A fairly even-handed introduction to how Hydrofracking is affecting the global energy market.
I wonder though if it will be more a gilded than golden age.
In its World Energy Outlook 2011 , the IEA remarks that “in all the scenarios examined natural gas has a higher share of the global energy mix in 2035 than it does today”.
The ever-changing fuel situation continues to develop in curious ways….
Also, note how Albany is specifically mentioned -I’m going to assume, since the link doesn’t specify otherwise, they mean Albany, NY…. specifically New York’s current deliberation about how to best allow Hydrofracking in New York.
‘Hurt Themselves’
Chevron Corp. (CVX) and ConocoPhillips, the second- and third- largest U.S. energy companies by market value, also are expected to post their largest full-year profit declines in 2012 since 2009, when worldwide fuel markets were reeling from the collapse of demand in the wake of the financial crisis.
“In a sense, they’ve hurt themselves,” Leonard Coburn, president of Washington-based Coburn International Energy Consultants LLC and a former director of Russian and Eurasian affairs at the Energy Department. “But that’s why we’re seeing them shifting away from gas toward more oil.”
Shale formations will account for 49 percent of total U.S. gas production by 2035, up from 23 percent in 2010, the Energy Department said in a Feb. 14 report. When other geologic formations such as tight sands that require the same intensive drilling techniques are added in, unconventional fields will pump 77 percent of domestic supply by 2035, the department said.
The supply bonanza of gas and oil made possible with fracking means the U.S. will become increasingly independent of foreign energy producers at the same time as burgeoning economic powers such as China grow more reliant on overseas supplies, said Jonathan Chanis, managing member of New Tide Asset Management LLC in Torrington, Connecticut. That outlook assumes lawmakers and regulators at the federal and state levels won’t place expensive restrictions on drillers, he said.
“With the right policy decisions in Washington and places like Harrisburg and Albany, the United States will be in an extremely positive position,” Chanis said.
Harnessing nature’s solar cells
Photovoltaic panels made from plant material could become a cheap, easy alternative to traditional solar cells
Within a few years, people in remote villages in the developing world may be able to make their own solar panels, at low cost, using otherwise worthless agricultural waste as their raw material.
That’s the vision of MIT researcher Andreas Mershin, whose work appears this week in the open-access journal Scientific Reports. The work is an extension of a project begun eight years ago by Shuguang Zhang, a principal research scientist and associate director at MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering. Zhang was senior author of the new paper along with Michael Graetzel of Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
(Source: mit.edu)
