energy

As predicted earlier this year, Japan continues to struggle with its energy needs. The chart below shows the recent trend in Japan's imports of residual fuel oil. These fuel imports are quickly translating into a rising trade deficit.

Take a look at the long-term charts of crude oil and natural gas. The historical oil-to-gas price ratio had ranged from 6:1 to 10:1 before the economic crisis. Since one barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of the 5.825 million…

Whatever happened to fuel switching between natural gas and diesel? The switch from diesel to natural gas is one of the biggest types of fuel switching in transport. You see this with all the buses now running natural gas instead of diesel.…

A chart of gasoline consumption and oil prices for the years 2000-2011.

Quick, what country is the economic engine that will power world growth? If you answered "China," you're far from alone. But there's another country that deserves as much attention and better yet, is much friendlier to investment: India,…

Any politician who talks of a green, utopian US - where wind and solar produce most of our energy, electric cars put power back into the grid, green fields of corn produce clean fuels, and millions of Americans work in green technology…

News links for 10 December 2011 on US politics, fracking, venture capital and technology

Some of the dominant policy issues of today – immigration, energy, the emergence of China – have their analogues in the great Industrial Revolution. The key government policies that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution in…

This column comments on Joe Nocera’s September 23, 2011 column entitled: The Phony Solyndra Scandal. Nocera’s column compares the statements of Solyndra’s controlling managers to Dick Fuld’s statements to the public about Lehman’s…

It turns out that China is not willing to pay whatever it has to for energy and metal resources. Several resource deals have faltered in recent months, indicating an increasingly choosy Chinese perspective on energy and metal acquisitions.…