May 2009 Archives

A session with a leading Peak Oil supporter can always be a sobering experience. That was certainly the case May 28 at the "New Challenges for Crude Oil" conference in Geneva, where the president of main international Peak Oil group spoke.

Refineries are caught in between the dwindling availability of sweet crude feedstocks, which is forcing facilities to process sourer crudes, and the trend toward more stringent limits on petroleum products' contaminant levels. This situation implies two things might happen to refineries as time goes by: they'll incur higher operating costs and produce larger amounts of waste by-products.

However, researchers at the Rowan University department of chemical engineering believe they've not only cottoned onto a way to help refineries retrofit their sour water systems to tolerate the increasingly sour crudes coming their way -- they also think their proposed solution will cut down waste production and help refineries save more than a few nickels and dimes.

Last month, a federal appeals court threw out the 2007-2012 offshore leasing program prepared by the Bush administration because the administration failed to properly consider the environmental sensitivity of areas of the OCS beyond the Alaskan coastline.

The plaintiffs challenged leasing offshore Alaska, nowhere else. And the ruling doesn't mention the Gulf of Mexico. However, the court made no distinction, vacating the "Leasing Program," and remanding it to the Interior Department to consider the effects of development on "areas of the OCS in addition to the shoreline."

Three signs that the inventory build of the last few weeks and months has probably come to an end:

In the age of robber barons and buccaneer capitalism, the captains of industry and the mill owners lived upwind and upstream from the pollution that poured from their factories, untroubled by bothersome regulations.

Less fortunate were the workers who lived cheek-by-jowl with the factories and mills in a miasma of poisonous pollutants. More than a century later, the CEOs of major industries might not even live in the same time zone of the facilities they run. But despite government-imposed regulations unimaginable 100 years ago, hundreds of thousands are people are still subjected to health risks from the air toxics emitted by industrial facilities. And those populations are disproportionaly minority and poor.

For years, green energy advocates were frustrated in a conservative-controlled Washington. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, the oil and gas industry is lamenting it's hard to gain traction with the new majority.

For example, American Petroleum Institute Chairman Larry Nichols says he has found himself left to pitch industry positions to a Capitol Hill summer intern.