Further to my note yesterday, there seems to a lot of focus recently on one particular commodity: oil.Producers within the energy world and beyond have been desperately seeking crude exposure. Largely because this one of the few commodities whose price has held up globally.The last few months have strengthened oil’s unstoppable image. At the start of the year, it looked like prices might break down–with WTI having fallen from $110 to near $90. But a recent bounce has taken it decidedly back above $100. Signalling that the party is still continuing.But…Read more…

Israel’s newfound natural gas wealth is moving the country from energy importer to potential exporter, altering the energy balance of the region in the process. Even more interesting is that Israel’s most promising export market just slipped from energy exporter to importer—that country is Egypt. Israel has historically been a natural gas importer, but recent offshore discoveries will likely change that. Concentrated in the Tamar (estimated 10 trillion cubic feet) and Leviathan (estimated 19 trillion cubic feet) fields, Israel’s…Read more…

The star of this week’s Qatar motor show will undoubtedly be Volkswagen’s “one-liter car,” the diesel hybrid XL1, which is able to achieve more than 300 mpg. The $60,000 XL1 is powered by an 800cc, two-cylinder turbodiesel powerplant (half a BlueMotion engine), producing 47bhp, supported by a 27bhp electric motor hat fuelled by lithium-ion batteries. The batteries can be charged from a domestic plug, allowing the car to travel 22 miles solely on electric power.  Over the past decade governments worldwide have been…Read more…

The onshore wind energy sector is booming in the United States, where there’s enough of the renewable resource on hand to meet the annual demands for 15 million homes.  It may take one of the biggest retailers in the world, however, to usher in the necessary change in energy consumption. The American Wind Energy Association said wind energy in the United States accounted for more than 4 percent of all the electricity generated in the country last year and the trend was on pace to continue.  America, the AWEA said, is increasingly…Read more…

The national vision by politicians, economists, industrialists and environmentalists to transition to hydrogen economy by 2030 seems deadlocked, with hydrogen fuel cells projected to represent a $3 billion market of about 5.9 GW by 2030, according to Lux Research, Figure 1.(1)The dream of fuel cell vehicles powered by hydrogen from zero-carbon sources such as renewable power or nuclear energy comes from estimates that the cost of avoided carbon dioxide would be more than $600 a metric ton – ten times higher than most other technologies under…Read more…

We hear a lot about climate change, especially now that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently published another report. At the same time, oil is reaching limits, and this has an effect as well. How do the two issues fit together?In simplest terms, what the situation means to me is that the “low scenario,” which the IPCC calls “RCP2.6,” is closest to what we can expect in terms of man-made carbon emissions. Thus, the most reasonable scenario, based on their modeling, would seem to be the purple…