October 2009 Archives

"I Want to Talk About Me," Toby Keith sings, and the natural gas industry seems to be singing along. But already "It's All About You," other traditional power-fuel groups might vocalize in return, along with the youth group pureNRG. For those sectors, the conversation always seems to get around to gas, anyway.

The gas industry is still seeking more from the climate change bill Congress will pass ... sometime. Probably. After having been scolded roundly by former Senator Tim Wirth and others several months ago for having missed the boat on the issue, the gas sector got itself in gear.

It hasn't succeeded so far in getting provisions it wants the Senate to include, so the industry, along with coal and nuclear, and efficiency interests, is continuing to work senators on the issue. The Kerry-Boxer bill is the vehicle for action, though it could be viewed as only a kind of position paper: A lot of horse-trading is yet to come.

The American Petroleum Institute and America's Natural Gas Alliance have many of the same members, but the associations' approaches to the Boxer-Kerry climate change bill in the Senate couldn't be more different.

"Like the House climate change bill, the Senate's Kerry-Boxer bill would hurt our economy by killing American jobs, increasing energy costs and undermining our nation's energy security," said API President Jack Gerard, the bad cop in what is shaping up as a bad cop-good cop routine. "The cost of Kerry-Boxer is even more than the House bill, and punishes consumers and businesses that depend on transportation fuels. Anyone who drives, rides a bus, flies on an airplane or ships goods to market is likely to see their costs rise."

If you build it, will they come?

Tres Amigas appears to think so. If the company builds a power hub in Clovis, New Mexico, in a project announced Tuesday, generation and transmission projects would have to be built to hook into it. The three power interconnections would suddenly be Three Friends instead of living mostly parallel lives. An idea exciting enough that it could make an adventurous type want to do it just because it's never been done. Because it's there.

But a lot needs to fall into place if the 22 square miles Tres Amigas has obtained the lease rights for is to be more than a field of dreams.

Along come the contrarians. As shale gas is hailed as the resource that will enable natural gas to be our long bridge to a low-carbon future, two people in one day call the thought a bubble that needs to be burst.

The director of a geoscience consulting firm told a Denver meeting that shale gas companies have been seriously overstating reserves that can be produced commercially. He said they are promoting two miracles, our colleague John Kingston reports: that producing shale gas can be both low-risk and high-reward, and that an exploration venture can have both high capital costs and low gas prices -- "and still make lots of money."

In almost breathless prose, the New York Times discovered Sunday that there's shale gas out there.

All over the world. Lots of it. As with US shale, estimates of proved reserves are all over the map -- ranging from as low as 10 years' worth to as high as several centuries' worth.

A sunny, sunny Sunday on the National Mall, and it was just the ticket for the apparently thousands of people lined up to get in the 20 800-square-foot houses erected there to show off what can be done with solar power.

And because just doing it is not enough, we can vote for the one we like best. Old-school, you can vote on paper, right there in one of several tents at the Solar Decathlon, but you can also exercise your American Idol-learned skills and text your vote, one vote per cell phone allowed. It just wouldn't be a bona fide event without a competition.

Senators from California and Massachusetts are leading the climate-bill effort. At least so far, it is named for them: the Boxer-Kerry bill. Or Kerry-Boxer. Depends on who's talking. It is surely no coincidence that the two states are energy efficiency leaders, and now the rivalry (if indeed they have competitive streaks) has gotten a bit more interesting.

Senator John Kerry's state, Massachusetts, has just enacted a plan to spend more than twice as much per capita as famously energy-conservationist California on energy-saving initiatives. California will still spend a lot more, because it's so much bigger, but Massachusetts will outspend it per person, the state Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs said.

About 30 big businesses, including several big electric utilities, are pushing the Senate for a climate change bill this year. Not the usual thing, but not surprising in this instance. A bill with dozens of provisions that make up for the pain of the mandates would be better for many of the companies than an unadorned set of requirements from the Obama administration.

At the same time, an almost innumerable list of mostly state and local companies and organizations -- but the American Petroleum Institute is in there, too -- are pushing the opposite way. MidAmerican Energy is the only big electric company involved in this group, called Energy Citizens. In DC, at least, the organization is running lots of those little bitty TV commercials urging people to save jobs and lobby their members of Congress against the measure.

We've noted before that with wind power, "if it's not one thing, it's another." The newest thing appears in Maine, where wind turbine protesters cite a brand-new medical malady. Maybe big pharma can develop a pill for it someday, but in the meantime ... welcome "turbine anticipation anxiety syndrome."