2010 may well become known in the renewable and environmental community as the year of the solar battles. Battle is definitely brewing in California, with the main focus at the moment on Brightsource. Just before the new year, Senator Feinstein introduced a new bill that she hopes will help balance preservation of the Mojave desert with recreation and renewable energy development.

Reporting from the negotiation room

Today's NRC, a Dutch newspaper I like akin to the NYT, heavily criticized the Copenhagen meeting, and it was not alone. All major newspapers expressed dismay after the speeches held by Chinese prime-minister Wen Jiaboa and President Obama. I was not overly enthused by their speeches either. Both repeated mostly old statements, praised their own proposed steps forward, and accused the other of hampering global progress and signing of an effective Copenhagen treaty.

Roz Naylor argued in her interview with us last year that a push for biofuels in the US or Europe may have significant consequences globally. Naturally, countries that rely on food crops that can either be used to generate biofuels, or are being supplanted by biofuels crops, can be negatively affected. Case in point is the so-called tortilla crisis, that is, the highly increased prices for corn after strong support of corn-based ethanol that impact large populations in Mexico and elsewhere for which corn is a staple food.

As I type this I'm listening to my colleague Ilan Kroo, professor in Aerodynamics at Stanford University and a world renowned airplane designer. The topic of his lecture is Sustainable Aviation: Future Air Transportation and the Environment.
A few blogs ago I gave some current numbers on the efficiency of air travel vs car travel. A Boeing 737 with 75% occupancy gives about 80 miles/gallon for each passenger. This compares favorably to a car, but then, we would not drive across the Atlantic.

President Obama's administration certainly sees the energy future of the US different than the last administration. Overall, this is very good news. A few years ago, when I first starting looking seriously at the US energy policies and proposals, I was not very confident about our chances to create a sustainable energy future. I'm much more optimistic now. Of course, this is a day to be optimistic and a day to believe in what we can accomplish if we just put our talents to it. At the same time, it's also the day to start looking more carefully at the proposals. There's much work to be done and the devil is, as always, in the details.

If you're anything like me, your head has been scratched many times in the last year because of the price of crude oil. When I started at Stanford in 2001, both gas and oil prices (15US$/barrel) were low. Much too low to encourage rapid development of greener alternatives for transport or electricity production. My colleagues and I certainly expected (and hoped!) that the oil price would go up in the years following. Global demand was clearly increasing, with most of the demand rise caused by growing economies in China and India. But none of us had anticipated the very sharp increases between mid 2006 and mid 2008, with the extraordinary peak of $145US just this last summer.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just published its long awaited
World Energy Outlook 2008 .
A highly recommended read.

A quick first summary with more analysis to come:

The current financial crisis could well lead to a growing worldwide petroleum shortage in the short to medium term. The crisis has lead to a decrease in crude oil prices (see our stats in the left column of the page). Oil companies are therefore not making the profits hoped for and some have started cutting or delaying new projects.
IEA expects that oil prices will bounce back up to around 100 dollars per barrel in 2010.

Is global oil production peaking? The peak oil debate has been going on for a number of years. Depending on how production and exploration numbers are presented, and also depending on who you talk to (NGO, oil industry, government, economist), you may either be convinced that oil will peak soon, or that we have plenty of it.

My colleague Roland Horne recently wrote an excellent summary of this problem, which he presented at the International Forum on Higher Education and Energy at China University of Petroleum last month. You can download it here. A very highly recommended read. It will help you put this debate in perspective.

October 10, 2008

Cannot resist chuckling a bit at today's newspaper reports about plunging oil prices. Oil price is falling below 80 dollars because of decreasing demand, so one paper write "demand predictions are *slashed* by 400,000 barrels a day for this year". Doing my maths, this means that "slashing" is equivalent to a reduction of less than 0.5%.
At the same time, the newspaper reports that OPEC is calling for supply reduction to keep the oil price from slipping more. If someone had said this last year when the oil price was, shriek yelp, above 50 dollars, it would have been considered ridiculous.