Will Ohio and Pennsylvania Voters Commit Economic Suicide?

Ohio and Pennsylvania have been enjoying an economic boom as a result of fracking for natural gas in tight rock formations. Good economic times favours the incumbent president in an election. But President Obama and his EPA are predisposed to regulate fracking for oil & gas out of profitable existence, once safely past the next election. They would largely kill Ohio's and Pennsylvania's nascent economic prosperity, as a result.

Obama says that green energy is best, and that "we can't drill our way out of this problem." But a lot of very serious people are saying that, "yes we can drill our way into millions of new jobs!"

Obama is not likely to acknowledge it publicly, but the only entities to profit from a shutdown of US fracking for oil & gas, would be Russia and the OPEC oil states.

H/T Carpe Diem

US Oil Production Reaches 17 Year High, thanks to fracking

More on the US energy boom from horizontal drilling and fracturing

More on shale oil & gas

Nuclear Energy Blog Carnival #126: Excerpts

The 126th Carnival of Nuclear Energy Bloggers is hosted by Entreprenuclear blog

Excerpts:

3. From Rod Adams' blog Atomic Insights

Theo Simon and George Monbiot – Rational discussion about nuclear energy development

http://atomicinsights.com/2012/10/theo-simon-and-george-monbiot-rational-discussion-about-nuclear-energy-development.html

During the past week or so, Rod Adams has been spending quite a bit of time following a discussion about nuclear energy between Theo Simon and George Monbiot. It is a deeply philosophical engagement between two literate and concerned people who view nuclear energy through different lenses and have, so far, reached different conclusions about its value and potential for growth.

Rod provides a third perspective and hopes that the development of smaller reactors may encourage additional deep thinking.

 

4. From the ANS Nuclear Cafe:

Howard Shaffer with a very interesting history of the founding of the anti-nuclear energy movement -- as told last week at UMass Amherst by two of the very persons who helped to found it, Anna Gyorgy and Lionel Delevingne.

http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/10/09/founding-the-anti-nuclear-movement/

Margaret Harding is blogging from the American Nuclear Society-sponsored Indo–US Nuclear Safety Summit in Mumbai, India.  Her notes on the discussions of regulatory issues, emergency risk assessment, international trade relations, economy, politics...

http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/10/11/update-from-mumbai/

http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/10/12/post-2-from-mumbai/

Check ANS Nuclear Cafe http://ansnuclearcafe.org/ for Harding's
continuing updates on news, and views, and traveler's tales, from the
Summit.

 

5. From the Yes, Vermont Yankee blog

Meredith Angwin revisits her area of technical expertise: PWR steam generators.  In "San Onofre Thoughts and Future. I told you so", Angwin quotes some of her earlier posts on the subject. She predicted the plant would be derated but start again. Plant opponents make endless negative predictions, and are all over the airwaves if even one of them comes true.  Angwin decided to trumpet her positive prediction this time. 

San Onofre Thoughts and Future. I told you so.

6. From Nuclear Diner:

Russia Plans to Raise Two Nuclear Submarine Reactors from Sea Floor

The Russian Defense Ministry is planning to raise and scrap two sunken nuclear submarines in the northern Barents and Kara seas. Susan Voss considers the reactors in those submarines and the hazards they may or may not pose. She also looks at Project Azorian, a 1968 CIA attempt to raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
_Entreprenuclear 126 Nuclear Energy Blog Carnival

Read the whole thing

Obama's War on Nuclear Power:

The same Department of Energy loan guarantee office that gave us Solyndra, Fisker, and other boondoggles, working with the White House-connected Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has essentially spiked additional loan guarantees, effectively killing the projects.

For a plant proposed in Maryland, the bad-faith dealings of the administration were so bad that the chairman of Constellation Energy and also the utility project owner, Michael Wallace, wrote in a public letter to OMB in October, 2010:

During the course of our discussions, Constellation Energy and our partners identified a significant problem in the methodology that the OMB requires for the credit cost calculation, a problem that is applicable beyond just our project, and therefore of significant program and policy consequence. Yet in seeking to explore this further, we encountered significant delay and resistance in being able to even engage on the issue[.]

One needs a little understanding of the process to see what's going on. Say our prospective builder of a new nuke (Constellation and partners in this case) seeks a $7.5-billion loan guarantee against the government changing its mind down the road -- i.e., after the necessary government approvals are in place and a bunch of private money has been sunk into the plant. What the OMB demanded was a "credit subsidy cost" in up-front cash for the loan, in addition to the regular interest and fees. This is supposedly to act as an insurance premium against the government having to pay out later for project default. In this case, the OMB calculated a non-trivial amount of $880 million, or almost 12% of the guarantee amount. In the words of Chairman Wallace, "[t]his would clearly destroy the project's economics, or the economics of any nuclear project for that matter."

In comparison, the credit subsidy cost for loan guarantees to projects like Solyndra were zero -- the Stimulus bill allocated $6 billion of taxpayer funds for such costs to "green" projects but none for nuclear. Perhaps someone can explain the accounting logic that has Congress budget funds that will eventually return to the government. _American Thinker

This is Obama's legacy: a war on nuclear a war on coal a war on offshore oil, and a coming oil on shale fracking -- if Obama can just get re-elected first.

For the US to enter an abundant age of energy, it will need to dispense with politicians who war against all reliable forms of energy in order to throw huge sums of money at crony political supporters and their intermittent unreliable energy projects.

An Obama Second Term? Energy Starvation on Steroids

US President Obama is running for re-election in November as an "all of the above energy policy president." But were we to look at the president's actual energy record a bit more closely, we might be less inclined to grant him another four years of power.

Respected energy analyst Geoffrey Styles examines Obama's energy record, and is puzzled by the president's many claims and contradictions, and wonders what Obama is really thinking and planning for America's energy future:

...having focused 90% of its efforts on a set of technologies that look important for the future but will still meet less than 10% of our energy needs for some time to come, they have now hitched their electoral wagon to an oil production surge that they didn't help and partly hindered. I can only imagine that this would be deeply disappointing to those who supported Mr. Obama in 2008 because of his vision for alternative energy and the environment. Nor does it provide much comfort to those who found large portions of that agenda ill-considered or premature. The President's 11th-hour conversion to "all of the above" creates great uncertainty about the course he would pursue with regard to energy for the next four years, if reelected. _Geoffrey Styles

Here is an abbreviated list of Obama's energy record during his first term as US President:

1. Slowing energy production on federal lands. According to a recent report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), energy production decreased 13 percent on federal lands in fiscal year (FY) 2011 when compared to FY 2010. The official moratorium and de facto moratorium as a result of a molasses-like permitting process reduced planned capital and operating investments by $18.3 billion and cost the Gulf more than 900,000 jobs in just the past two years. Federal production in the West has experienced a similar fate: The Administration’s delays on permitting oil and gas projects public lands are preventing economic activity. In Utah and Wyoming, for instance, 20 projects held up by the National Environmental Policy Act process is preventing the creation of 120,905 jobs, $27.5 billion in economic activity, and $139 million in government revenue.
2. Failing to open areas to exploration and development. Where the Administration is destroying energy jobs on federal jobs, it is failing to create them by aggressively opening America’s federal lands and waters to exploration and development. According to a recent study from energy consultant Wood Mackenzie, allowing access to domestic resources and imports of Canadian oil would generate more than 1 million jobs by 2018 and more than 1.4 million jobs by 2030. The federal government would stand to benefit tremendously as well, collecting more than $36 billion as soon as 2015 and more than $800 billion by 2030.
3. Delaying a decision on Keystone XL pipeline. The Keystone XL pipeline would bring up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada to the U.S., but President Obama punted the decision until after the election despite bipartisan support and despite the Department of State’s conclusion that the project would pose no significant environmental risk. The pipeline would create thousands of jobs, and the states through which the pipeline would pass—Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—would benefit greatly. The six states are collectively projected to receive $5.2 billion in property taxes in the course of the 100-year operating life of the pipeline,
4. Tripling down on energy subsidies. America’s addiction to energy subsidies began well before President Obama took office. According to the EIA, the U.S. spent $8.2 billion on energy subsidies in 1999. That spending more than doubled to $16.6 billion in 2007. Rather than eliminating subsidies for all energy sectors, President Obama tripled down by providing $53.2 billion in the 2009 stimulus bill for energy programs. We have a diverse, competitive energy sector, but government subsidies merely concentrate power in Washington. Energy subsidies merely shift labor and capital away from economically viable projects that would actually help grow our economy to those projects that have political preference. Further, subsidies increase the incentive to lobby and perpetuate mediocrity in technological innovation by removing the incentive to lower costs and compete in the marketplace without the subsidy.
5. Stifling all energy projects in red tape. The government’s assault on energy projects is relentless. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce identified 351 energy projects stalled by “not in my backyard” lawsuits, regulatory red tape, and, of course, endless lawsuits from environmental activists who want to quash these projects. Perhaps most surprising is the fact that almost half of these projects (140) are renewable-energy ones. These energy projects could provide a $1.1 trillion injection to the economy and create almost 2 million jobs.
6. Shutting down coal. With 497 billion tons of recoverable coal in the U.S.—enough to provide electricity for 500 years at current consumption rates—coal has the potential to be an important resource long into the future. Regrettably, the Obama Administration has taken actions that significantly reduce coal’s share of America’s energy portfolio now and in the future. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regulatory train wreck will prematurely shut down approximately 20 percent of America’s coal-fired electricity generation—enough to power 50 million homes. The EIA projects that 8.5 percent of the coal-fired generation capacity will come offline in the next four years.
7. Using extreme and unprecedented power. In an unprecedented move, in January 2011, the EPA revoked a water permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2007 for a West Virginia mine. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia struck down those EPA procedures, calling them “unreasonable.” The EPA also proposed a more stringent revision of National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ground-level ozone. Attaining that standard would have exceeded $1 trillion in costs between 2020 and 2030 and destroyed more than 7 million jobs by 2020; it was so devastating economically that President Obama had to request that EPA administrator Lisa Jackson withdraw the agency’s draft for more stringent NAAQS. The EPA’s Cross State Air Pollution Rule, which would compel companies to retire up to seven gigawatts of electricity generation and retrofit up to 576 plants, was struck down recently by a federal appeals court panel, which decided that the rule “transgressed statutory boundaries.” And the EPA, using inadequate and inaccurate information, is threatening to shut down the Pebble Mine in Alaska, one of the world’s largest concentrations of copper, gold, and molybdenum in the world that would create 1,000 high-paying jobs. The companies have not even applied for the permit yet, but the EPA is threatening to veto the permit because of an environmental analysis of a theoretical mine that would not come close to meeting state and federal standards for mining activities.
8. Threatening hydraulic fracturing. The shale gas production as a result of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) has dramatically lowered natural gas prices, saving consumers money through lower energy bills but also lower prices for goods and services. In fact, the Yale Graduates Energy Study Group calculated that in 2010 alone, the consumer surplus (the consumer savings or gain from reductions in price) from shale gas production was worth over $100 billion. The abundance of natural gas makes the U.S. an attractive place to do business, especially for energy-intensive industries. Used in over 1 million wells in the U.S. for more than 60 years, fracking has been successfully used to retrieve more than 7 billion barrels of oil and over 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Just 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is enough to heat 15 million homes for one year. Despite the length of time that hydraulic fracturing has been used, and despite the fact that the states have effectively regulated fracking, the Administration is proposing regulations that would be both unnecessary and duplicative and drive away opportunities for the safe development of affordable, reliable energy. In 2010, unconventional gas supported 1 million jobs in the U.S. and that figure is set to increase to 1.5 million by 2015, with an estimated $3.2 trillion in investments in unconventional gas over the next 25 years.
9. Shutting down Yucca Mountain. The Obama Administration says it wants to pursue nuclear power, but its rhetoric does not match its nuclear policy. Its decision to abandon the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project without any technical or scientific data is a case in point. With nearly $15 billion spent on the project, the data indicates that Yucca would be a safe place to store America’s used nuclear fuel. Yet the Obama Administration decided to terminate the program without having anything to replace it. Absent any nuclear waste disposal options, the U.S. simply will not significantly expand nuclear energy. In fact, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has suspended its reactor licensing activities as a result of this failed policy.
10. Attacking on consumer choice. The federal government finalized new automobile efficiency rules today for cars and light trucks for model years 2017–2025. The rules require an average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) in 2025. The government acknowledges that increased fuel efficiency standards will increase the upfront cost of a vehicle. Although the government also estimates that higher prices will be more than offset by gasoline savings, generally these cost savings assume that the buyer keeps the vehicle for its entire lifespan, which usually doesn’t happen. Further, consumers tend to drive new, fuel-efficient vehicles more, which reduces the estimated price, oil, and emissions savings. Higher prices reduce demand and force people to hold onto their older vehicles longer. Reduced demand means fewer cars produced, which means automakers have to shed jobs. Although not directly applicable to the Administration’s new rule, the Michigan-based consulting firm Defour Group projected that a 56 mpg standard would destroy 220,000 jobs. At the heart of the issue is consumer choice. Consumers have plenty of vehicles to choose from, including more than 160 different models today that get better than 30 mpg. While some may argue that the increased efficiency came as a result of mandated fuel efficiency standards that have been around since the 1970s, fuel efficiency has always been a top priority for consumers—whether they are purchasing compact cars, light-duty trucks, or heavy-duty trucks. The federal government shouldn’t be restricting that choice and determining what producers make and what consumers buy.

Obama and the US energy economy

The future of America's energy and industry depends upon a wise leveraging of the vast US hydrocarbon resource as a "bridge" to the development of advanced, cheaper, safer, scalable, reliable, clean future-generation nuclear reactors.

No thanks to Obama, the US is already benefiting from an expansion of tight oil & gas production. If Obama is re-elected, there is a good chance that his EPA will proceed to clamp down on that one bright spot in the US economy.

With all of Obama's promotion of "green energy projects" and for all the money he has spent, only a relative handful of actual jobs have been created -- most of them only peripherally related to any form of "green energy." And if the truth were told, Obama's "green energy" is more of a hazard to US electrical grids than a help.

Obama has attacked and obstructed nuclear power, coal power, offshore oil & gas, Canadian oil sands, tight oil & gas pipelines, LNG exports, energy projects on federal land, and threatens to tighten the chokehold around US energy production once he no longer needs to worry about re-election.

No wonder Russia's President Putin would like to see Obama re-elected.

China's Grand Green Charade and the Idiots Who Believe It

This article is cross-posted from Al Fin blog

China is losing a lot of money on solar -- even more than Obama lost betting on the intermittent unreliable form of energy!

China’s top ten photovoltaic makers have accumulated a combined debt of 17.5 billion U.S. dollars so far, leading the whole industry to the brink of bankruptcy, data from U.S. investment agency Maxim Group showed.

Goodness. That’s 35 Solyndras!

LDK Solar, the world’s second-largest maker of solar wafers, and Suntech Power, the world’s largest solar panels producer, are the mostly likely to be headed for bankruptcy, Maxim noted. LDK reported a net profit loss of 1.08 billion yuan in the first half of this year, with a total liability of 26.7 billion yuan, about 88 percent of its total assets. 2.42 billion yuan of debts will come due in 2013, compared with a cash pile of only 830 million yuan. With its debt-to-equity ratio at 7.4, the Jiangxi-based LDK has already been in insolvency based on corporate accounting standards in the Europe and the United States, according to Maxim. A bankruptcy filing or restructuring could be needed for LDK, it added. _Reason

Unfortunately for the Chinese people, solar companies in China are devastating the landscape with toxic waste on a monumental scale.

And more than half of China's installed wind power lies fallow -- disconnected from the power grid! Imagine all the wasted resources, just to be able to claim a large installed wind power base.

Land Area Required for Various Forms of Generation But knowledge of the grand green charade of China's wind and solar industries has not reduced the fervour of US green political activists such as Barack Obama or Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. In fact, Senator Reid is indulging in a grand corrupt and nepotistic scheme in his home state of Nevada, involving a public lands give-away to a Chinese solar company and an associated US company involving his own son!

Of course this type of insider political deal is not unusual for either Nevada - style or Chicago - style political operators.

China's grand scheme of infrastructure buildup -- including green infrastructure -- is proving to be something of a big bomb. China has been spending money hand over fist, stalling for time in hope that its big export customers -- Europe and North America -- would pull out of their economic doldrums, and start to buy Chinese products on a grand scale, once again.

China is getting a bit desperate, and cannot help but be relieved every time a foreign sucker -- in Germany, the US, Australia ect. -- gets sucked into another green energy scam.

Yes, China is poisoning itself to build and sell intermittent unreliable products such as big wind and big solar energy generation equipment. But if foreign devils like Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, etc. are stupid enough to buy this junk at high prices, why not? It's not as if China's people can do anything about it.

More: Is Obama facilitating technology transfer and theft to the Chinese?

Obama's War On Coal Leaves US Vulnerable

Energy Fix

The coal-fired electricity projected to be retired over the next five years is more than four times greater than retirements executed during the preceding five-year period, a mere 6.5 GW by comparison. The estimated 9 GW of coal-fired capacity retirements expected in 2012 will likely be the largest one-year amount EVER. And that record likely won’t stand very long because 10 GW are projected to be retired in 2015.

...The risks of brownouts and perhaps even blackouts on weekdays challenged by extreme weather loom as a growing risk that could trigger a backlash against emissions regulations, renewable sources of electricity and competitive power markets. _EnergyFix

As Obama fulfills his campaign promise to green supporters to put coal plants out of business -- and to prevent the building of new coal plants -- he is placing the US power grid and US industry in an increasingly vulnerable position.

Obama mad grand promises about the potential for "green energy" and "green energy jobs", but out of the tens of billions wasted on green energy projects, almost all are either bankrupt or struggling.

Put simply: Green energy cannot replace coal

Reading the entire analysis at the energy collective will help you to understand just how badly the green strategies go wrong. You will get the barest hint of how much this grand green strategy will cost American power consumers.

Based on this analysis of replacing all U.S. coal power with clean energy, total U.S. CO2 emissions would also be reduced by almost 22% from 2005 levels; the ACES base year for target CO2 reductions. Assuming other clean energy alternatives are competitive to replacing coal power with natural gas & wind clean power (i.e. $51.50/MT CO2), the total average-annual cost to achieve the ACES ultimate 80% CO2 reduction target would be about $220 Billion/yr. This is equivalent to about $1,835 direct + indirect increased Household annual power related expenses or almost 4% of total average gross Household income. _Green Energy Cannot Replace Coal

The reality will be much worse than even the above very sober analysis reveals. The reality is always worse than what the government promises, than what emotionally earnest advocates promise.

Obama's approach to energy and to the economy has been misguided and ideologically skewed.

From offshore drilling to Canadian oil sands to coal to nuclear, Obama's approach to energy has resulted in a stunting of energy production and a slowing of economic growth. The only exception is in tight oil & gas fracking -- and Obama's EPA came very close to trying to shut down that enterprise -- virtually the only bright spot in Obama's entire economy.

The third world and the emerging world show us what happens when bad energy policies are superimposed upon government corruption, debt, and demographic decline. If the current US president is re-elected, we should expect to see the US more firmly set upon a parallel declining path.

Obama's Green Energy Policy Sinks Itself

Most intelligent people could have predicted that Obama's poorly considered green energy blitz would come to a bad end. But the Obama crew was hoping that it would stay above water at least until after the next election. No such luck.

The Obama Administration’s clean energy program is reminiscent of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. It is taking on water, the crew has no idea of what to do, and the band plays on.

Germany and other EU clean energy advocates are facing up to the reality that they can’t right their economies while heavily subsidizing the so called clean energies that are not commercially viable and are an economic dead weight. In spite of this, President Obama continues to push his clean energy program as the key to our economic future, job creation, and energy independence. Over a 3 year period, spending on so called clean energy technologies more than doubled–$17.9 billion in FY-2007 to $37.2 in FY-2010.

The environmental community and rent-seeker continue to support his policy but unfortunately, the analytical community has jumped ship.

...Technology and energy economics are the main drivers for determining when a new technology is commercially viable. People like the President who don’t care for fossil energy keep underestimating how strongly they are embedded in our economy because of economics and utility. Fracking has resulted in an abundance of natural gas that will slowly replace coal for power generation and will have a role as a transportation fuel. The current alternatives to gasoline and diesel for transportation are too costly with the current technology and no breakthroughs are on the horizon. _Fuel Fix

Obama's green energy blitz was all about paying back campaign bundlers, contributors, and supporters. It was never about jobs and it certainly was never about real energy -- at least as far as those who understood the fundamentals were concerned.

The world is full of poor jerks who are willing to follow a charismatic leader wherever he may go. Mass movements such as carbon hysteria, green dieoff.orgiasm, and peak oil doomerism all attest to that fact.

Never has there been a greater need for independent, competent, and intelligent humans, with the ingenuity to solve the many problems which have always presented themselves to humans since the beginning of the species.

Peak ingenuity, peak competent manpower -- those are the peaks we should be concerned about.

Obama: I'll Do It "The Chicago Way!" A Tale of Two Pipelines

Enbridge has just announced the expansion of its pipeline access to the Gulf of Mexico, to provide an alternative pathway for Canadian oilsands in the wake of the recent Obama rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline northern leg.

Enbridge Oil Sands Alternative via Chicago
When Obama took executive action to prevent the upper leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, environmentalists celebrated as if they had won a victory. But there may be more involved in the story than what was printed in the newspapers or broadcast on the airways and cable channels. Whenever an economic decision is made by a government, sceptical people always ask: "Who benefits?"

Brian Westenhaus takes a look at the recent Enbridge announcement that it is expanding its pipeline network to provide an alternative pathway to the Gulf of Mexico for Canadian oilsands.

Oil flowing through Illinois is subject to local fees and taxes, which enrich the many corrupt FOOs (friends of Obama) who have taken up positions of power there. But one must also wonder what goes on behind the scenes before such a decision is even made.

Keystone XL Bypasses ChicagoAs you can see if you follow the dotted green line representing the Keystone XL pipeline, the pipeline which Obama is stonewalling does not come anywhere close to Illinois or Chicago. In that sense, the pipeline is no good to Obama or all the crazy FOOs in that corrupt state. Unlike the alternative pipeline plan recently announced by Enbridge.

More from GCC

Politics can be a byzantine affair, twisted and labyrinthine in its ways of distributing power and money to those who please the king.

Shale Gas Booms Globally -- Big Green Crashes & Burns

A Shale Gas Summit is being held on the 23rd and 24th of April, in Beijing, to assess the global impacts of the shale gas explosion.

Shale gas revolution created nearly 10% of all new US jobs in 2011

The World Economic Forum report, which highlighted the role that the energy industry can play in reviving the global economy, comes during a presidential election year as candiates argue about high U.S. unemployment and energy policy.

The report said the oil and gas industry contributed 37,000 direct jobs in 2011, which led to the creation of an additional 111,000 indirect jobs during the same period. It said the multiplier effect for solar and wind energy were lower during operation, but higher at up to 3.3 times during construction.

“We always suspected that energy had a vital role to play in the economic recovery but we were still surprised when the data uncovered the magnitude of the sector’s multiplier effects,” Roberto Bocca, head of energy Iidustries at the World Economic Forum, said in a release.

Early success for China's shale gas exploration well drilling: China has perhaps the world's largest deposits of shale gas. Once production of Chinese shale ramps up, world energy markets will never be the same.

Meanwhile South Africa may have a shale gas resource in excess of 485 trillion cubic feet. This is said to be enough to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide hundreds of years of energy for the troubled nation in southern Africa.

In fact, many analysts are beginning to see the oil shale revolution as the energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall crashing down, in terms of global impact.

On the green energy front, the UK is just beginning to assess its £120 billion wind energy blunder, and what it will have to do to recover from the disaster.

And in the US, the magnitude of damage from Obama's misguided pro-green energy policies is still mounting. The jobs destruction from the president's naive approach to national energy policy will continue long after he leaves office.

It’s unclear how much taxpayers spend on the 94 green building initiatives in the form of grants, loans, technical assistance, and tax incentives. That’s because many are combined with larger programs, and are not priced out individually by federal agencies. Equally unclear is the cost benefit of these programs, because two-thirds are not measured for their performance, GAO reported.

...“If you suggest a program that’s part of a hot issue for the President, like energy-efficiency, you’re likely as an agency to get more favor and funding in the budget,” Ellis said. But that practice results in enormous overhead costs for separate program staffs, and paves the way for the type of overlap that undermines the whole effort, Ellis said. “How can you deliver services and achieve the overall goal of saving energy when every cook in the federal government is trying to get their hands in the energy-efficiency pot?” Ellis said. _FiscalTimes

The US Must Have Both Nuclear and Coal: Obama Forbids Both

NewAmerican
An industrial society requires massive amounts of affordable fuels and electrical power. For electrical power, both nuclear and coal are suitable to provide the huge levels of baseload output required. But US President Obama is fighting a war to close down coal plants, while at the same time dragging his feet on allowing safe and revolutionary new nuclear designs to be licensed and approved.

Senator Obama declared a war against coal back in 2008, when he was still running in the Democratic presidential primaries against Hillary Clinton:

Consider candidate Obama’s January 2008 comment to the San Francisco Chronicle: “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

Obama originally planned to keep this promise through cap-and-trade legislation, a scheme to tax companies for their so-called greenhouse-gas emissions. Lacking congressional approval, the President has turned to his Environmental Protection Agency to kill coal by way of crippling new regulations just put into effect this year. _NewAmerican

Mr. Obama's EPA has taken extraordinary steps to shut down coal plants -- thus progressively destabilising the North American power grid and raising the cost of power to industrial, commercial, municipal, and residential customers. In the midst of an ongoing economic downturn, these policies would never be permitted in a rational society with a rational governmental system. More:

...the EPA passed new emission regulations that had to be complied with by utility companies within six months — in the past, utilities were given years to comment on the workability of the rules, plan the implementation of new rules, and adjust their budgets for the adoption of the regulations, because adding air scrubbers or other major implements to a coal-fired power plant is not as easy as adding a new deck to one’s house. Obviously, the new regulations were designed to lead to the closure of certain utilities, mainly coal-fired power plants.

How will this affect our citizenry? When utilities cannot afford to do the bidding of bureaucrats with respect to their generation facilities, they shut them down. According to the February 12 Wheeling (WV) News-Register, “It was revealed at least 32 coal-fired power plants in 12 states, including West Virginia and Ohio, would be closed so utility companies could comply with the Obama administration’s air pollution regulations.” Up to 55 million households will be in danger of outages, brownouts, or, at the least, higher rates due to this unnecessary EPA rule. Already financially strapped Americans will be thrust into what is known in Europe as “energy poverty.”

...The effect of depriving a population of reliable sources of electricity is catastrophic. This can be quantified by examining the average national use of electricity in watts per person, compared to life expectancy in those nations.

...The United States is considered by many geologists as the “Saudi Arabia” of coal. This resource provides life-saving and life-enhancing energy for America, but it is under attack for this very reason by those who would take us back to an earlier era that was infinitely dirtier, deadlier, and with fewer opportunities to move civilization to new levels of freedom and prosperity. Government should not pick winners and losers to subsidize or regulate out of existence but should get out of the way and allow the free market come up with solutions to provide our energy needs.

In the future coal should probably be a feedstock for liquid fuels and for production of iron and steel, with nuclear energy providing our electrical base load. Coal is a resource that is proven and available. _NewAmerican

Eventually, either American voters will eject this dysfunctional president and his administration, or time will run out on his lame duck presidency. By then, the damage will have been done.

A huge power generating infrastructure can be shut down by the act of putting pen to paper. It cannot be re-built nearly so easily.

It is taking Obama only a few years to dismantle a coal power producing infrastructure which will require decades to replace with nuclear -- if it can ever be replaced. The alternative to abundant energy is a depleted economy, a depleted agriculture, and depleted lives of citizens.

US voters require the facts, so that they can make a rational choice.

More: The Manhattan Institute recently held two panel discussions on the topic of "Keeping the Lights On: What Role for Coal and Nuclear?" Videos for Part 1 and Part 2 (Each session is just over 1 hour)



Power 2012 - Keeping the Lights on: What Role for Coal and Nuclear - Part I

Panelists: Laszlo Varro, Jacob Williams, Porter Bennett

March 1, 2012



Power 2012 - Keeping the Lights on: What Role for Coal and Nuclear - Part II

Panelists: David Mohler, David Diamond, David Dismukes

March 1, 2012

Oil Going to $200 a Barrel? Then to $1,000 a Barrel?

...the team at Bank of America Merrill Lynch believes that, independent of what's happening in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, additional money printing would result in multiple oil price spikes to $200 a barrel over the next five years.

Other prices would rise, too. But oil is what's on everyone's mind right now.

Over the short term, the analysts estimate a QE3 would quickly add more than $12 to the price of a barrel of the black stuff -- sending gas prices toward $5 a gallon.

Rising oil prices have already put us in the danger zone. All but one recession since World War II has been preceded by an energy price spike (1960 was the exception). And the global economy is already spending more than 8% of its economic output on energy, a peak level last seen during the 2007-2008 commodities bubble, and before that, during the energy inflation nightmare of the 1970s and 1980s.

If QE3 happens, it could push the global energy "tax" on the economy into uncharted territory. _Will Fed Push Oil to $200 a Barrel?

The author above is concerned that a third quantitative easing (QE3) by the US Federal Reserve Bank would be the straw that broke the economic camel's back. Read the article to learn why he feels Ben Bernanke will risk unleashing economic chaos in global markets such as the oil market, just to help his boss, Mr. Obama, get re-elected.

Other analysts think that oil could shoot much higher -- up to $1,000 a barrel and above!

The fact of the matter is, currency devaluation makes people poorer. If a currency declines in value by 50%, and your wages do not rise by a corresponding 100%, then you are obviously getting paid less. However, it is usually not so apparent at first that this is the case. The way in which we get poorer is by rising prices such as those for gasoline, and a broad economic deterioration which is quite difficult to put your finger on exactly...People as a whole know that they are being slowly devalued into poverty by the Federal Reserve’s “easy money” policy. However, this topic is much too complex for most individuals, so they focus on something – gas prices – which seems more direct.

Before this is all over, I expect to see oil prices north of $1000 per barrel – perhaps in 5-8 years.... _Oil Continues to Rise Because Dollar Continues to Fall

It is not likely that US President Obama is concerned about the long term fallout of the fiduciary and monetary excesses of his current regime. In fact, in many circles Obama is becoming known as the anti-growth president, the anti-energy president, the anti-private sector president, and even the anti-American president.

Whatever the moniker, it is clear that Mr. Obama and his happy minions are playing with fire across the economic, industrial, and energy war-fronts. It is probably a good thing that Obama does not actually care about the long term impact of his policies, because he clearly does not have the personal heft to understand what that impact will be.

An Early Start to the Keystone XL Pipeline, in Hopes of an Obama Defeat

Canadian company Transcanada Corp. has announced that it will begin early construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline -- the leg from Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico. This section of pipeline is the most critical leg in terms of global oil markets, since it will help to reduce the gap between the WTI oil price and the Brent price.

Image Credit: The Atlantic

Unlike the northern portion of the pipeline, the lower section won't require approval from the State Department, since it doesn't cross any international borders. So it doesn't appear there's much environmentalists can do to halt it.

Although Transcanada -- not to mention the Canadian government -- would surely love to see the entire, 1,600-mile Keystone XL pipeline built out eventually, constructing its southern link is by far the most pressing piece of business for oil companies. In the long term, Canada wants to make sure there's a reliable way to ship its crude oil as production in Alberta's tar sands ramps up. For now, it's oil companies would be happy if just a bit more of their product could make it to a refinery. During the past few years, the surge of both Canadian and U.S. oil production has overwhelmed the pipelines leading from Cushing to the Gulf, which has created a giant glut oil sitting in the heart of the country. As a result, prices have fallen well below oil drilled elsewhere in the world. That's been a boon for nearby refineries and motorists in state like Colorado. But it's an obviously frustrating situation for the drillers.

Creating a new pipeline from Canada to Oklahoma obviously won't alleviate that backup. But when the southern portion of Keystone XL is finished in 2013, it's expected to move about 700,000 barrels a day, which would go a long way towards a solution.... _Atlantic

Certainly the defeat of US president Obama in the ballot box in November would be a boost for energy producers across North America -- from oil to gas to nuclear to coal -- and a huge boost for the US private sector economy.

Another boost for world oil markets, would be the removal of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and a return to a more rational control of Venezuelan oil. Oil production in Venezuela has fallen under the bulbous bombast, and the oil sector is by no means the limit to Chavez' incompetence. He is much like the US' Obama in that regard.

Since Chavez came to power in 1999, he has wasted oil revenue buying votes and supporting countries such as Syria and Cuba. His decision to take 300 private companies into public ownership - many without compensation - has scared investors away.

The oil industry has been hit hard by Chavez’s policies. Not only did he reverse plans to let the private sector have a greater role, he raised production taxes and fired a large number of oil workers for political reasons – starving the state oil company of talent.

The 'Chavez effect' on oil production is easy to demonstrate: in 1998, when the price of crude oil hit a low of under $11 a barrel, Venezuela produced 3,167,000 barrels of crude oil a day. Twelve years later, despite record prices, output was only 2,090,000 barrels a day – nearly a third lower. _Moneyweek

We can all hope for the removal of both Obama and Chavez in 2012, for the sake of the world economy and world energy supplies.

One of the most serious oversights of peak oil lifers, is their lack of awareness that several nations have the capacity to increase oil production by at least 1 million bpd over current production levels, if they are willing to divert funds from political cronies and social welfare programs for purposes of upgrading and maintaining oil production equipment. Venezuela is merely one of these countries. I will leave it as an exercise for you to name at least two others which fall in this category. It isn't hard to do.

Here is an Australian look at the death of peak oil

Is This Man US Public Enemy # 1?

Messrs. Obama and Reid teamed up to elevate Gregory Jaczko to chair the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nation's independent regulator. Mr. Jaczko was anything but a neutral designee, having served for years on the staffs of both Mr. Reid and Massachusetts' antinuke Rep. Edward Markey. As a Reid adviser, Mr. Jaczko headed up opposition to Yucca. The clear intent in making him chairman was to ensure Yucca's demise. _WSJBut Jaczko was meant to kill all new nuclear power, not just the Yucca Mountain repository.

Image via WSJ
Gregory Jaczko is Obama's Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman. He is also the #1 enemy of safe, new, advanced nuclear power in the US. This means that Mr. Jaczko is the enemy of an abundant and clean future for the US, which places him rather close to the top position as public enemy # 1 in the US. Of course, he would have to compete with a number of other Obama administration officials, including the top dog himself.

Mr. Jazcko has been unilaterally closing down agency work on Yucca, even as the Energy Department's actions remain in adjudication. He's overridden fellow commissioners on Yucca decisions. He recently gave himself extraordinary emergency powers in the wake of the Japanese nuclear incident—without informing fellow commissioners or Congress. Mr. Jaczko has yet to make clear whether those powers are ongoing, when they will cease, or what actions he's taken with them.

All of this has inspired a revolt among agency staff and commissioners, and it's undermining the body's other work. Only this week, the NRC's inspector general finished an investigation into the chairman's actions. Mr. Jaczko claims the report vindicates him (though he refuses to release the report). House Energy and Commerce Republicans have their own copy (which they intend to release), and they'll be telling a starkly different story come Tuesday, when they hold a hearing on the report's gory details _WSJ

Brian Wang presents more details on how Obama's NRC is obstructing the licensing and permitting of new nuclear designs:

The NRC has over $1 billion per year in budget and over 3000 staff (charts below). Not only is the US not competing with China in building new reactors but the paperwork of its regulations continues to slow it down from even basic operations. The NRC also collects $200 an hour from utilities to cover the costs of license reviews. _NextBigFuture

The NRC charges hundreds of millions of dollars for licensing new designs -- which eliminates all entries but the ones with the deepest pockets. Of course, those with close ties to the Obama administration -- such as General Electric -- receive priority treatment. But even in such cases of cronies, the NRC tends to drag its feet. Such bureaucratic foot dragging often means billions of dollars in extra expenses for nuclear projects -- often enough to break the project entirely.

Jaczko is costing the US dearly in energy, jobs, GDP, and future prospects. He is a man to be despised and held in contempt, for what he has done and what he continues to do. Yet he is but one of many powerful obstructionists and energy starvationists who has taken up residence in the Obama regime.

If US voters cannot find it within themselves to clean out this nest of rats in 2012, future prospects for the US will grow much dimmer, and very quickly.

More on the vast energy resources of the US, and how the Obama regime is obstructing their development

Scrambling to Find Energy Sources that Obama Considers Kosher

US President Obama's administration has consistently opposed energy from coal, offshore oil, Canadian oil sands, shale oil & gas, arctic petroleum, oil shale kerogens -- even nuclear! The only form of energy Obama has consistently supported is big solar and big wind -- as long as he can benefit his crony supporters.

But wind & solar are unreliable and exorbitantly expensive. Tying the hands of your nation's energy infrastructure leads to reduced industrial capacity, a shrinking workforce, and eventually a collapsing economy. The US federal government has seemed to prosper despite the collapse of the US private sector under Obama, but eventually even federal government agencies begin to run up against shortages in the type of power and energy that satisfy their overlords in the White House.

Scrambling to shrink their carbon footprints, federal agencies in Hampton Roads and beyond are eyeing a proven yet controversial source of energy: nuclear power.

But they're not pursuing large-scale power plants that tend to evoke the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Japan. Instead, the agencies are considering small reactors — like those found on aircraft carriers — that would be assembled in factories and, in some cases, made to look like unassuming industrial sites.

"It's hard, at this stage, not to think of it as an option," said Roy Whitney, an administrator at Jefferson Lab, a nuclear physics facility in Newport News run by the Energy Department. _DailyPress

And yet, Obama's Nuclear Regulatory Commission continues to place huge obstacles in the way of the development of new reactor designs. When government grows as large as the US federal bureaucracy, one is lucky to be allowed to breathe.

Despite the Obama administration's policy of stonewalling virtually every form of reliable energy, researchers, entrepreneurs and industrialists continue attempting to develop abundant sources of clean and reliable energy which will slip through the deadly web of government regulations, restrictions, and insane mandates.

Various ways of using biomass -- such as "biocoal" and advanced cellulosic biofuels -- would seem to be acceptable even to irrational greens in government. And yet the big environmental lobbies who helped Obama get elected seem to find something in every type of practical energy source which they hate.

Environmental opposition to biomass power plants has been extremely vocal. The only reason that environmentalists have not come out publicly against advanced biofuels is that these fuels are still several years away from becoming economically competitive. But as soon as any form of energy comes along which threatens to provide human societies with reliable and abundant energy, environmental activists rise up against it.

President Obama's primary constituencies include corrupt labour unions, hyper-litigation attorneys, gay - lesbian - and - transgender activists, ethnic minorities, leftist and muslim activist groups, and big environmental lobbies. Prominently absent from that group of supporters is any organisation dedicated to the health of the economic private sector, or to an abundant and innovative future.

In other words, Mr. Obama's broad policy of energy starvation fits in with an overall "lethal meme" approach to societal control. Understanding this, anyone who wishes to promote a reliable and abundant source of energy would need to "fly under the administration's radar," so to speak.

Something to consider.

Shale Boom Spreads; Green Energy Crashing and Burning

The boom in shale gas & oil is spreading to other sectors of industry, despite the effort of Luddite greens inside and outside the Obama administration.

...a huge, 100-year source of cheap gas will make plenty of winners...

Chemical and fertilizer manufacturers like Dow and Potash, for example, use gas as a fuel and a feedstock. And pipeline companies—when they’re run right—make money by moving molecules from place to place. As gas prices fall electric utilities will start burning more of it and the commodity will find its way into new uses like truck fleets.

“The guys who win when shale gas grows are the ser­vice guys, the pipeline and processor guys, and the end user of this product,” says David Pursell, managing director at Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., an energy investment bank in Houston.

Kinder Morgan’s $21 billion takeover of El Paso Corp.—at a 45% premium to its 52-week average price—is clear evidence of pipeline capacity’s rising value. Other pipeline takeover targets include Williams Cos. and Holly Energy Partners.

Brad Handler of Credit Suisse in New York also sees a “very bullish outlook for services businesses”...

Overseas the shale play is just beginning. Geologists have found huge deposits in the U.K. and Poland, yet the entire international pressure-pumping fleet outside of Russia is just 2 million hp, Pursell says. Shale gas “is everywhere, and if you’re going to see significant growth in production, you’re going to have to see a lot of growth in horsepower,” he says. _Forbesvia_GWPF

Meanwhile in Europe, where the green revolution has been roaring along for many years, the limits to wishful thinking are beginning to enforce themselves. In Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and several other EU countries, the many problems of trying to fit inappropriate energy technologies into modern industrial infrastructures are beginning to become intolerable.

The current Socialist government, forecast to be ejected from power in general elections on Sunday, axed subsidy tariffs for solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity technology projects in December last year. Spain is the world’s largest per capita wind energy producer, with subsidies for renewable energy having fostered a €20bn sector that has become a pillar of state energy policy....

...The government argues that the action was needed to reduce the financial deficit in Spain’s electricity market, where end-user prices have been consistently too low to cover suppliers’ costs. _GWPF

Almost all solar companies are deep in the red, wind turbine manufacturers complain about lack of demand and are reporting growing losses. The stock index Renixx, which lists 30 international Greentech companies, has lost 56 percent since the year-high in April. _GWPF

The bumbling administration of US president Barack Obama is attempting, for ideological reasons, to take the US down the same ruinous path that European nations have already shown to be a trap. In a one-two punch of devastation, Obama is pushing unreliable green energy technologies onto the US power system while attempting to destroy the use of more reliable energy technologies such as nuclear, offshore oil, Canadian oil sands, shale oil & gas, newer clean coal technologies, and other proven energy winners.

It is unclear why Mr. Obama is pursuing the path to energy failure. No one can see inside the US President's mind, after all. But if the US is to climb out of its current economic quagmire, it will need to pursue quite a different approach.

More: The TransCanada Corp has upped the stakes in the Keystone pipeline standoff with President Obama. Within days of Obama's announcement that he will delay making a decision on the pipeline, TransCanada has submitted a re-routing plan which appears to address all of the US president's objections to the route. The ball is in Obama's court, but it is likely that he will ignore it, since he is in a poor position to play this game to begin with.

Needless the say, the battle over the Canada oil sands pipeline is far from over.

US President's Clueless Policies Continue to Weaken US

If the United States chooses to cut itself off from its largest, most reliable, and most durable supply of crude oil, from where will it, with its continuing high use of transportation fuel, get its future imports? Crude oil production in two other major U.S. suppliers in the Western hemisphere, Mexico and Venezuela, has been declining (by, respectively, more than 20 percent and more than 15 percent between 2005 and 2011), and in the Middle East the United States faces enormous competition from China.

By preventing the oil flow from Canada, the United States will thus deliberately deprive itself of new manufacturing and construction jobs; it will not slow down the increase of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion (OK, by two weeks, perhaps); it will almost certainly empower China; and it will make itself strategically even more vulnerable by becoming further dependent on declining, unstable, and contested overseas crude oil supplies. That is what is called a spherically perfect decision, because no matter from which angle you look at it, it looks perfectly the same: wrong. _Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil
If the US President were to pay attention to intelligent voices for a change -- such as the voice of Vaclav Smil, quoted above -- he would probably make a lot fewer mistakes, and his country would be in a much stronger position.

Unfortunately, Obama's bad ideas are not limited to the energy sector:

President Barack Obama continued his efforts to make China stronger and America weaker during last weekend’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hawaii. How? By pressuring Chinese President Hu Jintao to increase the value of the yuan relative to the dollar. If successful, this policy will make Americans poorer relative to the Chinese.

The theory behind the Obama Administration’s weak dollar policy is seductive, but wrong. _Forbes

One must look for a long time to find anything that Obama has done right. So sad, and so preventable.

Obama has invested deeply into the green scams and bubbles of his crony friends and supporters, while suppressing and prohibiting all possible forms of energy which are reliable and plentiful.

Without huge government subsidies, big solar and big wind are not viable. Neither are truly viable even with the huge subsidies which are proving ruinous to government budgets from Spain to California -- but without the subsidies, these renewables quickly go nose down into a crash and burn.

If the US re-elects their clown president, they will be committing suicide as a nation. Even with a more rational administration, there is no guarantee that the US can pull out of its steep nosedive.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

US President Obama Busy Creating Energy Jobs -- For Other Countries

The Obama administration continues to create energy jobs...for other countries that is. Friday I wrote about the Obama Administration's decision to delay the decision to make a decision on the fate of the Keystone Pipeline and that delay may kill the project and all the jobs that went with it. The Wall Street Journal writes today, "Just a few days after the U.S. said it would delay approval of an oil pipeline that would boost Canadian exports to the U.S., Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Sunday the country would push to sell its crude to Asian markets instead. " t Obama, for the sake of politics, cost the country 20,000 good paying jobs. But don't worry he is spending a lot of money on high risk, low return energy sources.

Read more: http://community.nasdaq.com/News/2011-11/the-energy-report-distillate-dilemma.aspx?storyid=102478#ixzz1dhzbOT6D _Community.Nasdaq

By slowing down US domestic coal, natural gas, kerogen oil shales, offshore oil, and imports of Canadian oil sands, Mr. Obama is helping overseas producers from Russia to Venezuela to Iran to Saudi Arabia. Obama has provided generous loan guarantees to Brazil to help develop its rich offshore oil & gas. By way of bailouts to the EU, Obama has indirectly helped to subsidise Spain's ruionous green energy economic destruction program -- after Spain itself had been forced to back away from subsidies for its own bad programs.

Obama's generous domestic subsidies have been geared to benefit wealthy campaign backers such as George Kaiser, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, the wealthy and connected family of Nancy Pelosi, and George Soros. Even if all of Obama's $billion green projects fail, his cronies will still get their loot -- guaranteed!

The government often backs questionable ventures, but throwing taxpayer dollars at risky projects without regard for proven market truth is counterproductive. The new loans are the latest offense for the Department of Energy and the Obama Administration—and they are heading straight for another deep failure that promises another expensive lesson for taxpayers.

As a country deep in debt, America does not need to waste money on President Obama’s political favors and errant energy subsidies. _Heritage

Follow the links for more details.

US President Obama's feckless cronyism and blatant disregard for the economic well-being of the US and US taxpayers -- present and future -- would be reason enough in themselves to seek a replacement with all due expediency. Sadly, that is just the beginning of Mr. Obama's malfeasance in office. And even more sadly, with the support of the US skankstream media, the incompetent clown may be given another four years of economic destruction, on top of his one remaining. Should that occur, expect the survivalist and prepper movement worldwide to become one of the the greatest boom economic sectors of all time.

Obama's Energy Starvation Agenda: Still Killing Jobs

... the most activist Department of the Interior in our nation's history is trying to change the rules and seize from Exxon Mobil one of the largest oil finds ever in the Gulf of Mexico. I thought that we were a better country than that. The Department of the Interior under the Obama administration has cost this country hundreds of thousands of jobs with their regulatory overreach. Not only has their ban on offshore drilling cost us thousands of jobs, it now appears that they are trying to take back leases from Exxon Mobil on a never before used technicality that will steal billions of dollars of profits from this US corporation that has acted in good faith. _FXStreet

Mr. Obama's agenda of national energy starvation continues to generate an economic recession without end. The Obama regime's relentless attacks against coal, oil sands, shale gas and oil, offshore oil, nuclear, oil shale kerogens, and every conceivable form of energy which is reliable and affordable are helping to destroy the US economy, bit by bit.

The ongoing battle between the Obama - Salazar US Department of the Interior, and Exxon Mobile, over billions of barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico Julia field, is a prime example:

ExxonMobil, and its Norwegian partner Statoil made the biggest discovery of all — a field worth a billion barrels of oil — 7,000 feet below sea level in its "Julia" field in 2007.

Exxon tried to keep its discovery secret to keep marauders away. Sadly, the pirates in this instance are U.S. regulators — and their aim is to stop them.

That's right: Instead of marvel at the continuing treasures of the New World, or hail the human ingenuity that made retrieval of so much oil possible, or simply quantify how this discovery will boost U.S. energy security, Interior Department bureaucrats moved instead to snatch Exxon's permits and shut the whole thing down.

...in the Obama era, which demonizes oil production in American waters by American companies, the bureaucrats came up with this permit technicality to effectively expropriate the entire operation.

Exxon is now fighting the permit action in a federal court in Lake Charles, La., calling it "arbitrary," "capricious" and "an abuse of law." It's also a textbook case of the anti-business climate fostered by the Obama administration which should be bending over backward to help Exxon create jobs and profits. _IBD

Obama should be helping Exxon to create new, lucrative US jobs, to help boost the depressed Gulf of Mexico and national economies. Instead, the regime is pursuing -- energy starvation.

Exxon has been keeping this huge oil find a secret, and is only coming out in the open due to the need to sue the Obama regime in court, in order to maintain its right to develop the Julia field.

... the fact that Exxon had made perhaps the largest discovery ever in the Gulf, and one of the largest in the company’s century-long history, wasn’t revealed until it sued the Interior Department in a Lake Charles, La., federal court last week over leases for the oil.

The find was made in 2007, and Exxon and Statoil did disclose it in January 2008, calling it significant. But the possibility of one billion barrels wasn’t spelled out.

... Exxon had kept mum on two 2009 and 2010 discoveries in the Hadrian prospect until it could resume drilling in the area after the end of a months-long exploration moratorium. Last June, after it found a third prospect that confirmed the area contained 700 million barrels of recoverable oil and gas, it announced the finds with great fanfare.

But Exxon’s reluctance to talk openly about the huge 2007 find, known as the Julia field, was also a result of circumstances. The oilthat Exxon found there is in a deeply buried layer of rock known as the Lower Tertiary, which is far from shore and requires large investments in pipelines and remote platforms. So Exxon may not have known for a while how much oil it could get out of the ground, or whether it had the technology to do so, say analysts who have talked with the company _GCaptain

The Julia field likely holds the potential to produce far more than 1 billion barrels, due to the conservative nature of oil geologists when quantifying reserves, and due to the "long tail" phenomenon of oil field production over time.

There are undoubtedly many more "billion barrel fields" sitting around, waiting to be found by competent, ambitious, and "hungry" oil explorers and prospectors. Some of them will be far offshore, such as Julia. Others will be in shallower waters or on land, but perhaps lying deeper beneath the surface.

Over the next 20 years, proven global oil reserves are likely to continue growing. Most of this growth in proved reserves will come from improved drilling and recovery technologies, in previously discovered fields. But as oil exploration technologies continue to develop and improve, expect large new oil field discovery to ramp up once again.

Obama, Putin, and Greens Aim to Kill Shale Gas Promise

US President Obama's gang of energy starvationists has been looking for an excuse to shut down the US shale gas revolution for years now. US shale gas has already foiled Russia's plans for the energy blackmail of Europe, and has opened the possibility for a vast new wealth of valuable hydrocarbons from South America, to the Levant, to China, to Europe. But the same gang of anti-energy thugs who engineered an ongoing de facto moratorium on US offshore drilling, now wants to shut down the technology which has kept US industry and the US economy's head barely above water. More on the world shale gas revolution:

The abundance of shale gas and other forms of unconventional gas discovered and extracted in the United States has prompted a new American energy boom and a global shale rush. It has also caused a dramatic drop in gas prices. Could the same happen in Europe?

At the European Union's energy summit in February, no other item on the agenda was as controversial as the impact of shale exploration. Despite protests from the green lobby, EU energy ministers agreed that the potentially game-changing nature of shale would be carefully considered in the next few months.

Unconventional gas is embedded in shale rock formations deep below the earth's surface. These geological strata hold vast deposits of shale gas. To exploit these resources, energy companies drill several kilometres deep into the rock and then horizontally in several directions. According to estimates of the International Energy Agency, supplies of unconventional gas could provide humankind with cheap and relatively clean energy for more than 250 years. _GWPF Benny Peiser

But the lefty-Luddite greens are not ready to call of their great energy starvation and human dieoff.orgy just yet. They have some solid connections within the research community, and people whom they can always call on for a bit of questionable research findings / loose associations. And we all know how easily the news media can confuse loose associations with true causation -- and create an instant crisis of world-ending proportions!

Since April, the findings of a shale gas study by Robert Howarth’s team at Cornell University, widely debunked for its “assumptions and inaccuracies” and, even though its authors admit it is based on “lousy” data, have been covered by eagerly awaiting media. The BBC’s “Shale gas ‘worse than coal’ for climate” is a classic example. The same cannot be said for The Shale Gas Shock report written by Dr Matt Ridley on behalf of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) which attracted a mere handful of journalists to its publication on May 4. While Howarth and co’s scientific ineptitude, as we shall see, makes fear-mongering headlines, the GWPF finding – at the opposite pole – finds shale gas to be “ubiquitous, cheap and environmentally benign”.

The Shale Gas Shock

For Ridley’s GWPF study, shale gas is not only proving to be “a revolution in the world energy industry”, but it promises to transform “world trade, geopolitics and climate policy”. Setting out an erudite history of shale gas and how it offers the world several more centuries of natural gas, point 22 of the report gets to the crux of the matter. “The key question about shale gas is not therefore whether it exists in huge quantities” (it demonstrably does), it is “whether it can be exploited on a large scale at a reasonable price”.

Ridley continues by scotching Bergman’s opinion that only around 10 percent of each shale gas field will prove recoverable, and that the current excitement merely amounts to another “speculative bubble”. Bergman concludes that US shale gas, for instance, may thus only last for seven years and not the 100 years+ widely projected. Ridley points out that Bergman’s audience “is investors, not consumers” and while he concedes Bergman may have a point that some investors in shale gas firms may get their fingers burnt, this will largely be because “their very success drives gas prices down” and/or because “volumes of gas are high”. In other words, the highs and lows of shale gas production would mirror that of any other extraction industry.

While we can expect “a shale gas boom in China”, with Russia being an “impediment” to development and not welcoming competition from shale gas, Ridley identifies Europe as particularly susceptible to exploitation opposition from “entrenched and powerful interests in the environmental pressure groups”. In the end however, “it will be a matter of whether over-borrowed European governments, businesses and people will be able to resist such a hefty source of new revenue and a clean energy source requiring no subsidy”. _A Tale of Two Studies

The informative shale gas report from Matt Ridley is available as a PDF download

A study from Duke University recently published in PNAS links "high" methane concentrations in water wells with oil shale fracking taking place very close nearby. And just like a Jack-in-the-box, US President Obama pops up with a somber expression to say that he may be forced to further energy-starve the American public, the American economy, and American industry -- but only for their own good!

The Duke study did not find toxic chemicals from the fracking process in the well water, and only those water wells which were extremely close to the gas wells were affected. No one knows whether there are any adverse health effects from the levels detected, and it is not known whether this association is widespread.

As long as Obama and the energy strangulationists can be held back from instituting devastating regulations and executive orders, it is likely that improved wellhead casings will put an end to what is a local phenomenon of questionable significance. But if the politicians and their hunchbacked fiends of dieoff.orgiasts are allowed to cut the throat of America's new energy cornucopia, the economic fallout will likely go on for decades.

Obama to US: Energy Starvation is for Your Own Good!

All of the press conferences and television appearances may say, “We want cheap energy,” but actions speak louder than words. We’ve heard the words. What do their actions say? Why are they killing energy? _EnergyTrib

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu vows that the Obama administration is working hard to "take the pain out of high gasoline prices." Yet across the energy spectrum, the documented actions [not words] of the Obama group displays a broad policy of "energy starvation," or progressive energy shutdown.

Banning deep-water drilling in the Gulf is probably the most well known energy-killer. Immediately after the BP spill, Obama issued a moratorium that prevented potential oil production. The ban, originally thrown out by a US District Judge, expired November 30th, 2010, but virtually no permits have been issued since—creating a de facto ban. On February 17th, the same judge ordered the Interior Department to act quickly on offshore drilling applications—calling the inaction "increasingly inexcusable." Not only have gas prices gone up as a result, jobs have been lost and businesses have gone bankrupt.

Onshore, the administration uses land designations to block oil and gas exploration and extraction. Right now the Dunes Sage Brush Lizard is threatening the entire economy of Southeastern New Mexico. The Fish and Wildlife Service has nominated the oil-rich region as critical habitat for the critter. Nearly a year ago, a Department of the Interior (DOI) list of “good candidates for National Monument designation under the Antiquities Act” was made public. Of the suggested locations, roughly half had known energy resources—to which the President can unilaterally restrict access through a National Monument designation. Additionally, in December of 2010, Interior Secretary Salazar circumvented Congress’s authority by creating a new designation: “Wild Lands”—which locks up lands without US citizens having a voice through our elected officials.

The “actions” are not just about oil and gas.

In late 2009, non-elected bureaucrats in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revoked a coal-mining permit in West Virginia issued to Arch Coal in 2007. Not only did the regulatory action stall the development of domestic energy, it hurts the American economy at time when we most need the jobs. The EPA is also tightening regulations that make coal-fueled electricity more expensive.

Despite Chu and Obama insisting they support nuclear power, actions suggest otherwise. While campaigning, Obama promised to shut down Yucca Mountain in Nevada—which was done in mid 2009. Without long-term storage of so-called nuclear “waste,” the administration will not allow any new nuclear power plants. Plus, the process is so prohibitive that no nuclear plant permits have been issued since Obama’s election. If nuclear power was a priority, plant construction that they say takes ten years, according to experts, could be done in half the time.

Nuclear power requires a source fuel: uranium—a mineral abundant in the US. But DOI and EPA actions bar new uranium mining in Arizona. The first new uranium mill in twenty-five years has been approved in Colorado, but construction, energy and jobs are being stalled by the EPA.

Not even renewable energy is immune. A new study reveals that 351 proposed energy projects in 49 states have been “delayed or cancelled” due to activism, permitting and “a system that allows for limitless lawsuits.” Of these, the study found that “almost half” are renewable energy projects.

Renewables, such as wind and solar, require vast quantities of metals and minerals. Yet, these, too, face regulatory barriers. A foreign company proposed to bring money into Montana’s economy by further drilling on a known deposit of tungsten—essential for steel (each wind turbine requires 335 tons of steel). The Forest Service would approve the permit if done with mules and pick axes instead of the modern equipment used there thirty-years ago.
_EnergyTribune

But this is just barely scraping the surface. A deeper look into the Obama EPA, DOI, DOE, NRC etc. would reveal top level government agencies full of ideologues, dedicated to the green ideals of reducing the human footprint on the Earth by any means necessary -- including poverty-inducing energy starvation. Everything these zealots do in the name of faux environmental hysteria has the full power of the US government behind it.

Politicians always say one thing and do another. And it is not impossible that Mr. Obama truly does feel the pain of those many Americans who suffer under his rule. As he twists the cold, sharp knife of energy starvation ever deeper....

More: If the US is to start building much-needed small modular nuclear reactors by the year 2020, they cannot delay. And Obama's NRC chief Jaczko is digging in his heels in order to delay development of newer, safer reactor designs -- even more so since the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear reactor incident.

If ever there is a time to promote new, safer nuclear energy, it is now. Unless your intention has been to stall and starve energy development all along.