UPDATES

Good morning!

There will be no shortage of oil/gas — ‘get over it’

Last August 16th, UC Davis expert Amy Myers Jaffe spoke at the 14th Biennial Conference on Transportation and Energy.

Ms. Jaffe had sobering words for the gathered environmentalists: if you were waiting for the world to run out of oil, it won’t!

In fact, high oil prices have sparked a technology boom in oil and gas exploration.

The result? Nearly unlimited availability of fossil fuels – if we are willing to pay the price.

According to Jaffe, “we could actually drill a hole in every inch of the United States and have plenty of oil and gas at a really low price, if you want to maintain a fossil fuel-based American lifestyle”. (more excerpts below.)

That’s what this fracking revolution means. It means that fracking is coming to your backyard; and we can’t just hope that it will go away.

That’s why it is so critical to put in place technologies like OriginOil’s to lessen the environmental impact.

Meanwhile, biofuels…

You’d think that, with all of the excitement about cheap oil and gas, biofuels would lose out.

But Lux Research reports that “novel fuels” are now taking off, and will show an annual growth rate of 18.7% from now through 2017 (see graphic below).

Great hopes for sustainable sources like waste and woody biofuels and, of course, algae!

Speaking of algae...

We are now installing a demo algae harvester at the National Algae Association’s showcase growth system in Houston!

We’ll be reporting on this development at the National Algae Association workshop in the San Francisco area on February 28th. Be there!

Long-Term Growth in Today’s 53.2 BGY Biofuel Market will be Led by Novel Fuels and Novel Feedstocks (Lux Research)

Enjoy the rest of your week!

Riggs and Team

Riggs Eckelberry
President & CEO
OriginOil, Inc. (OOIL)

Excerpts from Amy Myers Jaffe's speech at the 14th Biennial Conference on Transportation and Energy:

So there was this premise that somehow—and I think a lot of people in the environmental movement felt the same way—if we could just have this price-level playing field, if the price of oil were $100 or $200 a barrel, then that would enable renewable energy, and the energy transition would happen naturally…
In places like the United States and in Europe, we weren’t feeling like flying across the globe to diplomatically seek a lower oil price because we thought it would enable a transition to alternative fuels…

What this means is that as a society, we are going to have to make decisions not on the basis of scarcity. Once we can produce oil and gas [through fracking] from the source rock, it is not in the time frame of our generation that we will “run out” of oil…

One of the things we’re facing in terms of social dislocation is that this oil from source rock can be produced on almost every inch of this country. As Americans, we’re used to using as much oil as we want. We feel comfortable having 350 million cars on the road and using them as much as we want….

But all of a sudden, now that the oil production for our country can be all around our country, people are saying, “I don’t want to have industrial activity near my farm in Pennsylvania or where I live in upstate New York, so we have to do something!” And we do have to do something because we don’t want to drill a hole in every inch of the United States. But the reality is that given the breakthroughs in the oil industry, we could actually drill a hole in every inch of the United States and have plenty of oil and gas at a really low price, if you want to maintain a fossil fuel-based American lifestyle…

This, to me, is the real challenge of the transition: understanding that we could continue with business as usual, and we cannot count on the high price of fuel in the business as usual as constraining us. What we know now is that however much public money that we will invest socially in other kinds of fuel, we’re going to have the same amount of capital poured into oil and gas because it is so available, and the financial reward of producing oil and gas will continue to be high, especially given the unrest in the Middle East. There is so much money to be made selling this oil because the world will use it. The momentum of that is huge and will be difficult to overcome.

(For the full speech, click here.)