The Oil Drum

Bangladesh: No Gas for Eight Proposed Large & Medium Power Plants

The Power Division of Bangladesh is set to face a major setback in implementing at least eight large and medium power plant projects to generate a total of 1,700MW electricity as Petrobangla has informed the Power Development Board that it will not be possible to supply gas to the plants.

Yemeni price protests turn violent

Government officials say the rise is due to a sharp increase in the prices of commodities such as wheat in global markets.

...Four out of 10 Yemenis live on less than $2 a day, according to Britain's department for international development, which says Yemen's oil, its main earnings source, is expected to dry up by 2015.

Iran’s President Says 3,000 Centrifuges Are Running

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday Iran had met a planned target of installing and running 3,000 atomic centrifuges used in enriching uranium, Iranian news agencies reported.

A symbiotic energy relationship

The tiny country of Denmark is emerging as a model for Texas in the booming field of wind energy, just as Texas has been for Denmark in the traditional energy businesses of oil and gas.

West Bank Boys Dig a Living in Settler Trash

As the truck unloads, the children pounce on the garbage like flies. Some swing aloft on the hydraulic pistons that open the back, then drop onto the mound of trash to grab a piece of metal, a crushed can, a soda bottle or a stinking T-shirt.

One boy slips and disappears for a moment beneath the garbage as the truck lumbers forward to dump more of its load. He scrambles up again, losing his footing on a pile of animal intestines, grabbing onto a thicket of shrubbery cut from someone’s garden.

Another boy finds a small nylon Israeli flag and tries to tear it with his teeth; yet another unearths a small lilac umbrella, which he holds over his head and shows off to his friends. Most dig diligently for metal, which they dump into the ripped nylon sacks they carry.

Petrocaribe treaty sees closer energy embrace with Caracas

The PetroCaribe treaty which Guyana has not yet signed would draw it into a closer energy embrace with Venezuela and this along with the absence of any mention of bio-fuels which Georgetown is keen to develop may cause it to think carefully before adding its signature.

Hurricane Felix Gathers Strength, Passes Near Bonaire

Felix was about 60 miles northeast of Aruba, moving west-northwest at 18 mile per hour, the Center said. It may brush past Honduras before making landfall in Belize on Sept. 5, according to the Center's five-day forecast. If Felix remains south of the path of Hurricane Dean, the first Atlantic hurricane of the season, oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico probably won't be affected.

In Cuba, a Politically Incorrect Love of the Frigidaire

The island’s economic isolation, compounded by a United States embargo in place since the early 1960s, has made a necessity of preserving technology from before the revolution.

No guarantees about heating costs

Experts are hesitant to speculate what heating oil and other fuel prices will be this winter, citing the vagaries of world markets and unpredictability of weather.

"The trouble is, there is no way of knowing," said Joseph Broyles, energy program manager for New Hampshire's Office of Energy and Planning.

Pope Leads ‘Eco-Friendly’ Youth Rally

Pope Benedict, leading the Catholic Church's first 'eco-friendly' youth rally, on Sunday told up to half a million people that world leaders must make courageous decisions to save the planet "before it is too late."

Home grown apples can save the planet...

A few weeks ago, the climate activist and inventor Dave Wilks told me he’d hit on a new way to describe the warming of our atmosphere: it’s equivalent to nearly five Hiroshima bombs exploding per second, he said, and the rate is rising exponentially. I’ve also spoken to experts who believe there’s another threat facing us, no less significant than global warming: the end of oil. Our lives depend on ever-increasing amounts of cheap energy, and synthetic petroleum byproducts, and when oil production peaks we’re in trouble. Some believe that will happen as early as 2010.

And it will all, of course, be exacerbated by population growth. Last week researchers at a United Nations forum in Iceland said to keep pace with an increasing population more food will have to be produced world-wide in the next 50 years than during the past 10,000 years combined. We can look forward to economic collapse and literally billions of people starving to death.

No holiday for nation's 24/7 'energy slaves'

From oil alone, 150 energy slaves serve the average person in the United States. The electrical line worker drives a truck everywhere; the backhoe makes digging a foundation in flinty soil seem effortless compared to digging by hand in sand; and the nurse uses bandages and medicines made with and from oil, in a hospital heated with oil.

But now the slaves are starting to slip away.

Expect no relief from holiday hot spell

Day Five of the year's longest heat wave sent people fleeing to the beaches this holiday weekend as thousands were left without power in their homes and the promise of relief was still days away.

Late Saturday, power was restored to about 1,600 Eagle Rock households that had been without power since Friday night and to 2,500 in the Los Feliz area that lost power earlier Saturday. Citywide, roughly 5,700 customers lost power Saturday, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials said. Roughly 4,500 of Southern California Edison's 4.8 million customers were without power Friday.

Japan's oil products demand may have yet to recover

Japan posted an increase in oil products output in July for the first time in 14 months, but it may be premature to interpret this as a sign of demand recovery from Asia's second-largest consumer.

Even though the uptick came alongside a jump in crude oil imports and a fall in products inventories, the country's refiners may simply be preparing to rebuild their stockpiles after the plant maintenance season; more data will be needed in the coming months for demand growth indications.

Biofuels Don't Have The Juice To Go The Distance

Gasoline's EROEI ranges between 6-to-1 and 10-to-1, says Cutler Cleveland, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. In other words, we get anywhere from six to 10 gallons of gasoline for every gallon we use to find oil, pump it out of the ground and refine it. But the EROEI of corn-based ethanol, the most common U.S. biofuel, is a mere 1.34-to-1, the Agriculture Department says. So even though an acre of corn can make 360 gallons of ethanol, only 90 gallons of that is "new" fuel.

Bush's ethanol dreams make corn a hot commodity

When Americans fire up their grills for late summer barbecues over the next few weeks, a cloud will be hanging over them in the form of higher prices for steak, chicken and ribs.

Beyond Wind and Solar, a New Generation of Clean Energy

Oregon Iron Works has the feel of a World War II-era shipyard, with sparks flying from welders' torches and massive hydraulic presses flattening large sheets of metal. But this factory floor represents the cutting edge of American renewable-energy technology.

The plant is assembling a test buoy for Finavera Renewables, a Canadian company that hopes to harness ocean waves off the coast of Oregon to produce electricity for U.S. consumers. And Finavera is not Iron Works' only alternative-energy client: So many companies have approached it with ideas that it has created a "renewable-energy projects manager" to oversee them.

Power crazy

Across Canada, provincial governments are aggressively following the call of green power and energy conservation. No watt of electricity is exempt, from mandated fluorescent light bulbs to subsidies for windmill farms to the campaign to rehabilitate the granddaddy of power boondoggles, nuclear energy, out of long-term care.

Planet of the apes needs to get real

One of the conflicts between the Earth-centred universe and the Copernican model was the doctrine of heavenly, or "super-lunary", perfection. The church argued that while Earth was subject to human imperfection, up in heaven the trains all run on time. When astronomers observed the inconvenient truth that the moon is riddled with bumps, the geocentrists invented an invisible material that smoothed the bumps and made the "real" surface as perfect as God intended.

This is unprovable nonsense, like the idea that Generation IV nuclear reactors are guaranteed "fail-safe", and thus the cure-all for global warming.

Anthropogenic Climate Change (podcast)

The main knock against anthropogenic climate change — more or less unchanged since the 1980s — is that a cabal of cunning computer modelers have managed to dupe, co-opt, bamboozle, or intimidate climate scientists into believing fantastic, yet unsubstantiated, allegations. Recently put forward by the redoubtable Freeman Dyson, this critique also, unfortunately, picks up a certain amount of support in the progressive community. To help dispel these arguments and the confusion they still cause I turned to Dr. Chris Rapley, who knows as much as anybody about actually measuring climate change. It was a great pleasure to hear the facts from a primary source, and I'm very grateful to Dr. Rapley for talking with me on this and a range of other important topics. Please listen carefully and redistribute widely. Total runtime an hour and fourteen minutes.

Climate change and N. America farms to be studied

Iowa State University researchers will join a study of climate change to produce mid-century projections by late next year of the likely regional effects on North American farms from global warming.

"There is no question now that the climate is changing on a global scale," said Gene Takle, an Iowa State University professor of geological and atmospheric sciences who will lead a study to project North American climate from 2040 to 2070.

Greek forest fires could be CO2 threat

Greece's huge forest fires have been blamed by some on global warming, but satellite images of smoke plumes drifting as far as Africa prompt the question: are forests a major source of greenhouse gas?

The green faith effect

Solar panels are becoming a common connection for Christian churches, Hindu temples, Calgary synagogues and Toronto mosques as faith groups across Canada act on the so-called Green Rule: "Do unto the Earth as you would have it do unto you."

Climate change ticks ever closer

On the Leslie St. spit, signs of global warming are being picked right from the feathers of migratory birds. And the ticks now spreading north carry with them the spectre of Lyme disease.

No APEC deal on climate change targets: Howard

Asia-Pacific countries will not agree on binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at a major summit this week, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said Sunday.