Category Archives: Fossil Fuel Reduction

PLEA Network

7 October 2015, Renew Economy, Hunt says “inevitable” large numbers will quit grid with battery storage. Australian environment minister Greg Hunt says it is inevitable that significant numbers of consumers will leave the grid in coming years, and repeated his vow to help accelerate the deployment of battery storage. Hunt was asked on ABC TV’s Lateline program on Tuesday – following a segment on a couple in the Blue Mountains going off-grid – if he thought that significant numbers of consumers would follow. “I do. I think it is inevitable,” Hunt said, before noting that Australia already had the highest penetration of rooftop solar in the world – an average 15 per cent across the nation. “Increasingly we will see the adoption of battery storage, which is the key thing to enable people to go off the grid. This is clearly the future,” Hunt said. “The debate is how long it takes and the task for government is to help bring that forward.” Indeed, two big international battery storage developers have chosen Australia to be their global launch pad for their battery storage initiatives. This includes Tesla and California counterpart Enphase Energy, which describes the Australian market as the most promising in the world. Not everyone, however, agrees that consumers should be encouraged to go off-grid, and Hunt’s comments could be seen as controversial if that is what he is urging. Read More here

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28 September 2015, The Guardian, Shell abandons Alaska Arctic drilling. Oil giant’s US president says hugely controversial drilling operations off Alaska will stop for ‘foreseeable future’ as drilling finds little oil and gas. Shell has abandoned its controversial drilling operations in the Alaskan Arctic in the face of mounting opposition. Its decision, which has been welcomed by environmental campaigners, follows disappointing results from an exploratory well drilled 80 miles off Alaska’s north-west coast. Shell said it had found oil and gas but not in sufficient quantities. The move is a major climbdown for the Anglo-Dutch group which had talked up the prospects of oil and gas in the region. Shell has spent about $7bn (£4.6bn) onArctic offshore development in the hope there would be deposits worth pursuing, but now says operations are being ended for the “foreseeable future.” Shell is expected to take a hit of around $4.1bn as a result of the decision. The company has come under increasing pressure from shareholders worried about the plunging share price and the costs of what has so far been a futile search in the Chukchi Sea. Shell has also privately made clear it is taken aback by the public protests against the drilling which are threatening to seriously damage its reputation. Ben van Beurden, the chief executive, is also said to be worried that the Arctic is undermining his attempts to influence the debate around climate change. His attempts to argue that a Shell strategy of building up gas as a “transitional” fuel to pave the way to a lower carbon future has met with scepticism, partly because of the Arctic operations. Read More here

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28 September 2015, Renew Economy,  Coalition dumps chief climate denier Newman, Hunt still hamstrung. In one of the surest signs yet that the Malcolm Turnbull-led Coalition is making a departure from the climate denying, anti-renewable energy thinking that has guided the party’s policy-making from the top down, Maurice Newman will not be reappointed as chairman of the prime minister’s business advisory council. Newman, a far-right conservative and outspoken denier of climate change, was appointed to the role by Tony Abbott in one of his first acts after becoming Prime Minister in 2013, and has been a key influence on Abbott’s policy direction since then. His controversial views on climate change – essentially that it is not happening, and ratherit’s global cooling we should be worried about – have been given a regular airing in a weekly column Newman writes for The Australian. Newman was also behind the push to investigate whether the Bureau of Meteorology was exaggerating temperature data records as part of what he saw as a broader climate change conspiracy. A push that, according to recent evidence revealed by the ABC, was knocked on the head by environment minister Greg Hunt. And so, Turnbull’s decision not to reappoint Newman now that his chairmanship has expired – one of the eight things we recently suggested the new PM could do to show support for renewable energy and climate change – is good news, not least for Hunt, who is now overseeing these departments in a so-called environment “mega-office”. Read More here

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22 September 2015, Post Carbon Institute, A long-term abundance of oil & natural gas, but what if the boom is just a bubble? Tight oil reality check. Much of the cost-benefit debate over fracking has come down to the perception of just how much domestic oil and gas it can produce and at what cost. To answer this question, policymakers, the media, and the general public have typically turned to the U.S. Department of Energy’sEnergy Information Administration (EIA), which every year publishes its Annual Energy Outlook (AEO). In Drilling Deeper, PCI Fellow David Hughes took a hard look at the EIA’s AEO2014 and found that its projections for future production and prices suffered from a worrisome level of optimism. Recently, the EIA released its Annual Energy Outlook 2015 and so we asked David Hughes to see how the EIA’s projections and assumptions have changed over the last year, and to assess the AEO2015 against both Drilling Deeper and up-to-date production data from key shale gas and tight oil plays. In July 2015, Post Carbon Institute published Shale Gas Reality Check, which found that in 2015 the EIA is more optimistic than ever about the prospects for shale gas, despite substantive reasons for caution. This month we turn our eyes to the EIA’s latest projections for tight oil. KEY CONCLUSIONS:

    • The EIA’s 2015 Annual Energy Outlook is even more optimistic about tight oil than the AEO2014, which we showed in Drilling Deeper suffered from a great deal of questionable optimism. The AEO2015 reference case projection of total tight oil production through 2040 has increased by 6.5 billion barrels, or 15%, compared to AEO2014.
    • The EIA assumes West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil prices will remain low and not exceed $100/barrel until 2031.
    • At the same time, the EIA assumes that overall U.S. oil production will experience a very gradual decline following a peak in 2020.
    • These assumptions—low prices, continued growth through this decade, and a gradual decline in production thereafter—are belied by the geological and economic realities of shale plays. The recent drop in oil prices has already hit tight oil production growth hard. The steep decline rates of wells and the fact that the best wells are typically drilled off first means that it will become increasingly difficult for these production forecasts to be met, especially at relatively low prices.
    • – Perhaps the most striking change from AEO2014 to AEO2015 is the EIA’s optimism about the Bakken, the projected recovery of which was raised by a whopping 85%. Read More here