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Energy Sector Disruption: Three Political Lessons from 2012

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Working in the energy sector is an inherently political activity. I once sat opposite a friend of a friend at lunch, and when she found out that I covered the energy business and then quizzed me on the industry’s practices, asked if I found people often wanted to hit me. I don’t find that, but the way a modern economy depends on the energy business means that everyone – along the entire spectrum of beliefs – also has opinions about its politics in ways that don’t necessarily reflect a subtle, shifting, complex reality.

Over the course of 2012, we’ve been focusing on the issues at play in energy politics, and have gathered them together in a special hub that can be found on Breaking Energy here. Keep reading →

Published December 27, 2012 at 10:00 AM

Breaking Down the US Energy Independence Discussion

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Few topics have received as much attention over the past year as the concept of an energy independent United States. In fact, energy independence featured prominently in the run-up to the US presidential election. But what does energy independence really mean?

In the US, energy can be broken down mainly into electrical power – which accounts for 63% of total US primary energy consumption – and liquid transportation fuels – which account for the remaining 37%. As reported earlier this year in Breaking Energy, the US is already effectively energy independent when it comes to power generation, so it is worth instead focusing on the transportation side of the equation, where the issue of importing energy is more relevant. Keep reading →

Published December 14, 2012 at 12:15 PM

What Should the US Energy Industry Expect Under a Second Obama Administration?

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Now that the votes are in and media attention has shifted from a contentious US presidential election to the looming fiscal cliff, energy companies in the oil and gas space as well as wind, solar and other sectors are keeping a sharp eye on what the next four years of energy policy might look like.

The regulatory requirements associated with developing oil and gas on federal lands became a polarizing issue during the election, with republicans claiming the process is too strict, overly burdensome and impedes companies from producing resources vital to the US economy. Keep reading →

Published November 14, 2012 at 12:30 PM

The End of Big Energy?

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The term “big oil” carries quasi-political connotations of a kind of shadow state that has often attracted sharp criticism. But if we look at the end of “big oil,” will we like what we see?

Energy companies are often called on to operate like states rather than private firms. They are held responsible for the safety, health and livelihoods of enormous numbers of people, they are entrusted with resources owned by the public and by virtue of their size and reach they are often as much partners as targets in tackling political problems at home and abroad. Keep reading →

Published October 25, 2012 at 10:30 AM

Who Owns the Energy?

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The question of natural resource ownership has been answered in many different ways over the course of human history, with compromises between the interests of societies and individual developers taking on a variety of forms.

While it often seems that the basic parameters of ownership and regulation of ownership have been sorted out in places like the US, comparatively small evolutions in the perception of these relationships can have outsized impacts on specific energy projects or companies. Keep reading →

Published October 18, 2012 at 10:30 AM

‘Delta Boys’: An Energy Documentary Review

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Many oil and gas analysts know Nigerian energy fundamentals like backs of their hands, effortlessly rattling off statistics like the country’s 2.4 million barrels per day of 2011 oil production accounted for about 3% of the world’s total or the fact that Nigeria was tied with Australia as the world’s fourth largest LNG exporter that same year. And the soon-to-be released documentary “Delta Boys” begins much the same way, identifying Nigeria’s place in the global oil and gas producer hierarchy.

However, few analysts truly comprehend the situation as it exists on the ground. The same goes for the millions of news consumers worldwide that follow the complex web of human rights, environmental, political, economic and energy supply issues that pulse throughout the resource-rich region. Keep reading →

Published September 19, 2012 at 8:30 AM

The Flawed US Energy Policy Discussion

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Are the energy industry and the business of politics incompatible?

It could be the simplest explanation for why the US does not have a comprehensive, efficient or constructive energy policy set. On the most basic level, two-year and four-year election cycles are problematic for an industry that needs to make decisions and investments over twenty- to thirty-year time horizons. Keep reading →

Published September 12, 2012 at 3:45 PM

Citic, CLSA, CNOOC, Nexen, Sinopec and Talisman: China’s Multi-Billion Dollar Week in the Energy Markets

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The bureaucrats in Beijing and the businessmen in Shanghai have been busy in recent weeks, negotiating a series of headline deals that sync into broader themes of Chinese access to global energy and commodities markets.

Bankers at Wall Street and City of London banks have spent much of the past week telling financial reporters that the impending sale of the remaining 80% of the Asian arm of French bank Credit Agricole represented an old finance industry meme: an out-of-towner overpaying for access to the premier league of global banking. Keep reading →

Published July 25, 2012 at 10:30 AM

Nuclear Fusion: ‘This is the Adventure Part of Venture Capital’

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While eating lunch at a recent energy conference with the usual random selection of delegates and speakers, I asked the co-founder of a leading energy venture capital firm what technology he finds most exciting right now. Without hesitation, he began telling me about his company’s ambitious, longer-term bet on a small nuclear fusion company. He then put me in contact with his partner and co-founder, who helped fill in the details for this story. Keep reading →

Published July 19, 2012 at 8:30 AM

Renewable Energy’s Five Year Plan: Building the Transparency Set Amid Hectic Growth

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‘What gets measured, gets managed,’ is an long-standing cliché of business, but its truth is often self-evident when it comes to governance. In planning energy policies, regulators and businesses and even voters must have access to the right kind of data before they can even see which problems are most pressing and which solutions most viable.

The International Energy Agency’s new five-year forecast for the renewable energy sector joins the fuel-specific reports covered by its widely read oil, natural gas and coal mid-term reports. Those fossil fuels need little introduction, and in the developed countries covered by IEA and its parent organization – the OECD – production, processing, use and reserves of the traditional energy complex is very advanced and taken as fact. Keep reading →

Published July 6, 2012 at 4:20 PM
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