Tag: Energy

Brazil Gusher Bombshell

In Brazil, Another Gusher
If confirmed, a 33-billion-barrels find would trail just two larger oil reservoirs, in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Those fields were each discovered more than 60 years ago, but together still account for nearly 8% of global oil output. With a single field, Brazil could potentially top all the proved reserves in the United States, estimated at 29.9 billion barrels, according to BP’s 2007 Statistical Review of World Energy. Mexico’s 35-billion-barrel Cantarell field, discovered in 1976, was largely responsible for that country becoming the world’s fifth-largest oil producer.

“Carioca would be the third-largest oil field in the world,” said Haroldo Lima, director of ANP, at an energy seminar Monday.

The new geopolitics of crude oil

Khaleej Times Online – The new geopolitics of crude oil
View from a Dubai banker via Carlton Palmer – Last week was a defining moment in international relations. West Texas and North Sea Brent crude oil, the world’s light sweet crude benchmarks, soared to $105, above its inflation adjusted 1979 price of $92, when the Shah was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution and a buyer’s panic traumatised the Rotterdam market for spot tanker cargoes. While the immediate cause of the oil surge was an unexpected fall in US inventories and Opec’s failure to heed Bush’s call to boost production, black gold has become a hedge against the dollar, a new global currency of wealth and power, as the exponential increase in the numbers of Russians in the Forbes Global Billionaire list suggests.

Solar Thermal Possiblities Abound

Solar Company Says Its Tech Can Power 90 Percent of Grid and Cars | Wired Science from Wired.com
Solar-thermal power is gaining adherents, including Google.org, which cut a deal with another player, eSolar, as a way to cleanly generate cost-competitive, city-scale amounts of power. Unlike traditional photovoltaics, which use panels to convert sunlight into electricity, solar-thermal plants focus the sun’s rays on liquids to make steam that powers turbines. Solar-thermal is flat-out more efficient — at 20 to 40 percent — than photovoltaics, which in the field convert sunlight to electricity at about 15 to 22 percent. And solar-thermal fits into the industrial model of power production, meaning that it works in big plants, not distributed across a bunch of houses and buildings.

new research (.pdf) was presented at the IEA SolarPACES conference in Las Vegas, and is described as peer-reviewed. The paper says Ausra expects to commercialize its energy-storage technology within two years. A prototype of the system will go into a model plant the company plans to finish this summer in Bakersfield, California, the company’s founder, David Mills, told Wired.com.

Companies have been piling into the solar-concentrating space. Stirling Energy Systems, SkyFuel, Solel, BrightSource, Rocketdyne, Abengoa and the aforementioned eSolar are all working on using mirrors to concentrate the sun’s energy in one way or another.