Politics

Trillions and Billions: US Oil and Gas Sector Reviews Its Economic Footprint

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For many decades the benefits of oil and gas development in the US have been overshadowed by the amount of money companies in the sector have made, the environmental impacts of use or development and occasional accidents and the degree to which imports impact US foreign policy and economic health.

The extent to which the US oil and gas business drives job growth, contributes to local and the national economies and has renewed potential to shift economic and political power back to the US were the focus of the American Petroleum Institute’s State of American Energy presentation in Washington, DC today. API has sought ways to boost the reputation of the oil and gas industry in recent years after the industry faced unprecedented opposition to new development both on-and-offshore as new technology allowed access to onshore reserves and offshore development revived. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 8, 2013 at 2:20 PM

Update: Shell Kulluk Rig Accident in Alaska

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Shell spent billions of dollars and significant political capital to obtain the licenses and approvals required to explore for oil and gas off the coast of Alaska.

The company’s problems in the region were compounded when a drilling rig ran aground in rough seas on December 31st as it was being towed from Alaska to the port of Seattle, Washington for scheduled offseason maintenance – the rig was not drilling at the time. Although there does not appear to have been a petroleum release, the risks associated with operating in the Arctic have been highlighted by the incident. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 8, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Rebuild For the Next Sandy

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After Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Atlantic shoreline, my 88-year-old mother-in-law sat in her New Jersey home, unwilling to leave her things, for over a week with no electricity. Another friend of mine spent that same week waiting in gas lines to refill a generator and keep his brother’s small business going. These two examples don’t even include the truly unfortunate folks who completely lost their homes and businesses; they just lost their electric power.

There has been quite a bit of buzz about whether the “smart grid” and associated technologies and applications actually helped in the Sandy recovery efforts. They may have but I think we can do better. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 7, 2013 at 3:00 PM

Why The Pacific Strategy Requires A Western Hemisphere Energy Policy

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Energy security is a key element of national security. The missing piece of America’s energy security policy, in turn, is the glaring absence of a strategy to coordinate and secure the enormous energy resources of the Western hemisphere. Today, America is over-dependent on the increasingly volatile Middle East, China is increasingly aggressive in its quest for energy sources worldwide, and Russia is exploiting its energy reserves not just economically but as an instrument of global power. Clearly it’s important to reduce demand through various domestic means and to increase supply from alternative sources. But for now and even the mid-term future, it is more realistic to generating energy now and in the mid-term via an effective national energy policy which relies on the Western Hemisphere.

 /  Published January 4, 2013 at 12:30 PM

Subsidies for Big Oil?

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The US government needs to stop giving subsidies to Big Oil! This is such a common rallying cry that few stop to consider what it really means.

The idea appears simple: Oil companies make so much money the government should not support them. But is the government giving oil companies money? How does the system really work? Keep reading →

 /  Published January 4, 2013 at 9:00 AM

Biofuels A Winner In Fiscal Cliff Deal, Too

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The wind power industry wasn’t the only renewable energy winner in the fiscal cliff deal that cleared Congress late Tuesday – the legislation also showered taxpayer largess on the producers of various categories of biofuels.

The bill [PDF] included tax credits and depreciation rules that support cellulosic ethanol and revived, retroactively, a biodiesel tax credit that had expired at the end of 2011. Algae also won a spot as a favored biofuel. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 3, 2013 at 2:30 PM

Davos Preview: Energy ‘Architecture’ Issues A Global Priority

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The World Economic Forum is getting ready for its high-profile conference in Davos, Switzerland this month and has kicked off preparations with a controversial but eye-catching ranking of global “energy architecture” on a country-by-country level.

After several years of focusing on the outcome of the financial crisis, the world leaders and business titans famous for gathering at Davos may now finally turn their focus to the energy sector, which continues to go through significant convulsions created by shifting fuel markets, renewable energy integration and complex policy debates. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 3, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Wind Energy PTC Extension Underlines Lobby’s Growing Heft in DC

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They took it right to the edge, but the US wind energy business managed to rescue the production tax credit around which many of their projects and manufacturing investments are structured. In the process Capitol Hill supporters of the sector rescued a claimed 37,000 jobs and the supply chain for a rapidly expanding form of power generation.

The effort to rescue the wind energy PTC and the also-extended investment tax credit (ITC) was not directly linked to the fiscal cliff debate, but became intertwined with the calendar-driven effort to prevent earlier tax cuts and credits from expiring without any replacement policy in place. The inclusion of the wind energy PTC, which was thought to be sufficiently likely to expire that companies spent significant sums as they rushed to turn on wind farms before the end of 2012, speaks to the expanded power of the wind industry groups in Washington, DC and the increased centrality of the wind energy business to major infrastructure and engineering firms with substantial US manufacturing operations including GE Energy, Siemens and Vestas. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 2, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Top Energy Stories of 2012

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The past year has proved a fundamental pivot in North American energy markets, and set the stage for the coming years to look very different from the past four decades of US energy industry history.

I’ve reviewed the ways the changes that originated in 2012 will affect the political scene in the US here, but in looking through our most popular and most compelling posts on Breaking Energy in the last year I noted how many of them supercede easy categorization. Stories about fracking cut across the buckets in which we seek to put our daily dose of energy news, analysis and discussion, but so have stories about the wind industry, financial shifts and smart grid technology. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 31, 2012 at 1:00 PM

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
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