Earlier this month, I turned 50 years old. Such milestones are natural occasions for reflection. Beyond recalling many of the phases and individual episodes of my life, my reflection included a consideration of how the world had changed in the 50 years in which I had lived. And, naturally, given my profession, I pondered what it would have [...]
It’s Presidential Election year. Ergo, time to discuss our 40 year whacked out excuse for an energy policy. Royally botched up by every President since, umm? Objectives: Make US energy supply cheap for the US consumer and industry, fast growing and profitable for the American energy sector, clean, widely available and reliable, and secure, diversified, [...]
After having extensively tackled the topic of al-Qaida with The Bin Ladens and Ghost Wars, Steve Coll has turned his attention to ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM). At first blush, this might seem like a dramatic thematic departure for Coll as a journalist and author. However, Coll’s newest work, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, makes clear that [...]
Seemingly generating nary a ripple here in the U.S., the International Energy Agency (IEA) just issued its 2011 World Energy Outlook – its annual synopsis on the future of the global energy sector. If ignorance is bliss, then we’re certainly blessed by generally not bothering to confront the pretty-alarming conclusions of the report. A pastiche of the highlighted snippets in the Executive Summary, when [...]
Energy is life, the rest runs on it. Since the 70s through every presidential administration and every Congress, we have had an energy policy that boiled down to fighting the cold war through oil and getting lucky on locally sourced coal and gas. It’s not a zero planning energy policy, we’ve spent money, defined policies, [...]
Ordinarily, I let my fellow blogging colleague Neal Dikeman of Jane Capital take the lead in covering cleantech IPOs and publicly-traded stocks. However, I recently received the May 2011 newsletter from 21Ventures, and found the commentary by David Anthony on cleantech public equities an interesting complement to Neal’s most current take – sufficiently so to expound upon it herein. [...]
Will the 21st century be the fossil fuel century? Whether it’s peak oilers, climate scientists, renewable and sustainable gurus, or cleantech venture capitalists, we all talk like that’s not an option. We’ve preordained that the 21st century is a green energy, renewable power, cleantech century. And I’d like to believe that. But it’s not a [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi One of my favorite PowerPoint slides about the peak oil phenomenon comes from the dearly-departed Matt Simmons. The slide depicted a mountain peak in an automobile rearview mirror, the implication being that we would only know for sure when peak oil production has been achieved after it has been achieved and [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi Unlike many in the cleantech community, I’m not averse to increased drilling for oil in the U.S. I recognize that we’re not going to be able to leapfrog out of the corner into which we’ve painted ourselves over the past few decades, and that we’re going to need oil, gas and coal [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi as posted to Huffington Post As Jon Stewart so beautifully satired a couple of weeks ago, American political leaders have long said “enough is enough” about the lack of a coherent national strategy regarding oil. In the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf, is this time different? Will [...]
I was shocked when reading this letter from Governor Bobby Jindal. Now I find him to be over political at times, even though I like his governing style in general. In this case, he is just out of his mind. BP has not even capped the well yet and Governor Jindal is asking for more [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi I get a kick out of trite little lists that I can quickly report on and provoke some thinking and conversation. And so it is that I recently came across the “Top Ten Energy Myths”, as suggested by Thomas Tanton, a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. As listed in the [...]
Barrons had an interesting take on biofuels from garbage: http://online.barrons.com/article/SB127327100968888619.html I have been following this movement for some time and there does seem to be an extraordinary amount of capital and brainpower going into this space. People talk a lot about ethanol and I am a big of ethanol, mostly because I like the constiuency [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi In the past month, we’ve witnessed two major catastrophes associated with U.S. production of fossil fuels — the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killing 11 workers in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Massey Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion claiming 29 lives in West Virginia. It’s easy to vilify [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi Last week, the MIT Club of Northeast Ohio hosted a talk at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland by Professor Ernest Moniz, the Director of the MIT Energy Initiative, and a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Over the course of about an hour of [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi Jim Halloran, a financial analyst of the oil/gas industry now with Russell Energy Advisors at Financial America Securities, recently sent along to his various contacts something he came up with called “The Immutable Principles of Energy”. I liked it, and thought it was worth passing on verbatim to readers of my [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi A few weeks ago, I wrote here that it is often a good thing to read and reflect upon intelligently-crafted opinions that differ from those you hold. A good example is offered by the essay “Bound to Burn” by Peter Huber, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In this thought-provoking [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi Over my spring break vacation, I had the pleasure of reading The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burroughs. It was one of those books I just couldn’t put down. The Big Rich profiles the saga of the so-called Big Four of the [...]
I had the opportunity recently to chat with Stephen Brand, the chief technology officer for ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP), one of the largest major oil companies in the world. I have a long personal history with the ConocoPhillips organization. One of the first IPOs I ever worked on was the Conoco, Inc. IPO when DuPont spun it [...]
