Michael Giberson Boone Picken’s new book, The First Billion is the Hardest, reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. From the review, after a summary of Pickens’s business success with Mesa Petroleum: Such accomplishments are the core of Mr. Pickens’s 1987 autobiography, “Boone,” which was updated 13 years later and retitled “The Luckiest Guy in the …
Michael Giberson Retail gasoline prices typically rise like a rocket and fall like a feather (as discussed here before), but this most recent price rise and fall may be upsetting that typical pattern. Just eyeball the chart below from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and you see that prices appear to be dropping about as …
Gasoline Prices Dropping More Like a Rock Than a Feather Read More »
Michael Giberson According to the US Department of Energy, “The Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists, first and foremost, as an emergency response tool the President can use should the United States be confronted with an economically-threatening disruption in oil supplies.” In response to disruptions caused by Hurricane Gustav, the DOE has indicated a willingness to release …
Why is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Unable to Operate During Power Outages? Read More »
Michael Giberson Mississippi has a price gouging law which allows the state government to prosecute businesses that raise prices on certain kinds of retail goods and services during a “state of emergency” (as officially declared by the state’s governor). Now the Mississippi Attorney General discovered that businesses were working around the legal barrier to price …
Michael Giberson Around the web, stories about natural gas vehicles are bursting out all over (maybe prompted by this promotional effort which aims to increase the number of CNG vehicles). Newsweek offers a reporter’s trip test-driving a CNG car (a Honda GX) with her children, traveling from L.A. to San Diego and up to Oakland. …
Michael Giberson …but not in a good way. The Streetwise Professor deploys a little Property Rights Economics 101 lesson as he contrasts the development of petroleum resources in Russia and China: An article on the McClatchy wire states that the Russian oil industry is facing a dire future due to “the practice of reaping quick …
Insecure Property Rights May Be Helping to Maximize Current Russian Oil Output… Read More »
Michael Giberson Texas Monthly magazine profiles Boone Pickens. Here’s a sample: In addition to the advertising campaign, Boone is also laying out his energy manifesto in his latest memoir, The First Billion Is the Hardest, which Crown is releasing this month. (His first memoir, Boone, was published in 1987.) “The times require a George Patton, …
Boone Pickens – Texas Monthly on the Man Behind the Plan Read More »
Michael Giberson Just as Lynne was suggesting the importance of energy storage… If we had more efficient and distributed energy storage, then we could store wind-generated power near the source when lines are congested, and store it near demand by transmitting it when lines are not congested. Distributed energy storage gets us a one-two punch …
Michael Giberson EnergyBizInsider, Examining Texas: Like everything else in Texas, energy prices are getting big. But is it the cause of deregulation or other factors such as the price of underlying fuels? This is the question that the Governor’s Competiveness Council took up. … It acknowledges that prices have risen there the last few …
Retail Electric Power in Texas: Growing Pains or Just Pain? Read More »
Michael Giberson Perhaps the greatest appeal of the Pickens Plan is its cascading simplicity. First, Pickens wants to dot the Great Plains (“the Saudi Arabia of wind power”) with wind turbines to replace all the electricity currently produced by burning natural gas. Second, he wants to use the natural gas freed by wind-powered generation to …
Vaclav Smil on the Pickens Plan for Wind Power and Natural Gas Vehicles Read More »
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