When people found out I was going to be in Brussels, invitations for lunch and dinner came out of the woodwork, and people started booking train rides, including two from London. Lengthy conversations on different decarbonization challenges ensued, around the main event itself, the book launch of the second edition … [continued]
I recently came across a somewhat old spreadsheet from the U.S. Department of Energy, “Public Retail Gasoline Stations by State and Year,” which covered data from 1996 to 2012 (xlsx file found HERE). It was clear that the numbers in it were not precisely accurate, but there was something very … [continued]
As the cost of releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere goes up, so does interest in carbon capture.
It is not just the carbon footprint. During the Civil War, a postage stamp to mail a letter cost 3¢. It was still 3¢ when I was a kid. There had been times of inflation, but the price of the stamp had not changed. In fact, during the Civil War, … [continued]
I had the title written before I saw this tweet, but it’s a good metaphor for the overall topic:
I have come to believe that the end of oil & gas could look very different than what people expect. In ways it could appear even to defy the accepted law of supply and demand. If I am right, loss of demand in the face of continued availability of the resources could drive retail prices up instead of down. And once this process has begun, the consequences could quickly become disruptive.
At the moment, we have had over a quarter million deaths due to covid-19. This death toll will continue to rise until the virus infects everyone and causes millions of deaths, or until we defeat it, either by social distancing and contact tracing, a vaccine, a treatment, or whatever tools we employ, including new technologies. I am personally fascinated by the potential of covid-sniffing dogs.
The IMF says a price on carbon is far more effective than government rules and regulations. It recommends a minimum cost of $75 per ton of carbon dioxide.
Some people have asked when the prices will stop falling. Their understanding is that the decline in price really is unpredictable, and they believe that no definitive answer can be made about what source of energy will be least expensive in the future. In some important ways, they are wrong. The declines are predictable, to a degree.
There’s a reasonable case for an identifiable $800 billion in costs for the nuclear portion of the Fukushima disaster. It’s not hard to see that a 40-year recovery period along with costs excluded from this could add 25% to that without breaking a sweat.
