Category Archives: Natural gas

Feb 01 0 comments
Energy Policy, Government, liberalism, Markets, Natural gas, Tactics of Domination

Why the Media Blackout On New Energy Breakthrough?

CHEAPER ELECTRICITY OUGHT TO BE a topic of interest, you might think. But because the media is pushing uneconomical “green” technologies, you probably haven’t heard of the discoveries which promise to make electricity generated by natural gas cheaper.

Since 1992 the U.S. DOE has “invested” hundreds of millions of dollars into clean-burning, efficient “combined cycle” natural gas turbines made by GE and Westinghouse to power dynamos in central electricity generation stations.

GE? I saw these massive generators being built for South American installations in person at a General Electric Jacksonville, FL plant. A very clever highschool friend whom I was visiting at the time, built these awesome generators. I was impressed. Hamfisted and dreamy-eyed myself, I’d always considered Freddy Wilson a bona fide mechanical genius (after his dad), and now he was clearly proving how far he had come since taking apart every nut, bolt, spring, belt, and thingamajig rusted stubbornly into a 1960s AMC Rambler to then scrape, clean, drill, bore out, reshear, repaint, and finally reassemble a shiny spanking hot muscle rider whose poor white walls only lasted three, four weeks, month after month, until he would eagerly move on to another mechanical post-scholastic feat. He took a job at the Jax plant right out of highschool. Twenty years later he was still there, shop steward, I heard. With the woes and wranglings GE has experienced the last decade or so I would guess my friend has retired or has started a second career, tweaking some knuckle-skinning machine I’d wager.

But why is GE and Jeffrey Immelt now siding up to wind mills and disregarding this proven, more robust, and yes, clean technology?

Read more.

Dec 09 0 comments
Leftist, liberalism, Natural gas, Oil

UN To US, Frack Natural Gas Deposits Now

AS AMERICANS CONTINUE TO FRET the vacuous insanity of current US-Middle East energy policy, I have been among those writing and talking to anyone who can whistle Dixie about the untapped wealth America has packed beneath our feet and below our water tables in the form of shale gas.

The United States is the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, and boasts the four largest fields in the world. The Haynesville field in Louisiana (with production up by 77 per cent in 2009); the Fayetteville field in Arkansas and the Marcellus field in Pennsylvania (both with production up by 50 per cent); and the Barnett field in Texas and Oklahoma (with production up by double-digit increases).

These core centers of potent gas are trapped in shale rock that can be liberated via a process called hydraulic fractioning, more commonly called fracking. Wells are drilled several miles into the earth’s crust, greased by a stream of water, sand, and a minor amount of chemicals to fracture the rock and release the gas. All this happens far below the surface and the water tables. Natural gas is relatively clean-burning, is located on-shore, and is American energy wealth writ large.

Behold. Now we get a report from the United Nations, of all places, that asserts America can indeed be on the verge of energy independence and can become one of the world’s great exporters of energy because of these shale gas and oil reserves. Natural gas is the one commodity that has been plummeting in price and delivering an economic jolt of its own for consumers more accustomed to higher energy prices.

But why are we not rushing to pump this available gas? That’s where the news stops being news, and becomes the same old dog and pony show. In other words, where there’s a formidable US energy supply, there’s a yellow dog Democrat blocking the way.

Perhaps we should update the reference, and start calling these ridiculous “greenies” the green hornet Democrats, because they can’t help themselves but to stir up a lot of wicked buzz and stinging hot air with Speaker Pelosi most assuredly their queen.

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Sep 22 0 comments
Activists, Food Shortages, Natural gas, Shortages, Stupid Undergrounds, Tactics of Domination, The Resistance

Just A Simple Twist Of Fate

Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising news, as young Alex in Anthony Burgess‘ Clockwork Orange might have put it.

F

clockwork-orange

A Clockwork Orange

orecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world’s top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

“People will say this is global warming disappearing,” he told more than 1500 of the world’s top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN’s World Climate Conference.

“I am not one of the sceptics,” insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany, and one of the foremost recognized experts on climate change in the world. “However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.”

Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought.

Update: January 23, 2011

For two decades or so we have been told to urgently act against unprecedented global warming, changing every habit industrial man has grown to embrace, or else there will be fiery gloom and doom for the world and be careful not to confuse weather for climate. Yet, the opposite seems to be occurring all over the globe.

Greenland baseline. Click to enlarge.

Facts. The entire planet has stopped warming since 1998 and, more significantly, has started to cool since 2003. Instead of warning people of cooler weather for the next 30 years, there’s still the distinct false sense of expectation of unprecedented warming. People and governments are being urged to go entirely in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons—and at a potentially horrendous price.

Just look at what happened in UK. Ten years ago Britons were told to expect global warming only and that snow would be a thing of the past. Yet the opposite has arrived, three winters in a row. This winter it crippled the entire nation for nearly a month in December 2010. Alternating periods of warm and cooler weather have been with us as far back as our climate records go. Some of the past cooler periods have been more severe than others, like the Sporer, Maunder and Dalton Minimums. Professor Don Easterbrook has documented some 20 such cool periods over the last 500 years,

Read it all.

Oct 18 0 comments
Atheist, Dar-al-Islam, Demographics, Islam, Islamic supremism, Islamofascism, Muslim Brotherhood, Natural gas, Poverty, Serbs, Sharia Banking, Synchronicity, Tactics of Domination, Taqiyya, Time

1001 Tales of Purchasing Power

Freedom and personal liberty is rarely lost by a culture in a single blow from an enemy perfected with the arts of permanent destruction, but instead, culture is more often chastised to death by a thousand cuts. Militant Islam, in its natural role, has perfected this latter technique of warfare, using surprise and deception tactics, lies built upon lies, trojan horses and social manipulation, all practiced in the sometimes snarling, sometimes smiling spirit of oppression while busy with the replacement of the host culture in the service of global domination.

Here is an intelligent piece from the Washington Times—The Camel in the Tent—by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen on the strategies of power acquisition which is inherent to Islamic fundamentalism:

islamic fundamentlaism

Western stupidity with endgame analysis…

Objections to Borse Dubai‘s proposed acquisition of 20 percent of Nasdaq last week prompted Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank to quip, “In the ports deal, the concern was smuggling something or someone dangerous… What are we talking about here—smuggling someone onto a stock exchange?”

It is not “who” Dubai will smuggle into the stock exchange we should worry about. It’s the arrival of the world’s first Islamic stock exchange exerting unprecedented Islamic influence in the heart of the U.S. and Western economies that should raise our alarm. Dubai’s handsomely paid Washington lobbyists see nothing wrong with that. Rather, they claim the deal benefits U.S. financial markets, giving “Nasdaq access to rich Mideast pockets.” Unfortunately, the deal also increases the appeal and influence of Islamic financing in the West.

What is “Islamic” finance? Islamic, or Shariah-based finance, is the 1920s invention of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. He ordered the Muslim Brothers to create an independent Islamic financial system to supercede the Western economy, facilitating the spread of Islam worldwide. He set the theories and practices and his contemporaries and successors developed Shariah-based terminology for “Islamic economics,” finance and banking. Attempts by Muslim Brotherhood members in the early 1930s to establish Islamic banking in India failed. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser shut down the second attempt in 1964, after only one year, later arresting and expelling the Muslim Brothers for attempts to kill him. Saudi Arabia welcomed them and adopted their ideas.

In 1969, soon after a mentally deranged Australian Christian fundamentalist, Michael Dennis Rohan, tried to set fire to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Saudis convened the Conference for the Islamic Organizations (OIC) to unify the “struggle for Islam,” and have been its major sponsor ever since. The 56 OIC members include Iran, Sudan and Syria.

Most Arab and Muslim states publicly denounced bin Laden. But the impending Nasdaq acquisition, the purchases of over 52 percent of the London Stock Exchange and 47.6 percent of OMX (Nordic exchange) and the vigorous expansion of Shariah financing apparently follow the Muslim Brotherhood-bin Laden script.

Based in Jeddah, “pending the liberation of Jerusalem,” the OIC mandates and coordinates actions to “support the Palestinian people, assist them in recovering their rights and liberating their occupied territories.” The OIC’s first international undertaking was the 1975 establishment of the Islamic Development Bank “in accordance with the principles of the Shariah,” marking the beginning of the fast-growing, petrodollar-based Islamic financing market. From 1975 to 2005, the bank approved more than $46 billion in funding to Muslim countries. Since 2000, it has transferred hundreds of millions of dollars raised especially to support the Palestinian intifada and suicide bombers’ families—and has channeled United Nations funds to Hamas. Yet the bank received U.N. observer status in 2007.

Overseeing Shariah finance are the 1991-Bahrain-registered and -based Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), which laid the groundwork for the global Islamic financial network and the “de facto Islamic Central Bank”—the Islamic Financial Services Board (IFSB), established in 2002 in Kuala Lumpur “to absorb the 11 September shock and reinforce the stability of Islamic finance.” Chairing the meeting, then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir stated: “A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing to abolish this slavery [to the West].”

According to Saleh Kamel, president of the Saudi Dallah Al-Baraka Group and the Islamic Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ICCI), more than 400 Islamic financial institutions currently operate in 75 countries. They now hold more than $800 billion in assets—growing at a rate of 15 percent annually. All investments with Islamic financial institutions are subject to the minimum zakat (Islamic charitable wealth tax). On April 30, the OIC, the organization that initiated global Muslim riots after the Danish cartoon publications, established the clerical International Commission for Zakat, replacing more than 20,000 organizations that previously collected the money. Islamic clerics’ “expert committee” in Malaysia now supervises and distributes those funds. The new committee will shortly distribute to Muslim charities roughly $2 billion collected during Ramadan.

But not all charities are equal. In 1999, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi decreed: “Declaring holy war [and] fighting for such purposes is the way of Allah for which zakat must be spent.” If past zakat distribution is any indication, all Muslim jihadist-terror organizations (including Palestinian Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and the many al Qaeda offspring) will benefit.

Shortly after September 11, Osama bin Laden called upon Muslims “to concentrate on hitting the U.S. economy through all possible means. Look for the key pillars of the U.S. economy. Strike the key pillars of the enemy again and again and they will fall as one.”

Most Arab and Muslim states publicly denounced bin Laden. But the impending Nasdaq acquisition, the purchases of over 52 percent of the London Stock Exchange and 47.6 percent of OMX (Nordic exchange) and the vigorous expansion of Shariah financing apparently follow the Muslim Brotherhood-bin Laden script.

President Bush on Sept. 25 at the United Nations called on all nations to open their markets. Surely, he did not mean opening the markets to domination by Shariah.
_______________

Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the American Center of Democracy and a board member at the Committee for the Present Danger. She is also a member of the American Congress for Truth Board of Advisors. Alyssa A. Lappen is a senior fellow at the American Center of Democracy.

Feb 18 0 comments
Markets, Natural gas, Oil, Petroleum

HOPE UPON A NEW FUEL

MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. – With the wind chill making it seem like 40 below zero, Lt. Col. Daniel Millman said the Air Force picked the right place to test a new fuel. Millman, flying a B-52 bomber in these freezing conditions, helped test a synthetic fuel blend that could be made domestically from coal or natural gas as the Air Force seeks to wean its dependence on foreign crude and defray soaring fuel costs.

The cold-weather tests of the fuel, which wrapped up earlier this month, showed it compared well to conventional petroleum-based military aviation fuel, JP-8, Air Force officials said.

“It behaves exactly the same as JP-8, no more no less,” Millman said.

The fuel is a Fischer-Tropsch fuel, named after the two German scientists who developed the process in 1923 of converting natural gas or coal into liquid fuel. Germany used the process to convert coal to fuel during World War II. And apartheid-era South Africa, faced with embargoes, also built coal-to-fuel plants.

At $20 a barrel, the Fischer-Tropsch fuel the Air Force is testing costs about eight times as much as the standard fuel it uses, so its widespread use in military aircraft could still be years away. But proponents of the fuel argue that if there was increased commercial demand—and airlines are interested in the outcome of the tests, according to one Air Force official&151;its price would drop drastically. Furthermore, they say, it would offer a measure of protection should there be disruptions in the flow of global crude.

“The fact that we would not be dependent on foreign sources of crude is the prime driver for this fuel,” said Col. Eldon A. Woodie, commander of the Minot Air Force Base 5th Bomb Wing. Woodie said he’s sold on the fuel after the B-52 tests of it at Minot.

“Can we start this thing in cold weather? If we lose a motor in flight, can we restart it? At 47,000 feet can we get away from attack missiles? Yes. In every instance it performed,” he said.

One added benefit of the fuel is that it burns cleaner than traditional jet fuel, Woodie said. William Harrison, chief of the fuels branch at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, said the cold-weather testing at Minot “was a key milestone for the approval of using the synthetic fuel.”

A complete test report will likely be completed this summer, Harrison said. Jack Holmes, the CEO of Syntroleum Corp., which produced the natural gas-based synthetic fuel used in the Air Force trials at a test plant the company built, said it could also be made of coal.

“There are 280 billion tons of proven coal reserves in the U.S,” Holmes said. “The raw material source is there. But economics, of course, is the key. At current oil prices, the economics are good and make sense. The risk is: How sustainable are those oil prices?”

Building a commercial plant to make the synthetic fuel would carry some risk, as it would take several years and cost billions of dollars, Holmes said, adding. “We’ve got a saying in our industry: Everybody wants to be the first person to build the second plant.”

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