The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE) today released the 2015 Fuel Economy Guide, providing consumers with a valuable resource to help them choose the most fuel-efficient and low greenhouse gas emitting vehicles that meet their needs.
Read more at: Breaking Energy
In July, Brazilian airline GOL became the first airline to use a new type of biofuel to power a commercial flight. The fuel in question was farnesene, which is made from sugar cane. And like the ethanol in your gasoline, 10% of the Florida to São Paulo flight’s jet fuel was made of this biofuel. But this isn’t the only biofuel you could see taking flight in the future.
Read more at: Motley Fool
Troy Hilbish, a tool hand for the oilfield servicing company Schlumberger, says while he didn’t know oil prices have been falling, he does know what falling prices mean. “If the oil prices go up, we drill more,” Hilbish says. “If they go down, we don’t drill as much.”
Read more at: NPR
Elon Musk would rather wait to put out an eagerly awaited product than push one out that’s not awesome.
That was apparent from the language used in Tesla’s Q3 newsletter, published Tuesday (emphasis ours):
We recently decided to build in significantly more validation testing time to achieve the best Model X possible. This will also allow for a more rapid production ramp
compared to Model S in 2012.In anticipation of this effort, we now expect Model X [the company’s forthcoming SUV] deliveries to start in Q3 of 2015, a few months later than previously expected. This also is a legitimate criticism of Tesla – we prefer to forgo revenue, rather than bring a product to market that does not delight customers. Doing so negatively affects the short term, but positively affects the long term. There are many other companies that do not follow this philosophy that may be a more attractive home for investor capital. Tesla is not going to change.
Tesla’s earnings beat analyst’s expectations, but some weren’t impressed by the pace of deliveries by the luxury electric-car maker. Tesla said it would deliver about 33,000 vehicles in 2015, lowering its estimate by 2,000. John Thompson, CEO of Vilas Capital Management, said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” program that Tesla is “grossly overvalued … A company making 33,000 cars is worth half of Ford Motor Company today.”
Still, Tesla’s stock closed at $240.20 Friday, down 98 cents for the day, but up from $230.97 since Tuesday’s earnings report. Ford closed at $14.17, down 2 cents.
(Photo: Darren Brode, Shutterstock)
Since the oil plunge began in June, speculation has been rampant that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries might act to cut production to keep prices from falling further.
The 12-member OPEC cartel is due to meet Nov. 27 for a regularly scheduled meeting. But some officials with the group, meeting informally this week in Vienna, told The Wall Street Journal that a per-barrel price of $70 — from the current level of about $80 — would trigger action.
The paper’s story Friday said:
“At $70 a barrel, there will be panic in OPEC. We have become used to living with $100 a barrel,” said one OPEC official, speaking on the sidelines of the meeting.
Chevron spent more than $3 million to back three candidates for city council in Richmond, Calif. But voters rejected all three, in favor of candidates who have been critical of the oil giant, which is the largest taxpayer and employer in the Northern California city.
Richmond, north of Berkely, is about 45 minutes’ drive from San Ramon, to the south, which is the headquarters for Chevron. As Al Jazeera America reports:
For years, Richmond was known in the San Francisco Bay Area simply as a hub of high crime, pollution, and poverty. Politicians here had unabashedly close ties to Chevron — until 2008, most local elected officials were sympathetic to the company, which maintained a desk in the city manager’s office through the 1990s. But city politics began to change in 2004, when McLaughlin won a city council seat and then, two years later, became mayor.
The city has since risen into the national spotlight several times, partly because of [former mayor and Green Party member Gayle] McLaughlin’s willingness to take on Chevron, which is Richmond’s largest taxpayer and employer. Last year, the city sued the refinery after a 2012 fire sent thousands to area hospitals complaining of respiratory problems. “We don’t see Chevron as the source of keeping our economy going,” McLaughlin said defiantly at the time.
In response, Chevron has gone to great lengths to try to regain public sympathy, and to oust its opponents from local office. Earlier this year, the company launched its own online news outlet, the Richmond Standard, which offers both daily stories on local events and a section called “Chevron Speaks,” where the company posts its views. In the weeks before the election, the company plastered local billboards and stuffed residents’ mailboxes with ads attacking McLaughlin and her allies and supporting candidates backed by Moving Forward, one of its Richmond-based political action committees.
The campaign tactics seemed to have backfired, because all three candidates supported by Chevron lost. Now six of the seven spots on the Richmond council belong to Chevron critics.
The CEO of Oklahoma City-based petroleum producer Continental Resources is so certain oil prices will rise again that the company announced it has eliminated its oil hedges for all of 2015 and 2016.
Harold G. Hamm, whose company is the biggest oil producer in North Dakota’s Bakken oil-shale play, is “basically betting the company on the belief that oil prices won’t sink much more than the 25 percent decline they’ve experienced since June,” Forbes reported.
In its press release, which , Continental said that by eliminating its outstanding hedges, it had boosted its fourth-quarter profit by $433 million.
In the release, Hamm said:
“We view the recent downdraft in oil prices as unsustainable given the lack of fundamental change in supply and demand. Accordingly, we have elected to monetize nearly all of our outstanding oil hedges, allowing us to fully participate in what we anticipate will be an oil price recovery. While awaiting this recovery, we have elected to maintain our current level of activity and plan to defer adding rigs in 2015.”
The Wall Street Journal reports today that U.S. oil drillers are scaling back on plans to drill new wells, amid the plunge in global prices.
Nymex crude dropped 77 cents a barrel to $77.91 Thursday.
Crude is down more than 25 percent since June, making it much less profitable to drill for oil in shale-rock plays.
As WSJ (subscription required) notes:
Continental Resources Inc., a major oil producer in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale, said Wednesday that the company wouldn’t add drilling rigs next year. ConocoPhillips Co. said that next year’s budget would fall below the $16 billion spent this year, dropping plans for some new wells in places such as Colorado’s Niobrara Shale.
Pioneer Natural Resources Co. signaled that it might delay adding rigs in Texas unless oil prices rebound.
“We’re in a battle with Saudi Arabia in regard to market share,” Pioneer Chief Executive Scott Sheffield told investors Wednesday. The Irving, Texas, company hasn’t announced its drilling plans for next year, but Mr. Sheffield said they would hinge on where oil prices stand in the next few months.
A study at Columbia University indicates that children who were exposed to high levels of air pollution from vehicles while they were in the womb were five times more likely to develop symptoms associated with attention-deficit disorder later in life.
As Scientific American reports:
The study adds to earlier evidence that mothers’ exposures to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are emitted by the burning of fossil fuels and other organic materials, are linked to children’s behavioral problems associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
About 10 percent of U.S. children are diagnosed with ADHD, which can impair classroom performance, as well as lead to “risky behaviors and lower earnings in adulthood,” the Columbia researchers wrote.
The study, led by Frederica Perera, an environmental health scientist at the school’s Mailman School of Public Health, looked at the children of 233 African-American and Dominican women in New York City.
More from SciAmerican:
They measured the amount of benzo[a]pyrene bound to DNA – a biological marker for PAHs – in the mothers’ blood at the time of birth. Forty-two percent had detectable levels in their blood.
When the children were about 9 years old, parents filled out a questionnaire commonly used to screen for ADHD behavior problems. The researchers found that children whose mothers had the highest amounts of the PAH at the time of birth were five times more likely to show more behaviors associated with inattention than children whose mothers had the lowest levels. They were three times more likely to exhibit more total behaviors (inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity) associated with ADHD.
Read more on the Columbia website.
Politico gathered some of the nation’s most influential players in the energy and national-security realms to discuss what we should do next about the sudden drop in global oil prices the past four months.
Among the heavy hitters are Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at UC Davis (and a star of PUMP, the movie); environmentalist Bill McKibben; and geopolitical expert Ian Bremmer. But possibly the starkest commentary comes from magnate T. Boone Pickens, founder and chair of BP Capital. His entry in the roundtable is called “A False Sense of Energy Security,” and here’s an excerpt:
The key for America is that we shouldn’t let ourselves get distracted by falling oil prices when there is much more at stake. For decades, our dependence on OPEC oil has dictated our national security decisions and tied us up in the Middle East at an incredible price. We’ve spent more than $5 trillion and thousands of American soldiers have died securing Middle East oil. … it is critical that we not let ourselves lose sight of the problem and continue expanding American energy production. We have OPEC on the run, but we are still dangerously dependent. We have the domestic resources, but we need to demand that Washington get serious about a national energy plan that takes the real costs of energy into account. We cannot get sidetracked by a false sense of enhanced energy security and lower gasoline prices.
(Photo credit: Albert H. Teich/Shutterstock)
