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GliderGuider

(21,088 posts)
Fri Mar 7, 2014, 01:41 PM Mar 2014

The energy transition tipping point is here

The energy transition tipping point is here

The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out that oil and gas production by Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell has declined during the past five years even as the companies spent more than a half-trillion dollars on new projects. Chevron’s costs alone have jumped 56 percent since 2010.

The vice president of integration at oil services giant Schlumberger notes that four out of every 10 frack clusters are duds. Geologist Pete Stark, a vice president of industry relations at IHS—yes, that IHS, where famous peak oil pooh-pooher Daniel Yergin is the spokesman for its CERA unit—actually said what we in the peak oil camp have been saying for years: "The decline rate is a potential show stopper after a while…You just can’t keep up with it."

Look where we are today. Coal plants are being retired much faster than most observers expected. The latest projection from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is for 60 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity to be taken offline by 2016, more than double the retirements the agency predicted in 2012. The vast majority of the coal plants that were planned for the United States in 2007 have since been cancelled, abandoned, or put on hold, according to SourceWatch.

Nuclear power plants were also given the kibosh at an unprecedented rate last year. More nuclear plant retirements appear to be on the way. Earlier this month, utility giant Exelon, the nation’s largest owner of nuclear plants, warned that it will shut down nuclear plants if the prospects for their profitable operation don’t improve this year.

Nuclear and coal plant retirements are being driven primarily by competition from lower-cost wind, solar, and natural gas generators, and by rising operational and maintenance costs. As more renewable power is added to the grid, the economics continue to worsen for utilities clinging to old fossil-fuel generating assets. Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, which now obtains about 25 percent of its grid power from renewables and which has the most solar power per capita in the world.

Faltering productivity, falling profits, poor economics and increasing competition from power plants running on free fuel aren't the only problems facing the fossil-fuels complex. It has also been the locus of increasingly frequent environmental disasters.

His point is that none of this is reversible, which is obviously true. The big question for me now is, how does this play in the race against climate change?
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The energy transition tipping point is here (Original Post) GliderGuider Mar 2014 OP
This is where "unconventional" oil might kick in caraher Mar 2014 #1

caraher

(6,276 posts)
1. This is where "unconventional" oil might kick in
Fri Mar 7, 2014, 10:57 PM
Mar 2014

We have a lot more oil than the climate can stand, by any reasonable measure, if we're willing to pay for it by going to things like tar sands. So conventional wells running dry won't, by itself, prove decisive in decarbonizing the parts of the energy economy that currently rely on cheap(ish) oil.

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