Tag Archives: energy

Obama and “Energy”

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President Obama announced Sunday that he’ll use his executive authority to designate 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness, walling it off from resource development. This abrogates a 1980 deal in which Congress specifically set aside some of this acreage for future oil and gas exploration.

He also did this without so much as a faretheewell to any of Alaska’s leadership, including, explicitly its Republican delegation in Congress. Not a what do you think. Not a heads up. Nada.

Here’s his cynical divide-and-conquer bribery attempt:

The Obama administration is poised to unveil a draft plan for selling offshore oil and gas leases that is expected to rule out auctioning drilling rights in parts of the Atlantic Ocean as well as in some Arctic waters and along the West Coast between 2017 and 2022.
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The draft plan is expected to keep the door open for selling oil and gas leases off the coasts of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, though with a larger buffer zone than previously outlined. Possible oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea [off the northwest coast of Alaska] also would be set back further from the coast than during a previous 2008 auction of drilling rights in those Arctic waters.

This draft also would set off limits areas in the Beaufort Sea, off the north coast of Alaska, that had been available before this. It’s a naked attempt to get Republicans to abandon Alaska in return for the promise of future drilling elsewhere.

None of this has anything at all to do with energy or energy independence for the US. It’s entirely, and tightly, centered on an insecure man trying to show how powerful he is to those lesser men and women impudent enough to disagree with him.

The Congress and the President

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President Barack Obama is ready, willing—even eager—to work with the 114th Congress, instead of routinely bypassing it, The Wall Street Journal quoted “senior administration officials” as saying at the start of this new year.

Both Houses of this new Congress have introduced bipartisanly supported bills that would authorize construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. And Obama has said he’ll veto that legislation, never minding that 70% of Americans—Obama’s employers, as well as the employers of the new Congress—want the pipeline built.

I’m driven to the conclusion that Obama’s claimed willingness to work with Republicans is just more Obamatalk, and that “cooperate with” still means “be reasonable: do it my way.”

Carbon Footprint

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[I]n 2011, the University of Technology Sydney made a significant breakthrough by synthesizing something called graphene paper (GP), an ultra thin layer of graphite that has five to six times lower density than steel, but is two times harder with 10 times the tensile strength and 13 times higher bending rigidity.

GP also works well in lithium-ion batteries and even better in lithium-sulfur batteries. The latter kind has far greater storage capacity and is a whole lot cheaper; GP solves the sulfur degradation problem.

There’s a lot more at the link.

Of course there are practical problems yet to be solved at this early stage. A carbon fire burns hot. Get the car, or pickup, too light, and the shock absorbers will need serious redesign—a particular problem for working pickups that do off-road work. But still….

An all-carbon vehicle? Gah. The horror.

“Green” Energy, Competition, and Consumers

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Technologies that can’t compete in the market place aren’t ready for market, nor are they ready for our consumption. Subsidizing these not-ready techs is one way of plusing them up. Another way is to penalize their competition for being too successful.

The New York Times tells this tale, albeit carefully buried in the nether regions of Katharine Seelye’s article. Overarching all of this is this:

New England [Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont] already pays the highest electricity rates of any region in the 48 contiguous states because it has no fossil fuels of its own and has to import all of its oil, gas, and coal.

That’s not strictly true; the Marcellus Shale holds more natural gas than you can shake a…drill…at, and a significant fraction of that lies under western New York. New York, though, is throwing every road block they can think of in the way of extracting the natural gas, which would give the Northeast a nearby, if not local, source of natural gas.

There are two items of interest that backdrop this. One is the spiking energy prices in the Northeast. For instance,

[f]or October, [a small business owner] had paid $376. For November, with virtually no change in his volume of work and without having turned up the thermostat in his two-room shop, his bill came to $788, a staggering increase of 110%.

The other is the lack of infrastructure: there are all of five pipeline systems in the region, with seven new systems proposed.

The six states’ governors had agreed to a regional solution to this, involving building those additional pipelines.

However.

Just last August,

the Massachusetts Legislature rejected the plan, saying in part that cheap energy would flood the market and thwart attempts to advance wind and solar projects. That halted the whole effort.

That halted the whole effort.

But, it’s OK. Progressives and “environmentalists” have your back. And they have sharpened their knives.

 

h/t Power Line

Economic Viability of Wind Energy

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Tim Phillips, in The Wall Street Journal, quoted Christopher Flavin, of the Worldwatch Institute, as saying in 1984,

Tax credits have been essential to the economic viability of wind farms so far, but will not be needed within a few years.

It’s been a few years. It’s been 30 years’ worth of “few.”

In all, wind energy “generators” get $56.29 per MW-Hr in Federal subsidies. To put that in perspective, natural gas gets $0.64, and nuclear power $3.14.

These guys are free-loading off you and me, and it’s time to put a stop to it. They need to stand or fall in the free market: if their technology is ready for prime time, they’ll have no trouble. If their technology isn’t—after 30 years—they’ve had enough of our prop-up money.

Cut off the subsidies—or more accurately, do not renew them (they expired in 2013) with finality. While the new Congress is about it, it should cut off those natural gas subsidies (those for oil, too, even though they’re similarly just walking around money) and the nuclear energy subsidies, also.

The free market is a much better watchdog for energy production than the Federal government ever can hope to be, no matter how honest or diligent those bureaucrats and regulators might be.