Month: August 2020

You heard that right.
Texas.

Houston Chronicle:

Nearly half the electricity generated in Texas comes from natural-gas fired power plants, the state’s single biggest source of power. But don’t expect natural gas to continue that dominance.

In today’s electricity market in Texas, it doesn’t make much sense anymore for power generators to build natural gas plants. Plans to build them are getting put on hold or outright canceled because they’re expensive to operate compared to sources such as wind and solar energy.

Power prices repeatedly skyrocketed last summer to the state’s maximum price of $9,000 per megawatt hour during a heat wave in August when capacity was tight. But the price spikes, which last year boosted the bottom lines of power generators positioned to take advantage of peak prices, are never a sure thing. So far this summer, wholesale prices remained moderate.

Over the next five to 10 years, wholesale electricity prices in Texas are expected to hover about $26 per megawatt hour, or about 2.6 cents per kilowatt hour, according to an estimate by the energy research firm S&P Global Platts.

At that price, electricity would roughly cost about 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour when transmission and distribution charges are added, or about 2 cents per kilowatt hour less than the cheapest 12-month plans on the state’s shopping site Power to Choose.

“It’s hard to justify any gas plants,” said Manan Ahuja, manager of North America power analytics for S&P Global Platts. Generators also don’t have to look very far to see how newer gas plants are faring.

Continue reading “Wind and Sun Killing Gas in Texas.”

Bloomberg Law:

Climate change is poised to thaw and undermine the soil beneath ConocoPhillips’ proposed Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope, making its rigs and roads vulnerable to the same global warming the project will be aggravating. 

The project will be so vulnerable to climate change that ConocoPhillips plans to use chillers to keep the Arctic tundra frozen beneath its roads and oil drilling pads, according to the Bureau of Land Management’s environmental review of the plan published Thursday.

“Where necessary we use cooling devices (thermosyphons) that can chill the ground enough in the winter to help it remain frozen through the summer,” ConocoPhillips Alaska spokeswoman Natalie Lowman said. 

The Willow oil project, slated to be built over 30 years on Alaska’s North Slope, is vulnerable to a rapidly warming Arctic because it will depend on ice roads, ice bridges, and frozen permafrost that forms the foundation of its infrastructure. 

But the region will warm by an average of 4 degrees Fahrenheit over the life of the project, rapidly thawing the frozen Arctic tundra around the drilling rigs, and shortening the winter season during which ice roads and bridges will remain frozen, the land bureau said.

The land bureau’s analysis says the company plans to adapt its project to melting Arctic conditions by building thickly dug gravel roads and drilling pads to offset damage from thawing and shifting permafrost.

But the analysis warns the gravel roads themselves could contribute to further permafrost melting because road dust, where it settles, hastens the pace of soil thawing. And gravel used to fill in collapsed soil can transfer the radiant heat from above the ground and melt the ice beneath it.

Stilll, the land bureau is poised to approve the project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska as part of the Trump administration’s fossil fuels-focused energy and deregulatory agenda.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is trying to encourage even more arctic drilling…

Continue reading “To Keep Oil Flowing – Refrigerate the Arctic”

One good thing about climate change is how many cool youtube videos we’re going to have.

As for the people taking the videos, sucks to be them.

Iowa’s Republican Governor, Kim Reynolds, told Iowa Educators, Students and parents recently, that schools needed to re-open, or “face consequences”. But the Guv was a bit slow in responding to the devastating Derecho storm that battered Iowa last week.

Minnesota Public Radio:

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds pushed back Friday against criticism that she has been slow to respond to a wind storm that devastated the state, and promised more help soon for tens of thousands of residents struggling through their fifth day without electricity.

Reynolds said 100 members of the Iowa National Guard arrived in hard-hit Cedar Rapids on Friday to help clear tree debris that is blocking many downed power lines.

She said she has commitments from the state’s largest utilities that customers in Cedar Rapids and other areas should have their power restored by Tuesday, if not sooner. Many others, including those in the Des Moines area, should be back online this weekend, she said.

Reynolds, a Republican, said she would submit the state’s request for a federal disaster declaration Monday after completing mandatory damage assessments. She said President Trump has promised to act swiftly to provide federal resources once that’s approved.

The storm known as a derecho swept through Iowa on Monday with winds of more than 100 mph, downing trees and power lines, destroying a third or more of the state’s corn fields, and damaging homes and businesses. At least three people in Iowa and one in Indiana were killed.

Cedar Rapids, the state’s second-largest city, has been hardest hit, with officials calling the devastation more widespread than a historic 2008 flood that wiped out downtown neighborhoods.

Continue reading “Iowa’s Katrina”

Video above caught my eye – it’s a PR puff piece explaining the course-change happening at oil giant BP.
It frankly acknowledges what experts have been saying for some time – the ‘world is electrifying – and renewables are a clear winner..”

Course change is inevitable for old line energy companies that want to survive. BP has made this claim before and then reneged.
We shall see.

Washington Post:

With climate change bearing down on the planet and the novel coronavirus upending the fossil fuel business, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies on Tuesday mapped out how it plans to navigate the next decade by radically cutting back on its oil and gas business.

The London-based BP said that it will transform itself by halting oil and gas exploration in new countries, slashing oil and gas production by 40 percent, lowering carbon emissions by about a third, and boosting capital spending on low-carbon energy tenfold to $5 billion a year.

“This makes the BP the first supermajor to spell out, in detail, what the energy transition will actually entail, in practical terms,” said Pavel Molchanov, senior energy analyst for the investment firm Raymond James.

While BP announced earlier this year its broad strategy shift to comply with the goals of the 2015 Paris climate accord, Tuesday’s earnings report specifically laid out for investors how much — and how soon — this would change the company. BP had in February — before the pandemic hit — vowed to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but the new details show major impacts on its business by 2030.

“We believe our new strategy provides a comprehensive and coherent approach to turn our net zero ambition into action,” BP chief executive Bernard Looney said in a statement Tuesday. “This coming decade is critical for the world in the fight against climate change, and to drive the necessary change in global energy systems will require action from everyone.”

The earnings briefing on Tuesday also revealed more of the change in mind-set at the company once known as British Petroleum that gobbled up big rivals such as Amoco and Standard Oil of Ohio to bolster its reserves.

For investors, that means an immediate 50 percent cut in dividends, a significant hit for the British pension funds that rely heavily on BP’s quarterly payments to shareholders. But it will arm the company with more cash as the business reacts to climate change. And on Tuesday, investors applauded; at 3 p.m., BP’s shares jumped more than 7.8 percent, outpacing smaller gains among other oil companies.

Continue reading “BP: “Renewables a Clear Winner””

As always, Jeff Berardelli puts weather in a climate context.

Below, yesterday’s weather map from Needles, CA.

Above, Miami Herald interview with friend-of-this-blog Dr Jennifer Francis on hurricanes and climate.
Below, shithouse rat crazy Trump policy robs FEMA to fund unemployment claims due to COVID.
What could go wrong in the busiest tropical storm season on record?

RawStory:

With the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate on vacation despite the expiration of enhanced unemployment benefits, President Donald Trump has sought to use Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds as a workaround.

Trump’s plan would have FEMA pay $300 a week in enhanced unemployment if the state pays $100.

One problem with Trump’s workaround is that we are approaching the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season.

“As 2020’s record-setting hurricane season enters its most active phase, President Donald Trump wants to take billions of dollars away from hurricane-related disaster relief to provide expanded unemployment benefits due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Miami Herald reported Friday.

“Last weekend, Trump announced a series of executive orders after congressional leaders and the White House could not agree to another coronavirus relief bill that would have likely expanded federal unemployment benefits. One of the orders would allow the president to take up to $44 billion in disaster relief funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for COVID-related unemployment claims.”

“But if a major storm bears down in Florida in the coming weeks, Trump’s executive order would potentially divert funds from from the recovery effort. Ahead of Hurricane Irma in 2017, Congress scrambled to pass a relief bill because FEMA was scheduled to run out of disaster relief money two days before the storm’s projected landfall date. Irma made landfall two weeks after Hurricane Harvey caused billions of dollars in damage in Texas and two weeks before Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico,” the newspaper explained.

Continue reading “Trump’s Unemployment Scam: Using FEMA Money – As Hurricane Peak Looms”

Houston Chronicle:

Occidental Petroleum Corp. will have just a single oil rig in the Permian Basin in the second half of the year, illustrating the scale of the shale industry’s pullback and the company’s debt woes.

The deal to buy Anadarko Petroleum Corp. last year was supposed to consolidate Occidental’s position as the largest oil producer in the Permian, but instead did the opposite. In May of last year, Occidental was running 12 rigs in the shale region of West Texas and New Mexico, while Anadarko had a further 10, meaning the current plans represent a 95% decline in drilling.

Occidental shares plunged 8% to $15.16 at 4 p.m. in New York for the day’s worst performance in the S&P 500 Index.

U.S. shale’s explosive decade of growth and transformation of global energy markets came to an abrupt end when the Covid-19 pandemic struck this year, crushing demand for petroleum and busting open the fault lines of the debt-fueled boom. But a rebound in demand from the depths of the crisis in April is failing to translate into any real uptick in activity in the shale patch. Instead, production declines are expected to continue later this year.

There are only 176 oil rigs active in the whole of the U.S., the lowest since 2005, well before the shale boom. Worse may be to come, with the number of drilling permits last month dropping to the lowest since September 2010, according to Rystad Energy. Activity “is not likely to materially recover this year,” the Oslo-based researcher said in a note Tuesday.

Occidental, with its near-$40 billion debt pile, is an extreme example of the retreat, but it’s not alone. Supermajors Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp., long expected to pick up the slack from a slowdown from smaller rivals, will probably only have 14 rigs between them by the end of this year, down from about 70 a year ago.

U.S. oil production will likely end the year close to 10.1 million barrels a day, about 20% lower than at the start, according to IHS Markit. Production will only increase by 350,000 barrels per day next year, according to the firm’s analysts.

For Occidental, the pullback is particularly humbling. The Anadarko deal was supposed to create a Permian giant to rival the majors, with strong cash flows and enormous growth potential. But the pandemic, combined with the debt, means that Occidental is now shrinking, both in terms of production and market value.

Occidental slashed its capital budget by more than half to $2.5 billion for the year. That’s below the $2.9 billion per year it needs to sustain production going forward. As such, output is declining quickly, with a 13% drop to 1.23 million barrels a day expected in the current quarter and a further 5% in the fourth.

Continue reading “Fracking Crash Continues”