Recently in Global warming Category

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.

Negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations produced the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. It was a watershed event, marking the first international agreement curbing emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial countries.

The Protocol mandated a five-year first-commitment period setting levels of emission reductions, starting in 2008 and ending December 31, 2012. Thus began a decade-and-a-half countdown to negotiate and ratify "a new international framework [by 2012] that can deliver the stringent emission reductions ...clearly indicated as needed," according to the UN's climate change secretariat.

European nations scrambling to secure their gas supplies have made some big advances in recent weeks. The UK's largest household gas supplier, Centrica, signed on November 21 a $20 billion, 10-year gas supply deal for imports from Norway's Statoil.

Meanwhile, political leaders from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands gathered in the German coastal city of Lubmin November 8 to celebrate the inauguration of the first line of the Nord Stream project.

The Australian LNG industry's protestations that the federal government's planned carbon tax will put it at a competitive disadvantage to other exporters such as Qatar, Malaysia and Indonesia are starting to ring a little hollow.

There's no denying that a carbon tax is an impost that Australia's regional competitors will not have to bear, but the prospect is clearly not putting the brakes on investment in what has been a booming LNG sector based on conventional and unconventional gas resources on both sides of the country.

The EU and the US -- on different continents, or different planets?

The European Commission's proposal to tax CO2 from heating and motor fuels may or may not go anywhere, as it requires unanimous approval from all 27 member nations. But the fact that the EC was comfortable putting it out there just points up the vast gulf the Atlantic Ocean represents between Europe and the US.

Some bunker sellers in Houston who recently have been frantically removing traces of biofuels which somehow snuck into their supply -- because they're known to damage ship engines -- by 2020 may be trying to put those biofuels back in there. Or so says DNV, a Norwegian risk management company that just released in the US its technological outlook on energy and shipping through 2020.

Among its host of broad-ranging predictions are that shipping companies -- including those that carry oil, LNG, coal and the like -- will move ahead in using alternative fuels, or even developing a hybrid electric "Prius of the Seas." (Sorry, Jessica Simpson, we know that's confusing.)  

The world water market will grow twice as fast as oil between now and 2030, but traders
looking to branch out into the potentially lucrative business of moving water to where it will be needed the most will face massive challenges getting into the space, according to experts at a special seminar organized for Singapore International Water Week.

(This update corrects the estimated size of water market and recasts the lead)

The startling headlines regarding China's urban population growth this past weekend will likely lead to yet another microscopic analysis of the Asian economic powerhouse.

China's population is already the world's largest at 1.3 billion, according to Li Bin, director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

How can China meet its energy-efficiency targets as it faces the huge demand growth expected to meet the requirements of 700 million urbanites by 2015?

An even bigger question is, can China cope with its seemingly unending thirst for fossil fuels?

These days hardly a week seems to pass without some airline, somewhere running a successful test on using biofuel as jet fuel. Yet whenever the world's fuel experts roll up their sleeves to and dig into the latest issues in fuel supply -- as they did last week in Los Angeles at a fuel forum organized by the International Air Transport Association -- the conversation on biofuels quickly turns sour. The merest whiff of the stuff could ground a plane at an airport near you. What could possibly explain this schizophrenia, and how to bridge the gap?