europe’s gas and coal plants, which also provide backup power when renewables cannot operate, need constant spending on fossil fuels.
  • Policy makers are debating a system of support payments to keep uneconomic power plants open,
  • “Without long-term signals of energy prices, investment won’t happen.”
  • Some analysts also expect domestic regulators to eventually create financial incentives for companies
Gene Ellis

Switch to Natural Gas Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions Much, Study Finds - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...atural-gas-impact-on-emissions

shared by Gene Ellis on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Switch to Natural Gas Won't Reduce Carbon Emissions Much, Study Finds
Gene Ellis

Europe's dangerous addiction to Russian gas needs radical cure - FT.com - 0 views

www.ft.com/...64-11e3-8b15-00144feabdc0.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Europe’s dangerous addiction to Russian gas needs radical cure
  • “It really boils down to this: no nation should use energy to stymie a people’s aspirations,” Mr Kerry said in Brussels, just as Russia’s Gazprom raised the price it charges Ukraine for gas.
  • Bernstein Research has calculated that to do so, Europe needs to eliminate 15 bcm of residential and industrial gas demand, invest $215bn and incur $37bn of annual costs in the form of higher-priced energy. That works out as $160 for every single person in Europe.
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  • A new energy corridor has just been sanctioned that will bring Caspian gas being developed by a BP-led consortium into the heart of Europe.
  • Import terminals are being built to receive liquefied natural gas (LNG) from places such as Qatar and Nigeria.
  • And countries such as the UK are moving ahead with developing their substantial reserves of shale gas.
  • There are 20 operational LNG regasification plants in the EU, with a combined import capacity of about 198 bcm of gas per year. A further 30 bcm/y are under construction. But Europe’s terminals are conspicuously underused. Imports of LNG have fallen sharply, partly because of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, which prompted Japan to switch to gas-fired generation and diverted LNG cargoes from Europe.
  • The question is: are European customers prepared to pay Japanese prices for LNG?” says one Brussels-based European gas industry official.
  • Arguably a more urgent task is to improve energy security by unifying the EU market – in particular, linking up the countries of eastern Europe.
  • If Europe is serious about reducing its dependence on Russian gas, it will have to take radical measures. Bernstein’s Mr Clint lists some: switching from gas to diesel power, closing gas-intensive industries such as oil refining, reducing gas consumption in heating and adding more coal-fired generation – which would inevitably increase carbon emissions.
  • Added to that, Europe is contractually obliged to continue taking delivery of Russian gas. Bernstein makes the point that Gazprom has about 120 bcm of take-or-pay contracts – with companies such as ENI, Edison and RWE – that require Europe to continue paying about $50bn for Russian gas. Many of these stretch way beyond 2020.
  • Europe accounts for half of Gazprom’s gas revenues, according to the company, and 71 per cent of Russia’s crude oil exports, according to the International Energy Agency.
  • “Gazprom has heard it all before,” said Jonathan Stern, director of gas research at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies. “For the past 20 years Europe has been trying to diversify away from Russian gas and failed.”
  • A growing share of oil, largely from Rosneft, is flowing directly to China by pipeline. Lukoil last week started commercial production at its enormous West Qurna field in Iraq – much of whose production is likely to be sold in Asian markets, analysts say. And Novatek, together with CNPC of China, is building an LNG terminal that will help shift gas exports towards Asia.
  • Any reduction in imports from Russia thanks to Europe’s diversification strategy “is not a prospect for the next few years,” he said. “And by that time I think Russia will find alternative gas export markets, especially in an environment of strong Asian demand for gas.”
Gene Ellis

A Fracking Good Story by Bjørn Lomborg - Project Syndicate - 0 views

www.project-syndicate.org/...ng-good-story-by-bj-rn-lomborg

shared by Gene Ellis on 22 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years.
  • this year’s expected CO2 emissions have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14%, from their peak in 2007.
  • The cause is an unprecedented switch to natural gas, which emits 45% less carbon per energy unit. The US used to generate about half its electricity from coal, and roughly 20% from gas. Over the past five years, those numbers have changed, first slowly and now dramatically: in April of this year, coal’s share in power generation plummeted to just 32%, on par with gas.
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  • For starters, fracking has caused gas prices to drop dramatically.
  • Indeed, US carbon emissions have dropped some 20% per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.
  • the shift from coal to natural gas has reduced US emissions by 400-500 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 per year. To put that number in perspective, it is about twice the total effect of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions in the rest of the world, including the European Union.
  • America’s 30,000 wind turbines reduce emissions by just one-tenth the amount that natural gas does. Biofuels reduce emissions by only ten Mt, and solar panels by a paltry three Mt.
  • Since 1990, the EU has heavily subsidized solar and wind energy at a cost of more than $20 billion annually. Yet its per capita CO2 emissions have fallen by less than half of the reduction achieved in the US – even in percentage terms, the US is now doing better.
  • Along with the closure of German nuclear power stations, this has led, ironically, to a resurgence of coal.
Gene Ellis

Gas Prices Moving Away From Link to Oil - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-away-from-link-to-oil.html

oil

shared by Gene Ellis on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • That leaves buyers with enormous risk. Oil, which sold for as little as $10 a barrel in the 1990s, when some current contracts were agreed, now costs about $100 per barrel,
  • “Anyone with standard oil-linked contracts is likely losing money in Europe and specifically Italy,
  • Gas bought under such contracts can be 10 percent to 15 percent more expensive than gas bought at spot market prices, he said. Over the past year, Eni's gas and power unit has reported an operating loss of about €812 million, or $1 billion.
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  • “These are not easy discussions,” Mr. Alverà said. “Most sellers are reluctant to sit down and give you big discounts. The more they wait the more they increase their profits.”
  • Still, analysts say it may take decades for Asia to switch from oil linkage to market pricing.
Gene Ellis

What If We Never Run Out of Oil? - Charles C. Mann - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...4

oil

shared by Gene Ellis on 15 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.”
  • Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)
  • To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.
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  • Water-assisted fracturing has been in use since the late 1940s, but it became “fracking” only recently, when it was married with horizontal drilling and the advanced sensing techniques that let it be used deep underground. Energy costs are surprisingly small; a Swiss-American research team calculated in 2011 that the average EROEI for fracked gas in a representative Pennsylvania county was about 87—about six times better than for Persian Gulf oil and 16 times better than for tar sands. (Fracking uses a lot of water, though, and activists charge that the chemicals contaminate underground water supplies.)
  • Today, a fifth of U.S. energy consumption is fueled by coal, mainly from Appalachia and the West, a long-term energy source that has provided jobs for millions, a century-old way of life
  • and pollution that kills more than 10,000 Americans a year (that estimate is from a 2010 National Research Council study).
  • Roughly speaking, burning coal produces twice as much carbon dioxide as burning the equivalent amount of natural gas. Almost all domestic coal is used to generate electricity—it produces 38 percent of the U.S. power supply. Fracking is swiftly changing this: in 2011, utilities reported plans to shut down 57 of the nation’s 1,287 coal-fired generators the following year. Largely in consequence, U.S. energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions have dropped to figures last seen in 1995. Since 2006, they have fallen more than those from any other nation in the world.
  • In the sort of development that irresistibly attracts descriptors like ironic, Germany, often touted as an environmental model for its commitment to solar and wind power, has expanded its use of coal, and as a result is steadily increasing its carbon-dioxide output. Unlike Americans, Europeans can’t readily switch to natural gas; Continental nations, which import most of their natural gas, agreed to long-term contracts that tie its price to the price of oil, now quite high.
  • Several researchers told me that the current towel-snapping between Beijing and Tokyo over islands in the East China Sea is due less to nationalistic posturing than to nearby petroleum deposits.)
  • In mid-March, Japan’s Chikyu test ended a week early, after sand got in the well mechanism. But by then the researchers had already retrieved about 4 million cubic feet of natural gas from methane hydrate, at double the expected rate.
  • What is known, says Timothy Collett, the energy-research director for the USGS program, is that some of the gulf’s more than 3,500 oil and gas wells are in gas-hydrate areas.
  • In Dutch-disease scenarios, oil weakens all the pillars but one—the petroleum industry, which bloats steroidally.
  • Because the national petroleum company, with its gush of oil revenues, is the center of national economic power, “the ruler typically puts a loyalist in charge,” says Michael Ross, a UCLA political scientist and the author of The Oil Curse (2012). “The possibilities for corruption are endless.” Governments dip into the oil kitty to reward friends and buy off enemies. Sometimes the money goes to simple bribes; in the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of euros from France’s state oil company, Elf Aquitaine, lined the pockets of businessmen and politicians at home and abroad.
  • How much of Venezuela’s oil wealth Hugo Chávez hijacked for his own political purposes is unknown, because his government stopped publishing the relevant income and expenditure figures. Similarly, Ross points out, Saddam Hussein allocated more than half the government’s funds to the Iraq National Oil Company; nobody has any idea what happened to the stash, though, because INOC never released a budget. (Saddam personally directed the nationalization of Iraqi oil in 1972, then leveraged his control of petroleum revenues to seize power from his rivals.)
  • “How will the royal family contain both the mullahs and the unemployed youth without a slush fund?”
  • It seems fair to say that if autocrats in these places were toppled, most Americans would not mourn. But it seems equally fair to say that they would not necessarily be enthusiastic about their replacements.
Gene Ellis

Gaps in Graduates' Skills Confound Morocco - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-skills-confound-morocco.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • “It’s sad to note that the state of education is worse now than it was 20 years ago,
  • “How is it that a segment of our youth cannot realize their legitimate aspirations at professional, physical and social levels?”
  • They say that their education has left them ill-equipped for the workplace.
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  • but she is worried that the education she is getting, in a public system that she faults on quality, will not be enough to win her a place in a job market that she says is often skewed by bribery and favoritism.
  • “Students do not have an equal chance to succeed,” she said, adding that many parents had gone into debt trying to ensure that their children have some chance for a future by paying for them to study in private schools. “The quality of education all depends on the parents’ income.”
  • about one-third of the country’s civil servants work in the sector.
  • In his speech he called for mandatory foreign language training in university degree courses and a new emphasis on vocational and technical training.
  • In the 1980s, a political decision to reclaim the Moroccan identity resulted in a change in the language of instruction, with elementary and high school classes shifting to Arabic. Most higher education programs, however, remained in French.
  • Many critics attribute high dropout rates to this language switch. University students, they say, are struggling to learn in a language they barely understand.
  • Mr. Mrabet said other problems included an excessive focus in graduate training on quantity over quality; a failure to adapt courses to workplace opportunities; overcrowded lecture halls; student strikes; and school financing issues.
  • Instead of hiring graduates of the Moroccan public education system, recruiters tend to look for graduates educated abroad or the products of Moroccan private schools,
  • “Call centers are the biggest employers in Morocco with about 50,000 jobs that generally require good skills in French,” he said. “In some fields, like I.T., it is difficult to find people with the adequate training.”
Gene Ellis

Shifting energy trends blunt Russia's natural-gas weapon - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-a050-dc3322a94fa7_story.html

shared by Gene Ellis on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • As clunky Soviet-era factories and mines have become more efficient or gone out of business, Ukraine’s domestic gas consumption has dropped nearly 40 percent over the past five years, cutting its imports from Russia in half, according to a report by Sberbank Investment Research.
  • Domestic consumption might drop further if Ukraine trims the generous subsidies it gives households using natural gas, although so few households are paying their bills that it might not matter. “People will go from not paying the lower price to not paying the higher price,” said Thane Gustafson, senior director of Russian energy for the consulting firm IHS CERA.
  • Even if residential customers paid up, the Ukrainian state energy company, Naftogaz, would lose money on those sales
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  • “An inefficient and opaque energy sector continues to weigh heavily on public finances and the economy,” the International Monetary Fund said, noting that energy subsidies reached 7.5 percent of Ukraine’s GDP in 2012. “The very low tariffs for residential gas and district heating cover only a fraction of economic costs and encourage one of the highest energy consumption levels in Europe,” the IMF said in December.
  • Now, the upheaval of the past two weeks has thrown Ukraine’s gas strategy into greater confusion. “There is no government and there are no agencies to do business with,” said Simon Pirani, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “How high up the list of priorities it is is anyone’s guess.”
  • Even if the deals with foreign companies advance, Ukraine will need to import about half of its gas needs,
  • In 2012, many European industrial users and power plants switched to coal, and Russia agreed to renegotiate.
  • The link between gas and oil prices has been severed for about half of Russia’s gas sales.
  • Gazprom also agreed to eliminate contract clauses that said a country such as Germany could reship Russian gas only with Gazprom’s approval.
  • As a result, Ukraine ended up paying more than Gazprom’s customers in Germany, and last year Ukraine imported small quantities of natural gas from Germany and Hungary through pipelines in Slovakia and Poland, experts say. Germany buys gas from a variety of countries, but rerouted Russian gas has effectively been undercutting other Russian gas.
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