An Energy Eye on Russia: Week 4/ Russian Police Raid BP Venture (Reuters)

The theory is that Russia wants "to buy out the Russian billionaire shareholders in the venture [in TNK-BP, a venture of BP and some billionaire Russians] to become a partner of BP in a bid to further tighten the grip over energy resources."
For those of you who weren't paying attention, because it wasn't exactly news...

"Gazprom's chairman Dmitry Medvedev won Russia's presidential election by a landslide earlier this month and has promised to follow the policies of his mentor Vladimir Putin, the architect of renationalisation of the oil industry of the past year."

Apparently the Government gave two separate reasons for the search at different times, the first: a criminal investigation into an oil firm previously related to the Russian shareholders and not BP. The second: an investigation into TNK-BP's management.

Some similarities:

"Searches and document seizures became commonplace during a campaign against oil firms YUKOS, which was brought to its knees under a multi-billion dollar back tax claim, which led to its bankruptcy and asset sales at state-forced auctions."

"In February, police raided the headquarters of Slavneft, which TNK-BP co-owns with Gazprom, and also confiscated documents in a five-year-old tax evasion investigation."

BBC:

"The searches have renewed fears that the Russian government wants greater control of foreign-owned energy assets.
......
Last year, TNK-BP was forced to sell its stake in the Kovykta gas field at a discount price to Gazprom.
In 2006, Shell was forced to cede control of its Sakhalin gas field to Gazprom.
"We will co-operate with the authorities but we do not know what they were looking for or why they were there," a BP spokesman said."

Ah well. Good old Russia. Search and seizure. So much for Europe. Further emasculated.

An Energy Eye on Russia: Week 4/Who cares about international relations when we have pirates?

So Russia and the U.S. are making Uranium deals and Russia is pledging to provide consistent energy supplies. Big Deal. There are PIRATES in Somalia! They stole a TUGBOAT!

The tugboat is part of a Gazprom led consortium including Shell and Mitsubishi that is building the Sakhalin oil and gas projects (1-4.) This tugboat is apparently part of Sakhalin II oil and gas project. What I have gleaned.. this means a large LNG Plant (that can supply 8% of the world's Natural Gas) and an Oil Export terminal. The problem is that the construction of these projects and their pipelines in the ocean habitat threatens to cause extinction of endangered gray whales and fishing areas. The World Wildlife Fund finds the project in breach of environmental regulations. So the environmental groups are in an uproar... which means..

Even Better.


Environmental Pirates Steal Tugboat!!

Well no, it's the "Ocean Salvation Corps - a group of 'Somali nationalists who took it upon themselves to protect the country's shores.'" Much less exciting. But apparently they take care of the crew and just want to stop destruction of habitats. YaY Vigilantes!

Let's hear some demands next time.

Look at these maps!

Chapter 7 of "Hot Politics" mentions "The National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts", a document published then suppressed in 2000, presumably for fear of reactions to its warnings. The portion of this document that I found most striking, and most direct to address lingering questions I have had of the predicted effects of climate change, is linked to the title of this post.

My first job out of undergrad consisted almost exclusively of using finite element analysis to model how heat, current, and stress work their way through simple shapes, and what the effects might be, given the material properties. Day in and day out I was building models and running simulations, then trying to figure out if what they told me was anywhere near the truth. Sometimes the excitement of having a model run successfully made it very hard to admit that the results were unlikely.

So when I consider what complexity might be involved in modeling the climate of the earth and predicting to any certainty its future, I am overwhelmed with questions. This document gives a mechanical engineer, and I assume a lot of other laymen, a fighting chance at understanding the scientists' predictions.

We are given an example of a simple model. It includes: ice, water, clouds, and land; evaporation, runoff, heat exchanges, and of course, solar insolation. I wonder what the boundary conditions are, what the predictive equations are, how many versions of the eventual plots were produced and how the "true" ones were selected.

Regardless of which of the models presented actually come to fruition, several possible effects make my skin crawl. We have all seen the predictions that average temperatures will rise somewhere between 1 and 6 degrees F in the next 100 years. The peaks and valleys of that average are my current preoccupation. One map shows the July heat index for most of the U.S. increasing by more than 25 degrees F. Remember that mostly 100 degree summer in 2006? But then there is the matter of summer soil moisture, which considers Austin may become a veritable swamp. It looks like a lot of the quantities and types of trees will change, mostly increasing, but Florida will lose those beautiful pine forests, and the Rocky Mountains will sacrifice its glorious Alpine meadows.