Category Archives: energy

“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.

Well, Isn’t This Special?

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The British newspaper The Sun ran this interesting article the other day.  It seems the Brits have found a way to make petrol—gasoline to us colonials—from thin air.

[Air Fuel Synthesis] from the north of England has developed “air capture” technology which creates synthetic petrol with only air and electricity.

The technology was presented to a London engineering conference this week.

It mixes sodium hydroxide with carbon dioxide before zapping the resulting sodium carbonate with electricity, to form pure carbon dioxide.

At the same time, hydrogen is produced by electrolysing water vapour captured with a dehumidifier.

The carbon dioxide and hydrogen are then used to produce methanol which in turn is passed through a gasoline fuel reactor, creating petrol.

Wait, what?

This process works on air, but it adds sodium hydroxide to the mix?  But that’s minor; it’s not at all unusual to identify a process with a primary source, while adding additional chemicals along the way.

The really confusing part, to me, is this.  This process takes CO2 as an input and then messes with it to get, as a goal, CO2 as an output?  And then, to get the hydrogen, the process captures water vapor from the air and electrolyzes that?  I confess, I don’t understand.

Aside from processing carbon dioxide to get carbon dioxide, unless things have changed a bit since I took high school chemistry, reacting sodium hydroxide (NaOH) with carbon dioxide (CO2) generally produces “the resulting sodium carbonate” (Na2CO3) and…wait for it…water.  No need to collect water vapor with a dehumidifier.  Unless they wanted more water than that reaction would produce.  But that reaction produces a lot of water.

I’m no engineer, but a “breakthrough” isn’t what I see here.

Do the Brits do April Fool’s in mid-October?

Solar and Wind Energy Subsidies

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There was sort of a debate presented in The Wall Street Journal a few days ago concerning the efficacy of Federal subsidies for solar and wind energy companies.  I say “sort of” because the Mark Muro’s arguments in favor of the subsidies demonstrate an utter cluelessness of the basics of economics as well as of how well the subsidies have already performed.

For instance, the WSJ‘s lede cites generic proponents as saying in all seriousness,

There is widespread agreement that pulling the plug on the subsidy at this point could hobble the wind-power industry.  Meanwhile, the biggest federal subsidy for solar power, a tax credit for 30% of the cost of installed equipment, is set to drop to 10% at the end of 2016.  A cash grant for up to 30% of solar equipment costs expired at the end of last year.

Proponents say wind and solar subsidies are needed for a few more years to allow these clean, renewable sources of energy to develop to the point where they can compete on price with electricity produced from coal and natural gas.

Yet, if the technology can’t compete in a free market on its own, if it needs the subsidy to survive, the technology is not ready for commercial use or sale.  Spending taxpayer money—private citizen money—on such a thing is a textbook example of Fraud, Waste, and Abuse.  As the proponents admit without realizing it in that second paragraph: “…wind and solar subsidies are needed for a few more years to allow these clean, renewable sources of energy to develop….”

Muro then says in his argument,

Let’s remember the point of these temporary subsidies: to help emerging clean-energy technologies gain toeholds in challenging markets and advance toward unsubsidized price-competitiveness.

And

The ultimate reward is cheaper, cleaner energy and greater energy diversity, which will help guard against price shocks, keep energy costs down through competition and lessen the damage our energy consumption does to the environment….

Except that it isn’t cheaper if it needs subsidies coupled with coal, oil, gas (hydrocarbon) prices that are artificially elevated by government mandates to include “green” additives as the Feds do, or to buy electric power from solar and wind generators, as California does, in order to compete.  Moreover, diversity is reduced, not expanded by limiting us to solar and wind—or even by demanding that we buy a certain amount of solar and wind, regardless of market forces—and actively blocking access to hydrocarbon energy.  And finally, if these really are viable technologies that will deliver cheap energy easily, private investors will flock to invest, and no taxpayer subsidy will be even in the picture.

On top of that, there’s no case for environmental “damage,” given the great amount of cleanup already done, and the falsified “damage” attributed, for instance, to fracking by the EPA.

Muro goes on:

Wind and solar need the help because the barriers for new technologies in the energy industry are tougher than those in any other industry in this country.  Fossil fuels, with the help of their own government subsidies over the years, are thoroughly entrenched, with trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure in place.

Never mind that that entrenched infrastructure sits on top of centuries’ worth of economical, unsubsidized hydrocarbon deposits in the ground right here in the US and Canada, and the infrastructure easily can be extended to reach into the deposits in our respective territorial and economic zone waters, as the People’s Republic of China already is doing, filling the vacuum left by the present administration’s slow-walking of drilling permits for American companies.

Additionally, the beef that “the barriers for new technologies in the energy industry” are tough is just a cynical red herring.  Those technical barriers existed for the hydrocarbon industries, also, as they were developing.  Why should solar and wind get special treatment?  Muro has no answer; he merely asserts the “need.”

Muro concludes with this long-standing “promise:”

In sum, onshore wind is likely just a few years away from true subsidy independence, while several forms of solar aren’t far beyond.

Like commercial fusion, we’ve been “just a few years away” for decades.  It’s an empty promise.

As Dr David Kreutzer points out in his argument against these subsidies, though,

Surely some alternatives to fossil fuels will be developed, but they will only work if they are affordable.  Wind and solar aren’t, and that isn’t changed by shifting the costs from consumers and producers to the taxpayers.

Bureaucrats and politicians shouldn’t be the ones deciding which technologies are the most promising or what timeline is too long or what losses are too deep.  The market will do a much better job of answering the question: are wind and solar power really viable?

Let’s get rid of the subsidies and find out.

Renewable Energy

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Has German Chancellor Angela Merkel figured out something Barack Obama hasn’t?  As recently as last June, her government had set a goal that by 2020, renewable energy (vis., wind and solar) would comprise 35% of Germany’s electricity production.  In the first half of 2012 (ending that June), Germany already was generating 25% of its electricity from wind and solar, among other renewables.

Then some other things became apparent.  Germany’s Renewable Power Act requires power companies to buy wind- and solar-originated electricity in significant quantities.  Their largest industrial electricity users consume 18% of the electricity produced,  However, they pay only 0.3% of the extra costs generated by those required buys—German taxpayers pay the difference.

The power grid hasn’t kept up with the growth in alternative energy sources—like the offshore windparks in the Baltic and North Seas off the country’s north coast.  Many of those projects are at a standstill, with no way to deliver the power they generate to the mainland.

That Renewable Energy Act provides incentives to build wind turbines, but it doesn’t provide incentives to build the natural gas-fired power plants the country needs for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing (see the figure).

Withal, German consumers are faced with skyrocketing electricity bills.

Now Merkel is changing her mind.  She; her Environment Minister, Peter Altmaier; and her Economy Minister, Philipp Rösler are meeting with industry and union representatives “to discuss the rising costs for consumers.  In the run up to that meeting, Altmaier has indicated that he hopes to…put the brakes on the current rush toward renewables.”

In the US, we have these: green energy subsidies (guaranteed loans, tax credits) and a Federal requirement that power companies buy power from renewable energy producers.

Off the New England coast, special interests found the views from their beach front manses would be offended by wind farms, and the potential farms themselves were declared a “hazard” to aircraft, so they are not even being built.  In central California, environmentalists won’t allow some solar farms to be built and won’t allow the power cables that would deliver solar electricity to cities to be built.

The EPA still requires ethanol to be blended into our gasoline, even though not enough of that is being produced to meet EPA requirements, much that is produced is exported, and the whole charade is driving up the cost of food.

Maybe we should, in  this case, try Obama’s meme of being more like Europe, or at least more like Germany.