Natural gas find may spur interest in shallow Gulf waters

By BRETT CLANTON
Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle

Jan. 11, 2010, 9:29PM

Mostly left for dead years ago by Big Oil and scoured by smaller firms since, the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico are likely to get a second look by companies of all sizes after word Monday of what may be one of the largest discoveries in the area in decades.

A group led by New Orleans' McMoRan Exploration Co. said it found significant quantities of natural gas in a 5-mile-deep well it drilled in about 20 feet of water at McMoRan's Davy Jones prospect just 10 miles off the Louisiana coast.

Estimates of the size of the discovery range from 2 trillion to 6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, rivaling the largest gas finds ever made in the Gulf. But the companies said they will have to do further drilling to confirm the resource potential.

The discovery heralds the potential for yet another frontier for oil and gas development in an area of the Gulf of Mexico called the Outer Continental Shelf that has been drilled extensively for nearly a century.

And it suggests the same rock and sand layers that in recent years yielded major oil and gas discoveries several hundred miles out in the Gulf may be equally rich with oil and gas in shallow water areas, where exploration and production is much easier and cheaper.

“It's definitely going to bring a number >>>

Running for First in the Clean-Energy Race

By Daniel J. Weiss, Susan Lyon | January 28, 2010

President Barack Obama reiterated in his State of the Union address last night his vision to get America running on clean energy. “Providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future,” he said, “because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation.”

He used the annual address to advocate for a clean-energy investment agenda that would create jobs and reduce carbon pollution. The Obama administration’s efforts began on January 20, 2009, and it has already produced benefits. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which became law on February 17, 2009, includes $70 billion for clean-energy investments and will create nearly 900,000 new clean-energy jobs. One million low-income homes will be weatherized because of ARRA, and wind, solar, and other renewable electricity generation will double by 2012. ARRA also included $20 billion in clean-energy tax cuts for wind and solar power investments and the purchase of ultraefficient cars.

President Obama made it clear that more>>>

Climate Crisis Was Too Good To Waste

By J.R. CLARK AND DWIGHT R. LEEPosted 12/30/2009 07:05 PM ET

Climatologists are learning from economists. No, not how to more accurately forecast the future. Climatologists could certainly benefit from improving their forecasts, but they aren't likely to learn how from economists.

What climatologists are learning from economists is how to increase their importance by promoting a theory that gives politicians more power. Economists have shown that this can be accomplished with the flimsiest of evidence.

Economists began gaining in importance after World War II when they started rallying around a 1930s theory developed by John Maynard Keynes. The theory explained how politicians could prevent, or reverse, economic downturns by running budget deficits, and prevent, or halt, inflation by running budget surpluses.

Claiming budget deficits during World War II ended the Great Depression, economists convinced politicians to establish the Council of Economic Advisers in 1946 to give economic advice to the president.

By the 1960s there were claims of a Keynesian consensus of informed economists, with these economists knowing how to fine-tune the economy, effectively eliminating the business cycle, with advice on when and how to adjust government budgets to stimulate or dampen economic activity.

The result was better for economists than it was for the economy. The pronouncements of economists became more newsworthy, and government jobs for economists multiplied as the economy moved into the stagflation — economic stagnation with increasing unemployment and rising inflation — that characterized economic performance in the 1970s.

Stagflation had been predicted by Milton Friedman>>>

Food Vs. Trees

Posted 12/30/2009 06:57 PM ET

Agriculture: Already buffeted by rising food prices due to biofuels, consumers face a bigger hike if climate-change legislation is passed. Farming costs will rise, and it may be more profitable to plant trees than crops.

If the cap-and-trade provisions of the Waxman-Markey bill become law, you can wave goodbye to those amber waves of grain as America's heartland falls victim to a perverse set of incentives and a process called "afforestation." Soybeans and wheat will give way to elms and oaks.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack wants a review of what amounts to an agricultural impact study of HR 2454, which shows it would make planting trees more profitable than planting food.

The study, which was released by the USDA earlier this month, reckons that as a result of cap-and-trade, farmers with energy-intensive crops would see their cost of production go up 10% over the next 50 years. Couple that with the money to be made from carbon offsets, and it may not be long before we're unable to see the farms for the trees.

The USDA projects that under cap-and-trade>>>

Put Down That Shovel!

• DECEMBER 25, 2009, 10:05 P.M. ET

By Andy Kessler

The House has passed a $154 billion jobs bill, and the administration has announced a plan to spend $50 billion of repaid TARP money to "create" jobs—this time its green jobs, "shovel ready" infrastructure projects ($27.5 billion for highway construction and repair) and a tax credit for small businesses.

More infrastructure? Recycling Great Depression-era projects is lame. My advice? Put down that shovel! It's time to try something else.

We're in a knowledge economy now; we use high-tech tools to efficiently and effectively design, make, market and sell. Building roads and bridges willy-nilly won't make us more productive; and without increases in productivity and the associated corporate profits, there can be no sustainable job creation, no increase in standards of living, and no real economic recovery.

Given that real tax cuts are off the table and a new stimulus (even if it isn't called that) is inevitable, the best we can hope for is to use the power of the government to clear a path that private enterprise can't, via one-off projects that end and disband. Stop thinking concrete and massive construction projects. Think small—photons, electrons and proteins. Here are six ideas:

• Climb poles for wireless. Every street light in the country can be fitted with a wireless access point. Lots of companies, including Google, have tried to roll this out. But dealing with thousands of state and local governments to get access to poles and power is a nightmare. A stroke of the pen can create the Local Wireless Corps, with unfettered access to street lamps, telephone poles and utility sheds to create a massive wireless network to deliver Internet access—10 megabit, even 50 megabit speeds—to both homes and next generation mobile phones. AT&T and Verizon will complain about the competition, but so what—they're hardly hiring.

• Dig fiber ditches. Even faster wireless is too slow. If, as the Federal Communications Commission states, broadband is a priority, let's open up the right of way to a Local Fiber Corps to lay fiber-optic strands to every one of the 120 million U.S. residences (even the 10 million empty ones). The goal is gigabit speeds. It's attainable now. New applications like YouTube are bandwidth hogs. It's hard even to imagine the types of applications possible in a 100 meg or gigabit per second speed world. The only one way to find out? Build it. Then sell the fiber along with the wireless lamp posts to the highest bidders. More than one in each town will keep competition alive. And with so much bandwidth, arguments over things like network neutrality will magically disappear.

• Sequence proteins. In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a $100>>>

Five Decades Of Cooling Ahead

Posted 12/24/2009 06:17 PM ET

As Americans dig out from another bout of global warming, a new, peer-reviewed study sees decades of lower, not higher, temperatures ahead. AP View Enlarged Image

Climate Change: A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years.

Much of the nation got a white Christmas this year, some in unprecedented quantities. A record-breaking storm deposited 12 to 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many places set records for the most snow in a single December day as more than 50% of the U.S. was covered by the white stuff.

Scientists (and here we use the word loosely) at Britain's Climate Research Unit may have tried to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, but it's hard to hide two feet of snow. Their motto seems to be the immortal words of Groucho Marx: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?"

Qing Bin-Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy at Canada's University of Waterloo, is a believer in the value of drawing conclusions from observable data and not from selective data fed into computer models that are based on false assumptions and include "fudge factors."

In a peer-reviewed paper published in the prestigious online journal Physics Reports, Lu, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Newcastle, reports that CFCs, the compounds once widely used as refrigerants, and cosmic rays, which are energy particles originating in outer space, are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Lu puts the start of the cooling trend at 2002 and writes>>>

No Substitute For Fossil Fuels

Posted 12/22/2009 06:43 PM ET

Energy: Earlier this year, Congress approved a scheme to pour $80 billion — on top of the tens of billions already spent — into renewables. A government report released last week indicates the money will be wasted.

Renewable energy is the shiny gem that everyone wants but no one can have. Not even a president. Campaigning last year in Lansing, Mich., President Barack Obama said that it was his goal for the U.S. to generate 10% of its electric power from renewable sources by 2012 and 25% by 2025. But he cannot, by the force of will or executive order, change the laws of physics and economics.

America has long relied on fossil fuels to power its economy. Oil, natural gas and coal provide about 84% of the nation's energy.

And for good reason. They are plentiful and typically easy to retrieve, and, consequently, cheap.

At the other end of the spectrum are renewable sources such as solar, wind, biomass and geothermal. They supply only about 4% of our energy, the remainder coming from hydro and nuclear power.

An axis of environmentalists and Democrats want to change this ratio, because, according to the usual complaint, we depend too heavily on the fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide.

Trouble is, the market for renewables is poor. Few want to use the inefficient, unreliable and expensive sources. But that hasn't slowed the renewable energy campaign, which has succeeded in persuading the public that renewables are a sensible energy source and convincing Congress to fund supporters' daydreams.

The government can continue to "invest" in renewables, and the dreamers will keep using public money to find the magic formula. But little will change over the next 25 years.

The federal Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Outlook says in 2035, demand for liquid fuels will increase by almost 10% over 2008 levels, natural gas by nearly 7% and coal by 12%.

While use of renewables will increase as well>>>