The New Editor - Energy

Oil and Gas Pipelines in the US

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:23:00 -0700

This is a map of the thousands of oil and gas pipelines in the US.

(Source: US Dept. of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration)

Why exactly is the Keystone Pipeline being held up again?

'Keystone Cops' crippling US economy

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:03:00 -0700

The Financial Post's Dianne Francis:

President Barack Obama has kicked the can down the road by postponing permission to build Canada's Keystone XL oil sands pipeline to Texas until 2013, after the next election.

This decision, in essence, strands the oil sands indefinitely and shuts it out of the U.S. market for years, if not forever.

It's being billed as a temporary setback, but it's a major and devastating development.

The excuse is that a new route is going to be sought to avoid putting pipelines across the aquifer that straddles mid-America. The reality is that the environmental movement, not an aquifer, straddles the United States and cannot be circumvented. The Keystone, and Canada's oil sands, has become the environmental movement's line in the sand in a battle to shut down fossil fuel usage even though there are no alternative fuels for 20 or 30 more years.

Read the whole piece.

Innovative Thinking Creates Solar Bottle Lights in the Philippines

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:11:00 -0600

Smart, green energy created through entrepreneurial thinking.

The Truth About Fracking

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:03:00 -0600

From Reason.tv:

New Weapon Against Warming: "Flatulence Cards" Offset Dog, Human Emissions

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:02:00 -0700

An Australian company is offering carbon offsets for ... dogs, cats, and well ... gas.

National Geographic's Sean Markey writes: (emphasis added)

For 35 Australian dollars (about 27 U.S. dollars), customers of Sydney-based Easy Being Green can offset a year's worth of carbon emissions linked to their dogs, from trips to the vet to, yes, breaking wind.

Making your cat carbon neutral for a year costs U.S.$6, while U.S.$16 offsets two years of flatulence from that special someone.
...

Company spokesperson Murray Hogarth concedes that the "flatulence cards" fall on the "gimmicky" side of the company's otherwise serious product line, which is designed to help consumers and small businesses address greenhouse gas emissions.

Gimmicky product lines? How does one tell?

Energy Independence?

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:07:00 -0700

Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post:

Is there anything more depressing than yet another promise of energy independence in yet another State of the Union address? By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the Union addresses since the oil embargo of 1973 have proposed solutions to our energy problem.

The result? In 1973 we imported 34.8 percent of our oil. Today we import 60.3 percent.

And what does this president propose? Another great technological fix. For Jimmy Carter, it was the magic of synfuels. For George Bush, it's the wonders of ethanol. Our fuel will grow on trees. Well, stalks, with even fancier higher-tech variants to come from cellulose and other (literal) rubbish.

It is very American to believe that chemists are going to discover the cure for geopolitical weakness. It is even more American to imagine that it can be done painlessly. Ethanol for everyone. Farmers get a huge cash crop. Consumers get more supply. And the country ends up more secure.

This is nonsense. As my colleague Robert Samuelson demonstrates, biofuels will barely keep up with the increase in gasoline demand over time. They are a huge government bet with goals and mandates and subsidies that will not cure our oil dependence or even make a significant dent in it.
...

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear.

Wind Farm to Be Built Off Texas Coast; Some Environmentalists Object

tpelia@yahoo.com (Tom Elia) — Thu, 11 May 2006 14:26:00 -0600

From AP:

The nation's largest offshore wind farm will be built off the Padre Island seashore, a critical migratory bird flyway, Texas officials announced Thursday.

Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson lauded what he said would be an 40,000-acre span of turbines about 400 feet tall able to generate energy to power 125,000 homes.
...

Superior Renewable Energy Inc., based in Houston, would build the farm and pay the estimated $1 billion to $2 billion construction costs.

But some environmentalists say the promise of clean energy may not be worth the deaths of countless birds that migrate through the area each year on their way to and from winter grounds in Mexico and Central America.

"You probably couldn't pick a worse location, unless you're trying to settle the issue as to how damaging they are to migratory birds," said Walter Kittelberger, chairman of the Lower Laguna Madre Foundation. Laguna Madre is the strip of water between the mainland and Padre Island.