Summary of the 2010 Energy Conference
EIA and Johns Hopkins
April 6 & 7, 2010, Washington, DC
The annual Energy Conference is usually just sponsored by EIA a branch of the Department of Energy. This year John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) jointly sponsored this conference along with the support of Exxon/Mobil.
The conference was well attended with over 800 participants. The conference was aptly named Short-Term Stresses, Long-Term Change.
There were many speakers addressing the many forms of energy production. It appeared to the writer that everyone was surprised by the recent technological development of shale containing natural gas and that new ways of fractionating this shale with water probably led to over a doubling of reserves in the United States. Because of this new fractionation technology many papers forecasted that natural gas would be utilized primarily for electricity production more and displacing coal and other forms of energy used for electricity production.
There was one whole session devoted to water, indicating that water is required to produce energy and that energy was needed to clean up the water. Some papers indicated that the water is used in the production of energy. This is not true. What happens is that the amount of water remains the same, it only changes form in temperature, contamination or state.
Although there is a perceived short term stress because of reliance on unstable countries for over 1/3 of our energy production along with the pollution that this energy production generates all the papers did not indicate that there would be much of a change in the next 10 to 15 years of our energy production mix. However many talks and papers indicated that there was a lot of government investment in new technology that may change this landscape. One speaker from an oil company stated that their planning horizon was not 20 years but 40 to 45 years. This is how long investment decisions done now will take to pay off in the future.
In future blogs several papers will be discussed and links to these papers will be available