August 29th Changed Everything

I've been planning on doing a series of posts on alternative energy sources for a while now, and Hurricane Katrina's disruption of the US oil and gas supply seemed like the perfect motivation to get off my butt and do it. However, the more I researched each of my topics, the more clear it was that I was getting into a bigger project than I anticipated, and that anything I'd be able to cobble together would be only slightly more valuable than a high-school term paper.

So, instead, I'm going to take this moment to state my objectives with the hope that it will keep me motivated to stay on top of it, and complete some useful research, or face public scorn for being a loser-ass slacker.

In order to provide something along the lines of meaningful content, however, I will make a few observations. First off, I want to refer to Kevin Drum's post here. In it, he discusses Sen. Schumer's calls to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve due to the supply disruption caused by Katrina. He makes the point that he disagreed with Schumer's similar calls over the past few months, on the basis of high prices at the pump, on the grounds that the SPR is intended for emergencies, and Katrina-induced supply disruption is an emergency, whereas SUV-driven demand growth is not. I agree with that point. However, as was mentioned over on theoildrum, our nation's refining capacity has been maxed out for some time now. It's not clear how much value we're going to get from releasing unrefined crude from the SPR into the current environment without some magical increase in refining capacity to go along with it.

Second, I'm going to throw out some of the topics to be discussed in my future installments: 1. The Canadian Oil Sands 2. Montana's Push for Coal Gasification 3. Some as-yet-undetermined post about biofuels/ethanol/roadmap-to-hydrogen-economy. Keep them in mind, y'all.