Every five years, the federal government is required by law to update its leasing program for offshore oil and natural gas development. On November 8th, Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar announced the government’s proposed plan for offshore oil drilling for the next five years (2012-2017). The new plan can be summed up pretty easily: [...]
I wanted to share my first impression after driving the Nissan LEAF for the past couple of weeks. While it may be quixotic to think we can ever truly drive “guilt free,” the zero-emissions LEAF certainly is a step in the right direction. By charging the LEAF at non-peak hours to level off energy load demands [...]
The following blog post was written by Claire Pendergrast, SACE summer intern (Atlanta office). I wish her all the best at Dartmouth this Fall and beyond. To round out the final days of my summer internship with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), I had the opportunity to tour Down to Earth Energy’s (DTE) [...]
Earlier this year in the State of the Union, President Obama implored Congress to “eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies,” noting that “they’re doing just fine on their own.” Congress has now made two half-hearted attempts to end these taxpayer-funded subsidies to large oil companies. Last night, United States [...]
The 1 year anniversary of the nation’s worst oil spill was observed just two weeks ago but little has been done to improve offshore drilling safety measures to ensure another accident of similar magnitude does not happen again. Nevertheless, the U.S. House of Representatives just passed legislation introduced by Rep. Doc Hastings to speed up [...]
Co-authored by Simon Mahan and Toni Reale It seems like yesterday when the airwaves were filled with the horrifying news that an exploratory oil rig had exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing eleven men and spewing unknown quantities of crude into Gulf waters. The explosion happened on April 20th 2010 and just two days [...]
The age-old phrase ‘in like a lion, out like a lamb‘ has often been used to describe March’s weather – it starts with bold winds and typically ends with gentle rains. That phrase also leaped to mind as I listened to President Obama’s energy speech from Georgetown University yesterday. When I compared highlights from his [...]
On February 28th, the Obama Administration issued its first deepwater drilling permit since the Gulf of Mexico disaster in April of last year. Noble Energy Inc. has been granted permission to continue drilling their deepwater well ( 70 miles southeast of Venice, La.) that they started before the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The issuing of this [...]
It is hard to believe that it’s been just 10 months since the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed an estimated 205 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet the mantra of “Drill Here, Drill Now” can still be heard echoing throughout the halls of Congress. Negligence and lack of oversight by Transocean, BP [...]
In response to a proposed federal natural gas and oil leasing program for the Atlantic, Governor Beverly Perdue of North Carolina created (by executive order) a Scientific Advisory Panel on Offshore Energy in September 2009. The stated purpose of this panel is to evaluate all offshore energy options (wind, tidal, gas, oil, etc.) and develop [...]
