Renewable energy

The prospect of weaker oil demand in the face of the Euro crisis was balanced this week by warnings from the IEA and Saudi Arabia. Sadad al-Husseini, the former head of Exploration and Production at Saudi Aramco, wrote that "$100 for Brent is quite a correction and it will be a challenge to sustain such a low price beyond the short term"...

Fears of a new phase in the European debt crisis, a decline in oil imports to China in April, and the prospect of a new round of international talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have seen oil prices drop back from recent highs in the past two weeks. Despite all this however, and reports from OPEC that it bolstered supply by 320,000 barrels in April, Brent oil still stands around $112/barrel.

- Thomas Homer-Dixon: Exploring the climate “mindscape” (oil supplies and energy junk)
- Government influence is negative for energy fuel policy
- The German Switch from Nuclear to Renewables
- Scientists’ Arctic drilling plan aims to demystify undersea greenhouse gases
- Ancien directeur de TOTAL: Nouvelles découvertes et gaz de schiste retarderont à peine le pic pétrolier

In this post, I consider the limited impacts of climate policy on fossil-fuel production and discuss estimates of fossil-fuel production in the long run.

The shale gas 'revolution' suffered another blow this week as the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced an investigation into dealings between industry leader Chesapeake Energy and its chief executive Aubrey McClendon. It emerged recently that McClendon had been taking a private stake in each well the company drills and, unbeknownst to shareholders, borrowed over $1 billion against them...

I’ve been giving lectures on Peak Oil for over a decade now, and always look forward to the question period after the main show. It’s an opportunity to interact with the audience and take questions...Here are the top 11, along with brief sample replies and some resources for further reading.

In its quest to find new sources of energy, China is increasingly looking to its western provinces. But the nation’s push to develop fossil fuel and alternative sources has so far ignored a basic fact — western China simply lacks the water resources needed to support major new energy development.

A question that seems to garner a lot of debate whenever the topics of climate change and peak oil are raised is what our future sources of energy might look like. This is a common feature of groups involved in the Transition movement, since the vast majority of us in the north depend so much on finite sources of fossil fuels to power our modern, civilised lifestyles. Ever since the advances of the industrial revolution allowed us to harness the power of coal and oil, we have built our society around the potential of fossil fuels to provide us with the concentrated energy necessary for the processes involved in heavy industry. These days, access to affordable, reliable electricity is seen by many as a basic human need.

In a week in which the Leveson inquiry shone a light on the overlap between big business and politics, news that Shell made £2m an hour in Q1 demonstrated only too well why creating the political will to move away from oil appears to be such an uphill battle.

A new report has just been published which ought to provoke a Copernican revolution in dominant conceptions of renewable energy and of sustainability more generally. The message may not be one that environmentalists want to hear, but it is one that we must all take very seriously, or risk having our good intentions dedicated to goals that cannot actually solve the very real environmental crises that we face.

To mark the release of In Transition 2.0 — an inspirational film about communities printing their own money, growing food, localising their economies and setting up community power stations — I spoke to Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and Transition Totnes, about energy ownership, cooperative finance strategies, and how storytelling can change our expectations of ourselves and our communities.

Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn't feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That's certainly the case with Patricia Frank's Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she's a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.

Approval of hydraulic fracturing for gas in the UK moved a step closer this week as a DECC commissioned report on the seismic impact of drilling at Cuadrilla’s Lancashire operation advised ministers to proceed. The report recommended a tightening of procedures around drilling, including a pre-injection diagnostic phase, and a traffic light warning system halting operations should an earthquake over 0.5 magnitude occur...

-A Little Independent Energy Experiment on the Prairie
-Analysis raises atmospheric, economic doubts about forest bioenergy - report
-NASA one step closer to turning algae into fuel

According to the United Nations, access to reliable and sufficient sources of energy will be critical to meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing poverty and hunger by 2015. Many of the world’s poorest people are rural farmers with no connections to power grids or large-scale energy sources. Most of their day-to-day energy currently comes from the burning of wood and charcoal, practices that contribute to air pollution, deforestation, and the loss of precious time and energy collecting firewood.

Today, Nourishing the Planet introduces five sources of renewable energy that are meeting the demands of poor farmers and allowing them to improve their harvests and their lives.