Power Lines

Republican Mark Grisanti, a newcomer who defeated Democrat Antoine Thompson for a New York State Senate seat in November, will take over a key committee chairmanship from his former opponent.

The Buffalo News reported this week that Grisanti, a freshman from Erie County, was appointed by Dean Skelos, the new Senate majority leader, to chair the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee. The election flipped control of the Senate to the GOP.

The panel was previously chaired by Thompson, a veteran who also hails from Erie County and who authored the state's legislative ban on hydraulic fracturing.

The New York Independent Oil and Gas Association may have good cause to be wary of Joseph Martens, Governor Andrew Cuomo's pick to head the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

As president of the Open Space Institute, Martens said in a speech last year at Union College, New York, that hydraulic fracturing in the state's Marcellus Shale formation "may be the most difficult and daunting challenge" ever faced by the DEC, which is in charge of oil and gas drilling permits in the state.

"If nothing else, it seems to me, the department should go slow. The tragedy of the Deepwater Horizon operation in the Gulf clearly demonstrated that the unexpected can and will happen," he said. "It is also clear that the gas industry has not been as candid as it should have been with regards to the potential for problems. That suggests to me that our fate -- and the need to separate objective science and environmental assessment from industry rhetoric -- is in DEC's hands, and the stakes could not be higher." 

Just because he doesn't emphasize wind power as much as he used to, oil and gas tycoon T. Boone Pickens says he remains just as committed to its development as he is to natural gas.

"As I've said before: I'm for everything American, and there was a lot of focus particularly on my interest in renewable energy -- wind and solar -- to generate electricity, and in natural gas to fuel trucks, buses and fleets," Pickens said in a blog written December 15.

One point of contention in the ongoing battle between Cabot Oil and Gas and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has been resolved.

The DEP on Monday issued the Texas-based energy company an air quality permit for a compressor station.

While a fuss over a building permit may seem to many to be a minor issue, Cabot said it was prepared to pull up stakes in Pennsylvania if the DEP denied it.

The gold business card -- that's gold, not gold-colored paper -- said it all about where the money is coming from for a new kind of gasification industry. The small but growing area is a fairly low-emission process that turns carbon feedstocks, mainly coal, into synthetic gas for multiple uses -- including turning power turbines -- without burning them. It is especially expected to take off in China, with that country's abundance of cash, coal and carbon dioxide emissions.

The card came out of the wallet of gasification entrepreneur Robert Walker, who said it came from a Chinese business contact.

Some energy regulators are pretty much self-proclaimed "geeks" about their subject, but Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff may have taken his penchant for touting energy gadgets to a new level Thursday, as our colleague Tom Tiernan reports.

At a conference on one of his favorite subjects, demand response (which can't help also being about smart grid), Wellinghoff unselfconsciously displayed his home electricity usage -- in real time, as he spoke -- pointing out how different appliances in his home were kicking on without synchronization, creating a usage peak that could be shaped if only his house had better management technology or a home area network.

John Hofmeister is persisting in his promotion of the idea of a Federal Reserve-type board to set and manage US energy policy, but it certainly seems as though the prospects for it are even dimmer than they were when he was talking about it a couple of years ago.

The former president of Shell flogged the notion Wednesday at Platts' 4th Annual Global Energy Outlook Forum. US energy policy has proven to be an "unwinnable and hopeless way forward," he said at the New York City event. "How much hydrocarbons should we be using in 2040? In 2060? We have no idea what it could look like."

When good news about a particular cause is seemingly in short supply, you really can't blame an advocate for reading too much in a news story that reports his or her cause in a positive light.

Which is exactly the case with a recent Marcellus Shale Coalition press release.

The coalition said in a headline that the Marcellus Shale is "Saving Pennsylvanians Millions in Home Heating Costs." The coalition included in its release a Philadelphia Inquirer news story about municipal utility Philadelphia Gas Works, which said it cut its gas rates in part because of the "abundant supplies from new resources such as shale gas."

Two key figures in the New York State Assembly's battle over hydraulic fracturing legislation are no longer players in the long-running drama.

The closing act was a special session this week called by Governor David Paterson, who leaves office January 1 and wanted the legislature to close a $315 million mid-year budget deficit.

Turns out the Assembly failed to deal with the budget hole, but late Monday passed Democratic State Senator Antoine Thompson's anti-fracking bill, which had been passed by the state Senate in June. It effectively bans oil and gas fracking across the state until next May.

Taking a cue from Consumer Reports, the Electric Power Research Institute has published a handy Generation Technology Reference Card, which uses the device of circles colored to depict a technology's performance on a set of performance qualities. It seems to be a useful quick reference for those already in the know, and a dandy handout for people who are unfamiliar with power generation but want to know why generation choices are made.