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Fuel Pain Prompting Some Truckers to Park
Tweet Share on Facebook March 27, 2008 Comment (6)Since one of the commenters on my truckers item suggested that an independent rig operators strike may be in the offing—and no, I would not like being without food for a while—I thought I ought to check it out. The call for a work stoppage on April 1 is being sounded by Dan Little, an independent livestock hauler in Carrollton, Mo., who runs the UScattlehaulers.com blog. Little says that neither the government nor organizations such as the Owner-Operators Independent Drivers Association are helping the small truckers cope with $4 per gallon diesel fuel prices:
I do know I or my family can not keep going at this rate. Everyone is in agreement on April 1st, 2008 as the Date to pull over, Park & say enough is enough. The Gov. will hear us Only if we Stand United.
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Truckers Back a National 65-mph Speed Limit
Tweet Share on Facebook March 26, 2008 Comment (40)A highway slowdown has begun in response to high energy prices—and the big trucking companies are leading the way. Con-Way Freight, one of the nation's largest trucking firms with 8,500 rigs, has announced it is turning back the electronic speed limiters in its entire fleet from 65 miles per hour to 62 mph.
The company estimates that by keeping its drivers below that speed, it will save 3.2 million gallons of diesel fuel a year, while eliminating 72 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions—the equivalent of removing 7,300 automobiles from the nation's highways. And with diesel fuel at the current price of about $4 per gallon, Con-Way will be saving $12.8 million per year, a significant figure for a company that saw its operating income drop 27 percent last year to $235 million.
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Going Biodiesel Is No Cheap Alternative
Tweet Share on Facebook March 25, 2008 Comment (32)The retail cost of highway diesel fuel is $3.99 per gallon—thanks to tough environmental rules and strong global demand, especially in Europe. The national average retail price of diesel hit an all-time high for five weeks in a row, is above $4 per gallon in plenty of places, and is up 50 percent over one year ago.
I thought this might make it a good market for biodiesel, the alternative fuel blended from vegetable or plant oils, but then I saw Autobloggreen's report on a Minnesota biodiesel plant that was halting production, at least temporarily, because of skyrocketing soybean oil costs.
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Tune Up Your Car and Save—Eventually
Tweet Share on Facebook March 24, 2008 Comment (8)It's often said that keeping your car well maintained will get you better gas mileage, but some steps have a quicker payback than others. The government's fuel economy website has a rundown of the usual checklist and the savings you can expect—if your car needs the maintenance—at the current average gasoline price of $3.23 per gallon.
An engine tuneup, for example, could enhance an out-of-tune car's mileage by 4 percent, or the equivalent of about 13 cents per gallon. But my neighborhood mechanic says the cost of a tuneup for our old 1994 Saturn would be about $300. We'd earn back that cash outlay only after purchasing more than 2,300 gallons of gasoline at today's prices. And since our car gets about 27 mpg, we'd have to drive 64,000 miles. I don't think that car, which already has nearly 100,000 miles on it, will make it that far. If we found a mechanic who could do a tuneup for about $100, then it would take a little over a year and a half—assuming we drove about 12,500 miles per year.
However, replacing a clogged air filter has almost an immediate payback at today's gasoline prices. The government studies show that's like saving up to 32 cents per gallon, and air filters for many models can be bought for $20 or less. You'd have to buy only about 60 gallons of gasoline to break even on the investment in a new air filter, if you need one.
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The Disputed Cost of Light, Strong Cars
Tweet Share on Facebook March 20, 2008 Comment (3)Is carbon fiber one of the answers to stopping global warming and ending our oil dependence? Energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins thinks so, but the automakers—so far—do not.
Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, both made his point and got a laugh at the National Academy of Sciences energy summit last week by covering his head briefly with a "carbon cap." It wasn't a "cap" on carbon dioxide emissions like in the Kyoto protocol or the Warner-Lieberman bill, but it would be relevant to one. The headwear was a hard, black 2-millimeter-thick test piece for a military helmet. Lovins took the hat off and then whacked it to demonstrate its ringing clang. "You can tell that plastics have changed since The Graduate," he said.
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How a Slowing Economy Speeds the Oil Run-Up
Tweet Share on Facebook March 19, 2008 Comment (1)Now, everyone's getting on the stagflation bandwagon. Or, to be more exact, they're saying that the economic slowdown and even higher oil prices may go hand in hand, as we pointed out has happened in the past.
From oil industry consultant Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates: "Oil has become the 'new gold'—a financial asset in which investors seek refuge as inflation rises and the dollar weakens. The credit crisis has been fueling the flight to oil and other commodities, and that will last until the dollar strengthens or the recession becomes more pronounced."
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Energy Doubts Cloud Daylight Saving Time
Tweet Share on Facebook March 18, 2008 Comment (3)For those of us still rubbing our eyes each day, trying to adjust to the dark March mornings of the new earlier daylight saving time, here are some disappointing figures. Congress decided in 2005 to lengthen daylight saving time by about a month to save energy. But in March 2007—the first year of extended daylight hours—electric power consumption in the United States was 321.2 million megawatt hours—up 1 percent over March 2006, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Even more disturbing: Last October, the other end of the season when we should have been enjoying extended daylight energy savings, electricity use was up 3 percent over the previous year.
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Feds Weigh Long Island Sound LNG Terminal
Tweet Share on Facebook March 17, 2008 Comment (2)This week, the federal government will weigh a controversial energy decision for the Northeast—whether to allow a floating liquefied natural gas terminal to be moored 10 miles off the shore of New York in the middle of Long Island Sound. The 1,200-foot barge would accept supercooled fuel from Africa and the Middle East, process it back into a gas, and send it by pipeline to New York and Connecticut.
I wrote this story explaining LNG and the environmental and security concerns. Such issues are very much alive in this Broadwater project, a joint venture of Shell and TransCanada Pipeline. Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell leads the opposition on environmental grounds.
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Google Will Finance Enhanced Geothermal
Tweet Share on Facebook March 14, 2008 Comment (6)Expect Google.org to make investments in the next couple of months in enhanced geothermal energy, says Dan Reicher, the Internet giant's director of climate change and energy initiatives.
Google's philanthropic arm is in talks with universities on funding basic research into tapping into the vast stores of energy underground, Reicher said at a two-day energy summit sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. He said it also expects to finance companies that are working toward advances in this form of renewable energy.
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Schlesinger: No Energy Security in Sight
Tweet Share on Facebook March 13, 2008 Comment (11)James Schlesinger, who was the nation's first secretary of energy, had a grim analysis of the nation's current energy predicament this morning at an energy summit in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. Schlesinger, now a senior adviser to Lehman Brothers and chairman of the nonprofit engineering organization Mitre, predicted that energy prices would continue to rise and declared that the United States would never see energy independence as long as it depended on the internal combustion engine. Excerpts from his remarks:
We regularly hear that we must ensure that energy supplies are abundant, affordable and secure—an aspiration devoutly to be wished [quoting Hamlet]. These criteria or shibboleths—to be exact—are not likely to be achieved. We are not going to have energy security. What we are trying to do is fashion a set of policies that limit or mitigate energy insecurity. And we have done fairly well in that regard, most notably with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
