oil

Notable quotable

“Oh, yeah? That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.” — President George W. Bush, upon hearing that numerous analysts are predicting $4/gallon gasoline

Big Energy promotes Big Energy at Houston energy conference

Today's first panel focused on "supply-side solutions" and featured quite a line-up:

• Dana Flanders, President, Chevron Technology Ventures
• James Hackett, Chairman, President, and CEO, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation
• Thad Hill, Executive Vice President and President, NRG Texas
• Robert Kelly, Founding Director, DKRW Energy LLC
• Aubrey McClendon, Chairman of the Board, CEO and Director, Chesapeake Energy Corporation

This being a veritable who's who of the old energy economy, I was interested to see what they would say when among friends, as it were.

While it started out positive, with Chevron's Flanders citing efficiency ("a barrel saved is a barrel found") as the most promising new technology, things went downhill quickly as the discussion turned to the promise of oil shale and other unconventional fossil fuels like tar sands and liquid coal.

For his part, NRG's Hill repeated the talking points the nuclear industry is aggressively pushing these days. He referred to the nuclear waste issue as "not that big of a problem" and cited politics as the only real obstacle. Somehow I think the people of Nevada might disagree. And despite shockingly serious recent incidents in Japan and here in the U.S. at the Davis Besse facility in Ohio, Hall claims that nukes have had a "phenomenal safety record."

The most interesting -- and perhaps telling -- comments came from the head of Anadarko, one of the biggest oil exploration companies in the world. After some platitudes around environmentalism in regards to more drilling, particularly in the Arctic Refuge, he went on the attack.

Mr. Straight Talk voted against requiring double-hulled tankers after the biggest oil spill

You’re likely aware that the notorious Exxon Valdez case is back in court yet again. Yesterday, the Most Profitable Company of All Time argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that it shouldn’t have to pay $2.5 billion in damages to Alaskans harmed by the spill. (That was reduced from the original $5 billion, but Exxon […]

Could Canadian oil be the most destructive on earth?

Check out this new report from Environmental Defence Canada. The title sort of says it all: "Canada's Toxic Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project On Earth" (PDF).

I found the title a bit overheated at first, but take a look before you decide. The claim may be debatable, but it's also not mere hyperbole: the tar sands oil extraction very well could be the most destructive project on earth. In fact, it's already yielding catastrophic results for human health, not to mention for a vast swath of North America's ecology. (In any case, I've had the privilege of working on climate policy a bit with one of the authors, Matt Price, and I can attest that he's a smart guy, not prone to exaggeration.)

I won't summarize the study here, but just point out that among the many problems with tar sands oil, is that it can only be extracted and processed with very large energy inputs (which means huge carbon emissions):

Conventional energy vs. renewable energy

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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As all eyes turn toward Texas this week in advance of the Democratic primary, we will see a state that is beginning its transition to a new energy economy. Texas is grappling with a shift the entire nation faces -- and as usual, it's doing it on a big scale.

When it comes to energy and to carbon emissions, Texas is a place of superlatives and contrasts. It has more solar, wind, and biomass resources that any other state; but it's also No. 1 in total carbon emissions.

It is the ancestral home of Big Oil, but it also hosts the world's largest wind farms. It has a very successful renewable energy portfolio standard, but it also has two nuclear power plants in the pipeline to provide power to its rapidly growing population.

A year ago in a watershed deal, a private equity firm working with environmentalists arranged a $45 billion buyout of the state's largest power producer, TXU. As part of the deal, eight of 11 planned new coal-fired power plants were cancelled. However, as many as nine new coal plants remain in the pipeline.

In Texas, we see a contest between conventional and renewable energy resources, and between the past and the future.

Notable quotable

“I have the same feelings about wind as I had about the best oil field I ever found.” — financier and oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens

Is There Will Be Blood a dramatization of peak oil?

In the realm of art, no interpretation of a work can be final, but intriguing hints from no less than writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson suggest that the stunning movie There Will Be Blood is actually a story not about the rise and fall of a man so much as the rise and fall of a commodity: oil.

Of course, even the intentions of the creators -- and in the case of There Will Be Blood, that means principally writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, star Daniel Day-Lewis, cinematographer Robert Elswit, and composer Jonny Greenwood -- don't necessarily prove anything. (After all, Anderson revealed in one interview that he "had no idea what we were doing" until he heard Greenwood's revelatory score.)

But consider what Anderson said in an interview bout the movie with Terry Gross:

We all know what has happened with oil, don't we? We all know the end of the story. It's a bit like Titanic, we all know the boat sinks. The fun of the story is watching how we get there.

Or what he said in an interview with Charlie Rose, in reference to the oil industry's recent fortunes:

I haven't been living in a bubble for the last six years.

Or what the great music critic Alex Ross said of the score in The New Yorker:

Greenwood, too, writes the music of an injured Earth; if the smeared string glissandos on the soundtrack suggest liquid welling up from underground, the accompanying dissonances communicate a kind of interior, inanimate pain. The cellos cry out most wrenchingly when Plainview scratches his name on a claim, preparing to bleed the land.

Too literal an interpretation of what Anderson described to Charlie Rose as "a great boxing match" between the two of the most powerful forces in recent American history -- evangelical religion and the oil industry -- would be pointless.

But when it comes to the controversial ending, we have to consider the possibility that this story is not about an individual, or even an industry. We have no choice, really, because it's only in this context that the finale makes sense.

***SPOILER ALERT*** For those who have seen the movie, or who have no intention seeing the movie but still want to consider the idea, please read on.

Gas pricing, Big Oil, and carbon pricing

Apropos of British Columbia's big announcement, I have some ranting to get off my chest. One of the most frustrating things about U.S. climate policy is the reflexive fear that if we ever raise the price of gas -- or of driving generally -- people will riot in the streets or something. This makes it exceedingly difficult to rearrange the economy away from oil and its carbon contents.

But, of course, the price of gas keeps rising anyway. In fact, crude oil prices have more than tripled over the last half-dozen years, with futures closing above $100 recently.

To be sure, there's a silver lining to higher prices: they really do dampen demand, despite what you hear all the time. But it's a silver lining to a dark and ugly cloud: high energy prices mean that consumers are taking it on the chin -- and especially low-income consumers. And worse, all the revenue from the high prices goes to the energy companies. If prices had risen because of taxes or carbon fees, then the public could be reaping the windfall that big oil is raking in now.

For a decade, lawmakers have balked at the prospect of $20-per-ton carbon taxes (a figure that is sometimes kicked around as a price that would get us on the right track). Eighty dollars per ton sets off screaming and wailing. But those figures translate into an additional 20 to 78 cents, respectively, per gallon at the pump. In the time that we've all been afraid of those comparatively modest figures, the price at the pump has jumped $2 or more.

We could have been intentional about getting ourselves off oil, and about protecting consumers from price spikes. But instead, we've opted for the expensive and volatile route: we'll do nothing and hope for the best.

Now let's just hope we can figure out a cap-and-trade program that doesn't send any price signal to drivers.

Did we say ‘beyond petroleum’?

Never mind.