If there’s any doubt that the summer driving season is upon us — despite the feeling that it snowed only two weeks ago — just look at the price at the pump.
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Zimbabwe's Kariba dam 'be to expanded' after China deal
China has lent Zimbabwe $319m (£199m) to ease electricity shortages by expanding its Kariba hydropower station, Zimbabwe's Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa has said.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
US tops global clean energy investment rankings
The US has regained top spot from China as the biggest investor in clean energy in 2011, according to global rankings.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Canada PM in China to discuss oil and energy issues
The Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is visiting China for talks that will focus on oil sales, energy and other economic ties.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Rosier Outlook for U.S. Energy Security, But China Should Worry
The debate about the dependence of the U.S. on energy imports from unfriendly regions like Venezuela or the Middle East seems to have a certain fatalism these days. The natural assumption is that the problem is intractable and destined to get worse.
However, 20-year projections from U.K. energy giant BP make surprisingly optimistic reading for American energy worriers. BP’s well respected economists predict that U.S. dependency on foreign oil and gas has already peaked and will have declined substantially by 2030.
In their view, it’s China that should be fretting. If BP is correct, Asia’s economic powerhouse could be importing 80% of its oil and 40% of its natural gas within 20 years, a much more parlous position than the country is currently in.
According to BP’s long-term internal projections, released to the public for the first time Wednesday, U.S. oil and gas import dependency peaked in 2005 and is set to steadily decline over the next two decades. By 2030, it will be importing around half its oil, down from 60% currently, and will be entirely self sufficient in natural gas, BP says.
“Import dependency in the U.S. is likely to fall to levels not seen since the 1990s because of improved fuel efficiency and the increased share of biofuels,” said BP’s report.
The internal combustion engine will remain dominant, but U.S. road fuel consumption should decline steadily, as car manufacturers make incremental efficiency improvements and consumers choose smaller vehicles, said BP’s Chief Economist Christof Ruehl.
At the same time biofuels production, mostly corn or sugarcane ethanol produced in the U.S. and Brazil, is expected to more than quadruple to 6.7 million barrels a day by 2030. “For the first time, non-fossil fuels will be major sources of supply growth,” said Ruehl.
BP expects the shale gas revolution that has already transformed the U.S. natural gas market to continue apace. By 2020, U.S. natural gas imports could fall close to zero and by 2030 the country may well be shipping cargoes of liquefied natural gas elsewhere, Ruehl said.
In contrast, China, which imported 54% of its oil and 13% of its gas in 2010, will see import dependency soar. By 2030, BP projects that the country will import 80% of its oil and 40% of its gas. Ten years ago, China was importing just 25% of its oil and no natural gas, so this will be a jarring transformation.
These figures go a long way to explain why state-controlled Chinese companies are on a multi-billion dollar spending spree, snapping up foreign companies in every corner of the world so it can exert greater influence on the international oil and gas flows on which it will be so dependent.
But these acquisitions can only go so far. Even assuming, as BP does, that China’s economic growth becomes far less energy intensive after 2020, the country still faces a big energy problem.
“The scale of China’s energy requirements is such that it has an impact on global energy markets, and prices. Energy prices (or supplies) could indeed become a temporary constraint on growth,” said BP.
For the U.S., this data is perhaps one small sign that predictions of the country’s inexorable slide against an unstoppable China are premature.
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com
However, 20-year projections from U.K. energy giant BP make surprisingly optimistic reading for American energy worriers. BP’s well respected economists predict that U.S. dependency on foreign oil and gas has already peaked and will have declined substantially by 2030.
In their view, it’s China that should be fretting. If BP is correct, Asia’s economic powerhouse could be importing 80% of its oil and 40% of its natural gas within 20 years, a much more parlous position than the country is currently in.
According to BP’s long-term internal projections, released to the public for the first time Wednesday, U.S. oil and gas import dependency peaked in 2005 and is set to steadily decline over the next two decades. By 2030, it will be importing around half its oil, down from 60% currently, and will be entirely self sufficient in natural gas, BP says.
“Import dependency in the U.S. is likely to fall to levels not seen since the 1990s because of improved fuel efficiency and the increased share of biofuels,” said BP’s report.
The internal combustion engine will remain dominant, but U.S. road fuel consumption should decline steadily, as car manufacturers make incremental efficiency improvements and consumers choose smaller vehicles, said BP’s Chief Economist Christof Ruehl.
At the same time biofuels production, mostly corn or sugarcane ethanol produced in the U.S. and Brazil, is expected to more than quadruple to 6.7 million barrels a day by 2030. “For the first time, non-fossil fuels will be major sources of supply growth,” said Ruehl.
BP expects the shale gas revolution that has already transformed the U.S. natural gas market to continue apace. By 2020, U.S. natural gas imports could fall close to zero and by 2030 the country may well be shipping cargoes of liquefied natural gas elsewhere, Ruehl said.
In contrast, China, which imported 54% of its oil and 13% of its gas in 2010, will see import dependency soar. By 2030, BP projects that the country will import 80% of its oil and 40% of its gas. Ten years ago, China was importing just 25% of its oil and no natural gas, so this will be a jarring transformation.
These figures go a long way to explain why state-controlled Chinese companies are on a multi-billion dollar spending spree, snapping up foreign companies in every corner of the world so it can exert greater influence on the international oil and gas flows on which it will be so dependent.
But these acquisitions can only go so far. Even assuming, as BP does, that China’s economic growth becomes far less energy intensive after 2020, the country still faces a big energy problem.
“The scale of China’s energy requirements is such that it has an impact on global energy markets, and prices. Energy prices (or supplies) could indeed become a temporary constraint on growth,” said BP.
For the U.S., this data is perhaps one small sign that predictions of the country’s inexorable slide against an unstoppable China are premature.
Source: http://blogs.wsj.com
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Investors Beware: Hidden Dangers of Increasing U.S. Dependence on Canadian Oil Sands
Canada is the biggest supplier of oil imports to the United States. Increasingly, those imports come from its vast reserves of oil sands. Is the growing U.S. dependence on Canadian oil sands a win-win deal for both countries, crucial for U.S. energy security, and a source of jobs and economic growth, as American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard claims? Is the development of Canadian oil sands "the most destructive project on earth", as a Canadian environmental report calls it? What pitfalls for policy makers and investors lie hidden in the heated rhetoric coming from both sides in the oil sands debate?
The debate places much emphasis on how just dirty or clean oil from the Canadian sands is compared with the alternatives. Detractors prefer to call them "tar sands" to project an image that is as dirty as possible. (Both "oil sands" and "tar sands" are popular terms; purists prefer "bituminous sands.") They cite data showing that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for a barrel of oil from Canadian sands run from three to as much as seven times as high as from a barrel of conventional Texas crude. Oil sand supporters cite different numbers that indicate only 5 to 15 percent more GHG emissions from the sands than from conventional oil.
Surprisingly, the widely differing numbers do not come from competing scientific teams. Instead, both sides draw on the same studies, like this one from the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy. A closer look at the underlying data shows that two factors account for the gap between the "clean" and "dirty" numbers for oil sands.
One is whether GHG emissions are measured on a "well-to-tank" basis or a "well-to-wheels" basis. Most of the extra GHG emissions for oil sands come from the energy-intensive process of getting the gunky bitumen out of the ground, upgrading it to refinery quality, and then refining it. That is the well-to-tank part. Subsequent highway use of the fuel, regardless of its source, produces the bulk of GHG emissions for the whole well-to-wheels fuel cycle. As a matter of simple arithmetic, then, moving from a well-to-tank measure to a well-to-wheels measure makes oil sands look relatively less dirty.
The second source of the gap between the clean and dirty numbers lies in what oil sands are compared to. Oil sands detractors like to use U.S. domestic crude as the basis for comparison. On a well-to-tank basis, DOE data show that production of diesel fuel from Canadian sands emits two and a half times more GHG than the average for diesel from domestic crude. But domestic crude is a poor basis for comparison. We use all our domestic crude first; after that, we have to go out and import the rest. The decision to use more or less oil from Canadian sands means importing correspondingly less or more from other sources. It turns out that almost all U.S. oil imports are low quality, heavy, or high in sulfur, meaning more emissions from extraction and refining. Long-distance transportation adds more emissions. All things considered, then, it appears that oil from Canadian sands is about 10 percent dirtier than crude from Nigeria (8 percent of imports) and 42 percent dirtier than oil from Mexico (12 percent of imports) on a well-to-tank basis. The gap is even less on a well-to-wheels basis.
So what do we really learn from parsing the DOE emissions data? We learn that although oil from Canadian sands is dirtier than average, no oil is really clean. As far as GHG emissions are concerned, what really matters is the total quantity of oil that is used. Where it comes from makes some difference, but a fairly small one.
Our discussion of the environmental impact of Canadian oil sand development would be incomplete if it stopped with the GHG issue. There are also major adverse effects on the local environment. One big issue is land reclamation. Much of the bitumen is recovered by surface mining, which leaves a moonlike landscape in place of the original boreal forests and wetlands. Water is another issue. Both surface and subsurface extraction of bitumen use vast quantities of fresh water and leave behind huge storage ponds full of toxic tailings. Candice Beaumont, an industry supporter who thinks oil sands may help delay "peak oil," describes the situation this way: "If a bird flies over a river near the oil sands, the bird dies just from flying over the river. It's that toxic. They are just dumping all the waste into the waterways. If you did that in the U.S. you would be in jail." (She discounts environmental impacts on the grounds that few people live in the main mining areas.)
Canadian authorities, to their credit, require that producers restore the land and water, and deposit funds in escrow to ensure that they do so. However, critics question the adequacy of the regulations. They point out that restoration technology is poorly demonstrated--very little land and none of the most toxic tailing ponds have actually been restored as yet. Furthermore, they argue that the required escrow deposits are not adequate to protect against potential disasters like a major wastewater spill.
Because environmental concerns cannot be entirely dismissed, oil sands supporters play the national security card. As the American Petroleum Institute's Jane Van Ryan puts it, "Every barrel imported from Canada could replace one from a less secure source, adding to our energy security and benefiting our economy." To evaluate the energy security argument, we have to think both about the nature of the oil security threat and that of the global oil market.
One aspect of the security threat is logistical. If, say, a civil war cut off supplies from Nigeria, the United States would have to scramble to find alternative sources. Contracts would have to be renegotiated. Tankers would have to be rerouted. Refineries would have to be reconfigured to handle a different type of crude. Even if those adjustments were eased by releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, there would be short-term costs.
A second aspect of the security threat comes from oil price volatility. Oil is an import into virtually everything produced in the economy, and a major component of the cost of living. Sharp spikes in oil prices caused by war, politics, natural disasters, or industrial accidents send shockwaves through the whole economy.
A third security concern is who ends up pocketing the vast revenues generated by high oil prices. It has become a cliche to point out that not all oil producers are among America's closest friends. At worst, oil money funds authoritarian governments, the weapons programs of hostile states, and terrorism.
What could be better, then, than to replace oil from unstable countries like Nigeria with oil from friendly, democratic, and near-by Canada? It sounds good, but when you think about it, the security benefits are less than they seem. Again, consider a hypothetical Nigerian civil war. How much would it matter if, before the war started, Canadian output had expanded by enough that the United States was no longer an importer of Nigerian crude? It would not matter very much, because the global oil market operates as a single pool. Oil prices everywhere would spike as other countries scrambled to replace Nigerian oil. The dictators, hostile arms programs, and terrorist training centers we worry about would still get their inflow of new money. The U.S. economy would still be set back by higher import costs, unless, perhaps, our friendly neighbors to the north generously agreed to keep selling us oil at the low, pre-crisis price. True, there would still be logistical benefits to a short pipeline link with a stable Canada compared with a long sea route to a volatile Nigeria, but those would be of a second order of magnitude. For national security, as for the environment, the biggest part of the threat lies in excessive total consumption of oil, not in the specific sources from which that oil comes.
The preceding discussion of environmental and security issues reveals the hidden pitfalls of growing U.S. dependence on Canadian oil sands.
The pitfall for U.S. policy makers is that stable and abundant Canadian supplies will serve as an excuse to avoid the hard work of implementing a rational energy policy. Such a policy would be one that accounted for the full cost of every unit of energy from every source, new and old, and imposed those costs on the end user through higher prices. Meanwhile, Canadian policy makers would hopefully make sure that producers were pricing in the full costs of contingent liabilities from land reclamation and wastewater spills. A well-coordinated set of policies would place appropriate charges against all forms of energy, but oil from Canadian sands would take one of the biggest hits. Yes, such a policy would substantially increase end-user energy prices in the United States, but once the transition was complete, the economy would be strengthened, not weakened. As I have argued elsewhere, the one thing the country definitely cannot afford is "affordable energy."
The pitfall for investors is that putting money into the development of Canadian oil sands amounts to a bet that both the United States and Canada will, for the foreseeable future, remain committed to pro-producer policies that are non-rational from the point of view of broader national interests. True, that is not a completely stupid bet. Oil has a strong lobby on both sides of the border, and both governments are currently committed to further oil-sand development. But that might change.
It would be a mistake for investors to fool themselves with the arguments their own lobbyists are using to underplay the environmental impact of oil-sand development and overplay its national security benefits. Experience shows that a crisis can quickly shift public sentiment, and when that happens, politicians tend to run for cover. A generation ago, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island shifted sentiment against nuclear power. Last summer, BP's blowout in the Gulf of Mexico did the same for offshore drilling. A dramatic climate event like an ice-free summer on the Arctic Ocean or a burst dam on a big Alberta tailings pond could do the same for Canadian oil sands. At such moments policy can shift quickly from irrationally permissive to irrationally restrictive. Investors beware.
Source: http://oilprice.com
The debate places much emphasis on how just dirty or clean oil from the Canadian sands is compared with the alternatives. Detractors prefer to call them "tar sands" to project an image that is as dirty as possible. (Both "oil sands" and "tar sands" are popular terms; purists prefer "bituminous sands.") They cite data showing that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for a barrel of oil from Canadian sands run from three to as much as seven times as high as from a barrel of conventional Texas crude. Oil sand supporters cite different numbers that indicate only 5 to 15 percent more GHG emissions from the sands than from conventional oil.
Surprisingly, the widely differing numbers do not come from competing scientific teams. Instead, both sides draw on the same studies, like this one from the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy. A closer look at the underlying data shows that two factors account for the gap between the "clean" and "dirty" numbers for oil sands.
One is whether GHG emissions are measured on a "well-to-tank" basis or a "well-to-wheels" basis. Most of the extra GHG emissions for oil sands come from the energy-intensive process of getting the gunky bitumen out of the ground, upgrading it to refinery quality, and then refining it. That is the well-to-tank part. Subsequent highway use of the fuel, regardless of its source, produces the bulk of GHG emissions for the whole well-to-wheels fuel cycle. As a matter of simple arithmetic, then, moving from a well-to-tank measure to a well-to-wheels measure makes oil sands look relatively less dirty.
The second source of the gap between the clean and dirty numbers lies in what oil sands are compared to. Oil sands detractors like to use U.S. domestic crude as the basis for comparison. On a well-to-tank basis, DOE data show that production of diesel fuel from Canadian sands emits two and a half times more GHG than the average for diesel from domestic crude. But domestic crude is a poor basis for comparison. We use all our domestic crude first; after that, we have to go out and import the rest. The decision to use more or less oil from Canadian sands means importing correspondingly less or more from other sources. It turns out that almost all U.S. oil imports are low quality, heavy, or high in sulfur, meaning more emissions from extraction and refining. Long-distance transportation adds more emissions. All things considered, then, it appears that oil from Canadian sands is about 10 percent dirtier than crude from Nigeria (8 percent of imports) and 42 percent dirtier than oil from Mexico (12 percent of imports) on a well-to-tank basis. The gap is even less on a well-to-wheels basis.
So what do we really learn from parsing the DOE emissions data? We learn that although oil from Canadian sands is dirtier than average, no oil is really clean. As far as GHG emissions are concerned, what really matters is the total quantity of oil that is used. Where it comes from makes some difference, but a fairly small one.
Our discussion of the environmental impact of Canadian oil sand development would be incomplete if it stopped with the GHG issue. There are also major adverse effects on the local environment. One big issue is land reclamation. Much of the bitumen is recovered by surface mining, which leaves a moonlike landscape in place of the original boreal forests and wetlands. Water is another issue. Both surface and subsurface extraction of bitumen use vast quantities of fresh water and leave behind huge storage ponds full of toxic tailings. Candice Beaumont, an industry supporter who thinks oil sands may help delay "peak oil," describes the situation this way: "If a bird flies over a river near the oil sands, the bird dies just from flying over the river. It's that toxic. They are just dumping all the waste into the waterways. If you did that in the U.S. you would be in jail." (She discounts environmental impacts on the grounds that few people live in the main mining areas.)
Canadian authorities, to their credit, require that producers restore the land and water, and deposit funds in escrow to ensure that they do so. However, critics question the adequacy of the regulations. They point out that restoration technology is poorly demonstrated--very little land and none of the most toxic tailing ponds have actually been restored as yet. Furthermore, they argue that the required escrow deposits are not adequate to protect against potential disasters like a major wastewater spill.
Because environmental concerns cannot be entirely dismissed, oil sands supporters play the national security card. As the American Petroleum Institute's Jane Van Ryan puts it, "Every barrel imported from Canada could replace one from a less secure source, adding to our energy security and benefiting our economy." To evaluate the energy security argument, we have to think both about the nature of the oil security threat and that of the global oil market.
One aspect of the security threat is logistical. If, say, a civil war cut off supplies from Nigeria, the United States would have to scramble to find alternative sources. Contracts would have to be renegotiated. Tankers would have to be rerouted. Refineries would have to be reconfigured to handle a different type of crude. Even if those adjustments were eased by releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, there would be short-term costs.
A second aspect of the security threat comes from oil price volatility. Oil is an import into virtually everything produced in the economy, and a major component of the cost of living. Sharp spikes in oil prices caused by war, politics, natural disasters, or industrial accidents send shockwaves through the whole economy.
A third security concern is who ends up pocketing the vast revenues generated by high oil prices. It has become a cliche to point out that not all oil producers are among America's closest friends. At worst, oil money funds authoritarian governments, the weapons programs of hostile states, and terrorism.
What could be better, then, than to replace oil from unstable countries like Nigeria with oil from friendly, democratic, and near-by Canada? It sounds good, but when you think about it, the security benefits are less than they seem. Again, consider a hypothetical Nigerian civil war. How much would it matter if, before the war started, Canadian output had expanded by enough that the United States was no longer an importer of Nigerian crude? It would not matter very much, because the global oil market operates as a single pool. Oil prices everywhere would spike as other countries scrambled to replace Nigerian oil. The dictators, hostile arms programs, and terrorist training centers we worry about would still get their inflow of new money. The U.S. economy would still be set back by higher import costs, unless, perhaps, our friendly neighbors to the north generously agreed to keep selling us oil at the low, pre-crisis price. True, there would still be logistical benefits to a short pipeline link with a stable Canada compared with a long sea route to a volatile Nigeria, but those would be of a second order of magnitude. For national security, as for the environment, the biggest part of the threat lies in excessive total consumption of oil, not in the specific sources from which that oil comes.
The preceding discussion of environmental and security issues reveals the hidden pitfalls of growing U.S. dependence on Canadian oil sands.
The pitfall for U.S. policy makers is that stable and abundant Canadian supplies will serve as an excuse to avoid the hard work of implementing a rational energy policy. Such a policy would be one that accounted for the full cost of every unit of energy from every source, new and old, and imposed those costs on the end user through higher prices. Meanwhile, Canadian policy makers would hopefully make sure that producers were pricing in the full costs of contingent liabilities from land reclamation and wastewater spills. A well-coordinated set of policies would place appropriate charges against all forms of energy, but oil from Canadian sands would take one of the biggest hits. Yes, such a policy would substantially increase end-user energy prices in the United States, but once the transition was complete, the economy would be strengthened, not weakened. As I have argued elsewhere, the one thing the country definitely cannot afford is "affordable energy."
The pitfall for investors is that putting money into the development of Canadian oil sands amounts to a bet that both the United States and Canada will, for the foreseeable future, remain committed to pro-producer policies that are non-rational from the point of view of broader national interests. True, that is not a completely stupid bet. Oil has a strong lobby on both sides of the border, and both governments are currently committed to further oil-sand development. But that might change.
It would be a mistake for investors to fool themselves with the arguments their own lobbyists are using to underplay the environmental impact of oil-sand development and overplay its national security benefits. Experience shows that a crisis can quickly shift public sentiment, and when that happens, politicians tend to run for cover. A generation ago, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island shifted sentiment against nuclear power. Last summer, BP's blowout in the Gulf of Mexico did the same for offshore drilling. A dramatic climate event like an ice-free summer on the Arctic Ocean or a burst dam on a big Alberta tailings pond could do the same for Canadian oil sands. At such moments policy can shift quickly from irrationally permissive to irrationally restrictive. Investors beware.
Source: http://oilprice.com
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
US wants trade talks on China wind power 'subsidies'
The US says China is illegally subsidising the production of wind power equipment and has asked the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for talks.
It estimates China has given several hundred million dollars in questionable government grants to its companies which has distorted trade and made it tougher for American exporters.
It is the latest in a series of trade disputes between the two countries.
In 2008, China set up a "Special Fund for Wind Power Manufacturing."
US wind turbine manufacturers, including the giant General Electric and United Technologies want to sell their wares to China, which is potentially the biggest wind turbine market in the world.
'Expressly prohibited'
Its Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, said in a statement: "Import substitution subsidies are particularly harmful and inherently trade distorting, which is why they are expressly prohibited under WTO rules."
The announcement follows a filing in September by the United Steelworkers Union (USW) which listed a number of industries it accused China of subsidising or otherwise distorting trade from non-nationals.
It included a complaint about China's restrictions on rare earth minerals, which are used in production of wind turbines, electric vehicles, solar cells and energy efficient lighting.
The trade representative announced no decision on that, but spokeswoman Nefeterius McPherson said the United States was "very concerned about China's export restraints on rare earth materials, antimony and tungsten" and could still file a case on that at the WTO.
China has made some moves to open up the wind turbine market to outside countries.
It no longer requires foreign companies bidding for large-scale wind power projects in China to have had experience in China.
Source: BBC
www.bbc.co.uk
It estimates China has given several hundred million dollars in questionable government grants to its companies which has distorted trade and made it tougher for American exporters.
It is the latest in a series of trade disputes between the two countries.
In 2008, China set up a "Special Fund for Wind Power Manufacturing."
US wind turbine manufacturers, including the giant General Electric and United Technologies want to sell their wares to China, which is potentially the biggest wind turbine market in the world.
'Expressly prohibited'
Its Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, said in a statement: "Import substitution subsidies are particularly harmful and inherently trade distorting, which is why they are expressly prohibited under WTO rules."
The announcement follows a filing in September by the United Steelworkers Union (USW) which listed a number of industries it accused China of subsidising or otherwise distorting trade from non-nationals.
It included a complaint about China's restrictions on rare earth minerals, which are used in production of wind turbines, electric vehicles, solar cells and energy efficient lighting.
The trade representative announced no decision on that, but spokeswoman Nefeterius McPherson said the United States was "very concerned about China's export restraints on rare earth materials, antimony and tungsten" and could still file a case on that at the WTO.
China has made some moves to open up the wind turbine market to outside countries.
It no longer requires foreign companies bidding for large-scale wind power projects in China to have had experience in China.
Source: BBC
www.bbc.co.uk
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)