Energy infrastructure

Just days before French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged attendees at a Paris energy conference to buy more nuclear power plants, a very different nuclear power conference was held in Potsdam, Germany. The Brookings Institution and the Global Public Policy Institute convened 35 people from governments, academia, think tanks, and industry to consider nuclear power's future. Craig Severance offers his own insights, and his conference presentation on why new nuclear power should undergo a rigorous business oriented "Due Diligence" process.

While in the hills of western India last week I saw something I haven't seen since my schooldays. The something is old-fashioned fuel balls. You can hold one of these lightweight balls in your hand, for they are around 8-9 cm in diameter, their colour a slatey grey flecked with brown. You only rarely see them being sold in the small provision shops in these villages, for the fuel balls are made at home. They require two ingredients: cow dung and coal dust.

The world is heading for a renewed oil crunch as soon as 2013 due to shrinking production capacity and growing demand in the emerging markets, according to reports from two investment banks. Both BofA Merril Lynch and Barclays Capital conclude non OPEC production is close to peak, meaning a shift back to reliance on OPEC for new capacity...

What would happen if the unthinkable would happen? Author Edwin Black's threatens not with a slow run-of-the-mill peak oil scenario, but rather an acute (perhaps terrorist-induced?) fuel crisis because of reduced global availability of oil by 5-10% for a period of least a month. Black then goes on to propose A Plan for how the U.S. could cope with such a disaster in his book "The Plan: How to rescue society when the oil stops - or the day before" (2008).

President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of "clean coal" technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how "to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016."

Millions of job losses are pushing the U.S. Senate to consider a Jobs and Energy bill, even though Cap and Trade appears to be on life support. What are Five Key Measures that must be in a new Bill to avoid being a "half-ass..d" effort? (term from Sen. Lindsey Graham descrbing limited climate bill)

This week saw the Chairman of one of the world’s major oil companies publicly acknowledge the approaching peak in oil production...

Oil prices began the year with a rally, reaching nearly $84 a barrel as temperatures across much of the northern hemisphere required the heating to be turned up a notch.

"as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold"

Henry Ford is famous for having once said, "History is more or less bunk." He was, in fact, attacking tradition in an age of rapid technological and social change. Almost a century later we have a less ambitious observation which may not achieve the broad visceral appeal of Ford's statement, but one which may turn out to have a good deal of importance, to wit: Oil and natural gas reserve numbers are more or less bunk.

Oil prices ended Thursday under $76/barrel following a week of mixed economic and geopolitical news. A surprise announcement at the end of last week that Dubai, that shining symbol of sustainable development in the Middle East, would not pay the interest on some of its massive debts on time, briefly rallied the dollar pushing down oil prices...

Not deterred by the international financial crisis which became widespread in 2008 or by the many recessionary patterns that grip most country economies, financial engineers are massing in København to prepare for the next wave. This one is about the commercial opportunities which renewable energy technologies, country climate funds and sectoral mitigation programmes promise to contain.

We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security: though oil prices have declined from their historic highs, there is little doubt that peak oil is real. A 2008 research project completed at Washington University in St. Louis found strong evidence in support of the theory. Please feel free to circulate this academic document as a primer on peak oil.

The poor in the South African townships are feeling the brunt of it already, a growing electricity crisis that will squeeze already meagre household incomes, spur inflation, add to the costs of essential foods, and raise transport costs in a country whose mass transport systems are utterly inadequate. Already saddled with a more than 30% hike in metered power costs for this year, they were told to expect a hike of a further 150% over the next three years.

Plenty of people think of metaphysics as one of those abstruse topics that give otherwise unemployable academics something to do with their time. Meanwhile the industrial world lurches toward disaster along a trajectory marked out, in part, by a common metaphysical error. The Archdruid explains, in this second post of a series.