Archive for the 'Energy' Category

By Michael Bradwell / Observer-Reporter.com

ARDEN - More than 2,000 people turned out for an oil, gas and coal jobs expo Saturday at the Washington County Fairgrounds, with some coming from as far away as Texas and Colorado.

By noon Saturday, lines of as many as 20 to 25 applicants could be seen at several of the 40 exhibitors at the Oil & Gas Expo inside Exhibit Hall No. 1, waiting to talk with representatives of natural gas exploration companies, coal companies and related support services. Some major corporate participants included Consol Energy Inc., Range Resources, Halliburton and Atlas Energy Resources.

“There were 1,500 waiting to get in; there were people everywhere,” said Pat McCune, president of Community Bank and one of the sponsors of the Oil & Gas Expo, which has held several informational sessions since October in Greene County. The event ran from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

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Los Angeles Times
July 12, 2009

Ayear ago the Oracle of Oil, T. Boone Pickens, reinvented himself as the Wizard of Wind, launching a $58-million ad campaign to boost alternative energy and vowing to spend $10 billion to build the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle. It was a startling move from a staunch conservative who had made a fortune in the Texas oil fields, raising hopes that both ends of the political spectrum were coming around to the same point of view about weaning the country from its reliance on oil.

And then, last week, the Pickens plan foundered. Pickens announced that he was scrapping the wind farm. It’s too late to take back the $2 billion worth of wind turbines he has already ordered, so instead he has decided to place them in smaller projects around the country.

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Declaring “The Panhandle’s time is now,” the chairman of OGE Energy Corp. told shareholders Thursday he expects wind and solar energy to play a growing role in the electric utility’s future.

The Oklahoma Panhandle has wind and it has great sun resources, which puts it in position to take advantage of the political push to convert a growing percentage of the nation’s power supply to renewable energy sources, said Pete Delaney, chairman, president and chief executive of OGE Energy Corp.

Speaking at an annual shareholders meeting, Delaney was peppered with questions from shareholders interested in knowing more about the company’s plans to use wind and solar energy.

Delaney told investors OGE Energy Corp. only gets about 2 or 3 percent of its power from wind energy, but he expects that to increase to 15 to 20 percent in the next 10 or 15 years.

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By John Dorschner The Miami HeraldFor a year, while the green movement was at its height, Florida environmentalists, new solar companies, utility lobbyists and state regulators spent thousands of hours trying to determine how much of the state’s power supply should come from renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

They did it because the Legislature in 2008 ordered them to do it. After sifting through thousands of pages of documents and sitting in lengthy workshops, the Public Service Commission sent its recommendations to the 2009 Legislature. A renewable-energy bill passed the Senate but died in the House. The result: A year of work wasted.

Among the major victims: The ballyhooed Babcock Ranch project, which is trying to become the first solar-powered city in the world, and thousands of construction workers who would have been hired to build new power plants.

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By MEERA SELVA , 05.26.09

The U.S. energy secretary said Tuesday that he’s had enough of talk about fighting global warming. He wants action and has pledged that America will act first to help move along the talk.

And if others, especially new No. 1 carbon dioxide emitter China, are waiting for U.S. action, they’ll get it, said Steven Chu, a Nobel-Prize winning physicist who has long warned of the dangers of global warming.

“The U.S. will move, inevitably it will move first, as a more developed country we should be moving first, and I hope China will follow,” he said.

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Source: EnviromentalLeader.com
Concentrated solar power (CSP), using hundreds of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays, could meet up to 7 percent of the world’s power needs by 2030 and 25 percent by 2050, according to a new joint report from Greenpeace International, the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association (ESTELA) and IEA SolarPACES.

Even with moderate assumptions for future market development, the world could have a combined solar power capacity of over 830 gigawatts (GW) by 2050, with annual deployments of 41 GW, representing 3.0 to 3.6 percent of global demand in 2030 and 8.5 to 11.8 percent in 2050, according to the Global CSP Outlook 2009 report.

The report finds that CSP installations provided 436 megawatts (MW) of the world’s electricity generation at the end of 2008; however, projects under construction, primarily in Spain, will add at least another 1,000 MW by around 2011. Projects in the U.S. are expected to add up to 7,000 MW along with an additional 10,000 GW in Spain by 2017.

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May 26 (Bloomberg) — Reduced spending on energy threatens to slow the economic rebound, trigger a surge in prices and hurt future prosperity, the Group of Eight industrialized nations said at the close of their meeting in Rome.

“The current financial and economic crisis must not delay investments and programmed energy projects which are essential to economic recovery and sustainable prosperity,” ministers from the G8 and 15 other countries including Saudi Arabia, China and India said in their concluding statement yesterday after a three-day meeting.

The global economic slowdown has restricted credit for new energy projects and eroded demand for fuels, leading to a 58 percent slump in crude prices from their high of $147.27 a barrel in July. Oil companies’ spending this year dropped almost $100 billion, or 21 percent, according to a report this month from International Energy Agency.

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MAY 26, 2009

By Steve Gelsi

Energy stocks fell Tuesday as Wall Street mulled oil prices below $60 a barrel and more difficult long-term prospects for major oil companies facing pressure to replace aging wells.

OPEC also looms on investors’ collective radar screen this week, with the oil cartel expected to avoid any further cuts in production at a confab this week.

Against this backdrop, the Amex Oil Index (XOI) dropped 1.3% to 919, the Amex Natural Gas Index (XNG) lost 2.2% to 405, and the Philadelphia Oil Service Index (OSXX) declined 0.4% to 161.

While mega-projects such as the Thunder Horse project in the Gulf of Mexico are helping production, oil majors such as BP (BP) continue to be squeezed by maturing fields and capital-spending cutbacks, even while maintaining dividend payments.

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Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 24, 2009

RICHMOND — The federal government’s decision to lift its longtime ban on offshore drilling has thrust the hot-button issue of coastal drilling to the forefront of the Virginia governor’s race.

The three Democrats vying for their party’s nomination next month are taking strikingly different positions on whether Virginia should join Alaska, Texas and Louisiana in setting up offshore platforms to drill for oil and natural gas.

Brian Moran, a former delegate from Alexandria, opposes all drilling, a position that is in keeping with his strategy to stake out progressive stances on a variety of issues in the hopes of appealing to the party’s more liberal base.

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By Billy Loftin
Wednesday, May 20, 2009AMARILLO, TEXAS — The Panhandle Producers Royalty Owners Association (PPROA) hosted its 80th annual convention in Amarillo this week to discuss the oil and gas industry, and what challenges and other issues members face.

Hundreds of producers, royalty owners and others interested in the oil and gas industry met Wednesday to listen to Buddy Kleemeier, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

Kleemeier deals with Congress and different committees in Washington D.C. He spoke to representatives from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas about the Obama Administration and what changes may be implemented that effect oil and gas nationwide.

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