Recently in Carbon limits Category

Everybody knows that coal provides the cheapest electricity in the US and that renewables have a ways to go before they can be cost-competitive without subsidies.

Or do they?

Coalseam gas has been a growing source of supply for Australia, but it's about to come under a new level of scrutiny. It's not just coalseam gas; the Australian government is looking at coal as well. Christine Forster writes about it in this week's Oilgram News column, Regulation & the Environment.

Now that the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a regulation describing just what new coal and natural gas power plants must be like with respect to carbon dioxide emissions, one might think utilities and plant developers would have an easier time with long-range planning. The rule might deliver the certainty that executives always say they're looking for. 

But it's not necessarily so.

There's no such thing as a short document regarding the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard. If the LCFS was a software program, it would have several million lines of code.

What's surprising about the LCFS is that it's out there looming over the California market, and by extension, other markets, and there are far more unkowns about it than knowns.

So based on meetings The Barrel had in Sacramento earlier this month, here are a few things to bring you up-to-date, while trying to do it in less than those few million lines:

And now we're into electric power on this day at CERA, where electric power is the focus. But that inevitably brings in discussion of the things that produce that power.

Canada's official exit from the Kyoto treaty -- an act undertaken by one of the pact's biggest public supporters -- could be seen as a significant win for the oil sands industry. But that sector is facing a host of other issues, including rising costs. Platts correspondent Gary Park, in this week's Oilgram News column "Petrodollars," reviews the landscape.

In discussing the inclusion of airlines in the EU Emissions Trading System, which started January 1, here are a few numbers to consider:

The Barrel was preparing to pull together a blog entry based on recent Platts' reporting regarding the impact that California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard might have on the state's crude oil market and production. Then a federal court intervened.

Our top 10 survey this year had 37 news stories suggested as candidates for the biggest events of the year in the oil business.

There's certainly not a lot of consensus out there: 24 of those 37 stories got 1st place votes. We've never had a distribution like that in the five years we've been running this survey. Unlike last year, when Macondo stood out among all the events of 2010, or 2008, when the march to almost $150 crude and its subsequent post-Lehman Brothers collapse dominated the news, 2011 had a lot of things going on. But it didn't have that one signature story that everyone talked about, which is kind of surprising when you think about it.

In the end, it was the final fifty minutes of negotiations on the fly between the heads of the Indian and EU delegations that reached a compromise agreement at 3:30 am Sunday at the Climate Summit in Durban, ending the longest running climate summit ever, a dubious achievement. 

EU and India occupied center stage in the dispute over whether emerging economic powers such as China and India should have the same legal responsibilities for controlling their greenhouse gas emissions as do industrial countries.  The compromise Durban Platform for Enhanced Action was embraced, if not fondly, but at least with relief by exhausted delegates, most of whom worked through two or three nights of negotiations. 

In diplospeak, the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action is an "agreed outcome with legal force," rather than the more vague "legal outcome" that India and China wanted, or a "protocol with legal instrument," EU's preference. 

However, under the Platform, all nations will be required to commit to reducing emissions starting in 2020. But that will require the climate summit in Qatar next year to launch negotiations toward an agreement by 2015 to include targets that countries will have to achieve in 2020.

Reaching a  deal by 2015 will be  arduous. The Durban agreement also extends the Kyoto Protocol for the EU and a few other developed countries during a second commitment period after 2012. The rest of the world will have only voluntary commitments until 2020. 

The following Regulation & The Environment column published in Monday's Platts Oilgram News, was written prior to the conclusion of the Durban meeting.