Beyond the Barrel
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Fuel Pain Prompting Some Truckers to Park
Continue reading… 6 CommentsSince one of the commenters on my truckers item suggested that an independent rig operators strike may be in the offing—and no, I would not like being without food for a while—I thought I ought to check it out. The call for a work stoppage on April 1 is being sounded by Dan Little, an independent livestock hauler in Carrollton, Mo., who runs the UScattlehaulers.com blog. Little says that neither the government nor organizations such as the Owner-Operators Independent Drivers Association are helping the small truckers cope with $4 per gallon diesel fuel prices:
I do know I or my family can not keep going at this rate. Everyone is in agreement on April 1st, 2008 as the Date to pull over, Park & say enough is enough. The Gov. will hear us Only if we Stand United.
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Truckers Back a National 65-mph Speed Limit
Continue reading… 37 CommentsA highway slowdown has begun in response to high energy prices—and the big trucking companies are leading the way. Con-Way Freight, one of the nation's largest trucking firms with 8,500 rigs, has announced it is turning back the electronic speed limiters in its entire fleet from 65 miles per hour to 62 mph.
The company estimates that by keeping its drivers below that speed, it will save 3.2 million gallons of diesel fuel a year, while eliminating 72 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions—the equivalent of removing 7,300 automobiles from the nation's highways. And with diesel fuel at the current price of about $4 per gallon, Con-Way will be saving $12.8 million per year, a significant figure for a company that saw its operating income drop 27 percent last year to $235 million.
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Going Biodiesel Is No Cheap Alternative
Continue reading… 24 CommentsThe retail cost of highway diesel fuel is $3.99 per gallon—thanks to tough environmental rules and strong global demand, especially in Europe. The national average retail price of diesel hit an all-time high for five weeks in a row, is above $4 per gallon in plenty of places, and is up 50 percent over one year ago.
I thought this might make it a good market for biodiesel, the alternative fuel blended from vegetable or plant oils, but then I saw Autobloggreen's report on a Minnesota biodiesel plant that was halting production, at least temporarily, because of skyrocketing soybean oil costs.
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Tune Up Your Car and Save—Eventually
Continue reading… 7 CommentsIt's often said that keeping your car well maintained will get you better gas mileage, but some steps have a quicker payback than others. The government's fuel economy website has a rundown of the usual checklist and the savings you can expect—if your car needs the maintenance—at the current average gasoline price of $3.23 per gallon.
An engine tuneup, for example, could enhance an out-of-tune car's mileage by 4 percent, or the equivalent of about 13 cents per gallon. But my neighborhood mechanic says the cost of a tuneup for our old 1994 Saturn would be about $300. We'd earn back that cash outlay only after purchasing more than 2,300 gallons of gasoline at today's prices. And since our car gets about 27 mpg, we'd have to drive 64,000 miles. I don't think that car, which already has nearly 100,000 miles on it, will make it that far. If we found a mechanic who could do a tuneup for about $100, then it would take a little over a year and a half—assuming we drove about 12,500 miles per year.
However, replacing a clogged air filter has almost an immediate payback at today's gasoline prices. The government studies show that's like saving up to 32 cents per gallon, and air filters for many models can be bought for $20 or less. You'd have to buy only about 60 gallons of gasoline to break even on the investment in a new air filter, if you need one.
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The Disputed Cost of Light, Strong Cars
Continue reading… 3 CommentsIs carbon fiber one of the answers to stopping global warming and ending our oil dependence? Energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins thinks so, but the automakers—so far—do not.
Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, both made his point and got a laugh at the National Academy of Sciences energy summit last week by covering his head briefly with a "carbon cap." It wasn't a "cap" on carbon dioxide emissions like in the Kyoto protocol or the Warner-Lieberman bill, but it would be relevant to one. The headwear was a hard, black 2-millimeter-thick test piece for a military helmet. Lovins took the hat off and then whacked it to demonstrate its ringing clang. "You can tell that plastics have changed since The Graduate," he said.
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How a Slowing Economy Speeds the Oil Run-Up
Continue reading… 1 CommentNow, everyone's getting on the stagflation bandwagon. Or, to be more exact, they're saying that the economic slowdown and even higher oil prices may go hand in hand, as we pointed out has happened in the past.
From oil industry consultant Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates: "Oil has become the 'new gold'—a financial asset in which investors seek refuge as inflation rises and the dollar weakens. The credit crisis has been fueling the flight to oil and other commodities, and that will last until the dollar strengthens or the recession becomes more pronounced."
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Energy Doubts Cloud Daylight Saving Time
Continue reading… 3 CommentsFor those of us still rubbing our eyes each day, trying to adjust to the dark March mornings of the new earlier daylight saving time, here are some disappointing figures. Congress decided in 2005 to lengthen daylight saving time by about a month to save energy. But in March 2007—the first year of extended daylight hours—electric power consumption in the United States was 321.2 million megawatt hours—up 1 percent over March 2006, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Even more disturbing: Last October, the other end of the season when we should have been enjoying extended daylight energy savings, electricity use was up 3 percent over the previous year.
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Feds Weigh Long Island Sound LNG Terminal
Continue reading… 2 CommentsThis week, the federal government will weigh a controversial energy decision for the Northeast—whether to allow a floating liquefied natural gas terminal to be moored 10 miles off the shore of New York in the middle of Long Island Sound. The 1,200-foot barge would accept supercooled fuel from Africa and the Middle East, process it back into a gas, and send it by pipeline to New York and Connecticut.
I wrote this story explaining LNG and the environmental and security concerns. Such issues are very much alive in this Broadwater project, a joint venture of Shell and TransCanada Pipeline. Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell leads the opposition on environmental grounds.
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Google Will Finance Enhanced Geothermal
Continue reading… 6 CommentsExpect Google.org to make investments in the next couple of months in enhanced geothermal energy, says Dan Reicher, the Internet giant's director of climate change and energy initiatives.
Google's philanthropic arm is in talks with universities on funding basic research into tapping into the vast stores of energy underground, Reicher said at a two-day energy summit sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. He said it also expects to finance companies that are working toward advances in this form of renewable energy.
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Schlesinger: No Energy Security in Sight
Continue reading… 11 CommentsJames Schlesinger, who was the nation's first secretary of energy, had a grim analysis of the nation's current energy predicament this morning at an energy summit in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. Schlesinger, now a senior adviser to Lehman Brothers and chairman of the nonprofit engineering organization Mitre, predicted that energy prices would continue to rise and declared that the United States would never see energy independence as long as it depended on the internal combustion engine. Excerpts from his remarks:
We regularly hear that we must ensure that energy supplies are abundant, affordable and secure—an aspiration devoutly to be wished [quoting Hamlet]. These criteria or shibboleths—to be exact—are not likely to be achieved. We are not going to have energy security. What we are trying to do is fashion a set of policies that limit or mitigate energy insecurity. And we have done fairly well in that regard, most notably with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
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Why Dealing With Climate Change Won't Bankrupt Us
Continue reading… 0 CommentsA controversy has broken out in the utility industry over a prediction of how much it might cost the nation to address climate change. It seems that some of the power companies, notably those with less coal in their portfolios, think an Edison Electric Institute-sponsored study exaggerated the downside, with its prediction that there would be a 1 percent to 1.6 percent reduction in GDP by 2015 and 2 percent to 2.5 percent thereafter if Congress adopted the bill sponsored by Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia and independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
Expect more tussles over climate cost-benefit analysis ahead, says Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress. He argues that most cost-benefit studies of global warming solutions will overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits, because they are incapable of seeing the dynamic technological progress that inevitably will occur in the future. "These studies base their cost assumptions on existing technologies and practices, which means that they do not account for the vast potential for innovation once binding reductions and deadlines are set," he says.
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Massive Rebuilding Is What's Needed on Energy
Continue reading… 2 CommentsAltEnergyStocks is calling for a Marshall Plan, not a Manhattan Project, for energy. I found this provocative post because the author, Tom Konrad, used as one of the underpinnings of his argument my recent blog post illustrating how deeply divided members of Congress and the administration are on how to spend energy research money.
There are plenty of folks out there calling for a federal commitment on energy similar to the effort that led to the development of the atomic bomb or, more peacefully, man's journey to the moon. Most notable among them are the authors Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute, who call for a $30 billion annual clean-energy investment. James Pethokoukis, my editor and U.S. News Capital Commerce blogger, has predicted that both parties' presidential candidates will launch an Apollo Project platform for energy, although keep in mind he also forecast $60-a-barrel oil this year in that same post. (So far, he's been right about the monster flick Cloverfield, however.)
But Konrad at AltEnergyStocks is in the camp that believes that instead of (or, some say, in addition to) devoting more money to the energy problem in hopes of a breakthrough, there is plenty we can and should do now: "Much more than new scientific resources, we need to leverage our financial and organizational resources to get the needed projects on the ground today," he says. See also this post from Joe Romm at Climate Progress on how "accelerating the deployment of boring old technology" may be more important than space-age-style research.
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Energy Chill Heats Up Pennsylvania Politics
Continue reading… 2 CommentsI spent a few days in my home state of Pennsylvania, where everyone, of course, is braced for spending the next month and a half as the epicenter of presidential politics. The Keystone State, in fact, is a good place for the candidates to witness firsthand the havoc created in the economy by the high price of energy. The Morning Call newspaper in Allentown (where I held my first job out of school 26 years ago, writing obituaries) has this agonizing story of what has happened to some customers who tried to lock in a reasonable price for home heating oil before winter hit. In a word, they got screwed.
The author of the story, Sam Kennedy, talked with one customer who bought her winter heating oil in advance last summer at $2.50 a gallon, which would have been a remarkably smart move. That is, if her heating oil company had stayed in business. However, with cold weather still gripping Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, she called for a refill and found that the firm had simply shut its doors and stopped answering calls. Her tank running dry, she had to buy nearly $800 of heating oil at the current market price of $3.17 a gallon. I know I've been harping on this theme, but those economic stimulus checks certainly aren't going to go far in households that have had to pay for heating oil twice.
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Oil Analyst Says Renewables Get Competitive
Continue reading… 4 CommentsThose who believe that oil is running out have a special scorn for prominent oil industry consultant and analyst Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Yergin, who wrote The Prize, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that stands as the definitive history of the oil industry, has often dismissed concerns that the world is at or near "peak oil," or the point at which petroleum production will begin an inexorable decline.
Peak Oilers even recently issued a $100,000 wager—not accepted yet—challenging CERA's June 2007 forecast that global oil capacity would rise from its current 91 million barrels per day to 112 million barrels per day by 2017.
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The Bumpy Pathway to an Energy Breakthrough
Continue reading… 12 CommentsRep. Roscoe Bartlett is one of the founders and, one might say, the lion of Congress's peak oil caucus, a group of lawmakers concerned about the world's oil supply running out. With leonine intensity, the Maryland Republican took on the Bush administration on its funding priorities for energy research and development.
"Why are we interested in hydrogen?" Bartlett pounced, at a contentious budget hearing by the House Committee on Science and Technology's subcommittee on energy and environment.
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Oil Demand Is Dropping, but Prices Aren't
Continue reading… 7 CommentsThe buzz in the energy world is that American motorists do finally seem to be responding to high prices and driving less, as reported in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
Carbon Tax says the new statistics are "a powerful rebuttal of the notion that gasoline use is inelastic." And the Truth about Cars cites "a shift in both perception and reality" among drivers. Blogging Stocks says "the highly improbable may be happening."
JPMorgan's Global Energy Strategy report notes that the latest figures are the result of the U.S. Energy Information Administration's making a sizable downward revision in its earliest estimates for December 2007 oil demand. Total demand fell 0.4 percent from December 2006 levels, when it earlier had looked as if there had been 2.1 percent year-over-year growth. "On a detrended, deseasonalized basis demand for [gasoline] has not shown consistent above-trend growth since early 2005," JPMorgan notes.
But the chilling news, for both motorists and the U.S. economy, is that both crude oil and gasoline prices are rising anyway.
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Refineries Stagger Into Spring
Continue reading… 10 CommentsNow that the crocuses are out in Washington, D.C., it's time to look for signs of a spring run-up in gasoline prices. The AAA motor club now has the average price of gasoline at about $3.17 per gallon, up from $2.97 per gallon a month ago, but the next few weeks—when prices typically pick up along with driving demand—could be crucial.
One statistic that does not bode well for motorists is that over the past eight weeks, the nation's oil refineries have been working less efficiently than they have, on average, over any of the past 10 years. I averaged the weekly figures that the U.S. Energy Information Administration compiles on refinery capacity use rates:
