The world is running out of oil faster than the “official” report from the International Energy Agency suggests, according to an exclusive news report in the UK’s Guardian.

Whistleblowers, one inside the agency and one who has left the agency, say that the IEA has been downplaying the coming shortage of oil for fear of triggering a panic.

Further, the whistleblower still employed by the IEA (described as a “senior official” who wished to remain anonymous), says that the agency’s reluctance to come clean about oil supplies has been the result of pressure from the United States.

These allegations raise questions about the IEA’s prediction that oil production could be raised from its current level of 83 million barrels a day to 105 million barrels a day to meet increasing demand expected as the world comes out of the recession.

Looked at another way, the leaks from inside the IEA, which released its 2009 World Energy Outlook this week, give credence to critics who have been saying the world is close to or past the point of “peak” oil production.

The Guardian quoted the insider source as saying:

“Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,” he added.

Said the Guardians’ second source:

“We have [already] entered the ‘peak oil’ zone. I think that the situation is really bad.”

The IEA report is not stripped of bad news, however. A look at the Executive Summary shows the IEA projects that:

• Oil demand will grow from 85 million barrels a day in 2008 to 105 million barrels per day in 2030 with the transportation sector accounting for 97 percent of the increase in oil use.
• Falling investment in oil and gas energy will have “far-reaching and depending on how governments respond, potentially serious consequences for energy security, climate change and energy poverty. …Any prolonged downturn in investment threatens to constrain capacity growth in the medium term, particularly for long lead-time projects, eventually risking a shortfall in supply.”

The IEA report further warns that it is important that world leaders develop a treaty at Copenhagen to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (though it talks in terms of holding the planet to 450 ppm of carbon in the atmosphere  instead of the emerging consensus for 350 ppm).

“Energy needs to be used more efficiently and the carbon content of the energy we consume must be reduced…” yet in 2030, the report predicts, fossil fuels, with the exception of coal, will remain the dominant energy sources.

For a larger discussion on peak oil, a look at the bell curves and some postulations about life on planet Earth in the post-fossil fuel era see Matt Savinar’s blog Life After the Oil Crash.

The Roscoe, Texas, wind farm (Photo: E.ON Climate & Renewables)

Global energy company E.ON Climate and Renewables today announced the completion of what it says is the world’s largest wind farm near Roscoe, Texas. The new wind complex has an installed capacity of 781.5 megawatts (MW), which can generate enough electricity to power more than 230,000 homes.

The project area spans parts of four West Texas counties and covers almost 100,000 acres — an area several times the size of Manhattan. The wind farm has a total of 627 wind turbines manufactured by Mitsubishi, General Electric and Siemens.

North American CEO of EC&R Steve Trenholm said the wind farm is the result of a billion dollar investment, and involved the coordination of more than 300 landowners and 500 workers. “Today is a great day for our company and the team that made this a reality,” he said in a statement.

EC&R is constructing an offshore wind project near London that it says will be the largest offshore wind farm in the world. The company operates wind farms producing more than 2,600 megawatts worldwide, including 1,488 MW in the U.S.

“Texas continues to lead the nation in the development of renewable energy and has more wind generation capacity than any other state and all but four countries,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in a statement. “We are pleased that E. ON Climate & Renewables North America has chosen to open this facility in Roscoe that will further expand our state’s diverse energy portfolio.”

However, Gov. Rick Perry continues to oppose any federal cap and trade legislation.

Yesterday he met with business and industry leaders in Houston to discuss the impact of the proposed legislation in Washington. He emphasized the importance of diversifying the state’s energy portfolio by pursuing innovative energy sources as an alternative to the “burdensome regulations” associated with federal cap and trade rules. And he warned the proposed legislation would increase the cost of living for Texas families and “crush Texas and the nation’s energy producing sectors.”

“Texas has shown you don’t need federal mandates to improve the environment or foster the next generation of energy technology,” Gov. Perry said in a statement. “Rather than emulate Texas’ success, Washington seems determined to cripple our economy by imposing sweeping mandates and draconian regulation. Texans should be wary about a cap-and-trade bill that would not only impose the largest tax hike in the history of the United States, but also inject the federal government further into every Texas home, farm and workplace.”

Perry’s opposition to the Waxman-Markey Bill, also known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, is a sign that even as the state tries to become a leader in alternative energy development, it faces pressure to balance those efforts against the interests of a deeply entrenched legacy energy industry.  Texas supplies 20 percent of the nation’s oil production, one-fourth of the nation’s natural gas production, a quarter of the nation’s refining capacity, and nearly 60 percent of the nation’s chemical manufacturing.

Add it all up and Texas’ fossil fuel-based energy industry employs 200,000 to 300,000 Texans and represents $35 billion in total wages.

Pennsylvania environment officials have charged Cabot Oil and Gas with five violations after nearly 8,000 gallons of hydraulic fracturing solution spilled from a pipe system in two separate incidents near the town of Dimock last week. The department reported that a third, smaller spill, occurred at the site Tuesday morning.

According to the state, Cabot failed to prevent a fracturing fluid discharge, failed to keep that discharge from escaping into the environment and from entering a creek, and inappropriately dammed that creek after the spill, among other violations. The company could face fines topping $130,000.

“I was concerned with two releases,” said Bob Yowell, director of the north central regional office of the DEP. “A third release, although it was relatively small, gives us great concern that something unusual is happening at this particular well. This isn’t a normal situation.”

The spills began on Wednesday, Sept. 16 at 2 p.m. when a pipe coupling failed on the system that mixes the fracturing ingredients, sending as much as 2,100 gallons of fluid into the environment. At 8 p.m. that same day another pipe coupling broke in the same system, and 5,880 additional gallons of fracturing fluid were discharged, according to both state and Cabot accounts. On Tuesday morning, Sept. 22, another hose ruptured under pressure, releasing 420 more gallons of the same mixture, though only 10 gallons of that last spill escaped from the company’s spill catch system.

According to Ken Komoroski, a Cabot Oil and Gas spokesman, the fracturing procedure was being conducted by two contractors: Halliburton, one of biggest oil services companies in the world, and Baker Tanks, a petroleum storage tank company.

“Our policy is zero spills, zero unpermitted releases, and those goals were not met so there needs to be evaluations of what can be done to prevent them in the future,” Komoroski told ProPublica. “The spills were less than .5 percent gel, and at 99.5 percent water, this material is not hazardous or dangerous nor does it present any environmental risk.”

Pennsylvania officials allowed Cabot to continue fracturing the well while they conducted their investigation. According to the DEP’s Yowell, halting the fracturing may have presented additional problems, though he could not specify what those risks were. Cabot voluntarily halted the fracturing on Tuesday, after the third spill occurred.

The investigation into the spill is ongoing. According to a DEP press release and the notice letter sent to Cabot, a nearby wetland has been flushed and further remediation may be required, including excavation of soil surrounding the site.

ProPublica reported the spills Monday, stating that the fluids had seeped into Stevens creek and killed fish there, an assertion repeated in the DEP’s press release on Tuesday. Follow-up interviews with the state’s Department of Fish and Boat Commission, however, show that a small number of minnows were harmed and that the damage to the creek appeared minimal. However, water samples from the creek are still being evaluated, according to the DEP’s Yowell.

According to a Material Safety Data Sheet provided to the state by Halliburton, the substance spilled was a lubricating gel used in hydraulic fracturing that poses a substantial threat to human health and was described in the Halliburton document as a “potential carcinogen” that has caused skin cancer in animals.

Cabot’s Komoroski points out that the document refers to the gel’s concentrated form, and that the mixture spilled in Dimock was mostly water. He also disputes the information on the Halliburton form that warns the product is a “potential carcinogen.” The disclosure, required by law on the MSDS form, was an effort to be extremely conservative and account for the possibility that a derivative from the refining process could be part of the gel mixture, Komoroski said. He could not say what that derivative was, except that it is a hydrocarbon.

Halliburton did not respond to questions about the details of its MSDS disclosure for the product, called LGC-35 CBM.

We’re used to windy debates in Washington. Now the debates about wind have blown in gale force.

It’s been a while coming. At first, wind power seemed hard to argue against. It is emissions-free, technologically proven, shovel-ready, local and works well on the gusty plains of the US – with one key roadblock, there are some kinks to work out in getting it from there to here on the unprepared national grid system. The plan for many was straightforward: Fix the grid, keep building turbines, replace fossil-fuel dependent energy with renewal wind, and keep adding to an already robust wind sector job force of some 80,000.

Texas wind turbines (Photo: Texas State Energy Conservation Office.)

The Department of Energy jumped on board the trend toward wind, announcing in 2008 that wind energy could supply 20 percent of US electricity needs by 2030.

Then the naysayers caught up. This month, a conservative group called the Institute for Energy Research (IER) presented a study of wind in Denmark that suggested that Danish wind generation, held up as a model of renewable energy, causes more problems than it solves.

The study, Wind Energy, The Case of Denmark, reported that:

• Denmark only supplies about 5 percent of its electricity needs with wind power – not 20 percent as is widely understood.

• Ebbs in wind power mean that Denmark has to network with neighboring countries to import power, which means its wind power system does not reduce carbon emissions.

• National subsidies make Danish electricity “the most expensive in the European Union” and its wind jobs have been so generously supported by government subsidies that they haven’t substantially contributed to the economy.

Wait a minute, cried the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). Sensing that oil-interests were lurking behind what it saw as a collection of “misleading” and “outright false claims,” the AWEA released a counter report.

The non-profit advocacy group’s response, outlined in a fact sheet called Wind Power in Denmark and the U.S., reports that Denmark does indeed:

• Produce 20 percent of its electricity needs from wind power. In 2008, it produced nearly 3,200 megawatts of wind power, enough to power roughly 1 million US homes. (“How does the IER twist these numbers to claim that Denmark only produces 5 percent of its electricity from wind?” asks the AWEA blog. “By not counting any electricity that ever flows across the country’s borders, even if  an equal amount of electricity is then transferred back to Denmark.”

• Wind power generated in Denmark does reduce carbon emissions, because it “displaces the most expensive fuel source, commonly natural gas, but also coal and oil. Wind energy can also be used to reduce the output at hydroelectric dams, where water can be stored to later displace fossil fuels.”

• The Danish wind power industry employs nearly 30,000 people in the Scandinavian nation because Denmark also builds turbines and their components.

Government subsidies, the report adds, are not exclusive to the wind industry. In the US, subsidies support an array of energy programs and power utilities, and from 2002 to 2007, the fossil fuel energy sources received five times what renewable energy source did, according to the GAO.

The AWEA, not wanting to leave any pillar of the IER report standing, also pointed out (in its blog) that the price of Danish electricity grew in the 1980s, before the country developed its extensive network of wind turbines.

The IER report appealed to fears that new electricity generation will raise rates.

But, as the AWEA and others advocating wind note, the US has relied mainly on fossil fuels for decades. That infrastructure is in place and to many, it looks more affordable — until one factors in the potential spike in fossil fuels as the Earth’s reserves are depleted.

The AWEA is concerned that entrenched interests in the US could cause the nation to miss an important turn in the road toward sustainable energy generation.

With its great land mass, strong wind potential (it enjoys more land with higher average wind speeds than the European nations who are ahead in wind development), the US could seize the day in wind technology.

The advocacy group wants the companies it represents to be free to develop the wind farms and grid infrastructure that can carry wind power from the high plains to the urban centers where it is most needed.

The wind industry “represents a once-in-a generation opportunity for the U.S. job market as the global wind industry builds out its supply chain and decides where to locate factories,” notes the AWEA report.

Want to read more about the oil-connected sources behind the opposition to wind? See this Natural Resources Defense Council blog and this article from Facing South, the online magazine for the Institute for Southern Studies.

For a non-partisan look at the history and potential of wind power, see the WorldWatch Institute’s recent report Going to Work for Wind Power.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Environmentalists, community activists and some state legislators are calling for a temporary moratorium on coal plants in Texas, where 12 coal-fired power plants are proposed.

The opponents gathered at the capitol in Austin on Tuesday, saying that halting construction of the plants would help fight climate change and protect the health of local communities by cutting out coal’s toxic wastes and emissions, according to advocacy group Public Citizen.

“The evidence is now abundantly clear: Climate change is already affecting Texans and impacts will only increase in severity if we fail to act quickly. Texas already leads the nation in global warming gases. If we were our own country, Texas would rank eighth in the world among carbon emitters,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, in a press release.

“If all 12 of our proposed coal and pet-coke fired power plants were built, Texas would emit an additional 77 million tons of carbon dioxide,” Smith said, adding that capturing 90 percent of those emissions through a process known as “carbon sequestration” is  ”feasible with current technologies.”

The problem with carbon sequestration has been that existing coal operations find the technology too expensive, and consequently, there are no such “clean coal” operations.

Activists in Texas are targeting proposed new coal plants (and pet-coke plants which burn a byproduct of oil refining) because they’d like the state to hold them to a higher standard.

Two legislators have proposed bills that would require coal companies to ante up for sequestration. Each bill – Senate Bill 126, by state Sen. Rodney Ellis, and its companion bill in the house, House Bill 4384 by Rep. Allen Vaught — would place a temporary moratorium on coal-fired power plants that lack carbon “capture and sequestration” technology.

Among those opposing new coal plants that operate in the same way as existing “dirty” plants, are many health advocates. Robert M. Malina, Ph.D, a Bay City resident representing a group opposing the White Stallion pet-coke plant, says lead- and mercury-laced coal pollution takes a heavy toll on the human body, even before one considers its impact on global warming.

“My main concern is the potential influence of emissions from these coal-fired plants on childhood development. Our children are our future and their health and well-being should not be compromised. Both mercury and lead cause irreversible mental and physical health problems in children,” Malina said in the Public Citizen news release.

“What’s more, elevated mortality from lung cancer and increased prevalence of asthma are associated with coal-fired power plants emitting sulfur dioxide, nitrous dioxide and particulate matter. Everyone living near these plants or within reach of prevailing winds will be subjected to these health risks.”

The White Stallion Energy Center website touts the new plant as having “the most environmentally advanced, cleanest, commercially proven, emission lowering technology available”. The plant could supply energy for 650,000 homes and would be “much cleaner” than older generation coal plants, the website reports.

Another supporter of a Texas coal plant moratorium, Roger Landress, represents the Clean Economy Coalition of Corpus Christi, which opposes the Las Brisas Power Plant slated to be built in the Corpus Christi Bay.

The plant, which was the subject of a protest march in February, has “no plans to sequester the 10.4 million tons of carbon dioxide it proposes to put into the atmosphere each year, (and) will almost double the EPA regulated air pollutants in our city,” Landress said.

“Corpus Christi is already dealing with the environmental and health effects of being a refining town and this addition would likely push our county into non-attainment for ozone and sulfur dioxide,” he added.

For more information on pending coal plants in Texas or any state, see the Sierra Club’s coal plant directory.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

As long as the world is busy refining crude oil for gasoline and other petroleum products, it may as well try to maximize the benefits from the process.

That’s the aim of “cogeneration” plants, such as the newest one put into action by  ExxonMobil in Antwerp, Belgium. The refinery there will capture heat from the refining process to generate electricity, “cogenerating” or making dual use of the refining process, according to a press release.

ExxonMobil estimates that the practice will generate 125 megawatts of power and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 200,000 tons per year, the equivalent of removing about 90,000 cars from Europe’s roads.

The company also notes that the Antwerp facility will be “significantly more efficient than traditional methods of producing steam and power separately”. The result is lower operation costs for the company, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions for the everyone.

New cogeneration facilities are under construction in Singapore and China, which should increase ExxonMobil’s cogeneration capacity to more than 5,000 megawatts in the next three years, the press release stated.

Seeking to show that proposed new U.S. coal plants would exact a high environmental toll even beyond their carbon air pollution,  the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a list today of the states that would bear the greatest burden from coal waste.

Texas, with eight proposed plants, topped the NRDC’s “Filthy 15″ list. It was followed by South Dakota, Florida, Nevada and Montana, Illinois, South Carolina, Ohio, Wyoming, Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri , Wisconsin, Georgia and West Virginia.

Those states have 54 proposed coal plants awaiting permitting. Across the nation, there are 80 proposed plants that would dump an estimated 18 million tons of dangerous coal combustion waste annually into various dump sites, largely unmonitored by the federal government.

That waste would include some 18,000 tons of toxic chemicals and metals, such as lead, mercury and arsenic, that would threaten the environment and people because it could leach into groundwater and streams and lakes, according to the NRDC’s analysis.

Arsenic and heavy metals such as lead and mercury have been linked to increased incidence of cancer, hormone disruption and impaired cognitive abilities among children.

The threat from coal waste is especially acute because states typically have weak regulations, and the federal government has failed for the last three decades to finalize national regulations, NRDC experts said.

This waste “has never been regulated at the national level,” said Peter Lehner, executive director of the NRDC at a news conference. “Currently it’s just dumped into ponds and unregulated landfills and abandoned mines.”

Even outside the “Filthy 15″ no state has successfully controlled the problem, he said.

Lehner applauded the announcement earlier this week by the Obama Administration that the EPA would move forward with regulating coal ash. But he said the agency should act swiftly, adding: “We fully expect the coal industry is going to fight back very, very hard.”

One area of debate has involved the recovery of coal waste for believed beneficial uses, like filling abandoned mines. The practice provides a way to get rid of coal waste and the coal ash is supposed to neutralize acids in the mines and improve water quality in the area; but NRDC research suggests the practice can backfire with toxins leaking into the water supply.

In addition, the EPA has found that coal waste dumps have contaminated water (groundwater and at the surface) at 24 sites in 13 states, according to the NRDC report Dangerous Disposals: Keeping Coal Combustion Waste Out of Our Water Supply.

Aside from ongoing (and difficult to track) potential poisoning of soil and water, coal plants pose a danger from calamitous accidents such as the one in Harriman, Tenn., where a Tennessee Valley Authority waste pond spilled more than a billion gallons of coal sludge.

“Coal waste is one more nail that should be driven into the coffin of coal,” said Tom (Smitty) Smith, director of the Texas Office of the Public Citizen, who appeared at the conference.

“We need to stop permitting coal,” said Smith, ticked off the industry’s other polluting attributes, from shearing off mountaintops to causing acid rain and more carbon pollution than any other single source.
“The toxic toll of coal,” he said, “is too great for the country to bear”

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Related links:

• NRDC: Contaminated Coal Waste
• Watch Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars at SnagFilms.com
• Texas Business for Clean Air

1. Texas (8 proposed plants; 4,093,087 tons of coal ash waste)
2. South Dakota (2; 952,630)
3. Florida (3; 911,118)
4. Nevada (3; 888,272)
5. Montana (3; 848,278)
6. Illinois (4; 797,450)
7. South Carolina (2; 731,110)
8. Ohio (3; 711,616)
9. Wyoming (5; 697,850)
10. Michigan (5; 686,897)
11. Kentucky (4; 593,662)
12. Missouri (4; 515,709)
13. Wisconsin (3; 512,632)
14. Georgia (2; 507,952)
15. West Virginia (3; 445,202 )

Related links:

• Watch Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars at SnagFilms.com

Photo: The Redford Center at the Sundance Preserve and Alpheus Media

Narrated by Robert Redford, Fighting Goliath: Texas Coal Wars, followed the story of Texans fighting a high-stakes battle for clean air.

In its waning days, the outgoing Bush administration is promoting oil-shale development in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming by passing regulations that would open public lands to oil-shale exploration, leasing and development. In November, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management put these regulations into effect to develop an oil shale program that the bureau says could add 800 billion barrels of oil from land in the Western United States.

In response, earlier this week, 11 environmental groups notified the administration and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of their intent to file federal lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act. The BLM has 60 days to respond. The environmental groups, which include the Sierra Club, the Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity, among others, want the administration to consider the effects that commercial oil-shale development will have on endangered species.

Oil-shale development destroys habitats, causes air pollution and depletes and pollutes scarce water resources in the West, says Melissa Thrailkill, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco. In addition, the process of turning oil-shale into a usable fuel source demands massive amounts of electricity.

As many as 10 new power plants will be needed in these three states to generate this electricity, which then increases greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

Polar bears, ribbon seals, Pacific walrus, American pika and ocean corals are all at risk of extinction due to global warming.

And in order to produce energy from oil-shale, large amounts of water are required from the Colorado River, a water supply upon which many residents and farmers depend. The river is also home to four endangered fish species.

In a mid-November statement, Assistant Secretary of Land and Minerals Management Stephen Allred, defended the program, saying, “The United States needs all types of energy resources, both conventional and renewable, in order to meet our future needs. Production from domestic resources makes us more secure and less vulnerable to future energy crises, and increases our security and economic well-being. The tremendous oil shale resources that we have in the U.S., containing several times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, can be a vital component of that secure future.”

Tracy Boyd, communications and sustainability manager with Shell Exploration and Production, says these regulations were supposed to come out a while ago. “They are not so much eleventh hour maneuvers but just wrapping up business as the administration comes to a close,” he says. It’s possible, he says, that the environmental entities who are challenging the regulations may not realize the realistic timeline for development. “These regulations do not authorize the initiation of any actual commercial leasing. It may be as long as 10 years away. There are many more reviews that need to be conducted. [Oil shale] leasing is way down the road,” he says.

Thrailkill, though, says the new oil-shale regulations will have huge impact on global warming that “is simply unacceptable,” adding that, “dirty energy development will have enormous and damaging effects on the waters, wildlife and lands of the West.”

The new Bush administration laws will be procedurally hard to rescind. “This is a big hassle for the incoming Obama Administration,” she says. “Congress could step in,” she says, but with much of the population clamoring for oil, especially “homegrown and not foreign oil, there’s a lot of pressure to develop this land.”

“There needs to be incentives for companies to develop clean energy and at the same time reduce demand,” she says.

Unfortunately, Thrailkill says, the Bush Administration and the Bureau of Land Management did not consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to come up with an environmentally smart program. “Commercial oil-shale development could help lead us to catastrophic climate change, [rendering] thousands of plants and animals around the world extinct. “

“The Obama team is going to have to make [clean energy] one of its top priorities,” she says.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Drill, baby, drill may be what’s on the minds of gas companies, but if you’re a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.

Thanks to a new software application that’s being test marketed by MIT, landowners may now extract data to see if the gas companies’ proposals to drill are fair and safe. The software tool, called the Landman Report Card (LRC), will help landowners in any state navigate the government and corporate databases, as well as get feedback from other landowners who’ve been in similar situations. And they can do all this before agreeing to a drilling contract.

The term “land man” refers to an oil company representative who often times shows up on the doorstep of unsuspecting property owners who’ve been targeted as having prospective drill sites.

“People often will sign the day the land man shows up at the door,” says MIT professor Chris Csikszentmihalyi. “There are lots of negotiations that people can do, that they often don’t know they can.”

Csikszentmihalyi , co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, and Sara Wylie, a grad student in the Science , Technology and Society Program, are the directors of the Landman Report Card project, which is coming to fruition as natural gas exploration in America gains traction as an energy source that doesn’t rely on foreign oil — affecting land and homeowners from New York to Texas to the Rocky Mountains states.

Wylie says that the feedback from the first tests in Ohio were “pretty positive…We will make some tweaks, but for the most part the software tool technically went great.”

Environmental consultant Lisa Sumi, who has worked with Earthwork’s Oil and Gas Accountability Project (OGAP), says the Landman Report Card is needed “because there is a huge power imbalance between the oil and gas industry and the people affected by it. When the oil company comes in, they already have the technology information and legal background. But the landowner, who may never had to deal with them before, is at disadvantage.” OGAP, founded in 1999, works with communities to prevent and reduce environmental degradation caused by oil and gas development.

“The report card,” she says, “provides landowners with a place they can go to make sure they are not being taken for a ride.” The LRC provides leasing rates and comparable deals.

Mark Scoville is one of the affected landowners who participated in the recent test marketing of the LRC. Scoville, an electrical engineer, lives with his young family in northeastern Ohio, the site of much drilling due to its location in the relatively newly discovered Marcellus Shale region. Most of Ohio’s oil and gas is located in this eastern third of the state. Scoville believes the LRC is a wonderful tool. (See Scoville’s photo, left, of an oil well near a playground.)

“I’m interested in the tactics that landmen are using. The reviews by people who have dealt with them are like a Consumer Reports for the landowner. The oil and gas industry seems to be exempt from just about everything. Drilling is going bonkers here in the northeastern Ohio suburbs. Residents moved here because it’s zoned for residential use, yet the state has taken over responsibility for all oil drilling, thanks to House Bill 278,” he said.

House Bill 278, which went into effect in 2004, states if a gas company is looking for a tract of contiguous land, and a homeowner doesn’t want to be involved, the state of Ohio can force the homeowner to accept the deal.

In the official wording by Ohio’s Division of Mineral Resources Management in the Department of Natural Resources, the state “has exclusive authority to regulate the permitting, location, and spacing of oil and gas wells in the state, and to revise the laws governing the drilling of oil and gas.”

SANTA ROSA, CA — Gas prices have plummeted in recent weeks as dramatically as they climbed over the summer. Drivers are relieved, but is there a downside to the relief at the pumps? Maybe so.

>> Watch now

The latest edition of an annual report by the International Energy Agency was released this week, and while the news may not be unexpected, it’s unsettling nonetheless.

After conducting “field-by-field analysis of production trends at 800 of the world’s largest oilfields, an assessment of the potential for finding and developing new reserves and a bottom-up analysis of upstream costs and investment,” the agency projects that . . . without any new government policies, world primary energy demand will grow a staggering 45% by 2030.

Where the world currently uses 85 million barrels of oil per day, the IEA predicts it will demand 106 billion per day in 2030. Demand for coal, it says, will grow more than any other fuel, and while renewables will grow quickly, “oil will remain the world’s main source of energy for many years to come, even under the most optimistic of assumptions about the development of alternative technology.” (The predictions were actually higher last year, before economic turmoil made slower growth likely.)

That report can’t be bad publicity for Josh Tickell, an activist-turned-filmmaker whose new documentary Fuel is trekking across the country in a series of do-it-yourself theatrical engagements. The film, which has won awards including the Audience doc award at this year’s Sundance festival (and previously drew press attention under the title Fields of Fuel), was inspired by Tickell’s move from Australia to oil-industry-damaged Louisiana, and features interviews about the need for alternatives with everyone from Sheryl Crow to Richard Branson.

Audiences hoping to see the film (and maybe catch a glimpse of Tickell’s “Veggie Van”) can check the schedule here; Portland, OR, Seattle and Texas are the next on the list.

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media