Police in Rural England Begin “Tagging” Heating Oil to Prevent Theft
The idyllic farmhouses of Hampshire County, Egland are prime targets for heating oil theives. (image: holiday-cottages-rentals.com)
Heating oil theft is not a very common occurrence, but it does happen. Tough economic times have driven increasing numbers of desperate thieves to victimize unsuspecting homeowners in recent years draining their heating oil tanks. Such thefts usually occur in rural areas, where shady characters operating a truck or oil pump are more likely to go unnoticed, and the vast majority of the thefts take place in the UK.
In an attempt to reduce heating oil thefts this coming heating season, authorities in Hampshire County, England will soon provide free bottles of a heating oil additive that will “chemically tag” rural residents’ heating oil, the BBC reported on Sunday. The tagging will link the heating oil to its original owner so it can be returned in the event of recovery. The unusual initiative is a reaction to the quadrupling of heating oil thefts in Hampshire last winter.
Ruth Harper-Adams, a local farm advocate in Hampshire’s Test Valley region noted the negative effects of heating oil theft on rural communities:
Fuel theft from farmyards not only has a costly impact, it also creates other huge implications, such as delays in farming operations. It may also create an environmental problem where tank damage is a consequence.
The effectiveness of the tagging systems of course relies on the thieves eventually being caught and the stolen oil recovered, but in an area where heating oil theft is such a serious problem, it seems that almost any preventative measure is worth trying.
Don’t Drink and Trade: London Oil Broker Fined for Drunken Oil Futures Trades
An oil trader’s drinking problem pushed the price of Brent crude oil to new highs in 2009. (image: muchomartiniglasses.com)
Oil prices are determined by a number of different factors: supply, demand, currency values, global stock markets, and weeklong drinking binges by oil traders. Steven Noel Perkins, a former oil trader, has been fined £72,000 (US$108,000) for the unauthorized purchase of $520 million worth of Brent crude oil futures contracts—some 7 million barrels—while in the middle of a bender.
Perkins worked for PVM Oil Futures Ltd. and traded on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London. PVM trades on behalf of clients, but Perkins’s trades of June 29 and 30, 2009 were made without any authorization from clients and, according to the British financial regulator FSA, “As a direct result of Perkins’ trading, the price of Brent increased significantly.” Reuters reports that Perkins’s trades pushed the price of Brent crude to a 2009 high of $73.50 a barrel.
Bloomberg reports the full story of the illicit trades, which began on Monday, June 29, 2009. A weekend drinking jag that included a golf trip with PVM lasted into Monday for Perkins, and he phoned in eight trades—only one of them authorized by a client—to a PVM broker that afternoon. The trading continued into the early morning hours of Tuesday, June 30, at which point Perkins had accumulated contracts for 7 million barrels of oil, though he was in no condition to know it. According to a statement from the FSA:
He drank heavily throughout the weekend and continued drinking from around midday on Monday 29 June….He claims to have limited recollection of events on Monday and claims to have been in an alcohol-induced blackout at the time he traded in the early hours of 30 June.
Perkins has since stopped drinking and been to rehab, and his firm, PVM, lost about $10 million closing out the unauthorized trades, but there’s no recourse for consumers who may have paid higher prices for oil products as a result of drunken and unauthorized trades that drove up the market price for Brent crude oil. It’s not the first time we’ve heard of oil traders’ gaffes affecting oil prices and hurting consumers—sometimes mistakes in basic geography drive up prices, and just a year ago another oil trader in London got fined for trades he made after he got drunk at lunch, apparently something of a pattern in the London markets.
Perkins won’t be trading for at least five years—the FSA has banned him—but his case provides some insight into what people mean when they talk about the “complexity” of commodity markets.
Algae-Powered Plane Will Debut at Berlin Air Show
EADS’s algae-fueled plane will be making its first public appearance this week in Berlin. (image: eads.com)
The first airplane to fly on a 100-percent algae fuel will take to the air in Berlin this week, reported the news service AFP. EADS, a European aerospace conglomerate that operates Airbus and other aviation subsidiaries, has developed a plane that will run on pure algae-based biofuel and will be showing it off at the Berlin Air Show (ILA) that runs from June 9 to June 13.
The company’s technical director, Jean Botti, said that this is an unprecedented achievement:
At the ILA, we are going to fly for the first time a craft with biofuel that has been made 100 per cent from algae. That is a world premiere.
According to EADS promotional material, the algae biofuel has higher energy content than conventional jet fuel and causes no change in performance.
EADS’s demonstration will be the latest example of algae’s potential as a liquid fuel source with applications not just in airplanes but in diesel engines and home oil heating systems. But despite EADS work on alternative fuels, Botti does not believe algae-based fuels will eliminate the need for petroleum fuels in aviation anytime soon: “If 10 per cent of our fleet is flying with biofuel in 2040, I would be extremely happy.”
Heating Oil Thieves Foiled by Guinness, an English Police Dog
Heating oil thieves in England underestimated the ability of one police dog, and were found five miles away from the scene of the crime. (actual dog in question not pictured) (image: wikipedia.org)
Spaldwick is a small village in England, with a little over 500 residents, “a service station, a school, a church, a beauty salon and a pub.” That doesn’t mean it’s free of troubles, though. Local constables recently arrested four people for the theft of domestic heating oil, and are now holding them in the police station of the nearby town of Huntingdon.
But they couldn’t have done it without the help of their trusted police dog, Guinness. A burglary was reported just before 4:00 am, and while officers searched the area—finding two of the suspected culprits in a van—Guinness picked up a scent and led his handler some five miles away to the village of Brington, where the final two suspects were caught. Town & Crier, a local newspaper, reported Guinness’ triumph on Friday.
In sum, three men and one woman were arrested and two vans, replete with oil tanks and pumps, were seized.
Perhaps Guinness heard of the heating oil theft that occurred at an animal shelter in Pennsylvania this January, which subjected already vulnerable cats and dogs to chilly temperatures, and took a special interest in this crime. Unfortunately, that shelter in Pennsylvania did not have a valiant police dog such as Guinness to find the perpetrator.
So whether you prefer the adult beverage or the defender of justice, heating oil users have another reason to say, “Guinness is good for you.”
(image: recreatingtampa.com)
Total’s Strike Ends, French Refineries Resume Work
Workers continue to strike at Total’s refinery in Flanders, but the walkout ends at all other plants. (image: france24.com)
Workers at five of Total’s six refineries in France voted to end their weeklong strike on Wednesday, allowing shipments and oil processing to resume, reports Bloomberg. Total, the French oil major, planned to permanently close one of its refineries, precipitating the strike, but unions advised workers to end the walkout after Total promised that no other refineries would be closed or sold in the next five years and that refinery workers at the closed plant would find other work within the company.
At the refinery in Flanders, near Dunkirk—the refinery Total plans to close—workers voted to continue the strike until March 8, when Total will present its plans for the future of the plant. Total still intends to close the Flanders refinery, but has said it will build a training center at the site and restructure jobs to keep refinery workers employed with Total. The Flanders refinery has been idle since September, so the continuation of the strike there will not affect oil production.
Total said it would take between two or three days for output to resume, but a representative for the CGT, a French labor confederation, said at Total’s Donges refinery that the plant had tanks full of refined products that were ready to be shipped, according to the AFP. This will help ease fuel shortages in France, where Hundreds of gas stations have run out of fuel due to the strike.
While the walkout has ended, the CGT’s labor coordinator with Total, Charles Foulard, warned Total that “if it doesn’t keep its promises there will be another strike with fuel shortages.”
Russia and Belarus Reach Impasse in Oil Talks
The Druzhba pipeline system near Mozyr, Belarus. (image: Bymedia.net via rferl.org)
BusinessWeek reported on Friday that talks between Russia and Belarus over an oil imports dispute have ended with the Belarusian delegation walking out. The issue at hand concerns the Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian oil from Siberia to the European Union across Belarus. The former Soviet state receives about 20 million metric tons of crude from Russia annually, only a quarter of which is used in Belarus, with the rest continuing on to the EU. Until December 31 Belarus enjoyed a 65-percent price discount on those supplies, but now Russia is asking Belarus to fork over full import duties, a change of about $5 billion, or 10 percent of Belarus’s GDP.
Thus far there have been no extended, wholesale shutdowns in the oil supply, a tactic that Russia has exercised in the past in disputes over natural gas with Ukraine, but the continued stalemate doesn’t bode well for oil prices. The spike that started off the new year with crude at $81 per barrel was linked, in part, to anxiety over reports of the dispute. A shutdown of the pipeline would affect not only Belarus, but a large swath of Eastern and Central Europe: Germany receives 15 percent of its oil from the Druzhba, the Czech Republic 50 percent, and Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary 75 percent or more.
Literally Singing the Praises of Gazprom
With the days of socialist marches and propaganda posters fading away, it seems that Russia has found a new way to whip up nationalist pride: an epic anthem extolling the virtues of the national gas company, Gazprom. In a YouTube video that can be described as inspiring, strange, comical, infectious and frightening (or all of the above), Gazprom presents its new theme song in music video form with English subtitles.
Sure, natural gas is an important commodity that’s “giving people warmth and light for office and for home,” but does it deserve three and a half minutes of exultation that borders on religious fanaticism? It’s clear that natural gas is one of the main (if not the most important) factors that maintain Russia’s political relevance in our global society, as then-president Putin showed when he cut off Russia’s gas supply to the Ukraine in the dead of winter last year.
Crucial domestic resource, chief export, invaluable revenue source, political weapon…you can see why the Russians love their gas. However, I doubt average Russians share the unconditional love and reverence for Gazprom that the anthem expresses, or if the song is even known in the country (or anywhere outside the snickering group of 67,950 YouTube viewers), but I do know that they’ll “never ever find a surer friend than Gazprom.”
So pour yourself vodka straight up so we can “drink to all the Russian gas, that it never comes to an end, though it’s so hard to obtain!”
embedded by Embedded Video
Heating Oil in Sea Storage Headed for the Northeast
Contango: a word that sounds much more exciting that it actually is. (image: Aphex Puddle via flickr.com)
Contango describes a futures market situation in which prices for future delivery of a commodity are higher than prices for immediate delivery. And contango has been present in the crude and heating oil markets for the last few months.
Since late 2008, investors have been working toward cashing in on the contango in the heating oil market. At that time, investors bought up cheap heating oil and put it in storage on huge tanker ships. The tankers then docked at locations around the world and waited for heating oil demand, and heating oil prices, to grow. This week, that time is at hand.
Russia’s Fight with Belarus Threatens European Oil Supplies
This oil depot in Belarus is along the Druzhba pipeline that carries Russian oil to Europe. (image: nytimes.com)
Tensions are high between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Belarus, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, with Belarus threatening to cut off electricity to Russia’s westernmost region.
Belarus raised the stakes in an energy dispute that threatens midwinter disruptions for a pipeline system that supplies about 10 percent of the EU’s oil. Russia recently throttled back on supplies through the Druzhba pipeline, the main route for Siberian oil, after a pricing deal expired on December 31. The core of the dispute rests on Russia’s imposition of a new tax structure on the oil that Belarus siphons from the Druzhba line for refining. The demands could cost Belarus an estimated $5 billion this year, more than 10 percent of its GDP.
Heating Oil Price Trend for January 5: +8¢
(image: s.wsj.net and zimbio.com)
A variety of factors combined to produce yesterday’s price spike in crude and heating oil. Sustained cold weather in the US Northeast and in Europe, two large heating oil markets, has encouraged some investors that the fundamentals—supply and demand—of the oil market are improving as freezing temperatures boost heating oil consumption. Positive manufacturing reports from the US, China, and India signaled that those economies were recovering, which would raise global energy demand and support higher oil prices. Lastly, a tariff dispute between Russia and Belarus led Russia to briefly stop its oil shipments to Belarus, through which Russia supplies much of Europe’s oil. Russian exports have returned to normal, but the threat to the global oil supply worried investors and lifted oil prices.
Today’s average retail heating oil price in the Northeast is 8 cents higher than Monday’s average price.
Oil Prices Start Off New Decade with a Boom
A winter storm and freezing temperatures have battered the Northeast. (image: burlingtonfreepress.com)
For market-watchers, today isn’t just the beginning of a new year, it’s the beginning of a new decade. And for those watching oil prices, things kicked into high gear quickly as oil futures hit $81 a barrel. As the Wall Street Journal reported, that figure marked a two-month high brought on by, among other factors, a holiday weekend that saw bone-chilling temperatures throughout much of the Northeast.
The cold—the low in New York City for today is expected to be 17 degrees and the forecast shows no signs of the chill letting up in the region—brought about a spike in heating oil prices this morning with light, sweet crude hitting a high of $81.68, marking a level that it had not reached since October 23.
After Threats, Russia Agrees to Deal on Oil Transit to EU
Conflict between Russia and Ukraine again threatened energy supplies to several EU countries. (image: koxuz.org)
At least this year’s dispute didn’t escalate into January 2009’s crisis when natural gas shipments were halted and residents of 20 Central European countries shivered. No, this time an agreement was reached before Russian threats to cut off supplies to Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were carried out. As it was in January of this year, the dispute between Ukraine and Russia centered on the price of oil transit fees that Russia pays to Ukraine. Happily for Central Europe, Russia and Ukraine have resolved their differences, reports AFP.
The cutoff would have come via the Druzhba oil pipeline (ironically, Druzhba means “friendship”) one of the world’s biggest in capacity and length, connecting West Siberian oilfields to refineries in Europe. The pipeline has a capacity of over 2 million barrels per day (bpd); 1.2 million barrels of that went directly to the European Union in 2008, while about 400,000 bpd stayed in Belarus.
Businesses Volunteer Data on Carbon Emissions, Even Without Legislation
(image: cnsx.ca and cleancarboneconomy.com)
Copenhagen didn’t result in any binding agreement, and a Senate climate bill still looks a long way off, but some businesses are reporting their carbon emissions anyway.
The Carbon Disclosure Project, a London-based nonprofit, collects the emissions reports and shows businesses how they stack up to other firms in their industry. This information can help businesses reduce emissions, and by making it publicly available (see their website) to any potential investor the Carbon Disclosure Project hopes to create a market incentive to cut energy consumption and emissions. Boeing’s vice president for environment, Mary Armstrong, said the project encouraged Boeing to set environmental performance targets.
While the Carbon Disclosure Project’s founder and chief executive, Paul Dickinson, says the voluntary program could help cut emissions in China and India, where businesses are face fewer regulations than in Europe and North America, critics contend that no voluntary program could do enough. The project’s reports don’t undergo any external verification, and companies that pollute cannot be obligated to take part.
Though energy companies are targeted by legislation and international agreements to mitigate climate change, many have been willing participants in the project—giants like Chevron and Russia’s Gazprom filled out disclosure reports, to name two. With the EPA contemplating regulation, and the possibility of legislation still looming, they may have decided that disclosing their carbon emissions now will give them an edge on their competitors if such disclosures become mandatory. Disclosing emissions may cost them money—in the labor spent filing reports, if nothing else—but doing it now may position them to adapt more quickly to a new legislative or regulatory environment.
Scotland Turns to Wave Energy to Cut Emissions
Scotland plans to convert its waves into a renewable source of energy. (image: woodruffshelties.com)
Scottish energy developer Pelamis has signed a joint venture agreement with Swedish energy company Vattenfall for an energy project worth about $100 million off Scotland’s Shetland Islands, CleanTechnica reported on Monday. The project has been dubbed Aegir, after the mythical Norse sea god, and will be Scotland’s largest wave power scheme.
The project is expected to feature 26 wave power machines, each at a length of 180 meters; these machines will generate a total of up to 200 megawatts of power, which can power about 13,000 households for one year. Aegir will begin producing power in 2014.
Scotland hopes that this project and others like it will help the country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 42 percent by 2020, as delineated under the Scottish Climate Change Act. However, organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund think Scotland can do even more, and that renewable energy could fulfill 60–143 percent of Scotland’s energy requirements by 2030.
Scotland seems to be keen on using wave energy to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Many other countries and universities are also interested in harnessing the power of the sea to meet their renewable energy needs. For their part, England, Norway, and Australia have reported success with oscillating water columns. In addition, the Scottish government and its partners recently launched Oyster, the largest working hydroelectric wave energy device in the world.
Final Analysis on Copenhagen: Few Clear Gains, but Some Hope for the Future
(image: seattlepi.com)
In the wake of the largely-seen-as-failed climate talks in Copenhagen this month, news outlets, analysts, and politicians alike are trying to wrap their heads around what happened in Denmark. Most agree that the talks were a failure, many blaming the process itself. After all, getting 193 countries, all with their own challenges and interests, to agree on anything is a tall order.
Bloomberg columnist Eric Pooley takes it a step further. He points out that all parties going in to this conference knew it wasn’t going to produce a strong agreement, and that fact hinged on one country alone: the United States. Without a firm commitment from the U.S. Senate concerning emissions reduction, few others were willing to lay their cards on the table, and talks suffered because of it. George Monbiot of the U.K. Guardian said as much, perhaps in a more blunt fashion, in his commentary entitled “If you want to know who’s to blame for Copenhagen, look to the U.S. Senate.”
Heating Oil Weekly Roundup: Presidential Loopholes, Christmas in Copenhagen, and Green Tech in China
(image: Nick Anderson of the Houston Chronicle, via americanprogress.org)
Looks like the Copenhagen conference was kind of a bust, but what likelihood was there that the US could pass any international treaty, anyway? If President Obama can’t get 60 votes for any legislation, how could he get the 67 needed for a treaty? He might not have to, says <a href=”>Michael Livermore at the Vine, a blog of The New Republic. Livermore details some of the ways that Obama could use executive authority to bring the US into a binding international agreement. It might not come up after Copenhagen, but another set of talks is scheduled for Mexico City.
Christmas in Copenhagen might mean shopping for gifts at stores that keep their doors open, pumping heat out onto the cold street, but it also means a Christmas tree that’s green in more ways than one, says Spencer Schwartz at the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital blog. At City Hall Square, a massive Christmas tree stays lit through the power of volunteers on bikes that generate electricity for the lights. At night, when the volunteers go home, wind power keeps the tree bright.
Denmark seems a likely place for environmentally friendly innovation. What about China? In the New Yorker, Evan Osnos details China’s 863 Program, the clean-technology program that could progress by such bounds that the US would not even be competitive in the clean-tech sector. And this from a country whose capital, Beijing, often has air quality that the US typically associates with forest fires.
Natural gas drilling has come under criticism recently for the pollution it can cause in air and water, and in response the industry has taken steps to curb emissions and remove toxins from its drilling. But according to Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica—which has extensively and often critically covered problems associated with hydrofracking—these practices are still underused in natural gas drilling. According to Lustgarten, this doesn’t do much good for gas companies or local communities, since many of these steps not only cut pollution but boost productivity and save money.
Canada’s GV Energy to Produce Little-Known Biodiesel
The molecular makeup of dimethyl ether includes one oxygen atom connecting hydrogen and carbon atoms. Its molecular formula is C2H6O CH3OCH3. (image: wikipedia.org)
A Canadian energy company has proposed building a biorefinery to produce dimethyl ether, or DME, the CBC reported Wednesday. In November, Calgary-based GV Energy signed a memorandum of understanding with the city of Terrance, British Columbia, under which the city would set aside a 100-hectare site for the refinery in the Skeena Industrial Development Park.
Although DME is not widely known in North America, stricter U.S. greenhouse gas emissions standards may boost its popularity. GV Energy CEO Eric Switzer told the CBC that even though DME might never completely replace fossil fuels, if the world has reached peak oil production as many believe, it could comprise a viable solution.
DME is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be produced from biomass, natural gas, or coal. GV has been producing DME from black liquor, a wood-based biomass byproduct of paper manufacturing. As one might expect, DME has its pros and cons.
From Copenhagen: Sea Levels Could Rise Up to 29 Feet Over the Next Few Hundred Years
(image: dailymail.co.uk)
A new study emerged out of Copenhagen on Wednesday, claiming that global sea levels could rise by up to 9 meters (roughly 30 feet) in the next few hundred years, even if the world manages to stave off a temperature raise above 2 degrees Celsius. This new estimate is higher than any other that has been predicted so far, and would mean low-lying coastal areas like New Orleans, areas of Southern Florida, Bangladesh, and most of the Netherlands would be severely affected.
Perhaps ironically, the head of the African group of nations proposed a deal today that would cut aid to poor countries by more than half of what has been discussed thus far. Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia, called for $50 billion a year by 2015 and $100 billion per year by 2020, saying that they have more to lose, and therefore must be flexible. The amount of aid due to poor nations has been the subject of intense debate in Copenhagen, with the European Union pledging several billion in the short term, and the United States having yet to pledge anything at all.
While the aid will undoubtedly help poor nations as they attempt to deal with climate change, if no deal is struck at Copenhagen, the news for rising seas levels is not good. Hopefully as more world leaders make their way to Copenhagen over the next few days, negotiations will un-stall and begin to make some real progress forward.
Auctions of Emissions Permits Are Centerpiece of Latest Senate Climate Bill
Senators Maria Cantwell (WA) and Susan Collins (ME), spearheaders of the Cantwell-Collins bill otherwise known as the CLEAR Act. (image: ipahealthreform.wordpress.com and a1.twimg.com)
Another climate bill has emerged in the latest attempt at bipartisan support.
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Senators Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, and Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, introduced a new climate bill that, if passed, would reconfigure how the proposed cap and trade carbon emissions proposal would be implemented.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Carbon Limits and Energy for American Renewal Act, or CLEAR Act, would, like other proposals, require carbon emitters to hold permits, and the government would slowly reduce the number of permits over a period of time in order to reduce carbon emissions. Unlike previous proposals, the Cantwell-Collins bill would auction all permits and approximately 75 percent of the revenues raised by these auctions would be returned to energy consumers each month, doing away with free permits that would be given to utility companies, steelmakers, and others under competing bills.
Copenhagen Day 5: Demonstrations Result in 68 Arrests, and the EU Pledges Billions in Climate Aid for Developing Nations
Demonstrators in Copenhagen give the world the beach ball treatment. (image: whtc.com)
Climate activists in Copenhagen ramped up their protests Friday, resulting in 68 arrests made by Danish police. According to the U.K. Guardian, 250 activists met in the city’s center at 10am before splitting up with the intention of targeting companies and business who they considered to be a threat to the climate agenda. Organizers distributed maps to protesters online, leading them to such targets as the Danish Energy Association, McDonalds, and Shell, among others.
Their aim was to disrupt business at each of the targets, either with noise or invasions of the premises. Police made arrests at various points around the city, and none of the protesters turned violent at any point. However, ABC News reported out of Australia Friday that although this weekend’s 40,000-strong protest is also expected to be peaceful, it could be a different story next week. Wendy Miller, a volunteer with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition says there is some chatter about a possible “reclaiming of the conference center,” and she imagines it would, in some degree, turn violent. A spokesperson for the AYCC said the group does not anticipate a violent turn, and supports the peaceful protests that will be occurring next week.
-
Got a tip
Have a question? Let us know! Contact the HeatingOil.com newsroom now.
for us?
biodiesel biofuel cap-and-trade carbon emissions CFTC China crude oil crude oil futures crude oil prices crude prices diesel economic recovery EIA energy efficiency Energy Information Administration Heating Oil heating oil consumers heating oil futures heating oil price heating oil prices heating oil price trend home heating oil Maine New York City New York Mercantile Exchange Northeast NYMEX oil oil demand oil market oil price oil prices oil speculation oil supplies oil supply OPEC price of crude price of crude oil price of heating oil price of oil renewable energy today US US dollar weather
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
