Monthly Archives: June 2011

Black & Veatch’s 2011 Electric Utility Survey

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Water supply and effluent water management dominate top safety concerns.

Black & Veatch’s Strategic Directions in the Electric Utility Industry asked 700 executives from the U.S. electric utility industry about their take on the future ranging from utility pricing to electric vehicles to nuclear power and water issues. (via greentechmedia)

Some important poll results:
– When polled on whether “energy/commodity prices will rise significantly,” 70% of respondents said they “Very strongly agree or agree.”
– On electric utilities’ top safety concerns, water and nuclear waste disposal ranked #1 and #2 respectively.
– When asked to rank top technology and environmental concerns, “water management becomes the most significant environmental issue” ranked #1. This was above energy storage (#2), scrubbers and carbon sequestration (#3), biofuels (#7), bloom box (#8). See above chart.

“Fewer guns, more solar arrays”

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There is a large swath of the business community that continues to push for alternative energy infrastructure projects as the stimulus to getting our nation out of the current economic slump and ridding our dubious involvement in strategic energy resource-rich nation-states such as Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Read full article.

Saleh, al-Ahmar, Arcadia Petroleum and the Civil War in Yemen

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Anti-government protesters shout slogans while holding a defaced portrait of Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh during a demonstration demanding his ouster in Sanaa June 4, 2011.

As the violence in Yemen continues to escalate and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) probe reveals more about Arcadia Petroleum’s role in securing oil contracts in Yemen, one cannot help but wonder if there exists a more than just tenuous connection between the two high-profile events.

Bitter tensions between Saleh supporters and his defectors–the Al-Ahmar, Hashed, and Sanha camps–have fueled Yemen’s political crisis:

The CFTC’s recent allegations that Arcadia colluded with Yemeni multibillionaire Hamid al-Ahmar in order to receive uncompetitive oil bids coincides with the fomenting civil conflict in Yemen. A leaked September 2009 State Department cable says that:

an internal government shift in control over the country’s valuable oil exports, meant to open up oil bidding to more international buyers, threatened Arcadia’s sway over Yemen’s exports.

It also put at risk an alliance between Arcadia and its “local agent” in Yemen, tribal leader Hamid al-Ahmar, the cable says. Arcadia, in an interview, denied the allegations in the cable, saying it did not employ al-Ahmar as an agent, although it did work with some of his companies in the oil trading business. The company said it always paid official market prices for Yemen’s export oil.

But even if there might be no real relation whatsoever with Saleh’s refusal to relinquish his power and the “internal government shift in control” of the country’s oil resources, the international community cannot ignore the growing humanitarian crisis in Yemen as violence escalates, water resources deplete, and oil revenue remains misappropriated.