RealClearEnergy Charticles

U.S. energy independence is not coming anytime soon, but North American energy independence may improve dramatically by the end of the decade, depending on how it’s measured and whether you believe there is such a thing as ‘energy independence.’ The problem with the term ‘energy independence’ is that crude oil is a globally-priced and heavily-traded commodity. This means a country can produce more oil than it uses and still not be protected from volatile prices. Shortages somewhere in the world simply tighten supplies everywhere, making for higher prices. That...

The League of Conservation Voters' scorecard on environmental voting shows Republican scores dropping as their proportion of campaign funding from fossil fuel companies has grown during the last 40 years. Meanwhile, Democratic scores concerning the environment have risen an even greater amount over the same time period as the environmental movement became a core interest group within the Democratic party.

The hunt for a new metric to explain the proper long-term oil price has bagged a new creature. In this case, it’s the long-term ratio between the crude oil and the gold price, as explained by Forbes contributor Steve Hanke. Hanke cites work published in 2007 that found gold maintains its purchase power over long period of time, while prices of other commodities adapt to the gold price. Under this theory of price relationships, the spot prices of gold and crude parallel each other and the long-term oil-gold price ratio hovers around 0.0721. With this methodology, Hanke said he was able...

The dreams of major improvements in energy storage may finally be materializing. Over the past several years, utility regulators in the U.S. and Europe have mandated investment in energy storage. This means bankers are starting to finance large-scale energy-storage projects that have been the missing link the renewable energy revolution. This is because intermittent power sources like solar and wind often cannot be added to the electric grid at the right times, forcing the need for expensive electricity storage.  Utilities are starting to offer longer contracts and developers expect...

For those interested in the rise and fall of long-term oil prices and their geopolitical consequences, nothing is more important than great data sets. For the first time, a continuous monthly crude oil prices series dating back to the dawn of the oil age in 1859 has been made publically available by DC-based energy consultancy The Rapidan Group. Previously, only annual data was available via BP's annual report. The price series was developed as part of the research for Rapidan founder and president Robert McNally's new book -- Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil...

  U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) haven't been this low since 1994, when Ace of Base and Sheryl Crow were at the top of music charts. The fall of nearly 1 billion a year from its peak in 2007 is largely a result of a major displacement of coal-fired electrical generation with natural gas, which only emits half the GHGs that coal emits per unit of energy.

Big numbers. That’s the takeaway from reports that vehicle sales in China continue to grow unabated and are north of 27 million units in the first quarter 2017. By comparison, the U.S. is the second-largest new car market in the world and purchased 17.5 million new cars last year. Additionally, the new purchases are coming from a relatively low base of existing vehicles in circulation, with car owners purchasing cars for the first time. This means nearly every new car purchased is adding a new car to China’s roads. All of this points more crude oil demand coming out of East Asia...

Say what you will about electric vehicles, they remain very popular among new car owners in the U.S. Electric cars sales are up almost 60% year-over-year in January, with the Chevy Volt, Tesla X, and Toyota Prius Prime all seeing major growth. About 12,000 electric cars – and 25 separate models – were sold across the country last month, accounting for almost 1% of all U.S. auto sales.

John Maynard Keynes nailed a key component of human nature when he wrote that, "...a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities." As we...

Ok, it's not fair to call it a gimmick, but the situation is this: The fossil fuel market is glutted. Only the persistent and inventive will survive. Bloomberg gives us the dire news: "Global LNG production is expected to generate a record surplus of 46 million metric tons a year by 2019, or about 13 percent more than the market needs, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Developing nations will boost demand for gas and power by more than 2 percent annually to 2040, while consumption in richer countries is close to stagnation, according to the International Energy Agency." What's the...

Are you a CEO looking to put some renewables into your energy mix? EcoWatch condenses a study undertaken by the "Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) and Clean Edge, the research and advisory firm behind various useful rankings of clean energy progress." The analysis "aimed at assessing states 'based upon the ease with which companies can procure [renewable energy] for their operations located within each state.' The index has 15 metrics in three categories: purchasing from utilities, purchasing from third parties (someone other than...

There's a lot of gabbing about "advanced nuclear" (and it is indeed a very worthy thing to gab about seeing as advanced nuclear -- defined as fusion, Molten Salt, thorium and such -- would supply carbon-emission-free baseload energy with fewer, if any, waste storage problems. Still, read the fine print in the glowing press packets and so often these projects still seem tantalizing far away from deployment in the brick-and-mortar world. Not so for NuScale Power, the Small Modular Reactor maker. An SMR, writes James Conca for Forbes, is "something that we’ve never seen before...economic,...

People at California's Air Resources Board are worried. A climate "denier" like President Trump could do away with renewable fuel standards thereby underming the market for carbon credits, thereby cutting the incentive to enage in development projects underwritten with such credits. Bloomberg describes various schemes to "guarantee the money these project developers get for emission-reduction and clean-fuel credits by auctioning options that oblige California to pay a minimum price for them, based on measures the state’s considering." Obvs, "Having a buyer of last resort," as Bloomberg...

Europe has "significant shale capacity," according to the EIA, and a large, industiralized population that consumes a lot of oil. So why wouldn't they develop their shale? A writer for Seeking Alpha explains why he believes it's a "revolution that's not going to happen." http://seekingalpha.com/article/4036239-european-shale-one-shale-revolution-happen

Is an oil industry revival on the way?  According to the consultants at Wood Mackenzie (and Bloomberg which covered their report out today), "The oil industry will shake off the effects of the biggest downturn in a generation this year as they more than double project approvals and increase exploration spending for the first time in three years." Bloomberg reports that "Companies will green-light more than 20 oil and gas fields for development compared with nine in 2016, the Edinburgh-based industry consultant said in a report Wednesday. Drillers, led by U.S. shale operators, will also...

As anyone who watched Silicone Valley's hilarious and appalling lost-in-the-data-farm episode knows, the big tech companies like Google and Facebook consume staggering amounts of energy.  They can also get quite preachy on the importance of renewable energy sources (which may or not may not include hydro and nuclear which are clearly renewable but not always considered kosher enough to be included in the category.) All of this means -- rightly -- they come under special scrutiny when it comes to what they're doing about they're own energy consumption. Greenpeace is holding the big tech...

It was rumored all weekend but as of about 9am this morning it became official with Governor Andrew Cuomo's signature: Entergy's Indian Point nuclear plant, located about 35 miles outside of Manhattan, and supplying about 25% of New York City's energy, is now set to be shuttered by 2021. Lohud.com, which covers the lower Hudson Valley, beat the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to the story. But the Wall Street Journal does a valiant job supplying some context on the wave of U.S. nuclear plant...

One of the most dramatic narratives to watch over the coming year (four years? eight years?) will be the fate of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA.) No federal agency became more controversial over the Obama Administration's eight years in office. Echoing a very typical recent sentiment, one Brett J. Talley, deputy solicitor general at the office of Alabama's attorney general, charged on CNN a few weeks ago that "Under the Obama administration, the EPA became a lawless organ of federal power, divorced from the Congressional statutes that were meant to constrain it." Gee, Talley tell us...