Locations of shale basins not geographically precise. E.g. Haynesville basin is located on the north Louisiana/east Texas border. Figures in trillion cubic feet. Source: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission website, derived from the American Clean Skies Foundation.

Rising estimates of U.S. recoverable natural gas reserves from shale deposits could keep natural gas prices low over the next few years. The above map shows the sharp increase in recoverabe reserves from select shale basin in trillion cubic feet from 2006 to 2008.

Recent advances in horizonal drilling and rock fracturing techniques have made shale gas — traditionally quite costly to develop — more viable and help boost reserve estimates. — Joe Silha

Not interested in the humdrum appeal of driving the same car everyday, more city dwellers revel in the ability to be practical in a Honda Civic one day, conquer the road in a Ford Escape SUV the next and end the week sporting around in a Mini Cooper Convertible. How? Through car sharing. 
    
Gas price spikes and a shaky economy are driving more Americans in urban areas to forgo car ownership for car sharing, said the head of Zipcar.
    
Zipcar, the world’s largest provider of cars by the hour or day, saw it’s membership soar 50.3 percent in the past 12 months.
    
Scott Griffith, Zipcar’s chief executive, told Reuters that he’s seeing a significant change in people’s behavior when it comes to car use.
    
“In the past, about 40 percent of our membership base either sold a car or chose not to buy a car because of our service,” Griffith said. “More recently in the last 12 months that number has gone to over 60 percent.”
    
The economic downturn is adding to the popularity of car sharing as the credit crunch makes it more difficult to get car loans and some are forced to sell their car for the cash or to avoid defaulting on their payments. 

Griffith said Zipcar members are also looking to other modes of transportation.
    
He said people take 46 percent more public transit trips, 26 percent more walking trips and about 10 percent more bicycling trips after joining Zipcar.
    
“That significant increase in other ways of getting around town sort of combines with Zipcar to show an overall decrease in vehicle miles traveled,” Griffith said.
    
“They drive a lot less, more than 50 percent less in total miles annually,” he added.
    
Zipcar operates in the United States, Canada and London. A merger with Flexcar in 2007 made the company the largest car share company in the world.
    
But car rental company Hertz Inc plans to bring some competition as it opens Connect by Hertz, a car sharing unit available in London, Paris, New York and expanding to more locations in the United States.
    
Zipcar maintains it sets itself apart from other car rental companies by offering “fun” cars like the Mini Cooper and convenient pickup locations and by trying to build a sense of community among its members, Griffith said.
    
“We want you to drive the car you would aspire to own. We want you to be proud of using car sharing,” he said.
    
Griffith said that 19 percent of car owners’ incomes go to transportation costs, while Zipcar could bring that figure down to 3 or 4 percent if they get rid of their car.
    
Griffith wants people to look at Zipcar as a replacement for car ownership.
    
People want the freedom to pick up and go whenever they like and car sharing offers them access to this freedom, he said, without needing to own a vehicle.

For more on Americans and their cars, click here.

Photo Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar (Cars wait in a traffic jam on a New York City highway); Handout photo from Zipcar

Democrats floated big plans to tackle climate change proposals in the U.S. Congress this week but realistically there will be much more hot air — both from industry and politicians — before this bill is turned into law.
 
The draft legislation, running hundreds of pages, will now be considered by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in coming weeks along with all manner of panels. And, oh yes, the Senate, home of the filibuster, will also get to weigh in.
    
At the heart of of the legislation is Cap and Trade — a panacea for those who believe greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet to dangerous levels and a boon to those who think the sinking economy makes this the dumbest time to anchor industry with more costs.
    
“This legislation will create millions of clean energy jobs, put America on the path to energy independence, and cut global warming pollution,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman.
    
Sounds good but Waxman is a Democrat from California, where these ideas are more readily embraced.  
    
Listen to what a guy from Texas thinks: “Tuesday’s cap and trade bill marks a triumph of fear over good sense and science and it couldn’t come at a worse time because it proposes to save the planet by sacrificing the economy,” said Representative Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the energy and commerce panel.
 
In a cap and trade system, power plants and other industries would need permits for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit. Unused permits could be sold to other companies, but overall emissions would gradually drop.
    
Under the proposal that uses 2005 as a base year, U.S. carbon emissions would have to be reduced by 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050. Those goals are a tad more aggressive than what President Barack Obama had proposed.
    
Now let the games begin. Very few seem ready to predict when a climate change bill will pass but most say it won’t be this year — especially if Democrats in Congress decide to give Obama’s health care plans the priority.
    
So there certainly will be a lot more talk, much of it heated. And one other thing is for certain: each yearly delay will mean the United States, as the world’s largest emitter, will spew another 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

For more Environment News, click here.

Photo Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer (The Empire State building in New York turned off its lights on March 28 at 8:30 pm local time, joining homes, office towers and landmarks in more than 80 countries that signed up for Earth Hour to raise awareness about climate change); Reuters/Chris Baltimore (An aerial photograph of a power plant in Georgia)

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The above map shows South America’s LNG import terminals ahead of the coming Southern Hemisphere winter, including Chile’s Quintero terminal, which is expected online in June. (Click on individual terminals for details)

South America’s nascent import capacity will add a new dynamic to the Atlantic Basin market, drawing LNG counter-seasonally when demand in the Northern Hemisphere wanes during summer.

LNG imports to South America are not expected to be huge in 2009 due to falling industrial demand, but they could tighten the LNG market in the longer term. - Ed McAllister

A slump in U.S. oil drilling activity due largely to weak prices could thwart the Obama administration’s goal of cutting crude imports by putting a dent in future production, analysts have said.  Below are graphs showing the decline in the number of rigs actively drilling for oil.

Alaska is known as a big oil producing state, but don’t forget about it when it comes to renewable energy. That was the message of the state’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, to U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. 
    
At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing this week, Salazar showed several large U.S. maps of potential wind, solar and geothermal energy resources. One problem, the country’s biggest state, Alaska, was nowhere to be found.
    
“There are few things that irritate me more than maps of the United States of America that do not include that great northern state,” Murkowski told Salazar, as the standing-room-only hearing room burst into laughter.
    
“Our renewable energy resources are wonderful and vast and we look forward to the time that you will come up to visit them,” she said. 
    
Murkowski even defended Hawaii, which was also left off Salazar’s maps.
    
“We do encourage the Department of the Interior to make sure that all 50 states are represented on your maps,” she said, raising more giggles from committee members and those sitting in audience, including the press table.
    
Salazar was just as amused.
    
“That’s a point well taken,” he said. “Alaska is so important that it merits a map all to itself.”
    
“You’re right,” Murkowski responded.
    
If Salazar follows through on his promise, the solar energy map for Alaska would be rather dark — at least during the winter, when the sun doesn’t shine in some parts of the state for several months and is out for only a few hours a day elsewhere.

–Tom Doggett

For more news on renewable energy, click here.

Photo credit: DOI (Interior Secretary Salazar testifies before Senate committee)

The headline that emerged from nearly five hours of weekend talks by the producers’ club OPEC was that it that had decided to leave its output policy unchanged. But you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the press.
OPEC http://www.opec.org/home/cited the fragile state of the world economy and said it was doing its bit to try to nurse the economy back to health by avoiding any aggressive cuts in oil supply.
As far as the wider world could tell, the group, which supplies more than a third of the world’s oil, was united in its concern for its hard-pressed customers, especially the biggest one of all, the United States whose new leader is far more palatable as far as OPEC is concerned than his predecessor.
In reality, the closed-door debate inside OPEC’s scruffy Vienna secretariat on the banks of the Danube Canal, which feeds into the more romantic Danube River, was rather more heated than we were led to believe.
Languishing oil prices and ballooning oil stocks are more worrying for some members of OPEC than others and those most concerned about balancing their books were said to be holding out for radical action to try to drive up the oil market.
Delegates circulating in the lobbies of Vienna’s elegant hotels whispered that far from a straightforward consensus, some members had battled for a supply reduction of anything up to 1.5 million barrels per day.
Kuwait, whose government offered to resign en masse on Monday, and Iran, which faces expensive presidential elections in June, were among those keenest to prop up prices that have fallen by more than $100 from last year’s record high, the delegates said.
But intent on presenting a unified front, ministers chose not to tell the line of reporters waiting outside the meeting about any internal divisions.
The version for the media’s eyes and ears was that a new administration in the world’s biggest energy consumer made it so much easier to bury old enmities and agree with U.S. ally and leading oil exporter Saudi Arabia that for now the best output policy is one that doesn’t send oil prices soaring.

The number of rigs drilling in Western Canada in March has fallen to the lowest level for this time of year in more than seven years. Drilling could fall further if storage fills this summer and Canada’s high cost natural gas producers are unable to find a buyer for their gas and shut in production.

– Scott Haggett in Calgary

U.S. gasoline demand has showed signs of picking up over the past month, edging up 1.6 percent over the past for weeks according to government data. Analysts say lower pump prices have led some Americans to drive more. U.S. demand fell last year for the first time since 1991 as gasoline and crude prices raced to record highs, with further pressure coming later in the year due to the economic crisis.

The above graph shows five years of gasoline consumption in the world’s top consumer, compared with the average price for a gallon of U.S. gasoline.

As the debate over "clean coal" rages on, General Electric is keen on offering up ideas to help coal transition from yesterday's polluter to a greener source of energy.
    
John Krenicki, the head of GE's energy infrastructure unit, says governments should invest in a dozen large-scale clean-coal demonstration plants in the United States, Europe, China and India. The plants would generate between 600-900 megawatts of power each and capture and sequester climate-changing greenhouse gases underground.
    
"We can change the game in coal for the next 100 years," he told Reuters in an interview.
    
Some environmental groups consider clean coal nothing more than a fairy tale. The technology to capture and store carbon in an environmentally safe way is commercially untested and not yet cost competitive, they say.
    
But the U.S. stimulus package provided $3.4 billion for fossil energy research and development. Some of these funds could resurrect the FutureGen pilot clean coal project that was abandoned last year.
    
President Barack Obama, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood -- all former Illinois legislators who fought hard for Illinois-based FutureGen -- are now in positions to push clean coal forward.
    
The United States must show leadership in this area if it expects the rest of the world to do its part to combat climate change, according to Krenicki.
    
"We're pursuing (projects) in the European Union and we're pursuing them in China, but the answer from most countries is, 'We'd like to see the U.S. lead,'" Krenicki said.
    
A 600 MW clean coal plant would cost more than $2 billion to build, but it would also create thousands of jobs in states hit hard by the economic downturn, he said.
    
Krenicki said the United States seems "paralyzed" by trying to jump to strictly green and renewable electricity generation from its dependence on fossil fuels. Clean coal, he says, is a needed evolutionary step to get the country out of the current stalemate to a green future.
    
Krenicki noted that with technologies like a smart grid and wind turbines the results are quick and easy for voters to see. "You can put points on the board so I think it's politically acceptable," he said of such projects.
    
"Some of these other technologies, like cleaner coal, you're doing it for the next administration, even if you're two-term," he said.

For more green business news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid (GE's John Krenicki); Reuters (A miner working at a coal mine in China)