Category Archives: energy

Federal Solar Energy

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What do you do when you host an auction, and no one bids?

A short time ago, the BLM tried to auction 3,700 acres in three parcels of prime solar farm territory and got no bidders.  None.

Maryanne Kurtinaitis, BLM’s Colorado Division Renewable Energy Program Manager, said

We are going to have to regroup and figure out what didn’t work[.]

Well, NSS.

Here’s a clue, offered by Ken Johnson, Vice President of Communications for the Solar Energy Industries Association:

To date, BLM has yet to finalize any regional mitigation plans.  Frankly, it’s not smart business to commit to something until you’ve read the fine print.

The whole thing about government involvement is too uncertain.

Hmm….

Obama’s War on Energy

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The Obama administration plans to block the construction of new coal-fired power plants unless they are built with novel and expensive technology to capture greenhouse-gas emissions[.]

There’s a surprise.  The EPA’s latest rule version on this subject looks to control CO2 emissions as an urgency exists in the minds of climate deniers (i.e., those who deny that the existing climate change is an ongoing natural phenomenon) to reduce humanity’s output of this “greenhouse” gas.

[T]he revised rule said it would propose an emissions limit of 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour for coal plants and 1,000 pounds per megawatt hour for large gas-fired plants.

…such stringent limits would ban new coal plants….

And

The rule is also a crucial stepping-stone for the Obama administration’s next big environmental project, emissions standards for the fleet of existing power plants.  Mr Obama has told the EPA to produce those standards by June 2014.

Never mind that CO2 is a trailing indicator, confirming the health of the planet.

The climate deniers’ minds—and those of their pet policy makers in the EPA—are made up, and they resent being confused by facts.

Be More Like Europe

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Maybe we should, at least in one area.

The Strasbourg-based European Parliament passed an amendment to limit the amount of transport fuel, such as gasoline and diesel, that can be obtained from food and energy crops to 6% of total energy consumed for transport by 2020, from 10% previously. … The new limit is meant to ease concerns about the amount of agricultural land that is turned over to growing crops for biofuel use….

There shouldn’t be any requirement, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.

Corinne Lepage, the lawmaker driving the legislation [says] “Taking indirect land-use change into account is important for the integrity of the EU climate-change policy.”

Because, among other concerns, “food prices could rise if crops are diverted from the dinner plate to the fuel tank.”  Our…environmentalists…need to understand this.  It diverts, here in the US, actual food crops—like corn—from the mouths of our poor to the gas tanks of “environmentalists'” cars.  And it jacks up the costs of food crops that substitute for corn.  And it jacks up the price of food that eats corn—like cows, pigs, and chickens.

Be like Europe.  At least in this.

“All of the Above” is just Obamatalk

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Kelly David Burke has the sorry tale in a recent Fox News article.

The Bush administration had set aside 1.3 million acres for oil shale and tar sands development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.  The new Bureau of Land Management plan cuts that amount by two-thirds, down to 700,000 acres….

I’ll elide Burke’s poor arithmetic—the 600,000 acre reduction amounts to a reduction of a bit under 50%–he is, after all, a journalist; his point remains valid: this is an enormous reduction in oil resource availability.

President Barack Obama’s BLM has its excusesrationale all lined up though.  It’s

…not against oil shale and tar sands development, but will restrict the amount of public lands available for leasing until the processes are proven, and proven safe.

Never mind that Canada has been successfully and safely extracting oil from shale and from tar sands for decades, and US companies have been extracting from shale for nearly as long with similar success and safety.

This is, in the end, just part of Obama’s effort to artificially suppress the price of otherwise unviable solar and wind energy sources with enormous subsidies and loans while trying to restrict the supply of oil (and gas) in an attempt to price these sources up into the stratospheric range of even the subsidized “green” energy…sources.

It’s all of a piece with his decision elsewhere to slow walk oil leases and drilling permits.

We’re Capable of So Much More

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In a related article, I described how even Progressive Europe recognizes the retreat of the US from the global stage and from our responsibilities as a major power.  Yet we have the economic and resource capacity to do so much better, as Spiegel International Online notices.  Fracking provides an example of both our capacity and of our willful impotence.

The United States is sitting on massive natural gas and oil reserves that have the potential to shift the geopolitical balance in its favor.  Worries are increasing in Russia and the Arab states of waning influence and falling market prices.

And

American drilling experts began using a method called “fracking,” with which oil and gas molecules can be extracted from dense shale rock formations.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the United States will replace Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas in only two years.  The Americans could also become the world’s top petroleum producers by 2017.

And

…the boom could generate 600,000 new jobs, and some experts even believe that up to 3 million new jobs could be created in the coming years.

And

…the United States will benefit the most from the development of shale gas and oil resources.  …the political threat potential of oil producers like Iran will decline. Optimists assume that, in about 15 years, the United States will no longer have to send any aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to guarantee that oil tankers can pass unhindered through the Strait of Hormuz….

However.  There’s always a however.

President Barack Obama’s EPA continues to manufacture “investigations” of ground water pollution from fracking where none exists—their Wyoming fiasco, for instance.  His EPA continues its war on oil, gas, and coal by instituting output regulations that Congress already had rejected.

Obama continues to slow-walk oil and gas drilling permits on Federal lands and at offshore sites.  He has moved to cancel unused oil leases, never caring that the lessees had been reluctant to act on their leases due to uncertainty over Obama’s handling of hydrocarbons generally.

Obama even is slow-walking approval (and that approval is not a foregone conclusion, even now) of the Keystone XL Pipeline project, now that all environmental objections have been cleared with Nebraska’s approval of an alternate route.  This pipeline doesn’t directly address the resource explosion that fracking provides, but it remains symptomatic of his administration’s disdain for practical energy self-sufficiency.

It’s very unclear whether we will be allowed to realize the fruits of this technology and to bring into use these vast energy resources.