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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (8777)	11/17/2008 11:00:01 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24233

An idea to fast-track alternative power Posted by David Beard, Boston.com Staff November 16, 2008 05:33 PM By David Beard, Globe Staff How can the Bay State jump-start alternative power generation? One idea: give the state the power to approve small-scale power generating plants. Massachusetts would like that authority, a decision already granted to state officials for the Bay State’s neighbors, Ian Bowles, the state’s secretary for energy and environment, said on Sunday. The move could accelerate the ability to get beyond fossil fuels. Now the state can approve only sites that would provide 100 megawatts of energy or more, although authorities in other New England states can approve sites with 10 or 20 megawatts, Bowles told a conference today at MIT’s Stata Center sponsored by Mass Climate Action Network. State officials in Vermont, Bowles said, have 100 percent jurisdiction. Bowles also urged the hundreds of students and grass-roots environmental activists in attendance to keep challenging local efforts to maintain high energy conservation standards. For example, if a big-box store seeks to open in a community, Bowles said, make sure to press the company and local officials to include solar energy in it. The state is committed by 2020 to get emissions at least 10 percent below 1990 levels. A theme of the conference looked at ways residents could bypass state solutions in cutting back home power, discretionary driving, etc. One energy conservation leader noted that in 2006, NASA scientist and global warming expert James Hansen said we had 10 years to make serious inroads in cutting carbon emissions – or climate change would be irreversible. The conservation leader, David Gershon, told the crowd at MIT that Nobel Peace Prize winner Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the UN Intergovernmental Agency on Climate Change, said we must take drastic action before 2012. That’s not enough time, Gershon told the conference Sunday, to rely on legislation, taxation and protest to push for rapid transformation. Instead, neighbors must collaborate now to reduce the nearly half of energy usage that is residential based. ‘’The old thought was there’s an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ The new thinking says there’s only a ‘us,’ ‘’ said Gershon, CEO of the Empowerment Institute and the author of “The Low Carbon Diet: A 30-Day Program To Lose 5,000 Pounds.’’ ‘’We seem to be thinking like we have a lot of time to solve these problems, and we don’t.’’ Gershon, in conjunction with the Mass Climate Action Network, hopes to organize 10 communities in the state to commit by spring to reduce energy use drastically. He says that the communities, to be formed by spring, will try to get 25 percent of their households to cut 25 percent of their carbon emissions within three years. Another wave of communities could be organized to begin by fall 2009, Gershon said. boston.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (8777)	11/30/2008 6:17:21 PM
From: Ron	Respond to of 24233

Pullback in the Oil Patch Oil Majors Cut Back on New Wells as Prices Fall Petro-Canada's decision to scrap a big oil-sands project is the latest among 17 energy projects put on hold or canceled due to plunging oil prices By Steve LeVine Until recently, the oil sands of Canada were heralded as a secure and potentially lucrative substitute for Middle East crude oil. But on Nov. 17, Petro-Canada (PCZ) became the latest company to call a halt to its work in the tar-rich province of Alberta. The Calgary-based company planned to open a 140,000 barrels-a-day oil sands project by 2011. But now Petro-Canada says the price of oil simply doesn't justify the project's construction costs, which have soared by 50% in just the last year, to about $24 billion. "We're going into tough times," Petro-Canada Chief Executive Ron A. Brenneman told reporters on Nov. 25. "It's more important to us to get the costs right than to meet a predetermined schedule." When oil prices surged over the last two years to $147 a barrel, they generated a flood of energy projects previously regarded as prohibitively expensive. But now a plunge in prices to a three-year low of about $50 is having the opposite impact. From Canada, to Russia, to Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, oil companies are slashing planned capital spending on wells and refineries—the energy infrastructure the world still depends on. In a Nov. 19 report, Morgan Stanley (MS) lists 17 specific energy projects that have been delayed or canceled since October alone, in addition to across-the-board capital-spending cuts by a dozen companies. Most Big Oil corporations (the six biggest producers, including ExxonMobil (XOM)) have yet to announce any cutbacks, but they are expected to do so. Credit Suisse (CS) sees a 5%-to-10% drop in the $342 billion in capital spending planned for 2009 by the 26 largest global integrated oil companies, including national producers such as Saudi Aramco and Gazprom. Some predict worse. "Companies are whacking [capital spending] by 20%," says Christopher Ruppel, an analyst with the Greenwich (Conn.)-based brokerage Execution. EXPENSIVE PROCESS Among the hardest-hit regions is Alberta. Its tar-rich sands are estimated to hold about 175 billion barrels of oil, second in volume only to Saudi Arabia's reserves. Although oil sand is among the most expensive kinds of petroleum on the planet to extract, these projects would be profitable at $85 to $95 a barrel, a level surpassed in the price surge earlier this year. But now nearly every major oil sand development has been put on hold, including expansions planned by Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) and Suncor Energy (SU). Elsewhere in the global oil patch, expansion of a giant Kazakhstan gas field has been postponed, and construction of the critical Yanbu refinery in Saudi Arabia has been delayed. The cuts may set the stage for another price spike. By late 2010 demand in China, India, and the Middle East—tamped down now because of the gathering worldwide recession—will begin to pass global supply and push prices near or even above $100 a barrel, say analysts. By 2013 spending cutbacks will reduce projected new production capacity by some 3.8 million barrels a day, or 4% of current supply, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Says Fatih Birol, chief economist at the Paris-based International Energy Agency: "We may end up with prices even higher than we saw last summer." LeVine is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Washington bureau. businessweek.com