U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department will no longer be the “handmaiden” of the oil and gas industry and will conduct tougher environmental reviews of proposals to drill on public lands. Criticizing the Bush and administration for turning federal lands into a “candy store” for the petroleum industry, Salazar told reporters, “The difference is in the prior administration the oil and gas industry essentially were the kings of the world.” He said lax leasing policies “ran afoul of communities, carved up the landscape, and fueled costly conflicts that created uncertainty for investors and industry.”

Salazar said he was ordering federal land managers to get out from behind their desks and to visit proposed leasing sites to evaluate the environmental and social impacts of drilling. The stricter review process would not reduce the amount of oil and gas extracted from federal lands, Salazar said, but would ensure that drilling was done in a more responsible manner. (more…)

The headline on Tuesday’s editorial in Investor’s Business Daily – “Get the Frackin’ Gas” – is both clever and on the mark. The publication gets into trouble, however, when the body of its editorial veers into mischaracterizing ProPublica’s reporting on the environmental risks that need to be dealt with to produce the huge amounts of natural gas available underground in the United States.

Our reporters, led by Abrahm Lustgarten, have researched and written more than 50 stories on the subject over the past 18 months and are as expert on the topic as anyone in America.

Here is what is beyond dispute: The gas is highly desirable as a fuel, because it burns relatively cleanly and produces less greenhouse gas per unit of energy than oil or coal. There is lots of it obtainable within the U.S. using an enhanced version of an old drilling technology, called hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” – much more than was widely supposed just a few years ago. That means using natural gas to power cars and electrical generation doesn’t require sending huge sums abroad, weakening the dollar and strengthening countries that aren’t particularly friendly to ours – Russia, Iran and Venezuela among them.

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Dubai’s debt woes could have an impact on a key experiment in the renewable energy sector.

In late November, Dubai indicated that its state-controlled investment firm Dubai World needed to restructure $26 billion in debt, sending a shock through global markets.

Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven city-states ruled by hereditary clans. It is largely bankrolled by neighboring Abu Dhabi, which uses Dubai as the UAE business center. (more…)

As the keynote speaker at the Singapore Energy Lecture, Dr. Daniel Yergin was toeing his usual line of optimism on the subject of oil and energy.  As the Founder and Chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associate (CERA), Dr. Yergin has a long career in the energy industry, though one some challenge as upholding the status quo of business and industry.

“The century ahead of us will be defined by energy innovation,” he said in his keynote address.  “We need availability and security of energy, and a depth and diversification of energy sources.”

He spoke of the odd timing of the Copenhagen agenda of lowering carbon emissions (of which fossil fuel energy sources are a key contributor) by 2050, as well as projections that by 2030, there would be a substantial growth of energy needs worldwide.  Some 80% of which these energy demands are to be met by hydrocarbon sources.  Indeed, humanity faces some difficult decisions and conflict in the years ahead: development at what cost?

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Even small amounts of oil leave a fluorescent sheen on polluted water. This oil sheen is difficult to remove—until now. According to a recently published article in the journal Chemosphere, an inexpensive new method has been developed to remove oil sheen by repeatedly pressurizing and depressurizing ozone gas, creating microscopic bubbles that attack the oil so it can be removed by sand filters.

“We are not trying to treat the entire hydrocarbon content in the water — to turn it into carbon dioxide and water — but we are converting it into a form that can be retained by sand filtration, which is a conventional and economical process,” says lead author Andy Hong, University of Utah professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Hong says the technology — for which patents are pending — could be used to clean a variety of pollutants in water and soil, including:

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A group of Colombian farmers has filed a lawsuit against the oil company BP, claiming that construction of a 450-mile pipeline in the mid-1990s has caused landslides, permanently damaging soil and crops and harming livestock.

In the suit filed in a London court, 95 farmers claim that BP Exploration Company ignored evidence that the pipeline would damage the land, and never informed the property owners, many of them illiterate, of the risks.

The pipeline, which delivers as much as 620,000 barrels of crude oil to an export terminal daily, crosses 192 rural villages. Farmers say that during construction, natural vegetation that protected their soil from the elements was removed, leading to significant erosion. (more…)

Last month Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the New York Times an interesting op ed on why America should tax more gasoline. This occurs as the United States is the least forceful OECD country regarding gas tax. US drivers pay on average less than ten euro cents of tax per litre when their German, British, Italian, Turkish or French counterparts pay as much as 60 to 70 cents per litre. Even Australia does better with more than 20 cents per litre.

The situation varies from State to State with Alaska only taxing 26.4 cents per gallon of gasoline while California taxing up to 63.9 cents per gallon. Federal authorities already tax 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel.

Since the United States’ addiction to oil is widely documented and recognized as a threat by both sides of the political spectrum, why shouldn’t it tax oil more to curb the consumption?

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Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have recommended dramatically scaling back oil drilling plans off U.S. coasts and have proposed a ban on oil and gas exploration in the Arctic until oil companies significantly improve their ability to prevent and clean up oil spills.

The non-binding recommendations to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar represent a stark reversal from the pro-drilling policies of the Bush administration; the new administrator of NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, is an oceanographer who has vowed to restore science to federal environmental policy.

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The United States has entered a new energy era, ending a century of rising carbon emissions. As the U.S. delegation prepares for the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December, it does so from a surprisingly strong position, one based on a dramatic 9 percent drop in U.S. carbon emissions over the past two years and the promise of further huge reductions.

Prominent among these carbon-cutting initiatives are stronger automobile fuel-economy standards, appliance efficiency standards, and the potential to heat, cool and light buildings with carbon-free sources of electricity.

On the supply side are efforts supporting the development of U.S. wind, solar and geothermal energy resources.

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NPR’s On Point never disappoints, and their show with Christopher Steiner, author of $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better was no exception. Steiner’s thesis is that as liquid hydrocarbons become all the more difficult to naturally extract and regulation makes them all the more costly to refine and use, prices will inevitably rise. At $20 a gallon, we might not recognize our lives…all for the better, says Steiner.

People will live and buy their locally-grown produce in mixed-use developments clustered around high-speed rail lines. In Steiner’s view, $6 a gallon is an inflection point that begins to redefine the way we live our lives. But, will innovation (or the US government) ever allow prices to remain at that level? Not according to Mark Mills, co-author of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy.

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