Robert Rapier's Contributions

I have seen others write about the reduced demand for oil. That’s about as accurate as “Innocent until proven guilty.”

I just finished reading a story that made my blood boil. It was about how the oil industry is using dirty tricks to keep the ethanol industry in check. I need to sit down, take a deep breath, and make sure everyone knows of the atrocity that has happened in Kansas.

Over the past three weeks, there have been numerous headlines insinuating that a freefall in oil prices is underway. Last week I read that the various causes were a slowdown in China’s economy, OPEC’s decision not to cut production, and America’s growing oil production.

Natural gas is an important feedstock for the chemicals and fertilizer industries, so higher prices could pressure those sectors. Oil companies with significant chemical operations could also see this business segment take a hit...

Over the past two years the spot price of natural gas fell from nearly $5 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in June 2011 to less than $2 per MMBtu in April 2012, before beginning a steady climb back to the current level of about $4 per MMBtu.

Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of solar and wind power is their intermittency. In locations like Hawaii, where I live, wind and solar power are already competitive on price. My fossil-fuel supplied electricity typically costs above 40 cents a kilowatt-hour, and wind and solar power can compete with that.

In last week’s column, we examined some oil production trivia involving US states. This week, we look at some international oil trivia covering the 5-year period 2007-2011, as well as some individual trivia from 2012.

As a result of the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution, US oil and natural gas production have been rising for several years. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), US oil production has risen by 27% over the past 5 years.

Governments have a poor track record when it comes to pushing new energy technologies because they are generally unqualified to conduct due diligence on companies seeking government funding.

Last year, to much fanfare, the first batch of qualifying cellulosic ethanol was produced (i.e., it qualified for credits under the EPA program for certifying ethanol for sales). I reported on the development at that time.

If not for the US government’s latest demonstration of incompetence that played out at the end of last week (a.k.a. sequestration), the top news story might have been a report issued by the US State Department late Friday.

By 2020, the goal is for 50% of all of the Navy’s energy consumption to come from alternative sources. In pursuit of this initiative, the Navy is doing research, and testing and certifying all of their engines on renewable fuels.

In my previous column — Why I Don’t Ride a Unicorn to Work — I used an analogy to describe the US government’s approach to cellulosic ethanol mandates. In brief, they have mandated that something that does not exist — commercial cellulosic ethanol volumes...

It isn’t because it’s too far to work. Nor is it because it rains here in Hawaii nearly every day and I might get wet. It isn’t because the powerful automobile lobby has convinced me that driving a car to work is a better option for me. No, it’s a bit more fundamental than that.

A few years ago, I made the observation that the best thing that could happen to mitigate against some of the potentially severe consequences of peak oil was for oil prices to rise, and remain high in the years before oil production peaked.

When Hurricane Sandy was forecast to make landfall on the East Coast, I advised people to top off their automobiles with fuel. There were a number of reasons for that, and some people in New York and New Jersey are learning those reasons the hard way.

California provides a valuable lesson for the rest of the country, because we are not immune to the problems there. Their special circumstances simply forced these issues to manifest themselves there first. But we will see these problems crop up in other areas, and I believe eventually across the United States. As a country we need to note what is happening in California and plan accordingly.

While U.S. gasoline prices have been on the rise for the past two months — and are presently $0.15/gallon higher than they were a year ago — I expect that gasoline prices will start to fall rapidly in the weeks ahead. There are four reasons for this.

Over the past two decades, Chinese oil consumption has quadrupled to nearly 10 million barrels per day. For the past decade they have been on a growth trajectory which has shown signs of slowing, but could nevertheless see them overtake the U.S. as the world’s top oil consumer by the end of the decade.

Without a doubt, some of the attacks against climate science are ignorance-based. But some of those challenges and questions are by sincere people — sometimes scientists — who doubt the science in the same way that there have always been skeptics in science.