Free Republic

New figures show that China’s use of coal has continued to fall dramatically over the first four months of 2015, according to Greenpeace Energydesk. In fact, following news in October of 2014 that showed coal use had fallen for the first time this century, these most recent figures suggest that the decline in China’s coal use is actually accelerating. According to Energydesk, coal consumption in China fell by almost 8%, and CO2 emissions dropped by approximately 5% over the first four months of 2015, when compared to the first four months of 2014. Impressively, for China, their figures are roughly...

U.S. net imports of natural gas decreased 9% in 2014, continuing an eight-year decline. As U.S. dry natural gas production has reached record highs, lower domestic prices have helped to displace natural gas imports. Net natural gas imports (imports minus exports) totaled 1,171 billion cubic feet (Bcf) in 2014, the lowest level since 1987. Imports by pipeline from Canada account for nearly 98% of all U.S. natural gas imports, and were the main driver of the decrease in total imports. Net imports from Canada represented 7% of total U.S. natural gas consumption in 2014, down from 11% in 2009. U.S....

On May 18, the U.S. average retail price for gasoline was $2.74 per gallon ($/gal), or 92¢ per gallon (¢/gal) lower than at the same time last year. This is the lowest average price heading into the Memorial Day weekend—the traditional start of the summer driving season—since 2009. Lower gasoline prices reflect lower crude oil prices, with the spot price of North Sea Brent crude oil at more than $45 per barrel ($/b) lower than the same time last year, despite having increased more than $10/b since the beginning of February. Average retail prices for all regions of the country...

UGI Energy Services, a UGI Corporation unit, said it plans to build a liquefied natural gas production facility in northern Pennsylvania that will utilize Marcellus Shale gas. The proposed facility will be adjacent to UGI Energy Services’ Manning natural gas compression station located in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania. Natural gas will be supplied by its Auburn gathering system, which transports Marcellus Shale gas produced from local wells to major interstate pipelines serving markets in the Mid-Atlantic region, the company said in a statement. The LNG plant, which will include both liquefaction and local storage, is expected to be in full commercial...

BIG mistakes in economic policymaking abound. But it would be hard to find a worse one than energy subsidies. Recent research has shown that they enrich middlemen, depress economic output and help the rich, who use lots of energy, more than they do the poor. But now a new working paper by the International Monetary Fund highlights another cost too: damage to the environment. Including this, the authors reckon that the total drag on the global economy caused by fuel subsidies now amounts to a stonking $5.3 trillion each year, or 6% of global GDP—more than world spends on health...

Bakken production will keep growing, albeit at a slower pace, and the Eagle Ford still has running room within high-return portions of the play, according to a recent analysis by Wood Mackenzie. The Bakken and Eagle Ford together produce just over 2.5 million barrels per day of oil, or nearly two-thirds of U.S. tight oil production. Higher oil prices in the 2013 to 2014 timeframe spurred operators to drill not only in the core of the Williston Basin, but in the fringe and speculative areas. This included areas along the Montana-North Dakota border, the northern most part of the play...

U.S. oil companies, still smarting from the crude price rout, are attracting a wave of new investment from unlikely sources - hedge funds and private equity firms flocking to the energy market for the first time to bet on a rebound. By pouring billions of dollars into energy shares and bonds in the past few months these newcomers, dubbed "energy tourists" by Houston's seasoned dealmakers, have thrown a lifeline to scores of companies that a few months ago looked like potential targets for bigger rivals or distressed debt and restructuring specialists. "You've got generalist funds that have never invested in...

Employees at Marathon’s Galveston Bay Refinery overwhelming rejected a contract offer late Monday night, said union spokeswoman Lynne Hancock. Details of the offer, which had been brokered through the help of a federal mediator, were not available. The 1,100 workers, who are represented by the United Steelworkers union, have been on strike since Feb. 1. They walked off the job as part of a nationwide work stoppage that eventually expanded to include 15 refineries, chemical plants and power generators. While nearly all the workers nationwide are back to work – with the exception of Marathon’s workers in Texas City and...

A new government report finds that taller wind turbines could help the U.S. vastly expand its wind-generated electricity, throwing new weight behind a wind industry push to reach higher into the air. The wind power market is dominated by a dozen states, with Texas in the lead as the nation’s top producer, but all 50 states have the capability to mine their gusts and breezes for electricity, the U.S. Department of Energy argues in a new report. “This report is great news for consumers, job-seekers, rural communities and others in the states that have yet to fully benefit from American...

An estimated 21,000 gallons of oil dumped into the ocean from a broken pipeline just off the central California coast before it was shut off on Tuesday, creating a spill stretching about 4 miles along the beach, the U.S. Coast Guard said. Santa Barbara County health officials have shut down Refugio State Beach, the central site of the spill, though many had abandoned the site already because of the foul smell. That smell brought county firefighters to the beach earlier in the day to discover the spill. “They found about a half-mile slick of dark, black crude oil in the...

Offshore driller Transocean has idled three more deep water rigs, bringing its number of out-of-work units to 15, it said Monday, as the oil slump continued to hammer the drilling market. The Swiss rig contractor with corporate offices in Houston has idled 10 rigs and stacked five others, and it has said it plans to sell 19 units for scrap. Idle rigs are between contracts; stacked machines are shut down for longer periods, and scrapped rigs are torn apart for their steel hides. Transocean owns or has a stake in 65 offshore rigs around the world. The three Transocean rigs...

Faced with sliding domestic demand for coal, the governor of Wyoming has kept pressing for access to deep-water ports in the Northwest that would allow exports to Asian markets. Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead met Monday with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee in Olympia and plans to meet Tuesday with Oregon Gov. Kate Brown. "I wanted to get out here and talk to these two governors," Mead said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "If there are practical issues as well that we could help work through — everything from train traffic to train congestion, to issues of coal dust...

Oil prices declined on Tuesday, losing value as the strength of the dollar dissuaded buyers. The dollar gained versus the euro after a senior official at the European Central Bank said the institution would " front-load" its bond-buying program, snapping up more eurozone sovereign debt in May and June to avoid having to buy large volumes during the summer lull in July and August. A stronger dollar makes oil more expensive for buyers holding other currencies. The Wall Street Journal Dollar Index, which tracks the dollar against a basket of other major currencies, rose 0.5%. Brent crude for July delivery...

Most people buy rooftop solar panels because they think it will save them money or make them green, or both. But the truth is that rooftop solar shouldn’t be saving them money (though it often does), and it almost certainly isn’t green. In fact, the rooftop-solar craze is wasting billions of dollars a year that could be spent on greener initiatives. It also is hindering the growth of much more cost-effective renewable sources of power. According to a recent Energy Department-backed study at North Carolina State University, installing a fully financed, average-size rooftop solar system will reduce energy costs for...

EIA's most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook forecasts that the amount of electricity generation fueled by natural gas in April and May will total just 3.5% less than the projected amount of coal-fired generation. This convergence has occurred only once before, in April 2012, when natural gas fueled just 1.5% less generation than coal. Power generation from the two fuels is expected to rise at similar rates over the next couple months, and then diverge again later in the summer as demand rises and coal unit capacity utilization continues to rise. Natural gas-fired generation has been rising over the past few...

On Thursday, Iranian boats fired shots across the bow of the Singapore-flagged oil tanker, Alpine Eternity, in the Persian Gulf in an attempt to stop the ship. Both US and Iranian sources say the reason for this action was an apparent attempt to disable the oil tanker over a financial row over damage to an Iranian oil platform. The US official told the AP that the Alpine Eternity is involved in a financial dispute with Iran. On March 22, the said tanker accidentally struck and damaged an Iranian oil platform. The tanker was also damaged in the incident and went...

The creator of the award-winning film ‘Gasland’ was just arrested at a protest in rural New York. Here’s the mini-documentary he made on the eve of his arrest. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Josh Fox, who wrote and directed the acclaimed fracking film Gasland, was arrested this afternoon while engaging in a human barricade at a natural-gas storage facility in the Finger Lakes. “People need to see what’s happening at Seneca Lake, and also understand that this isn’t isolated, it is happening everywhere,” Fox told The Daily Beast before the protest. “We need to educate people that our dependency on fossil fuels...

Adapting the technology that powered the shale oil boom in Texas to the deserts of Saudi Arabia and elsewhere could produce 141 billion barrels of crude, research firm IHS said Thursday. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, alongside other technological breakthroughs in recent years, could pump that much oil out of 170 older, largely unproductive fields around the world, from the Middle East to Latin America to Russia. In its initial assessment, IHS found 96 percent of the oil that could be recovered from those fields would have to be released using hydraulic fracturing, a process of blasting water, sand and...

The Obama administration has delivered a critical natural gas export license to Cheniere Energy’s proposed liquefaction terminal in Corpus Christi, marking the first such approval for a greenfield project that would not be built on the footprint of an older LNG facility. With the move late Tuesday, the Energy Department is allowing Cheniere to export as much as 2.1 billion cubic feet per day of liquefied natural gas over the next 20 years from the planned facility to countries with which the United States does not have free trade agreements. The company announced Wednesday that its board of directors had...

FBI documents obtained by the Guardian and Earth Island Journal show the bureau colluded with an oil company and illegally spied on environmental activists in Houston. The Guardian reports the FBI’s Houston division closely monitored groups that oppose the Keystone-XL pipeline, cultivated informants in activist groups, and shared intelligence with TransCanada, the company building the pipeline. Furthermore, the investigations violated FBI policy because agents failed to get prior legal approval to begin monitoring the activists. In an interview with the Guardian, the bureau admitted the error. The documents, about 80 pages obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show...