Methanol is a bit of a mystery. It is the simplest form of hydrocarbon, one oxygen atom attached to a simple methane molecule. Therefore it burns. It is manufactured in small quantities, but production could be ramped up at any time.
Read more at: Real Clear Politics
A story in BusinessWeek highlights a Goldman Sachs report from this week hinting that U.S. drillers might want to let up a bit, in the face of still-plummeting worldwide prices.
The shale boom in the U.S. isn’t likely to pull back until oil gets so cheap that people can’t make money drilling for it. There are a lot of estimates of the break-even price for U.S. shale producers. Some think it’s around $80 a barrel, others think it’s closer to $60, and it’s obviously not going to be the same for everyone. The number changes depending on where you’re drilling and how good you are.
The United States has been in protracted negotiations with Iran over a settlement that would reduce or eliminate economic sanctions against Iran, in exchange for that country delaying its nuclear program.
With oil prices falling — one expert notes that Iran needs a price of $140 per barrel to balance its national budget — the U.S. position could be strengthened. But as this excellent story by Thomas Erdbrink of The New York Times shows, Iran isn’t likely to give away everything, even if it halts the nationwide economic pain.
“They will remain focused on getting a deal, but not any deal,” said Ali Khorram, a former Iranian ambassador to China who is close to the negotiating team.
North Dakota flares more than 25 percent of the natural gas it extracts from the Bakken oil-shale play. Not only is natural gas cheaper (i.e. not as profitable) than the oil that comes out of the same wells, there’s a lack of pipeline and storage capacity in that region. Texas, by comparison, flares only 1 percent of its natural gas.
But the state is taking steps to build the infrastructure to capture and use more natural gas. As Adam Belz of the Minneapolis Star Tribune notes:
A quiet transformation is underway, however, as the state bids to turn natural gas into a native business and drive down flaring.
A growing network of pipelines and processing plants has made North Dakota a recent target for billions of dollars of investment toward factories that convert natural gas into other products like fertilizer and plastic.
Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, shared his thoughts last week on the U.S. ban on oil exports, saying on API’s Marketplace program that with global prices so low, it might not make sense for American drillers to increase production.
“I don’t think anyone knows what the price of oil will be in a year,” he said. “The big news in the oil markets is not just lower prices — it’s the return of volatility, and volatility works in both directions. … In the worst case, relaxing the ban doesn’t do anything.”
The story on the Marketplace website, by Dan Weissman, leads with the Government Accountability Office report stating that relaxing the 40-year-old export ban could lower domestic gasoline prices. Some experts disagree with that prediction, and in an event, the GAO report was written more than a month ago, before oil prices began to fall sharply on their own.
Breaking Energy’s Jared Anderson added:
“US producers might not want to sell into a bear market, as a sustained period of low oil prices would hurt their profitability and could put the brakes on US oil output growth. So changing the policy on exports might not alter physical balances and the price signals they send.”
Everything about Alberta’s oil sands is huge–from the sheer scale of the 170-billion-barrel resource in the ground, to the two-storey trucks that haul bitumen ore in the mines, to the $30-billion per year in capital investment to expand the flow of crude.
Read more at: The Globe and Mail
Scientists are using biotechnology to chip away at barriers to producing biofuels from woody plants and grasses instead of the corn and sugarcane used to make ethanol. NC State’s Forest Biotechnology Group, which has been responsible for several research milestones published this year, summed up biofuel research progress and challenges for a special issue of the Plant Biotechnology Journal.
Read more at: Phys
Image rights: Phys.org
While the debate rages about what the threshold for biofuels should be in the government’s next (and long-delayed) Renewable Fuel Standard, Breaking Energy’s Jared Anderson has a timely post about the makeup of the current RFS, as it was proposed by the EPA last November.
There are thresholds within the larger thresholds, and it looks like the cellulosic ethanol target will go down. But as Anderson notes:
“While the battle over the RFS continues, the cellulosic ethanol industry took a major step forward today with the inauguration of a commercial-scale plant in Hugoton, Kansas. The biorefinery has the capacity to produce 25 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year, which alone exceeds EPA’s proposed 17 mm gallon blending target under RFS. The plant also generates 25 MW of electricity, which supplies its own needs and provides excess power to the local community.”
Anderson signs off with:
“The RFS will remain controversial, but this new plant is a big win for the cellulosic ethanol portion of the equation.”
(Photo credit: Shutterstock)
Four years after the EPA approved E15 for use in cars and light trucks model 2001 and newer, members of the Travelers Motor Club and Association Motor Club Marketing have reported no problems as a result of using E15, said Gene Hammond and Mark Muncey, co-owners of these organizations. In a press conference hosted by the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE) this morning, Hammond and Muncey said that they support E-15 (15 percent ethanol and 85 percent petroleum in motor gasoline).
Read more at: Farm Industry News
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Tom Nowak of Quantum Financial spoke at Green Fest in Chicago recently, and there he discussed whether it makes financial sense for investors to divest from funds that include fossil-fuel holdings. Nowak, an expert on socially conscious investing who wrote the book Low Fee Socially Responsible Investing: Investing in Your Worldview on Your Own Terms, says the financial case rests on the likelihood that there will someday be a carbon tax imposed on energy producers. Read more in Forbes.
