Peak Oil Review: 23 March 2020 - Resilience
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-03-23/peak-oil-review-23-march-2020/
The silver lining to the coronavirus epidemic is that a slowing global economy is leading to a significant reduction in harmful carbon emissions. The downside is that cheaper fossil fuels and a massive reduction in economic activity are leading to slower investments in clean energy projects ranging from electric cars to solar and wind generator farms. How long this situation will last is unknown.
The conventional wisdom, as expressed by the IEA, is that the pandemic will be over shortly and that emissions will return to their inexorable growth. The IEA says that multi-billion-dollar investments in clean energy are likely to evaporate into thin air, with the current year set to record the first fall in solar energy growth in four decades.
Sales of electric vehicles are expected to come to a standstill for the first time in more than a decade. Even more worrying, the agency sees a dramatic reversal in the incremental shift away from coal-fired power plants that have lowered harmful emissions in recent years. However, many industrialized countries, particularly in the EU, are dedicated to reducing harmful emissions in the next decade. Advances in battery technology and large-scale production of electric vehicles could make them cheaper to own and operate.
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Given the unprecedented impact the coronavirus epidemic is having on the global economy, it seems unlikely that there will be much new investment in renewable energy sources for the immediate future. With fossil fuels, consumption and prices plunging, and the consequent reduction in carbon emissions, the growth in renewable usage is likely to slow for a while.
Observers are already ruminating as to whether the rush to electric cars will be grinding to a halt soon. While scientists continue to report progress in developing better batteries, hydrogen trucks, electrical recharging cables buried under highways, and even nuclear fusion, the implementation of these developments seems likely to be delayed for months, years, or perhaps decades.
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Biofuels markets across the world are reeling from the oil crash this week, from Brazil to Malaysia. Bloomberg News points out that crude’s nosedive erases any chance of discretionary blending of palm oil with diesel, and drastically inflates the cost of government mandates. Biofuels, such as a blend of diesel with palm, need to be attractively priced compared with fossil fuels to encourage consumption, and that often requires subsidies.
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Airline bankruptcies coming: Sydney-based consultancy CAPA Centre for Aviation warned in a statement on Monday morning that most of the world’s airlines will be bankrupt by the end of May. Airline carriers are suspending routes for March, April, and May, and a full grounding of fleets has yet to be ruled out as flight restrictions have been placed across the world, spurring a collapse in demand, due to the Covid-19 pandemic
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IEA urges stimulus package support for clean energy: The executive director of the International Energy Agency said on Saturday that any major economic stimulus package should have a heavy focus on clean energy. He noted that while everyone is rightly focused on the pandemic, the threat of climate change continues to grow. The IEA has long received criticism from environmentalists for favoring fossil fuels, so the full-throated statement for what sounds like a version of the Green New Deal, at a time when the oil and gas industry is in a historical crisis, is remarkable. (3/18)
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Negative oil prices? As prices barrel toward the lowest levels since the start of the century, negative prices have re-entered the realm of possibility. US oil futures just hit an 18-year low and that has a few traders and analysts wondering whether physical crude prices — in at least some parts of Canada and the shale patch — could actually drop below zero. It’s a rare but not impossible feat. Case in point: In the aftermath of the last major downturn four years ago, a North Dakota sour crude was briefly priced at negative 50 cents a barrel before being revised to a mere $1.50. (3/20)
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Ozone-destroying chemicals once thought to be successfully banished are now making their way into the air again, slowing down our atmosphere’s recovery after those same chemicals effectively ripped a hole in it in the mid-20th century. Slowing things down still further: scientists haven’t been able to figure out where the chemicals are coming from. (3/19)
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China’s greenhouse gas emissions rose 2.6 percent in 2019 despite a fall in the share of coal in the country’s energy mix, driven by a rise in energy consumption and greater use of oil and gas, the research team Rhodium Group said Wednesday. Total greenhouse gas emissions in China last year were estimated at 13.92 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The annual growth rate is slightly lower than the 2010-2019 average of 3 percent and well below the average 9.2 percent increase over 2000-2009. (3/19)