Shale Gas Exports

Tue, 2012-10-23 05:00Steve Horn
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As You Sow: Coal Investments, Shale Gas, a Bad Bet

In a missive titled "White Paper: Financial Risks of Investments in Coal," As You Sow concludes that coal is becoming an increasingly risky investment with each passing day. The fracking boom and the up-and-coming renewable energy sector are quickly superseding King Coal's empire as a source of power generation, As You Sow concludes in the report.

As You Sow chocks up King Coal's ongoing demise to five factors, quoting straight from the report:

1. Increasing capital costs for environmental controls at existing coal plants and uncertainty about future regulatory compliance costs

2. Declining prices for natural gas, a driver of electric power prices in competitive markets

3. Upward price pressures and price volatility of coal

4. High construction costs for new coal plants and unknown costs to implement carbon capture and storage

5. Increasing competitiveness of renewable generation resources

Read more: As You Sow: Coal Investments, Shale Gas, a Bad Bet
Wed, 2012-06-06 08:36Steve Horn
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TransCanada's Latest Extreme Energy Export Pipelines in the U.S. and Canada

TransCanada was once in the limelight and targeted for its Keystone XL pipeline project. Now, with few eyes watching, it is pushing along two key pipeline projects that would bring two respective forms of what energy geopolitics scholar Michael Klare calls "extreme energy" to lucrative export markets.

Pipeline one: the southern segment of the originally proposed TransCanada Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, popularly referred to as the Cushing Extension, but officially referred to as either the Gulf Coast Project or the Cushing Marketlink pipeline. This pipeline will carry tar sands crude, or "dilbit," extracted from Alberta, Canada's Athabasca oil sands project southward first to Cushing, Oklahoma, and then to Port Arthur, Texas, where it will be shipped off to global export markets.

While the northern Alberta-to-Cushing segment has been punted until after election season by President Barack Obama's U.S. State Department, the Cushing-Port Arthur segment has been rammed through in a secrective manner by various Obama regulatory agencies, as pointed out recently by Friends of the Earth-U.S. (FOE-U.S.). 

FOE-U.S. explained in a long blog post published on June 5, well worth reading in its entirity,

Read more: TransCanada's Latest Extreme Energy Export Pipelines in the U.S. and Canada
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