If We Have Trouble Delivering Fuel on Land, How Would We Handle a Winter Oil Spill in the Arctic Ocean?

The U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy approaches the Russian-flagged tanker vessel Renda Tuesday evening.

By Kiley Kroh

Today the Russian tanker Renda, escorted by the United States’ only operating icebreaking vessel, will attempt to make its final push in delivering much-needed fuel to the remote, icebound community of Nome, Alaska.  The ships’ progress has been impeded by high winds, strong currents, brutal cold, and thick sea ice. They moved just 50 feet on Tuesday and slowed even further on Wednesday.  With a 25-foot ice ridge still blocking access to the harbor, the tanker will be forced to attempt offloading its cargo through a mile-long hose to shore.

The tanker Renda and ice-breaker Healy arrive in the area of the ice-choked Nome harbor today.  Photo KNOM.

Ordinarily, the last delivery is made prior to the ice closing in, but this year it was delayed by a “monster storm” that hit Alaska in early November covering an area twice the size of Texas.  The tempest produced hurricane-force winds, blizzard conditions, coastal flooding, and spurred evacuations of many coastal communities.  The 3,500 residents of Nome, a city located on the western coast of Alaska, rely on tanker barges to deliver home heating oil, gasoline, and diesel for the winter months. The village has enough fuel to last until March, but ice in the Bering Sea won’t clear until midsummer.  In a bid to avoid the $9 per gallon gasoline that would likely result from flying fuel into the isolated city, the Nome-based Sitnasuak Native Corporation signed a contract to have a double-hulled Ice Classed Russian tanker deliver the 1.3 million gallons of fuel.

The unprecedented effort has captured worldwide attention and also brought serious concerns to light about the nation’s insufficient resources and infrastructure in the Arctic.  With the President of Royal Dutch Shell expressing confidence yesterday that his company will begin drilling in the fragile Arctic waters off Alaska’s northern coast this summer, addressing these concerns becomes even more urgent.

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The Oil Goes to China, the Permanent Jobs Go to Canada, We Get the Spills, and the World Gets Warmer

by Danielle Droitsch, cross posted from NRDC’s Switchboard

You’ll hear the GOP, the American Petroleum Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce make wild claims about the job creation potential of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Don’t be fooled. The pipeline company itself admits only “a few hundred permanent jobs” are created by Keystone XL.

The debate over whether Keystone XL creates jobs is a convenient diversion from something oil company backers don’t want you to know: this is an export pipeline to help them access foreign markets and bypass the United States. Oil companies will make bigger profits and oil prices for Americans will increase. That’s not a project that helps Americans. It’s a project that helps Big Oil.

CNN posted this interview with a TransCanada executive who admits that permanent jobs would only number “in the hundreds, certainly not in the thousands” from Montana down to Houston:

The oil industry is pulling a bait and switch scam with Keystone XL – offering it as a path to economic and national security when the pipeline is mostly meant for export. According to the State Department, only 20 permanent jobs will be created by the pipeline.  Even the pipeline company acknowledged that only “a few hundred permanent jobs’ will be created.   Claims the pipeline will created 100,000 jobs are false.   The U.S. State Department estimates no more than 6,000 temporary construction jobs will be created over the two years. We need better from Republicans when it comes to a jobs plan than a single project with jobs that won’t last.

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At the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, which opens to the public this weekend, advances in fuel economy are taking center stage. Thanks to aggressive leadership by the Obama administration, working in concert with the state of California and the unions and carmakers of the American auto industry, fuel economy standards are zooming toward an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. A Detroit Free Press editorial reports that the new fuel economy standards have breathed new life into American automobile manufacturers, spurring them to innovate new technologies and new styles. Their new cars — which reduce our vulnerability to the whims of Big Oil and lessen dangerous pollution — will be able to compete on the international stage, which has much higher standards for fuel efficiency:

Against the backdrop of the North American International Auto Show, which opens to the public Saturday, anything seems possible, including fuel efficiencies that seemed out of reach just a few years ago. The stylish introductions focused as much on engine and power configurations (hybrid, plug-in, turbocharged, direct injection, etc.) and weight-savings as they did on appearance.

“This year’s auto show proves beyond all doubt that fuel efficiency is no longer just a euphemism for ‘econobox,’” writes the Detroit Free Press. “With the long-term planning horizon offered by the new fuel efficiency rules, automakers can do far more than survive. They can thrive, they can do it with style and — most important to everyone around here — build the cars that people want to buy.”

by Richard W. Caperton, Michael Conathan, Jackie Weidman

More than a decade ago, Denmark built the world’s first offshore wind farm near Copenhagen. Since then offshore wind has been added to the energy portfolio of nine other countries in Europe and Asia. The East Coast of the United States, from the Mid-Atlantic region north through New England, possesses some of the world’s most favorable environmental conditions to tap into this massive renewable energy resource. And even though public opinion throughout the region strongly supports such development, we have yet to begin construction on even a single turbine.

With a stronger commitment from Congress, Atlantic coastal states could advance projects that simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lower our dependence on foreign oil, and create jobs and industrial innovation from Maine to the Carolinas.

Yet to take off

2011 was pretty good for advancing the U.S. offshore wind industry in many ways. The Cape Wind project proposed for the waters off Massachusetts received its final permits from the Department of the Interior, theoretically paving the way to begin construction on America’s first offshore wind farm. The Obama administration advanced its “Smart from the Start” initiative, designating wind energy areas off the coasts of five Atlantic coast states, and it is actively pursuing leases with potential developers. And projects in state waters off New Jersey, Texas, and Ohio took important steps and cleared hurdles in the planning and permitting stages.

Unfortunately, as has been the case throughout the history of offshore wind in this country, it soon became another example of three steps forward, two steps back. Less than a month after Interior gave Cape Wind the green light, the Department of Energy informed the company it would not be eligible for a loan guarantee. Then, in the waning days of the year, another offshore wind pioneer, NRG Bluewater Wind, announced that it would back out of a three-year-old power-purchase agreement with Delmarva Power because it couldn’t generate sufficient investor interest.

Meanwhile, developers in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Spain, France, Norway, China, South Korea, and other countries are proving that offshore wind is a viable economic model. They have permitted more than 40,000 MW of offshore wind energy capacity. The United States has only issued permits for 488 MW. (see table)

Not only does this delay reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and our transition to renewable energy sources, but it also prevents American innovators from taking advantage of the design, manufacturing, and construction jobs that go along with it. In Europe, where more than 4,000 MW of offshore wind capacity is already installed, developers expect to create 169,000 jobs by 2020 and 300,000 by 2030.

Public support isn’t the problem

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With a glut of shale gas on the market, natural gas prices continue to tumble in the U.S. And they’ll only fall more throughout the year.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, average natural gas prices on the wholesale spot market dropped another 9% in 2011, falling to the second-lowest price average since 2002. And the agency expects prices to fall substantially in 2012 due to record-high inventories of supply.

In a few short years, domestic energy supply has undergone a major shift in favor of natural gas, challenging the economics of renewable energy technologies that compete directly with the resource. It’s not exactly the kind of shift that renewable energy proponents imagined. But it has helped keep electricity and heating prices low, while also shifting enthusiasm away from coal. Those are notable short-term victories — assuming renewables don’t get swept aside in the process.

The picture is mixed. Although wind development has dropped off a cliff in states like Texas, in part because of low gas prices, Bloomberg New Energy Finance believes that wind will be competitive across the board with natural gas by 2016. And in utility-scale solar, large photovoltaic projects are also keeping pace with projected prices of natural gas.

However, a study released earlier this month by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology modeled an energy scenario with and without shale gas, finding that renewables were indeed being negatively impacted:

The continued need for strong renewables prompts concerns, as the study finds that shale use suppresses the development of renewables. Under one scenario, for example, the researchers impose a renewable-fuel mandate. They find that, with shale, renewable use never goes beyond the 25 percent minimum standard they set — but when shale is removed from the market, renewables gain more ground.

We should also always remember that some of the leading (center-right) economists in the country — Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus — publishing in a top economics journal found that natural gas damages were larger than its value added for electricity generation even at a low-ball carbon price of $27 per ton. At a price of $65 a ton of carbon, the total damages from natural gas are more than double its value-added.

That means renewable energy deserves strong support by state and federal policymakers even in the face of low natural gas prices.

So will the slide in gas prices continue? Not according to some forecasts. EIA expects prices to rise again in 2013. With an increase in exports, a build out of new combined cycle power plants and continued questions about how much shale gas is actually in the ground (it’s still a lot, even on the low end of estimates), IDC Energy Insights Analyst Sam Jaffe doesn’t see how prices can stay as low as they are today:

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On January 24, President Obama will address Congress and the nation on the state of the union, with the chance to stir this country to action on the existential threat of climate change. Obama has the responsibility to seize the moment and finally explain to the American people the great mobilization of resources and will that protecting our homeland from a poisoned climate requires.

In a tweet to ThinkProgress Green, White House Director of Public Engagement Jon Carson promised that he would personally tell Obama that people believe he needs to talk about the science of climate change in his State of the Union address:

If Obama does make clear that the nation’s prosperity is already being damaged by the first glimmers of the coming onslaught of climate change, it will mark a dramatic departure from the past. Each year of his presidency, as more Americans suffered and died from the consequences of climate pollution, Obama’s discussion of global warming in his State of the Union addresses has withered.

In his 2009 address, he spoke of the need to “save our planet from the ravages of climate change” through “legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America.” As the climate bill stalled in the Senate that year, Obama went silent. “Thus far, he has neglected to use his bully pulpit to hammer a climate science message home, thereby helping to fuel skepticism about climate science and lend support to the building backlash against the policies he favors,” climate blogger Andrew Freedman wrote in September 2009. After Obama made a major speech calling for health care reform, climate hawks hoped he would explain to Americans the need for the climate bill held up in the Senate.

In the 2010 State of the Union, he said only he wanted to advance a “comprehensive climate and energy bill,” but then the White House avoided the subject.

“I’m just not sure how you do a response to climate change if you can’t really say the words ‘climate change,’” wrote Ezra Klein in June 2010.

In last year’s State of the Union address, Obama avoided any mention of climate change, spurring dismay from climate hawks. At Grist, David Roberts called the omission a “moral failure, a failure of leadership, but also, I would argue, a political failure.”

A textual analysis of State of the Union addresses found that Obama mentions climate change far less than President Bill Clinton ever did, and less even than President George W. Bush. “From a political viewpoint, it is clear that Obama is not talking about climate change,” Robert Brulle wrote. “In my opinion, this approach has several major drawbacks, and effectively locks in massive and potentially catastrophic global climate change.” Bill Becker even wrote an entire sample speech on the climate challenge for the president.

There are many other climate hawks Obama could follow — in the past year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka have delivered compelling speeches on the mandate for action to fight the greatest threat of this generation to human civilization.

by Richard Caperton

From now until the day Americans vote for president, every single candidate running for office will be talking about one thing: jobs.

But while candidates ramble on about who’s creating and who’s killing jobs, they’re ignoring the simple things that would actually help businesses create jobs – particularly in the crucial clean energy industry.

Exhibit A: Congress’s refusal to extend the production tax credit (PTC) is about to kill tens of thousands of high-paying jobs in the wind industry and is already causing businesses to stall projects, reduce orders and decrease manufacturing activity.

Yesterday, Vestas – a leading manufacturer of wind turbines – announced that it will have to lay off as many as 1,600 workers if Congress raises taxes on wind power by not renewing the PTC. What’s most frustrating is that there’s an easy fix. All Congress has to do is extend the PTC to 2016, as I called for earlier this week, and the whole problem would be avoided.

At a time when so many politicians are making tax issues a key piece of their campaigns, it’s quite ironic that one of the nation’s fastest growing industries is suffering from uncertain tax policy.

Sadly, there’s a lot of history for us to learn from on this issue. As has happened every other time the PTC has expired, wind turbine installations in 2013 will collapse. In fact, the Energy Information Administration currently projects literally zero wind projects for 2013. This chart shows how the PTC expiration has hurt wind in the past and will in the future:

Letting the PTC expire will hurt the entire wind industry, but it’s especially devastating to manufacturers like Vestas. As I wrote in my recent paper, “Good Government Investments in Renewable Energy”:

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Other stories below: How to restrain global warming by nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit by 2050; Sunflowers inspire new solar designs

Union chief: Congress controlled by ‘climate change deniers’

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Thursday that climate change deniers call the shots in Congress.

“[I]t is clear that as long as Congress is effectively controlled by climate change deniers, all of us — investors, companies, workers and the broader public — must take action ourselves,” Trumka said.

In a wide-ranging speech in New York at the Investor Summit on Climate Risk & Energy Solutions, Trumka made the case for creating jobs with the build-out of low-carbon infrastructure.

He said the collapse of global warming legislation has prompted the labor federation to seek other means to spur investments in climate-friendly technologies. The federation backed the sweeping climate bill that passed the House in 2009, but climate legislation collapsed in the Senate the following year and remains politically moribund amid GOP control of the House and the Democrats’ slim Senate majority.

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