“While commercial operations would take time to start, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has struck the first shale gas in a pilot project at Ichhapur in Burdwan, West Bengal. Its drilling started on October 27, 2013, with ConocoPhillips, which helped ONGC in providing technical help in well planning and data evaluation stage. In addition, ONGC has spudded one more well for shale gas and oil exploration in Gandhar area of Cambay basin.”

Shale gas can emerge as an important alternative source of energy in India. Identified shale-gas formations are spread over several sedimentary basins of the country, such as Cambay, Gondwana, Krishna Godavari Onland, and Cauvery. Shale oil is less developed. [1]

Shale gas is important because India wants to add natural gas’s 7 percent share of its energy basket, now filled with coal and oil.…

“Perhaps in a new free-market era the functional equivalent of an anti-Lois Lerner will investigate such rent-seeking entities as the Regulatory Assistance Project. Meanwhile, be warned: RAP may soon be coming to a Public Service Commission or environmental program near you, if they haven’t been there already.”

The Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP) may be one of the most influential “clean energy” not-for-profit organizations you’ve probably never heard of. RAP’s long-standing general policy to keep off the radar screen may be changing as this organization becomes emboldened by their own rhetoric. But behind the scenes, RAP is effectively demoting gas-fired end-use technologies, including cogenerated power capacity, in favor of renewables and forced efficiency that favors electrification.

In the beginning, RAP was involved with electric utility rate-case proceedings before state utility commission’s in the area of “energy efficiency.”…

“Falling commodity prices in general are a good thing in a free market because, as economist Ludwig von Mises emphasized, the sole end of production is consumption. Consumption first, production second. Also the US is a net importer of both oil and natural gas, which means we consume more than we produce. So provincially speaking, the US gains more than it loses from well-to-pump or well-to-burner-tip price drops.”

Business consultant Carlos Lara and I produce a monthly financial publication, the Lara-Murphy Report, which highlights the Austrian School of economics in both academia and the financial markets. The January 2016 issue interviewed Rob Bradley of Houston, Texas, who was trained in Austrian-school economics and is a longtime historian of oil markets. This interview is reproduced below.

Robert L. Bradley Jr. is the founder and chief executive officer of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a 501(c)3 educational foundation with offices in Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C.…

“The month-long decommissioning project was the first in the world for an offshore wind farm, but more projects will soon follow as early turbines reach the end of their two-decade lifetimes.”

– Sonal Patel, “Vattenfall Completes World’s First Decommissioning of an Offshore Wind Farm.” Power magazine, April 1, 2016.

“… many calculations of the much relied on measure of levelized hourly cost assume a 30-year lifetime…. As a result, many publications of levelized costs for wind turbines are understated by a factor of about two.”

– Kent Hawkins (below)

The April 2016 issue of Power Magazine contains a very likely revealing story on offshore wind plants. Given the political correctness of wind power, the revealing story can be interpreted in two ways:

1. It is critical of offshore wind plants, but in a way that is not clearly so, or
2. It is not critical, but the writer was not careful about what was being said.