August 24, 2010
Wall Street Journal
The wind industry has achieved remarkable growth largely due to the claim that it will provide major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. There's just one problem: It's not true. A slew of recent studies show that wind-generated electricity likely won't result in any reduction in carbon emissions—or that they'll be so small as to be almost meaningless.

August 16, 2010
Slate
They like everything big in Texas, and wind energy is no exception. Texas has more wind generation capacity than any other state, about 9,700 megawatts. (That's nearly as much installed wind capacity as India.) Texas residential ratepayers are now paying about $4 more per month on their electric bills in order to fund some 2,300 miles of new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from rural areas to the state's urban centers.

August 16, 2010
Energy Tribune
In the wake of the Macondo well blowout, we are hearing renewed claims that we must quit using oil, that we must win “the oil end game.” In addition, there are the continuing calls for drastic reductions in carbon-based fuel consumption, and those calls are being amplified thanks to the drought and record-setting heat that has affected parts of the globe in recent weeks.

August 9, 2010
Energy Tribune
Over the past few years, whether the discussion was peak oil or peak natural gas, Matthew Simmons was almost always involved. No longer. Simmons, 67, died suddenly Sunday in Maine. A local paper, the Kennebec Journal, is reporting that Simmons died last night of an apparent heart attack while in a hot tub at his home.

August 5, 2010
Energy Tribune
Imagine this scenario: Politicians at the state and federal levels begin handing out billions of dollars is subsidies so that over the next decade America’s wealthiest people – those with household incomes of $200,000 or more – will be encouraged to buy more vacation homes. Oh, and those homes should be concentrated in the areas around Los Angeles and San Diego.

July 30, 2010
The Daily Beast
Electric cars are all the rage. Last Sunday’s New York Times contained a long profile of Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Tesla Motors, the startup that has produced about 1,000 electric sports cars. On Tuesday, the news was dominated by the announcement of the sticker price ($41,000) of the new Chevrolet Volt. And late Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced a scaled-back energy bill that promises some $400 million in new subsidies for the electric-car business.

July 29, 2010
Energy Tribune
For months, the corn ethanol industry has been pushing the Obama administration for permission to increase the amount of ethanol that can be blended into the US gasoline supply.

July 15, 2010
Energy Tribune
(Note: This article shares a byline with Harry Wertheimer)
An increase in the amount of ethanol in your gasoline won’t hurt your lawnmower…if it’s a push-reel. Otherwise be prepared for big repair bills.

While that sounds alarmist, the threat is real. This fall, the Obama administration will, through the EPA, likely approve a change in federal regulations that will allow gasoline retailers to increase the “blend rate.”

July 14, 2010
Energy Tribune
Today’s announcement that engineering and construction giant Bechtel will join forces with Babcock & Wilcox to build modular nuclear reactors is a big deal.

June 29, 2010
Energy Tribune
We live in the age of video. As a writer, particularly one who writes books, that fact is rather painful. But the reality is that television, and increasingly, video on the Internet – think YouTube, Hulu, etc. – is the dominant medium of our time.

June 25, 2010
The Daily Beast
Tony Hayward’s lips were moving but all I could hear was Ken Lay.

Indeed, the specter of the late Enron CEO was apparent last week during Hayward’s testimony in front of Congress whenever he said something to the effect of “it wasn’t my job” or “I wasn’t directly involved” in the decisions that preceded the blowout of the Macondo well.

June 24, 2010
Energy Tribune
With each passing day, as more news reports explain what happened aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the hours before the accident, it becomes ever clearer that BP’s mismanagement of the Macondo well was responsible for the disastrous blowout in the Gulf of Mexico.

June 18, 2010
Energy Tribune
Back in 2006, George W. Bush declared that the US is “addicted to oil.” Since then, that phrase has been repeated ad nauseum by politicos on both the Left and the Right. But on Tuesday night, President Obama took the addiction meme to an entirely new level of inanity by saying “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.”

June 15, 2010
Energy Tribune
Richard Nixon had an enemies list. And now, so, too, do the corn ethanol scammers.

Last week, Tom Waterman, the editor and publisher of The Ethanol Monitor, published a list of the top ten enemies of ethanol. Here’s the list:

#10: Business Week/Ed Wallace (Bloomberg)
#9: GRIST
#8: “Big Oil”
#7: Grocery Manufacturers Association
#6: David Pimentel
#5: Robert Rapier

June 10, 2010
Slate
The most disgusting aspect of the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico isn’t the video images of oil-soaked birds or the incessant blather from pundits about what BP or the Obama administration should be doing to stem the flow of oil. Instead, it’s the ugly spectacle of the corn ethanol scammers doing all they can to capitalize on the disaster so that they can justify an expansion of the longest-running robbery of taxpayers in U.S. history.

June 10, 2010
Energy Tribune
The oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico provides a near-perfect onshore platform for political demagoguery.

June 4, 2010

New Deal 2.0

Nothing. That’s the single most important step that can be taken right now to combat climate change. Yes, that’s a heretical position, but stay with me for a moment and consider these numbers:

– About 1.6 billion people on the planet do not have electricity in their homes.

– India alone has 400 million people who live without electricity.

– The entire continent of Africa, a region with a population of about 1 billion people, about 14% of the world’s population, uses just 3% of the world’s electric power.

June 3, 2010
Energy Tribune (Note: This piece was co-authored with Xina Xie and Michael J. Economides)
China, which has struggled in recent years to keep up with booming domestic demand for oil products, may soon have a major excess in refining capacity.

May 27, 2010
Energy Tribune
BP and many other people watching the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico are desperately hoping that the company’s current effort to kill the well by pumping heavy mud into it will finally stanch the flow of oil.

May 26, 2010
Washington Examiner
The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is providing barrels of new ammunition to pundits on both the Right and the Left who contend we have to end our "addiction" to oil.

Repeating this meme - which we've been hearing non-stop since President George W. Bush used it in his 2006 State of the Union speech -- allows pundits to sound professorial and rational. The term "addiction" is a loaded term that appeals directly to the self-help/self-improvement genre that Americans are predisposed to accept.

May 13, 2010
New York Times
ON Wednesday, John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman introduced their long-awaited Senate energy bill, which includes incentives of $2 billion per year for carbon capture and sequestration, the technology that removes carbon dioxide from the smokestack at power plants and forces it into underground storage. This significant allocation would come on top of the $2.4 billion for carbon capture projects that appeared in last year’s stimulus package.

May 11, 2010
Forbes.com
The growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has, predictably, resulted in a new chorus of voices calling for increased use of renewable energy sources. But over the past five decades renewables have actually been losing market share.

May 10, 2010
The Daily Beast
We’ve seen taxpayer bailouts of Chrysler, GM and the big Wall Street banks. Now, thanks in part to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s virtually certain that the Obama administration will bail out the ethanol industry by increasing the amount of ethanol that can be blended into gasoline. That means that U.S. consumers will be compelled to buy a new blend of gasoline called E15 (containing up to 15% ethanol) that is inferior to conventional fuel. And here’s the real insult: that new fuel blend may well damage your car, boat, or lawnmower.

April 30, 2010
Energy Tribune
As the first oil from the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico starts reaching the Louisiana coast, here are a few thoughts on the spill and what it will mean over the coming months:

1. This a “reputational disaster” for the entire US offshore business. That’s the assessment of David Pursell, a managing director at Tudor Pickering Holt and Company, a Houston-based energy investment banking firm. The results of that will likely be:

April 25, 2010
Washington Post
Americans are being inundated with claims about renewable and alternative energy. Advocates for these technologies say that if we jettison fossil fuels, we'll breathe easier, stop global warming and revolutionize our economy. Yes, "green" energy has great emotional and political appeal. But before we wrap all our hopes -- and subsidies -- in it, let's take a hard look at some common misconceptions about what "green" means.

1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.

April 24, 2010
Wall Street Journal
Oil, and foreign oil in particular, has been a favorite whipping boy for American politicians since the 1970s. They say that we are "addicted" to oil, that oil fosters terrorism and that we can "win the oil endgame." While those claims are effective at rousing the masses, here's the reality: The world isn't using too much oil. It's not using enough.

April 23, 2010
Energy Tribune
Offshore drilling, particularly in deep water, makes the action available at Las Vegas casinos look almost tame.

The fire and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon earlier this week provides yet another example of just how complex and dangerous the energy business can be. Sure, poker players in Vegas can wager tens of thousands of dollars at a time. But consider this: the lost revenue to BP – just from the loss of the oil production from the well being drilled by the Deepwater Horizon – amounts to about $600,000 per day.

April 12, 2010
Energy Tribune
Back in 1999, Peter Huber and Mark Mills wrote a piece for Forbes titled “Dig more coal – the PCs are coming.” That article, and subsequent pieces written by Huber and Mills, made clear their belief that increased use of electronic equipment, from personal computers to cell phones, was going to mean dramatic increases in electricity demand.

March 25, 2010
Energy Tribune
The wind energy lobbyists love to claim that installing new wind turbines is the cheapest form of new electricity generation capacity. In fact, I heard that very claim while at a party here in Austin a few weeks ago. But as usual, there’s the hype and there’s the reality.

March 23, 2010
Energy Tribune
Last week, Gallup released the findings of a survey which found that just 28% of Americans worry “a great deal” about global warming. In fact, global warming ranked eighth among environmental concerns, behind other worries like drinking water pollution, pollution of rivers and lakes, toxic waste, air pollution, and loss of tropical rain forests.

March 16, 2010
Energy Tribune
Today, the Governor’s Wind Energy Coalition, a group that represents governors from 29 states, will send a report to Congress and the White House urging the federal government to increase use of wind energy and to require utilities to derive 10% or more of their electricity from renewable sources no later than 2012.

March 12, 2010
Energy Tribune
(This article was co-authored with Michael Economides and Xina Xie)
China and Russia have reached an initial agreement on pricing of natural gas from Russia. According to a recent statement by Zhang Guobao, the deputy director of China’s powerful National Reform and Development Commission, Russia will supply China about 2.5 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas per year, starting in 2015. Although there was no mention of the actual price, Zhang said that the agreement “symbolized that the pricing negotiation had gone through the most difficult step.”

March 5, 2010
Energy Tribune
Oh the irony. This morning, the Des Moines Register is reporting on the death of a piece of legislation known as SF 2359. The bill would have required that all gasoline sold in Iowa contain at least 10% ethanol. But Iowa legislators couldn’t garner enough political support for the bill.

March 2, 2010
Wall Street Journal
Imagine this scenario: The oil and gas industry launches an aggressive global drilling program with a new type of well. Thousands of these new wells, once operational, emit a noxious odor so offensive that many of the people living within a mile of them are kept awake at night. Some are even forced to move out of their homes. It's easy to predict the reaction: denunciations of the industry, countless lawsuits, and congressional investigations.

March 1, 2010
Energy Tribune
I used to adore the opinion page of The New York Times. Whatever was printed there had to be the closest thing to the gospel truth handed down since Paul got knocked on his arse while heading to Damascus. I assumed only the smartest people were allowed to preach from the media world’s most hallowed pulpit.

February 23, 2010
Energy Tribune
Modular nuclear reactors are gaining momentum. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Babcock & Wilcox, a division of Houston-based McDermott International, had signed agreements with a trio of companies that could help Babcock & Wilcox get federal approval for its proposed modular reactor, a unit that would generate up to 140 megawatts.

February 18, 2010
Energy Tribune
What a difference 12 months makes. Almost exactly one year ago, the popular, newly minted president, Barack Obama, was telling Congress that he wanted “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.”

February 16, 2010
Counterpunch
When it comes to energy issues, Thomas Friedman simply doesn’t care about the facts.

February 12, 2010
Energy Tribune
(Note: This story co-written with Xina Xie)
The 1997 UN meetings in Japan about climate issues did more than give birth to the term “Kyoto Protocol” they also created the concept of “carbon capital.” And over the past few years, no other country has capitalized on that concept more than China, which is collecting major subsidies from the international community for its energy projects.

February 10, 2010
Energy Tribune
Some headlines are so telling, that you don’t really need to write the story to go with them. So I’ll keep this story short and focus primarily on the facts that were revealed by the Earth Policy Institute last month. The think tank reports that in 2009, US ethanol distilleries consumed 107 million tons of grain.