Natural gas prices are volatile. Their price pattern can generate large fortunes. The volatile pattern can also generate painful bankruptcies for those on the wrong side of the bet. People who bet on those prices need to recognize the risk. Most people assume that power generators who are planning to meet demand in the next…
John Rowe is the recently retired CEO of Exelon, an electric power generation and natural gas delivery company with the largest fleet of nuclear power plants in the United States. Exelon just completed a merger with Constellation Energy, bringing the total number of nuclear reactors in its fleet to 22 (17 from Exelon and 5…
On April 22, 2012, the Christian Science Monitor published a lengthy feature article titled With all this natural gas, who needs oil? that helps illustrate the extent of America’s current love affair with methane, a fuel that we have been using commercially for about 150 years. According to some of the people quoted in the…
During my recent low production periods for new posts on Atomic Insights, I received some well intentioned advice from a frequent commenter – he told me that it would be less frustrating for me to maintain Atomic Insights if I focused more on innovations in nuclear energy than on the efforts of competitive energy suppliers…
Ben Heard at DecarboniseSA.com posted a thought-provoking question on April 4, 2012 – Why Gas? Good Question… Here is the introduction of Ben’s post. “Why gas?” Good question… It was meant to be a jingle, not a prophecy… In Australia back in 1990, we were subjected to a saccharine , family friendly bit of advertising…
The world would be a better place if more people thoroughly understood how the balance between supply of a commodity and demand for that commodity worked to establish market prices. The improvement would be even more impressive if customers learned how to take action to shift the balance into their favor instead of allowing the…
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the most venerated engineering institutions in the United States. Its pronouncements and considered opinions have a significant influence on our government’s policy, especially in such important fields as energy. In recent years, the MIT Energy Initiative, a multi-disciplinary team led by Professor Ernie Moniz has issued…
Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious science publications, has published an article that should give natural gas promoters in the environmental community an enormous dose of indigestion. It provides scientific evidence supported by hard data measurements that the act of extracting and “producing” natural gas for consumption releases enough methane into the atmosphere to…
On February 2, 2012, the Sierra Club allowed a Time magazine blog to break a poorly kept “secret” whose existence had threatened to get out of hand. In a post titled Exclusive: How the Sierra Club Took Millions From the Natural Gas Industry—and Why They Stopped Bryan Walsh described how one of the oldest, largest,…
On January 9, 2012, The Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University held a hydrofracking workshop. The organizers invited a number of speakers from both industry and academia to discuss a contentious, but important energy issue from a variety of perspectives. You can read about the workshop on TheGreenGrok on a post titled Minds…
In the months and years to come, post-Fukushima, people who influence power plant construction decisions will be making choices that will have a large impact on future generations. In this reflective time of the year, it is important to gather the most accurate lessons learned and to offer some food for thought about the motives…
As an undergraduate, I was trained to read between the lines and to interpret the words on the page in context with the author’s background and intent. With that in mind, I see an interesting marketing plan in between the following words from page 31 of ExxonMobil’s 2012 The Outlook for Energy: A View to…