http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/ A debate with Steve Mufson on how energy prices are moving money, nations, and lives. en Copyright 2008 Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:18:58 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Energy Wire talked to Gov. Sarah Palin in May about her views on Big Oil, offshore drilling and a long-awaited, expensive and controversial natural gas pipeline for which she has been pushing hard. With McCain's announcement Friday, suddenly her comments seem a lot more interesting. Many environmental and Democratic activists attacked her yesterday for being too close to Big Oil. They dislike her support for drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, her skepticism about alternative energy sources, and her opposition to listing polar bears as an endangered species. "Sarah Palin reinforces John McCain's plan to continue the Bush-Cheney big oil energy policies," said Daniel J. Weiss, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "Palin may be new, but her big oil energy agenda is very old-fashioned." However, back in May Palin portrayed herself as standing up to the biggest oil companies in discussions over a new $30 billion natural gas pipeline, talks that have drawn out over many years. (When I talked to her then, she already knew that McCain was considering her for the vice presidential spot on the Republican ticket.) http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/sarah_palin_and_big_oil.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/sarah_palin_and_big_oil.html Energy Wire Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:18:58 -0500 One of the people who will parade across the platform Tuesday night for a four-minute speech will be Nancy Floyd, founder and managing director of Nth Power, a San Francisco venture capital firm specializing in energy technology and materials. The firm has $420 million under management with investments in companies involved in light-emitting diode bulbs, hydrogen-based generators, photovoltaic panels, microturbines, biodiesel, and the sale of voluntary carbon offsets, among others. She said that nationwide about $3 billion a year of venture capital, about 14 percent of total U.S. venture capital, is going into energy. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/energy_policy_convention_style.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/energy_policy_convention_style.html Energy Wire Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:16:18 -0500 Hoping for some insight about oil prices, I attended a meeting on Thursday at the New America Foundation where Richard Vague, who was the founder and former chief executive of credit card firm First USA, was talking about oil prices. He is also co-founder and chief executive of Energy Plus, a firm supplies electricity to homes in New York. I trust he was more astute about credit cards than he was about oil prices. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/vague_on_oil_prices.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/vague_on_oil_prices.html Energy Wire Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:24:27 -0500 suggested that demonstrating the pipeline's vulnerability may have been one of the underlying motives for the Russian incursion. ]]> http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/plenty_of_pipeline_options_all.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/plenty_of_pipeline_options_all.html Energy Wire Georgia Iran Qatar Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:27:23 -0500 cars, which she wrote as a rebuttal to this Outlook piece by Terry Box last weekend. Steve will return to blogging next week.]]> http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/got_a_sweet_ride_get_over_it.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/got_a_sweet_ride_get_over_it.html Energy Wire Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:12:56 -0500 It seems every candidate has his favorite energy subsidy. Or two. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has favored setting a minimum goal of 60 billion gallons for ethanol of all kinds, derived from corn and cellulosic materials such as grasses or wood chips. That's twice the current target for an industry which has thrived largely because of federal mandates and subsidies for refiners that blend ethanol into motor fuel. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has opposed subsidies for ethanol. And last Tuesday he attacked Obama for voting for the 2005 energy bill (widely supported by Republicans) because, McCain said, it had subsidies for big oil and gas companies. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/energy_subsidy_dreams.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/energy_subsidy_dreams.html Energy Wire Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:58:34 -0500 There are some people who would claim that President Bush's announcement about lifting a presidential ban on drilling in offshore areas currently off limits has had something to do with the recent drop in oil prices. The other night, a friend asked me if this was true. The short answer is: no. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/bushs_drilling_ban_its_not_so.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/bushs_drilling_ban_its_not_so.html Energy Wire Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:57:20 -0500 surprise - you're getting an extra $25 a barrel. ]]> http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/whos_to_blame_for_oil_profits.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/08/whos_to_blame_for_oil_profits.html Energy Wire Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:00:12 -0500 It's not every company that can register $11.68 billion in quarterly profits -- and still disappoint the analysts. Yet Exxon Mobil Corp. is a special company in many ways, and analysts have their own view on the world. Poor Exxon. Its profit margin is a meager 8.5 percent of sales. It doesn't have enough places to drill. Costs are going up. Skilled manpower is scarce. Despite all that, it is still under attack from members of Congress, consumer groups and environmental groups. And now the analysts are disappointed too! http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/the_poor_rich_guys.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/the_poor_rich_guys.html Energy Wire Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:18:06 -0500 Those of us who live in the United States have a tough time with high oil prices. But the Philippines doesn’t produce any of its own oil, and it’s having an even tougher time. And that means tough times for the Philippines’ President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Her popularity has fallen to a low point, lower than any president there since 1986, the year long-time leader Ferdinand Marcos was toppled from power. Moreover, while the nation’s growth rate is still good, inflation has climbed to 11.4 percent. Growth has slowed from 7 percent to 5.2 percent. Many members of Congress are demanding that Arroyo trim the 12 percent value-added tax on oil products, but she has refused. Tomorrow she is scheduled to deliver a nationwide address, and oil prices will be at the center of her talk. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/oil_shock_in_the_philippines.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/oil_shock_in_the_philippines.html Energy Wire Philippines Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:16:03 -0500 announcement by the US Geological Survey that there may be 90 billion barrels of oil and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids in 25 geological areas underneath the Arctic Sea as evidence that there isn’t any oil supply crisis. Or you could look at it as evidence that we need to go to the ends of the earth to get enough oil to feed our oil addiction. Finding all that Arctic oil will require huge expensive drilling rigs and ways of dealing with dangerous melting ice. One line in the USGS release: “For the purposes of this study, the USGS did not consider economic factors such as the effects of permanent sea ice or oceanic water depth in its assessment of undiscovered oil and gas resources.”]]> http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/arctic_dreams.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/arctic_dreams.html Energy Wire Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:09:53 -0500 If $4-plus for a gallon gasoline feels like a burden to American households, it feels like an emergency to members of Congress. With elections looming, how Americans will factor the high price of gasoline into their voting makes both parties anxious. Democrats think it's such an emergency that they want to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower prices. President Bush, by contrast, wants to keep the emergency reserve aside for what he might call a real emergency -- one with war and a really big disruption in world supplies. There's a lot of rhetoric flying around on this at the moment, but neither side gives the other its due. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/is_4_gas_an_emergency.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/is_4_gas_an_emergency.html Energy Wire Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:08:23 -0500 The price of crude oil has tumbled almost $11 a barrel in less than two days and a lot of people are (again) asking: Has it all been a bubble? Is it about to burst? Have prices fallen short of the predictions of the financial analysts who were talking up the idea of $150 or $200 a barrel? I don't think it's quite that simple. I think that a combination of things are happening to oil prices: an influx of financial players into the market has helped drive up prices, but they wouldn’t have been able to do that in a sustained way if the gap between global production capacity and global oil consumption were not so narrow. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/speculating_about_an_oil_bubbl.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/speculating_about_an_oil_bubbl.html Energy Wire Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:57:43 -0500 For two days this week, oil was looking like a typical bubble market. The price slid more than $10 a barrel in two days. Had supply and demand changed that much? Was this the beginning of the end of high oil prices? Then on Thursday, the oil price bounced up at the end of the trading session. It’s hard to see what news might have triggered that. The day’s major developments – the firing of missiles by Iran and an e-mail from Nigerian insurgents calling off their self-declared ceasefire – were known at the beginning of the day. Brazilian oil workers were planning a strike, but the International Energy Agency lowered consumption forecasts. Go figure. That led some analysts to say that the oil market is indeed a bubble. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/oils_weird_week.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/oils_weird_week.html Energy Wire Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:55:21 -0500 spilled from the Tricastin nuclear site on Wednesday, forcing the closure of two French rivers for fishing and bathing, and threatening people and the environment. The timing, right after the Energy Department said it would seek proposals for new nuclear plants worthy of federal loan guarantees, could have been better. “This spill should knock down the myth that France ’s dependence on nuclear power is a role model for the U.S. to follow,” said Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth. Speaking of timing, the Government Accountability Office issued a report on the $38.5 billion in federal loan guarantees lawmakers approved early this year. The GAO recommended that Congress limit the size of the program (PDF) because the Energy Department isn't ready to assess risk of defaults and protect taxpayer interests. The GAO said that “Risks inherent to the [loan guarantee program] will make it difficult for DOE to estimate subsidy costs with a reasonable degree of accuracy…” It criticized the Energy Department for considering non-cash assets, such as land, as equity if contributed to the project by developers. It also said that the Energy Department’s decision to lend as much as 100 percent of the project costs diminished the incentives project owners might have if they were on the hook for part of the project cost. ]]> http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/two_nuclear_setbacks_for_franc.html http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/energywire/2008/07/two_nuclear_setbacks_for_franc.html Energy Wire France Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:53:30 -0500