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Sierra Club official lauds Kentucky for phasing out coal-fired units

WEST PADUCAH, Ky., Nov. 15 (UPI) — Alice Howell, a regional director for the Sierra Club, lauded the planned closing of two coal-fired units at a power plant in western Kentucky. “Kentucky is proving that it can move beyond coal,” she said in a statement Thursday. The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned utility and economic development corporation, is retiring the units at the 50-year-old Paradise power-generating facility, the Sierra Club said. The advocacy group said the plant has 13.6 million tons of emissions every year. The TVA will compensate for the loss of power with a 1,000-megawatt natural gas plant, the Sierra Club said. The New York Times reported Thursday the closings are part of the TVA’s strategy to use less coal as a power source. The closings extend to coal-fired plants in Alabama. The TVA offered no deadline for when the plants’ coal units would shut down. […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Water Shortages Could Dry Up Shale Gas Craze

Environmentalists won’t stop the shale gas craze. Neither will federal regulators. But a lack of water could possibly do so. And that is why drillers are looking for new ways to find water supplies. The surface of a freshwater lake During the exploration of shale gas, a concoction of sand, water and chemicals is pumped into the ground. Some of the dirty water returns and it must either be treated or re-injected underground , which at least in the northeastern United States involves trucking such tainted water to different locales — something that then upsets the green movement. Treating — or recycling — the “fracking water,” by contrast, optimizes a scarce resource while potentially mitigating any ecological ramifications, albeit at potentially higher costs. “No question: Recycling is the way that the industry is moving,” says Bill Charneski, chief operating officer of Origin Oil , in a telephone interview. “It […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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EnQuest: $6.4 billion slated to develop Kraken oil field in North Sea

LONDON, Nov. 15 (UPI) — British energy company EnQuest said Friday it would invest $6.4 billion to develop the 137 million-barrel Kraken oil field in the North Sea. EnQuest said its development plan was approved by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It said the investment is the largest in the British portion of the North Sea and one of the biggest industrial investments in the country this year. “Kraken is a transformational project for EnQuest and we are delighted to be able to proceed with it; working with the government and our partners to maximize the extraction … of oil in this field over its 25-year-long life,” EnQuest Chief Executive Officer Amjad Bseisu said in a statement. The Kraken field is about 75 miles east of the Shetland Islands. EnQuest said the field contains 137 million barrels of oil and that gross peak oil production should be […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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When is the oil going to run out – and should we worry about it?

When is the oil going to run out – and should we worry about it? Page added on November 17, 2013 Energy experts have warned recently that Britain currently stores enough natural gas for only thirteen days of supply. Such a stark reality indicates how little reserve actually exists to fall back on. The news also brings to mind the concept of energy and fossil fuel shortage, depicted in movies such as ‘Mad Max’. But with our entire economy and way of life dependent on one particular fossil fuel, namely crude oil, how long can we expect this commodity to last, and for the present levels of production to be maintained? A study by a German think tank published in September, 2010 , warned of the potential for a dire global economic crisis in the next fifteen years as a result of a peak and irreversible decline in world […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Update on Peak Oil

Page added on November 17, 2013 I summarized my attitudes to Peak Oil in an (anonymous) contribution to the Azimuth discussion a couple of years ago, reproduced below. It seems right [except the dubious comment on shale oil was way off]. World economic growth continues to be constrained by the fact that we can only slowly change infrastructure. Fossil fuel use continues to grow as we go to gas and back to coal for many applications. The world peak is different to the peaks we’ve seen in individual countries and fields, because the price can now rise. This should mean that the tail is more stretched out as otherwise uneconomic fields come into play (like tar sands, very heavy oil, coal liquefaction, abandoned fields, and maybe even oil shales). Also it means that there is a lot of pressure to get off oil as much as possible. Even the […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple