Tag Archives: business & technology

Water use for electricity production set to double globally by 2035

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on January 31, 2013

Water use for electricity production set to double globally by 2035

By Philip Bump

You can’t make electricity without water. I mean, you can, but you have to use things like “solar panels” or “wind turbines,” and who’s going to do that? (Lots of people, I guess, but that doesn’t help my point.) A 2009 study suggested that half of the freshwater we use goes to energy production, boiled to create steam to turn turbines, or used to cool off reactors. When we run low on water — or when the water gets too warm — the ability to generate electricity declines or halts. (Except from wind turbines and solar panels; I’ll just keep pointing that out.)

According to the International Energy Agency, the amount of water we use for energy is about to go up. A lot. From National Geographic:

The amount of fresh water consumed for world energy production is on track to double within the next 25 years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects. …

If today’s policies remain in place, the IEA calculates that water consumed for energy production would increase from 66 billion cubic meters (bcm) today to 135 bcm annually by 2035.

That’s an amount equal to the residential water use of every person in the United States over three years, or 90 days’ discharge of the Mississippi River. It would be four times the volume of the largest U.S. reservoir, Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead.

National Geographic

That 90 days of Mississippi discharge presumably means when the river is at its normal level, not when it has been depleted by drought.

Which is the flip side of this heavy coin. Even as power sector water use doubles globally, the amount of water at hand is expected to drop, as climate change increases the length, frequency, and severity of droughts. A draft government report released earlier this month suggests that the Southwest will see more drought and the Southeast more strain on water supplies as the century continues. During Texas’ drought in 2011, several electricity production facilities came close to shutting down for lack of water.

Interestingly, shifts in power production away from coal and to other sources (excluding solar and wind!) won’t help the trend. The IEA suggests that the increased use of biofuels — renewable, organic material — will be a major source of “water stress,” increasing 242 percent over the next 20 years. Fracking for natural gas, on the other hand, isn’t likely to consume a large share of water. (We’ll see about water contamination.)

Enjoy it while you can, cow.

I could be apocalyptic and suggest that we’ll see some weird, Matrix-y war in 100 years as electricity-dependent robots seize control of dwindling water supplies that humans need to drink. That’s not going to happen. What could happen is that we’ll increasingly need to choose between uses for our water as we need more and have less.

If only there were a way to make electricity while using hardly any water at all.

Source

Water Demand for Energy to Double by 2035, National Geographic

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Pirates on Africa’s west coast have a new target: Oil

by dfonis5 Posted on January 31, 2013

Pirates on Africa’s west coast have a new target: Oil

By Philip Bump

The rate of piracy off the coast of Somalia in East Africa has dropped significantly over the past few years. The International Chamber of Commerce maintains a live map of attacks; the plurality at this point are off the coast of India. Earlier this month, a Somali pirate kingpin announced his retirement using that traditional pirate tool: the press conference.

ooocha

A rocket-propelled grenade fired by Somali pirates is buried in the side of a cruise ship.

At the same time, attacks along the western coast of Africa have increased. One key target? Oil. From Quartz:

The East Africa attacks were also sometimes on oil tankers, but with the goal of squeezing out large ransoms from the cargo-owners. The difference now is that the West Africa attacks are after the oil itself. On Jan. 21, for example, a tanker called ITRI was captured by pirates near Cote d’Ivoire; it has not been heard from since. Most of the oil attacks are off the coast of Nigeria, where pirates ply the Niger Delta.

The ICC’s tool provides more detail on that attack (which it places on the 16th).

Pirates boarded and hijacked the tanker and sailed her to an unknown location. They stole her cargo. The 16 crew members and tanker were released unharmed on the 22.01.2013. The vessel proceeded to Lagos port.

That the crew of the tanker was released suggests that personal ransoms aren’t the intent; that the vessel ended up in Lagos, Nigeria, suggests that the thieves intend to actually process the oil. As we noted last year, some $7 billion worth of oil is stolen in Nigeria each year. The country is home to black-market refineries of the sort that could handle the tanker’s cargo; the country’s government recently considered bombing them.

This oil piracy is driven by the market. Lots of oil leaves Nigeria (often bound for U.S. refineries), and it and other countries along Africa’s west coast don’t have robust safety systems. When on-the-books oil companies can make $62 million a day in profits, it’s no surprise that lightly guarded oil tankers within a short distance of illegal refining facilities should prove a tempting target.

Source

These pirates are not after ransom, but oil, Quartz

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Guacamole Sunday: A better name for the Super Bowl, or a crappy marketing campaign?

by biglermyrta910 Posted on January 30, 2013

Guacamole Sunday: A better name for the Super Bowl, or a crappy marketing campaign?

By Susie Cagle

It’s a good thing that unexpected California frost didn’t freeze out the state’s avocado crop. It’s not just the Golden State that loves nature’s butter. Americans’ appetite for avocados has exploded over the last decade, jumping significantly in 2012 alone, in no small part due to marketing campaigns by foreign avocado growers. This weekend, Americans are expected to eat several tons of avocados on “Guacamole Sunday” while watching the Super Bowl.

Nate Steiner

Twilight Greenaway at the Smithsonian‘s Food Think blog:

Last year, according to the produce industry publication The Packer, about 75 percent of the avocados shipped within the U.S. in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl came from Mexico. Most of the rest came from Chile. And that translates to a lot of the creamy green fruits. This year Americans will eat almost 79 million pounds of them in the few weeks before the big game — an eight million pound increase over last year and a 100 percent increase since 2003.

None of this has been an accident. The avocado industry started promoting guacamole as a Super Bowl food back in the 1990s, shortly after the NAFTA agreement began allowing floods of avocados from Central and South America to enter the country in winter. By 2008, Mexico had become the largest supplier of avocados to the U.S.

Touchdown for the centralized global food system! Funny end-zone dance for big profits! But a painful loss for local farming. Avocado season hasn’t really begun yet, so the ones you buy for Guacamole Sunday aren’t likely to be super-tasty, even after you let them ripen in a bag for a couple days. If you’re going to give in to the green monster, though, just please don’t do this.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Guacamole Sunday: A better name for the Super Bowl, or a crappy marketing campaign?

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TransCanada accidentally starts building Keystone XL on land it doesn’t own

by anjunonstennyao Posted on January 29, 2013

TransCanada accidentally starts building Keystone XL on land it doesn’t own

By Philip Bump

Job opening at TransCanada: Director of Making Sure That We Actually Have the Right to Build Our Pipeline on This Plot of Land. New position, competitive salary and benefits.

From FuelFix:

TransCanada contractors building the Keystone XL pipeline mistakenly planned their route and cleared several hundred feet of land through public property they had no right to work on, an Angelina County [Texas] official told FuelFix.

Officials noticed the mistake after protesters set up in trees in Angelina County to oppose work on the pipeline, which is intended to link the Texas coast with Canadian oil sands fields.

TransCanada cleared trees, soil and other foliage from a 50-foot wide strip of land owned by the county without any prior agreement for work there, Angelina County Attorney Ed Jones said.

“I would say it was a surprise to the county,” Jones said.

I would say so! “Hey, Jim, know why those backhoes are ripping up vegetation on that right-of-way?” “No, Tony, I sure don’t. Seems like something we would have heard about, being county employees and all.”

ctcaldwell

I told TransCanada I owned this and they could build a pipe on it; I am waiting for my check.

To be fair (since we like to be fair), the owner of the property seems to have made a mistake or two himself. Or, rather, the former owner.

The company had negotiated an agreement with a landowner and had paid him for use of the property for Keystone XL, TransCanada spokesman David Dodson said.

But the landowner, Nacogdoches resident Kevin Bradford, had sold a 6-acre parcel of his land to the county in 2009, six months before TransCanada approached him to negotiate payment for work on the property, Jones said. …

“It’s up to us to check things like that and inadvertently we staked out that area,” Dodson said.

It is! It is up to you. That is correct. Were it not, I would happily sell you lots and lots of land on which to build your pipeline, including this bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Rest assured: TransCanada insists this is “an isolated incident.” So was the Titanic.

Source

Keystone XL work veers onto wrong land, FuelFix

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Today’s oily news: Refiner wants to ship oil on Great Lakes, oil barge spills in Mississippi

by Pauline80x Posted on January 28, 2013

Today’s oily news: Refiner wants to ship oil on Great Lakes, oil barge spills in Mississippi

By Philip Bump

A refinery in Superior, Wis., wants to cut in on the rail industry’s sweet deal: shipments of oil from North Dakota. The company doesn’t own trains. But it does sit at the tip of Lake Superior.

NASALake Superior,

covered in white

instead of oily black.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Petroleum refiner Calumet Specialty Products Partners is exploring whether to build a crude oil loading dock on Lake Superior, near its Superior, Wis., refinery, to ship crude oil on the Great Lakes and through connecting waterways, the company said Friday. …

Pipelines are the cheapest way to move petroleum products, [analyst Ethan] Bellamy said, but their delivery points are fixed. Railcars, barges and ships can move to different delivery points. That allows crude to go to the highest bidder.

And what could go wrong?

Josh Mogerman of the Natural Resources Defense Council noted that a pipeline spill two summers ago of Canadian tar sands oil fouled Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, a Lake Michigan tributary.

“That should give anyone who cares about the Great Lakes pause,” he said.

Well, yeah. But that was a pipeline. When is the last time a boat carrying oil leaked into a waterway? I mean, besides yesterday.

From Reuters:

Two oil barges pushed by a tugboat slammed into a railroad bridge in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Sunday, causing one to leak crude oil into the Mississippi River, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

Officials used an “absorbent boom” to contain the undetermined amount of oil that leaked into the river after the collision, which occurred shortly after midnight and damaged both barges, Lieutenant Ryan Gomez said. The barge that is leaking was holding 80,000 gallons of light crude oil, he said.

The Associated Press has more details:

Tugs were holding the barge near shore on the Louisiana side of the river, south of the bridge it hit and directly across from Vicksburg’s Riverwalk Casino.

Orange containment boom was stretched across part of the river downstream from the barge, and a small boat appeared to patrol the area. …

The oily sheen was reported up to three miles downriver from the bridge at Vicksburg on Sunday. Gomez said crews have laid down a boom and also a secondary boom. They also were using a rotating skimmer device to sweep up oily water in the river.

This is a minor spill on a relatively narrow body of water. A big spill on Lake Superior — which could, in its worst case, then flow through each of the other Great Lakes and over Niagara Falls — is a daunting prospect. (We looked at the prospect of such a spill last year.)

Spills are written into business plans like Calumet’s, maybe the second or third paragraph on the 19th page. They’re worst-case scenarios for which theoretical accommodations are made. Until, as happened yesterday, the spills cease to be theoretical.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Today’s oily news: Refiner wants to ship oil on Great Lakes, oil barge spills in Mississippi

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How the Kochs funneled millions to climate deniers through a secretive nonprofit

by marinavhunt Posted on January 25, 2013

How the Kochs funneled millions to climate deniers through a secretive nonprofit

By Philip Bump

Donors Trust, Inc. works “to help alleviate, through education, research, and private initiative, society’s most pervasive and radical needs, including those relating to social welfare, health, the environment, economics, governance, foreign relations, and arts and culture.”

Read that sentence twice. Unintentionally, Donors Trust is giving away its actual goal: Working to alleviate society’s most radical needs, including the environment. Alleviate the environment? That, according to a report from The Independent, it very much does.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

The Independent notes that the Koch-directed fund gave Donors Trust $4.5 million between 2007 and 2010. By 2010, the nonprofit was sitting on $18.4 million dollars, according to its IRS Form 990 filing. Over the course of that year, it paid out hundreds of grants to a number of organizations, including:

$23,550 to the pro-oil, anti-fact American Enterprise Institute
$7,577,000 to the Koch-linked Americans for Prosperity Foundation (right)
$1,280,000 to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, whose director called global warming “man-made hysteria”
$58,200 to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is being sued by climate scientist Michael Mann for defamation
$41,000 to the anti-environment FreedomWorks Foundation
$2,250 to the notorious climate-denying Heartland Institute
$49,300 to the conservative Heritage Foundation
$82,000 to the pro-fracking Manhattan Institute
$21,500 to Montana’s Property and Environment Research Center, focused on “improving environmental quality through property rights and markets”
$30,650 to the anti-wind Reason Foundation

Donors Trust also gave massive grants to libertarian organizations, nonprofits pushing to break down the separation of church and state, anti-labor organizations, and, unexpectedly, animal care nonprofits like “Feline Rescue.” We’ve uploaded the full set of recipients; feel free to see if you can find anything else interesting.

View this document on Scribd

This is the tip of the iceberg, one year’s worth of grants out of a decade. The role of Donors Trust appears to be, in part, to mask who’s doing the funding. The Independent:

The Donors Trust is a “donor advised fund”, meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash. …

[Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said,] “By becoming anonymous, they remove a political target. They can plausibly claim that they are not giving to these organisations, and there is no way to prove otherwise.”

Donors Trust is clear on the scale of its investments.

To date, DonorsTrust has received over $400 million from these donors who are both dedicated to liberty and to the cause of perpetuating a free and prosperous society through philanthropic means. Since inception, DonorsTrust has granted out over $300 million to over 1000 liberty-minded charities.

Your definition of “liberty” — and, for that matter, “charity” — may differ.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Hey evil coal boss: Is it also Obama’s fault if you’re hiring workers back?

by nension Posted on January 24, 2013

Hey evil coal boss: Is it also Obama’s fault if you’re hiring workers back?

By Philip Bump

Reuters / Danny Moloshok

This guy! We haven’t seen Robert Murray since around election time and, to be honest, we missed him. He’s the closest thing we’ve got in the 21st century to an evil 19th-century coal baron, hellbent on profit and laughing heartily at the misfortunes of the poor. He’s retro. That’s always fun.

Last time we heard from Murray was when he sent a prayer to his local West Virginia paper lamenting how the reelection of Barack Obama meant he had to fire a bunch of his staff. (Was it the staff that he docked a day’s pay to appear in a Romney ad? Was it the staff he forced to contribute to his political action fund? We may never know.) So, wiping away big fucking crocodile tears, Murray wrote these powerful words:

The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance. …

Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.

Then: boom, pink slips, because Obama is killing coal and hates white people, probably. Boo-fucking-hoo, Robert Murray is so sad.

Anyway, here’s the update. From New Republic reporter Alec MacGillis:

I was surprised when I got reports from Ohio this week suggesting that operations at the Red Bird West mine, the one whose shutdown was announced with such fanfare last summer, are now picking up again. “It’s opened back up…they’re hiring people,” said Gary Parsons, a former superintendent at the mine who worked there for five years before being laid off with the announcement of the shutdown last summer. Parsons himself has not been called back, and is planning simply to retire early, but he said he had talked to several locals who were taking steps to get hired back on. He said he did not understand why, after the big headline-making closure last year, things were perking up at the mine. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “They said they was going to close the mine down.”

Another former Murray employee confirmed that operations were picking back up at Red Bird West. “They’ve called back some hourly folks. They’re definitely starting it back up,” the former employee said. What explained the reversal? This former employee conjectured that presidential campaign politics may have played a role. After all, announcing the shutdown of the mine a few months before Election Day was not helpful to Obama, who dearly needed to win Ohio. “In my opinion, it was all for politics,” the former Murray employee said. “It was just a show of politics to try to scare people, to get votes for [Murray’s] candidate…I felt they were playing politics from day one, and they certainly didn’t waste any time starting back up again.”

If this is true — and it would take as much for me to believe it is as it would take to convince me that I exist on this planet Earth — it’s almost admirable in its sheer, egregious shittiness. For all of the handwringing and wailing and moaning done by Obama opponents about how horrible he was making the economy and how doomed we would be if he won reelection (all while unemployment dropped and the Dow soared), it takes a special kind of scumbag to actually lay people off to prove your point. Much less to invoke the name of Jesus in doing so. Lord, please forgive Robert Murray for possibly closing a mine and firing people just so his massive investment in Mitt Romney might be substantiated.

When speaking to MacGillis, the company denied it was reopening the facility. However:

The only work going on at the mine, they said, was “reclamation” required as part of any shutdown. “We’re required to put things back together. We’re picking up some remnants of coal, some coal that was left over, as we clean up the place,” said Gary Broadbent, a senior attorney for the company. He said that there were 42 or 43 people at the mine doing this work, and while the work could go on for a few years, there would be no expansion at the mine, which at its peak employed more than 200 people. …

[T]he company’s current account would appear to be at variance with the announcement last summer, when Broadbent said that the mine would “gradually be closed through late September or early October,” with no mention of a possibly years-long reclamation project. After all, if the head count was really dropping from only 56 to 43, odds are the move would not have made the headlines it did.

Oh, and an addendum:

A former Murray employee in Utah informs me that people are being hired back at the Murray operations there, too, just a couple months after the big post-election layoffs. The former employee said about 25 had recently been hired back on. Murray officials demurred when asked about any uptick in activity at the Utah or Illinois mines where the post-election layoffs occurred. “I’m not intimately involved with the hiring or firing of employees,” said Broadbent.

Lord, when Robert Murray appears before you for his final judgment, feel free to use any and all information from Grist’s archive to make your decision. If you need me to appear as a witness, I will do so happily.

Sorry. Not when he appears before you. If.

Source

Is Obama’s Coal-Country Nemesis Hiring Again?, The New Republic

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Hey evil coal boss: Is it also Obama’s fault if you’re hiring workers back?

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TransCanada accidentally emails its internal media information to reporters

by nension Posted on January 23, 2013

TransCanada accidentally emails its internal media information to reporters

By Philip Bump

TransCanada, the company that would like to build a large pipeline carrying toxic oil from the Canadian border to Texas, got pretty excited yesterday when the governor of Nebraska removed a key obstacle to the project. Very excited. So excited that the public relations team forgot how to use email.

tarsandsblockade

Hopefully this pipeline worker is better at using a backhoe than TransCanada’s PR guy is at email.

Yesterday afternoon, TransCanada’s Shawn Howard inadvertently emailed a number of journalists an internal report on how the media had covered the news about Nebraska’s governor. The report notes the areas in which TransCanada feels it has been most effective, the questions it gets frequently, and the company’s go-to message points to be used when responding. Argus Leader reporter Cody Winchester posted the email on his blog. Excerpts:

Earlier today, Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman sent a letter to President Obama, indicating that the State had now approved the re-route of Keystone XL through the state. Shortly after the announcement, External Communications provided more than 55 reporters with quotes from [TransCanada CEO] Russ Girling on the announcement. Following that, TransCanada issued its own news release with more detailed information (based on content drafted prior to and after Christmas). …

The main range of topics included: eminent domain in Nebraska, if we expect President Obama to approve KXL (juxtaposed against his comments in his Inaguaral Speech on climate change), what steps come next in the process, how quickly we could begin construction if we receive a Presidential Permit and the importance of the route approval through Nebraska. …

As of now, there have been more than 440 media hits on this story and many have taken directly from our news release and background information on our website. …

Many of our supporters were active online in their support for today’s Nebraska announcement. Those tweets and social media postings will be re-tweeted by TransCanada tomorrow and included in our next Media Today report.

Howard outlined the company’s response to protests in Texas.

Work has been suspended on a small parcel of land in the overall 485-mile Gulf Coast Project in Angelina County, Texas, south of the city of Diboll.
TransCanada executed an easement agreement with the landowner, who subsequently sold a portion of the property to the county for purposes of construction of a weigh station. TransCanada inadvertently included the county property in its proposed route.
TransCanada is working with the county and other relevant agencies to resolve the issue. Resolution may include a slight route deviation. …
The project is employing about 4,000 workers in Texas and Oklahoma. Because of the nature of pipeline construction and the protestors’ choice of targets, the impact of all the various protests can be counted in hours, not days.
Still, if the protestors had their way, these thousands of American workers would be kept from their jobs, and an important part of President Obama’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy would be thwarted.
TransCanada is gratified by the many showings of local support, and we do not believe these protestors represent an indigenous, grass-roots movement. It is a handful of individuals, and the vast majority of them are from out of state.

This last point is certainly questionable, given the high-profile opposition of local residents to the southern extension of the pipeline.

For those concerned about the Keystone XL pipeline, this small error with email will probably resonate. If a company can’t master email, they might wonder, how can we expect it to maintain a pipeline? Which is probably not a valid conclusion to draw. If you’re worried about TransCanada’s ability to manage a pipeline, you should probably focus on its pipeline errors instead.

Hat-tip: Climate Adaptation

Source

TransCanada flack accidentally emails reporters a report about the reporters’ reporting, City Notes

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Nebraska governor signs off on new Keystone XL pipeline route; TransCanada laughs maniacally

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on January 22, 2013

Nebraska governor signs off on new Keystone XL pipeline route; TransCanada laughs maniacally

By Philip Bump

Somewhere in Canada, a TransCanada executive has a big checklist on his wall. At the bottom, circled in red: “Approval of Keystone XL!!!!” Until today, only two checkboxes remained unchecked. But now, there’s only one, because he’s put a big fat X next to “Get OK from Nebraska.” The Times reports:

Gov. Dave Heineman of Nebraska approved on Tuesday a revised route for the Keystone XL pipeline through Nebraska, brushing aside vocal opposition from some citizen groups and putting final approval of the pipeline project squarely in the hands of the Obama administration.

Governor Heineman, a Republican, said in a letter to Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that his state’s review found that the new route avoided sensitive lands and aquifers. Mr. Obama had rejected the previous route last January on the grounds that construction of the pipeline threatened Nebraska’s Sand Hills region and that a spill could contaminate the critical Ogallala Aquifer.

Thomas Beck Photo

For now, anyway.

This was basically the bare minimum of what TransCanada needed to demonstrate: that a spill wouldn’t permanently ruin a critical source of water used for irrigation. Last October, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality OK’d the new proposed route. Last month, hundreds of Nebraskans attended a public meeting to dispute those findings — and to suggest that any spill would be hugely problematic.

The governor has a response for that.

Mr. Heineman said that the pipeline’s operator, TransCanada, had assured him and state environmental officials that the chances of a spill would be minimized and that the company would assume all responsibility for a cleanup in case of an accident.

Pipeline spills are like pregnancy. There’s only one guaranteed way to prevent them: abstinence. But tell Nebraska that you’ll always be there for it, and the state is ready to be screwed.

It wasn’t just TransCanada’s VP of Checkbox Checking that was giddy.

The American Petroleum Institute, a strong advocate of the project, applauded Nebraska’s action, saying that it removed a critical hurdle to completion of the pipeline.

“With the approval from Nebraska in hand, the president can be confident that the remaining environmental concerns have been addressed,” said Marty Durbin, the oil lobby’s executive vice president. “We hope President Obama will finally greenlight KXL as soon as possible and get more Americans back to work.”

Though not as many Americans as the industry likes to pretend.

So there’s only one last checklist item. TransCanada still needs approval from the Obama administration to build Keystone XL across the Canadian border. The decision ostensibly lies with the State Department, but, ultimately, it’s with the president himself. Yesterday, he pledged to combat climate change, in stronger language than he’s used in years. Whether or not the Keystone pipeline meets his standard for combat remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, that guy at TransCanada HQ has his marker hovering over that tantalizingly empty box.

Source

Nebraska Governor Approves Keystone XL Route, New York Times

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Nebraska governor signs off on new Keystone XL pipeline route; TransCanada laughs maniacally

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Exxon makes up with Iraq just in time for the discovery of a billion barrels of oil

by oks23po Posted on January 22, 2013

Exxon makes up with Iraq just in time for the discovery of a billion barrels of oil

By Philip Bump

expertinfantry

An American soldier stands near a 2006 oil field fire near Kirkuk.

Tensions between the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq and that country’s government are high — in large part thanks to oil. ExxonMobil’s recent agreement to explore drilling within Kurdish territory sparked a ferocious response from Iraq. One military officer suggested that exploration would be “a declaration of war.”

It’s no secret what prompts such fury. There’s an enormous amount of money in the Iraqi oil fields; some of those disinclined to be generous to our former president suggest that opening Iraq’s oilfields to American companies was a motive for Bush’s initial invasion of the country. Both Kurdish and Iraqi leaders would like to maintain control over those inky streams of money, reinforcing ExxonMobil’s tricky position.

Last week, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson sat down with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in an effort to repair relationships between the two. It’s an important consideration. When Chevron announced an extraction deal in Kurdistan, Iraq banned the company from exploration elsewhere. From the Associated Press:

Iraq announced the meeting between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Exxon Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson in a brief statement following the talks in Baghdad. It offered few specifics, saying that the men discussed the company’s activities and working conditions in Iraq.

Tillerson said Exxon was eager to continue and expand its work in Iraq and “will take important decisions in this regard,” according to the statement. …

A spokesman for the Kurdish regional government, Safeen Dizayee, downplayed the significance of Monday’s meeting.

“What is important is the results of this meeting, not the meeting itself,” he said. “We have not seen any change in Exxon Mobil’s policies regarding its work in Kurdistan.”

Another recent announcement provides additional incentive for ExxonMobil to mend fences. From Agence France-Presse:

Iraq said on Sunday it has discovered deposits of crude equivalent to one billion barrels of oil after the first exploration work by state-owned firms in almost 30 years.

The deposits were found after exploration in Maysan province, in southern Iraq near the border with Iran, and could potentially make a significant addition to Baghdad’s already substantial reserves.

There’s no indication that ExxonMobil knew about the new discovery prior to Tillerson’s meeting. But it reinforces the value to the company in staying on the Iraqi government’s good side. ExxonMobil’s politics are the same in the Middle East as they are here: work with and support anyone that makes it easier to suck oil out of the ground. Civil wars are bad for business.

Update Patrick Osgood, correspondent for Iraq Oil Report, clarifies (and takes issue with) the report above.

We’re working to verify Osgood’s assertion that the billion-barrel find has been misreported.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Exxon makes up with Iraq just in time for the discovery of a billion barrels of oil

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