Category:

Japan Continues to Re-Embrace Coal

Coal is stockpiled at the Onahama port of Iwaki in Fukushima Prefecture in February 2014…. ENLARGE Photo: Bloomberg News TOKYO—Japan is continuing to re-embrace coal to make up for its lack of nuclear energy, with plans for another power station released Thursday bringing the number of new coal-fired plants announced this year to seven. Utilities in Japan are eager to take advantage of coal’s relative cheapness to give them a competitive edge at a time when other countries are seeking to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by moving away from a fuel source seen as dirty. The liberalization of Japan’s power industry by 2020 will pit power companies against each other as rivals for the first time. In addition, with a relaxation of restrictions on coal power and no new emissions targets on the horizon, utilities are increasingly seeing coal as an important part of their business plans. Kansai Electric […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

China’s Carbon Emissions Drop for the First Time Since 2001

Steam rises from chimneys at the Junliangcheng power station in Tianjin, China. In the battle to rein in pollution, China has cut its dependence on coal. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg (Bloomberg) — China’s emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide fell last year for the first time in more than a decade, offering fresh evidence that efforts to control pollution in the nation of 1.4 billion people are gaining traction. Total carbon emissions in the world’s second-biggest economy dropped 2 percent in 2014 compared with the previous year, the first drop since 2001, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimate based on preliminary energy demand data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics. “Coal demand is slowing” while all other fuels, including oil, gas and renewables, are being consumed more, said Sophie Lu, a Beijing-based analyst at BNEF. The International Energy Agency has identified shifting energy consumption in China as among the […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Oil CEOs Press Obama Administration to Lift Export Ban

Oil tankers sit at a rail yard at the Kinder Morgan Inc. facility in Richmond, California. U.S. energy policies severely restrict crude exports while applying no such limits to products processed in refineries. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg (Bloomberg) — About a dozen U.S. drilling executives, including ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Ryan Lance, were in Washington this week trying to persuade White House officials and lawmakers to lift the 40-year ban on U.S. oil exports, according to two people familiar with the meetings. Chief executives from the lobbying group Producers for American Crude Oil Exports, or PACE, met with White House senior energy policy adviser Brian Deese March 11 to ask the Obama administration to roll back a prohibition on most U.S. oil exports imposed after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, according to two people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions weren’t public. Producers are eager to […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

China’s Captains of Heavy Industry Confront ‘New Normal’

ENLARGE The sun sets behind a chimney of a steel mill in Tangshan, Hebei province. Millions of metric tons of steelmaking capacity and more than 100 mines were mothballed in Hebei last year, according to officials. Photo: Reuters BEIJING—China’s resources industry leaders are confronting twin pressures likely to come into sharper relief this year: slower demand in the world’s largest commodity buyer coupled with Beijing’s tough new environmental standards. Speaking on the sidelines of this year’s annual legislative National People’s Congress, which concludes Sunday, China’s captains of heavy industry, from copper smelters to steel plants, said Beijing’s campaign to restructure the economy will likely result in lower profits, potential job losses and migrating capacity for the resources sector. The top exhibit lies just outside the nation’s capital Beijing: Hebei province, which has the capacity to produce a quarter of China’s steel — nearly three times the entire steel output […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

A Windfall for China as Commodity Prices Plunge

ENLARGE DALIAN, China–Lower prices for oil and other commodities are delivering China a windfall, as the world’s largest importer of natural resources stocks up and saves money in the process. By some estimates, China is enjoying annual headline savings of as much as $250 billion from stepped-up purchases of discounted oil, copper and iron ore–much of it arriving aboard dented bulk carriers and greasy tankers at northeastern Dalian port and other trade gateways. “China is the mega winner from the drop in industrial commodity prices,” said Kenneth Courtis, chairman of Starfort Holdings, an investment, private equity and commodity group. He estimates that China is saving over $600 million on its daily 12-million-barrel import bill, or over $200 billion a year, following the halving in oil prices since last summer. Those savings are equivalent to the investment initiatives announced by the government to strengthen ties with neighbors by building trade […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Hong Kong Finds Radioactive Contamination in Sample of Japanese Tea

HONG KONG — A sample of powdered tea imported from the Japanese prefecture of Chiba, just southeast of Tokyo, had 9.3 times the legal maximum level of radioactive cesium 137 allowed in food, the Hong Kong government announced late Thursday evening. Hong Kong’s legal limits for radioactive material in food are low and stringent. But the discovery is not the first of its kind. The government’s Center for Food Safety found three samples of vegetables from Japan with “unsatisfactory” levels of radioactive contaminants in March 2011, the month that nuclear reactors in Fukushima, northeast of Tokyo, suffered partial meltdowns following a powerful earthquake and tsunami. Other samples of Japanese food have occasionally been found to have low levels of radiation since the Fukushima disaster, the Hong Kong food center said. Some tea samples were found in Japan with radioactive contamination in the months immediately after the earthquake and tsunami. […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Arctic Melt Brings More Persistent Heat Waves to U.S., Europe

Sea-ice melt in the Arctic, Barents and Kara seas since 2004 has made more than twice as likely atmospheric circulations that suck cold Arctic air to Europe and Asia, a group of Japanese researchers led by the University of Tokyo’s Masato Mori said in a study published in 2014 in Nature Geoscience. Photographer: Martin Bureau/AFP via Getty Images (Bloomberg) — The U.S., Europe and Russia face longer heat waves because summer winds that used to bring in cool ocean air have been weakened by climate change, German researchers said. Rapid Arctic warming disturbs air streams in ways that have “significantly” reduced summer storms, raising the likelihood of heat waves, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said in a report Thursday in the journal Science. Hot weather in Russia in 2010 devastated crop harvests and caused wildfires. “Unabated climate change will probably further weaken summer circulation patterns which could […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Bakken oil production is already declining

With the large oil price drop that began last summer, the big question for world oil markets has been: How will U.S. shale drillers respond? There’s been widespread expectations that U.S. shale oil—and hence total U.S. production—would continue rising through the middle of 2015. According to data I compiled for the prolific Bakken shale oil play, production dropped in January—and looks set to drop in the following two months, at least. It could be that U.S. total production is already declining, but the data hasn’t come in yet. Read more in my new post, " Bakken oil production is already declining ." This helps clear up some questions I’d asked in my previous post, " Is U.S. oil production already declining? ", about how recent data from EIA is actually based on forecasts, rather than measurements of real production. This new post also builds on data compilation I did in […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
Category:

Striking U.S. Oil Workers Reach Tentative Labor Pact With Shell

(Bloomberg) — The United Steelworkers union representing 30,000 U.S. oil workers reached a tentative deal on a four-year contract with Royal Dutch Shell Plc, potentially ending a nationwide strike that has lasted for over a month. The proposed deal includes annual wage increases and maintains the cost-sharing ratio of the union’s current health-care plan, the United Steelworkers said in a statement on Thursday. It also contains language addressing the USW’s concerns about worker fatigue and contractors performing routine maintenance at oil refineries. The accord could end a strike at U.S. plants that began on Feb. 1 and has since spread to sites that account for almost 20 percent of the country’s total refining capacity. It’s the first national walkout of U.S. oil workers since 1980, when a work stoppage lasted three months. The USW represents workers at plants that together account for 64 percent of U.S. fuel output. “We […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple