Energy

The following was posted in The Kensington Review, which interviewed by email Ken Hughes, the newly appointed Energy Minister in the Canadian Province of Alberta. We are grateful to the minister for his time, and to the staff in the provincial government who assisted in this effort, especially Bob McManus and Bart Johnson. Kensington: Just how […]

The world gas market is currently dominated by gas exporting behemoths like Qatar, Russia, Algeria, and Iran. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel–compared to coal and oil–and therefore encourages an increase in power plants that run on natural gas. Many coal-fired power plants in the U.S. are being retrofitted right now because of the abundance […]

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has announced his decision to restart two nuclear reactors in western Japan. As I noted in this blog a month ago, all of Japan’s nuclear reactors are offline. Before the Fukushima meltdown, 30% of the nation’s electricity came from uranium fission reactors. As a result of these shutdowns, there is […]

  Two decades after achieving independence from the Soviet Union, Lithuania is still struggling to achieve energy independence. It appears to have taken some significant steps in that direction recently. First, it managed to get the foreign shareholders of Lietuvos Dujos, a Lithuanian natural gas company, to agree to divide the utility into three separate […]

  Today the Foreign Policy Association hosted a conference on “The Future of Energy“. I had the pleasure of attending and, given that I am writing on energy, I also have some interesting insights to share. Especially interesting was the panel discussion “The Energy Picture, Redrawn.” The key insight is that energy is crucial for […]

The European Nabucco pipeline project was first discussed in 2002 as a means of bringing the energy riches from the Caspian Sea Basin region and possibly the Middle East to the heart of Europe via a new southern corridor (via Turkey) that would bypass Russia. The opera this project was named after tells the biblical […]

For the first time since 1970, not a single electron on the Japanese power grid comes from fission reactors. On Saturday, May 5, 2012, engineers began inserting control rods to bring the fission process to an end at the third and final Tomari reactor. Until last year’s earthquake, tsunami and reactor meltdown, Japan got 30% […]

Jochen Flasbarth, President of Umwelt Bundes Amt (UBA – Germany’s central federal authority on environmental matters), was in New York last week, where he discussed, among other things, Germany’s efforts to create a national electric supply that relies completely on renewable energy. Germany’s goal is to reduce its overall greenhouse gas emissions by 80-90% by the […]

U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) data – analyzed by AP – show that coal exports topped 107 million tons of fuel worth almost $16 billion in 2011 due to stronger overseas demand especially from Asia, Bloomberg reported recently. This is the highest level in 21 years and more than double the export volume from 2006. […]

Nikkei.com and Dow Jones Newswires reported referring to a press conference on Thursday by Japan’s government spokesman Mr. Fujimura that four Cabinet ministers in charge of deciding whether to restart the country’s idled nuclear plants will meet to discuss putting reactors at the Oi plant in western Japan (Fukui prefecture) back online. These four ministers […]

Two decades ago, the Baltic States became politically independent from Moscow. Their energy independence has yet to occur. In Lithuania, Russia’s Gazprom remains the sole supplier of natural gas to the nation of 3.2 million, Obviously, this gives Russia quite a bit of leverage in Lithuania post-independence – February in Vilnius is much more pleasant […]

In his recent article Michael Klare points to an often overlooked cause of higher gas prices in the U.S. – “a fundamental shift in the structure of the oil industry”. In any public discussion the usual explanations for rising gas prices are geopolitical pressures in connection with current tensions in Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan […]