Free Republic

The builders of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline are pulling the plug on the project as companies continue to meet mounting environmental opposition to new fossil fuel conduits in the U.S. Duke Energy Corp. and Dominion Energy Inc. said Sunday that they were abandoning the proposed $8 billion pipeline—which aimed to carry natural gas 600 miles through West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina and underneath the Appalachian Trail—citing continued regulatory delays and uncertainty, even after a favorable Supreme Court ruling last month. Dominion meanwhile said it was selling the rest of its natural gas transmission and storage network to Warren Buffett’s...

France’s oldest nuclear power plant was finally closed on Tuesday (30 June) — after four decades in operation and a long-standing campaign by anti-nuclear activists. The process to remove the fuel used by the reactors of Fessenheim power plant, which was connected to the grid in 1977, should be completed by 2023 — although the plant is not expected to be fully dismantled before 2040. Following the disaster of Fukushima in 2011, then French president François Hollande pledged to close Fessenheim power plant, after complaints about safety from both the German and Swiss governments. However, his successor Emmanuel Macron only...

The recession is hitting state and city budgets hard in the new fiscal year that starts on July 1. They are responding by firing workers, reducing services, and even increasing taxes. Massive federal aid is the only real solution. The new fiscal year for 46 states and many cities begins on Wednesday. And a flood of red ink caused by the deep pandemic recession is forcing them to fire workers, reduce spending and services, and even raise taxes (one of the worst things you can do in a recession). Without Congress providing up to $1 trillion in federal aid, non-federal...

Long restoration times are likely depending on how the coronavirus plays out during the six-month Atlantic hurricane season, which started June 1 and is predicted to be extremely active. It means everyone living in hurricane-prone communities must be ready to be without power longer following a major hurricane. Just as important is adding hand sanitizer and face masks to a storm-preparedness checklist, as well as checking with local emergency management officials for changes to shelters and evacuation orders due to the coronavirus. [B]ecause of the way the critical manpower and equipment operations unfold, standard procedures almost certainly would run afoul...

Chesapeake Energy Corporation said Sunday it had filed for bankruptcy amid a drop in oil and gas demand and prices due to the coronavirus pandemic. Chesapeake Energy said in a release it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will continue to operate throughout its restructuring process. The Oklahoma City-based company said it secured a $925 million debtor-in-possession financing from certain lenders under Chesapeake’s revolving credit facility, which will be available upon court approval. The company and certain lenders under its revolving credit facility also agreed to the principal terms of a $2.5 billion exit financing, consisting of a new $1.75...

First there was Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans, then came Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm, and now Michael Schellenberger’s Apocalypse Never. All three authors sound the common theme that the hyper-green environmental activists who have captured, politicized, and monetized the concern for the environment have, as Lomborg explains, created a false climate alarm which has “costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.” To varying degrees, all three authors come from a strong environmental activist background, which observation makes their public revelations even more noteworthy. Planet of the Humans, the recent film produced by Michael Moore,...

While the pandemic and political unrest have taken center stage in the U.S. and Europe, some major policy developments in Eastern part of the world have gone unnoticed. Among those is the big fossil fuel push by India and China. India, in particular, has gone public with its intentions to open new coal mines and increase coal production. It has even celebrated the decisions publicly. These are huge developments that are likely to have a lasting impact on the global energy scene and the politics surrounding the controversial and restrictive Paris climate agreement. They most probably will also impact future...

The EU and US urge "strongman" Khalifa Haftar to return oil ports to the "Libyan people". We're glad that Washington has a sense of humor ___ Libya was the richest, most developed, most educated country in North Africa. It was a model of much-needed stability in the region, with a government that was considerably less terrible than NATO's numerous medieval dictator-allies. Before the "revolution", the Libyan government used oil revenues to subsidize a whole range of social benefits for its citizens. And now that Libya is a moon crater, the U.S. and its European poodles are whining about "returning oil...

1- Basic auto repair shops will disappear. Read on to know why. 2- A gas/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has only 20 parts. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are repaired only by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor. 3- Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with robots 4- Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what looks like a car wash, and your car is towed through...

A new type of battery is coming onto the market that can store multiple days’ worth of energy, that doesn’t degrade, can’t possibly explode and is up to five times cheaper than lithium-ion, claimed its developer as it prepares to pilot the technology in New York state. The zinc-air hybrid flow battery developed by Canadian company Zinc8 has the potential to disrupt the entire energy-storage market — making wind and solar farms baseload and even replacing the need for transmission grid upgrades in many places. “For large-scale energy storage, lithium-ion can’t touch us on cost,” says chief executive Ron MacDonald,...

Hundreds of "protected areas," including some of the world's greatest wilderness resources, are being threatened by renewable energy projects, according to a new study. The green projects are degrading 886 protected areas, 748 Key Biodiversity Areas and 40 distinct wilderness areas," according to the study, published online at ResearchGate. Authored by Jose Andres Rehbein of the World Bank, and Joe Lane, James Watson and Laura Sonter of University of Queensland, the study explains: "Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy is fundamental for halting anthropogenic climate change. However, renewable energy facilities can be land�use intensive and impact conservation areas, and...

The country music sounds blasts from the past good to be here again I'm looking at a radio programming book from 1968 and here in York, PA WNOW at 1250 AM and 105.7 FM was the place for country music back then. I would start listening in during the fall of 1970 to begin my country music journey..... Today out of Dallas we get Glenn Beck with predictable negative comments about Russia. Russia and Texas have something in common. They produce oil and natural gas. Energy. Last December President Trump signed legislation to sanction companies helping to build the Nord...

June 9, 2020: Despite the financial crises, continuing anti-government protests and growing criticism from government and military leaders, the senior clerics who run Iran believe that there is a good chance the American presidential elections in November will put a more pro-Iran and anti-Israel government in power. While this is a possibility, many Iranians don’t believe the clerics can hang onto power until the end of the year. Poverty is growing in Iran and the government continues to spend lots of money on military operations in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Syria is the costliest foreign adventure. So far this...

LONDON (Reuters) - BP will cut about 15% of its workforce in response to the coronavirus crisis and as part of Chief Executive Bernard Looney’s plan to shift the oil and gas major to renewable energy, it said on Monday. Looney told employees in a global online call that the London-based company will cut 10,000 jobs from the current 70,100. “We will now begin a process that will see close to 10,000 people leaving BP – most by the end of this year,” Looney said in a statement. [snip] ENERGY TRANSITION The job reductions are also part of Looney’s drive...

From my quarantine hidey-hole in Girdwood, Alaska, it was the oddest of Zoom calls. The oil industry and the fishing industry are not always chummy, but here we were on the same video link. Crews in close quarters – be they fishing boats or oil tankers or drilling platforms offshore – needed appropriate safety measures in this pandemic. Onshore, in remote coastal communities, fish processing plants and oil production facilities both bring in itinerant workers, so both industries sought to avoid enabling contagious “vectors” of coronavirus for others. The call looked like Hollywood Squares, but no one was cracking jokes....

Egypt has announced an anti-Turkey alliance that includes Greece, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and France to confront Turkish moves in Libya and the Mediterranean. The announcement was made during a virtual meeting with the foreign ministers of these countries on May 11. In a joint statement issued shortly after the meeting, the five-party alliance said it will focus on confronting the Turkish moves in the territorial waters in Cyprus, where Turkey has been carrying out “illegal” excavations in the Mediterranean under Cyprus sovereignty. The alliance also condemned Turkey’s escalated violations of Greek airspace.  The European Union condemned May 16...

The coronavirus won't destroy America's energy industry. But Democrats might. Progressive lawmakers like Senator Bernie Sanders have long called for a nationwide ban on fracking. But even Joe Biden, the "moderate" Democratic apparent nominee, recently seemed to embrace this radical idea. The oil and gas industry has already taken a big blow to the gut. Because of reduced demand caused by lockdown orders nationwide and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, the unthinkable happened in April when an oil futures contract sank into negative territory. In my home state of Colorado, hundreds of wells have been abandoned and...

The sustained plunge in global oil prices has brought deep, unexpected shifts on the geopolitical landscape, with impacts felt in the Arctic and the Middle East, and in the fortunes of the American heartland and the future of the Russian-Chinese strategic alliance. A U.S.-engineered market truce has helped energy prices rebound slightly this month after flatlining in April, but analysts say reverberations will likely be felt for years to come as they chip away at the foundational international partnerships in the post-World War II era and create new alliances and rivalries. Analysts say there is no way the U.S. and...

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the 2018 election by a landslide. His approach to government spending — even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout — might best be compared to that of conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Recognizing that industrial wind and solar electricity bring little to no value to electrical grids, Mexico is moving to avoid the higher electrical prices experienced by Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, South Australia, California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other governments that have heavily subsidized their supply of intermittent electricity. The only things ‘inevitable’ about the ‘transition’...

If completed, the pipeline, which has spent the past decade in political and legal limbo, would help carry some 830,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada to refineries in Texas. Although Biden’s climate plan was more ambitious than anything proposed by Obama, it attracted criticism from liberals who faulted Biden for not pledging to ban fracking and for attending a fundraiser co-hosted by a co-founder of a natural gas company. Beyond that, Biden’s environmental critics worry he will not try to rein in greenhouse gas emissions as aggressively as climate scientists say is necessary. In 2018, a panel...