Free Republic

We hadn’t written about the monthly EIA statistics on US oil supply and demand for a while because they’d gotten kind of dull. The big movements recorded month after month, particularly in product export growth and net import dependence, had fallen into a bit of a predictable range. That changed in June. The EIA released numbers from that month today. US petroleum import dependence in June dropped to 4.659 million b/d. That’s only the second time in the post-shale era that number had been less than 5 million b/d. And the last time the US recorded a number that low...

e American energy miracle continues to make waves as more and more people realize just how big it is. The FT reports: The US will overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s largest global oil producer by 2017, according to the International Energy Agency, in one of the clearest signs yet of how the shale revolution is redrawing the global energy landscape. This marks the first time the IEA, the developed world’s most respected energy forecaster, has made such a prediction. It underscores how the drilling boom that has unlocked North America’s vast reserves of hard-to-get-at oil and...

President Obama called out Capitol Hill’s “climate change deniers” Wednesday night at a Democratic fundraiser in California. Obama, speaking at a San Francisco event for donors, called rising gasoline prices an economic drain on drivers and said curbing oil reliance is a “national security imperative.” “And then there’s the environmental aspect of it. There are climate change deniers in Congress and when the economy gets tough, sometimes environmental issues drop from people’s radar screens,” Obama continued, speaking at the home of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt that unless we are able to move forward...

The Orkney Islands, where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean violently meet, last gained fame in 1725 when the pirate ship Revenge was captured there. Today a handful of startups and big companies including General Electric (GE, Fortune 500) are hoping to capture a different prize in Scotland's northernmost waters: marine energy. With waves that travel thousands of miles across the Atlantic before battering its coastline and tidal flows that exceed eight knots, the Scots are poised to become the world leader in this renewable energy source - a market potentially worth billions. By 2020, according to some estimates,...

Simple, clever, fun. That's the philosophy behind the vehicle you see pictured above, the Loremo (pronounced lo-ray-mo which is short for Low Resistance Mobile). Of course, there's nothing simple about designing and building a car, but there has certainly been a large need for cleverness to meet our current standard of "fun". Don't let the picture fool you. There's nothing really new here, aside from the impressive 50g/km CO2 figure. This car achieves its high level of fuel efficiency by taking current fuel-saving methods to a level almost beyond reason. A main part of this is weight saving. Every part...

Energy Security: Unable to explain to its constituents why gas costs so much, the Senate has passed the first expansion of U.S. oil exploration in decades. But it's almost a drop in the ocean. As we've noted, Brazil has achieved energy independence in part from the 1.9 million barrels of oil it gets from offshore drilling. And Cuba's Fidel Castro's last act may be to drill 50 miles from Key West, Fla. In February, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service estimated that the Outer Continental Shelf contains 85.8 billion barrels of recoverable crude. We imported 3.67 billion barrels of oil...

I HAVE a dream: President Bush pushes through a grand compromise -- he bucks Big Oil and Detroit by raising automobile fuel-efficiency standards, while enviros grind their teeth and support oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That dream was interrupted Thursday by U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, who was in San Francisco to speak at the Commonwealth Club. He arrived here just as Congress passed a 1,745-page energy bill that doesn't do much to improve fuel efficiency but has billions of dollars in tax breaks for energy companies. I've clung to this dream because raising fuel efficiency would...