Notes From New England

This posting is not about the oil industry in North Dakota. It is simply a rambling post from some Saturday morning reading. These are some notes from this month's issue of National Geographic and from the Boston Globe. Take it for what it is worth.

First, the cover story from the June, 2010, issue of National Geographic: "Greenland: Ground Zero for Global Warming." On page 49, the big introduction to the story: "Viking Weather: As Greenland returns to the warm climate that allowed the Vikings to colonize it in the Middle Ages, its isolated and dependent people dream of greener fields and pastures -- and also of oil from ice-free waters."

I cannot make this stuff up.

"... Greenland returns to the warm climate that allowed the Vikings to colonize it in the Middle Ages..." I guess the global warming in the Middle Ages was due to man burning all that wood and coal, and had it not been for Sir Gore Alad who instituted cap and trade, trading lutefisk credits for coal briquettes, back in the 1500's, the earth would have been destroyed by rising global temperatures.

Second: same article. Greenland is pinning its economic hopes on oil. "The sea off the central west coast now typically remains ice free for nearly half the year, a month longer than 25 years ago. ... ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other oil companies have acquired exploration licenses. Cairn Energy, a Scottish company plans to drill its first exploration wells this year....Greenland estimates it has 50 billion barrels of recoverable oil and gas reserves. With oil at $80 a barrel, those reserves would be worth more than four trillion dollars."  [Update, May 27, 2011: Cairn to drill four exploratory wells.] [Update, September 21, 2010: yup, a Scottish oil company reports that they have found oil off the coast of Greenland.] [Update, October 26, 2010: Scottish oil company, Cairn, is happy with initial results off Greenland.] [Update, January 6, 2011: Cairn has secured two rigs to drill at least four wells.] [Update, January 27, 2011: Cairn solidifies position off west Greenland with as many as four exploratory wells in 2011.] [Update, November 30, 2011: great news for environmentalists. No oil; Cairn is abandoning two exploration wells in Greenland; the company said it would review its exploration program there.]

I cannot make this stuff up.

Four trillion dollars would work out to a billion dollars for each resident of Greenland.

Third story: this story is from the Boston Globe, Saturday, May 22, 2010. Cape Wind is a wind farm off Nantucket Sound, Massachusetts. It is now in negotiations to start selling electricity to regional utilities. Earlier this month, National Grid, a large regional utility serving several New England states, signed a 15-year contract to buy half the power Wind Cape is expected to generate. The cost is almost exactly twice what conventionally-produced electricity costs, 20 cents vs 10 cents per KWH, respectively. The cost will increase at an annual rate of at least 3.5%.  Massachusetts attorney general has now stepped in to see whether that contract is in the best interests of the state's taxpayers. (Obviously not.) Wind Cape "invited" NStar, another major regional utility over for tea, to discuss contracting for the rest of Wind Cape's production. NStar was polite enough to accept but paying that high a price for electricity was meant with less than a lukewarm response.

It turns out that Wind Cape has been in the works for nine (9) years now, at a cost of $1 billion, "but industry observers say the technology has become more expensive. Officials of the project have declined recent requests for new estimates." It should be noted that not a single turbine is yet in the water.

Again, I can't make this stuff up.

Okay, one more story.

Fourth story, again from National Geographic, this month's issue: the whooping crane is the number 1 endangered species in North America. Great strides have been made in the past several years to save this bird. Things were going well until 2008. Biologists and whooping crane census takers "... are now worried. The flock's population had reached 266 in the spring of 2008. But by the following spring, 57 had died, 23 of them in the birds' wintering grounds in south Texas ... Others probably perished during migration, often after striking power lines, the biggest known killer along the flyway." The flyway is from south Texas to northern Canada, right through "wind farm country." Yup, after all these years of working to save the whooping crane, it appears the environmentalists' answer to coal is killing them.

Again, I can't make this stuff up. (Yes, I know the same transmission lines carry coal-generated electricity as well as wind farm energy, but the wind farms are spread out over hundreds of thousands of acres requiring new transmission arrays, compared to existing conventional power plants where the transmission lines are already in place.)

So, that was my reading this fine Saturday morning in Boston. As JRR Tolkien said, we all have our myths. You have yours; I have mine.