by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica,
Native Americans on an oil-rich North Dakota reservation have been cheated out of more than $1 billion by schemes to buy drilling rights for lowball prices, a flurry of recent lawsuits assert. And, the suits claim, the federal government facilitated the alleged swindle by failing in its legal obligation to ensure the tribes got a fair deal.
“The city of Williston has announced plans to annex 4,800 acres north of the city.
“City officials say the annexation is needed to keep pace with the region’s oil boom.
“The city currently occupies about 8,100 acres or about 12.6 square miles. That’s up from about seven square miles in 2006. The so-called ‘North Annexation’ would enlarge the city to more than 20 square miles,” via Forum of Fargo Moorhead.
The plan would have boosted railroad’s daily train traffic through Mankato from two or three to as many as 34 mile-long trains — half of them coal-filled trains feeding power plants to the east, half of them westbound empty trains returning to the Powder River Basin.
Photo by Michael Hicks via Flickr taken in Rochester, Minn.
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“Southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin have huge deposits of sand that is perfect for hydro-fracking, a fast-growing mining technique used by the nation’s oil and natural gas industry. Dozens of frac sand mines and processing facilities have opened in Wisconsin. In Minnesota, a few mines have opened and many more are proposed,” via Star Tribune.
“Owners says it would not be fair to penalize them when it’s their tenants whose energy use is high,” via Star Tribune.
“The proposed improvements would allow the Flint Hills Resources refinery, about 20 miles south of St. Paul, to come closer to its processing capacity of 320,000 barrels of crude per day and also reduce emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, spokesman Jake Reint said.
“However, the upgrade will increase the output of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change. The Pine Bend refinery, the largest in Minnesota, currently contributes about 3.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, or 2 percent of Minnesota’s total greenhouse-gas emissions, according to Flint Hills,” via Associated Press.
“Here in the western province of Alberta, energy companies are racing to tap the region’s vast deposits of oil sands. Canada is looking to double production by the end of the decade. To do so it will have to lure more workers _ tens of thousands of them _ to this cold and sparsely populated place. The weak U.S. recovery is giving them a big assist.” via Grand Forks Herald
“When the Mountrail-Williams Electric Cooperative turns on six new substations today, it is a sign of things to come as electrical demand is expected to triple in the Oil Patch,” reports the Fargo Forum.
Photo: Prairie Island/Xcel energy
“As it weighs a possible upgrade to its aging Prairie Island reactors, Xcel Energy Inc. is finding the economics of nuclear power as challenging as the engineering.
“Xcel’s stalled plan to boost output of its nuclear power plant in Red Wing, Minn., faces cost concerns when state regulators later this month consider a scaled-back version of the utility’s original proposal,” reports the Star Tribune Star Tribune.
North Dakota sunset by Ross Perkins
“A federal judge accepted some arguments by North Dakota and some by Minnesota in a lawsuit over the future of new coal power plants and cross-border electricity sales.
via Star Tribune.
“The newest wind turbines gracing the naction’s countryside actually are turning more slowly than their older cousins. The languid pace is the most visible consequence of new-generation wind turbines that are taller, have longer blades, capture more wind and produce more power.” Austin Daily Herald
The Guardian reports on a new report outlining the promise and challenges facing wind energy development.
“Wind energy could provide 20-100 times current global power demand, according to a study published this week in Nature Climate Change. Other studies have shown similar results, but they do not mean that wind power is all we will ever need, says Ken Caldeira of Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution, and co-author of the new study.’We’re always going to need a variety of energy sources,’ Caldeira told the Guardian. Nor does it mean installing enough wind turbines to power the world is practical or even feasible. There are significant technical and resource problems to overcome, not least of which is finding the money to construct millions of turbines, he acknowledged.’It’s a huge scale-up … but not unimaginable. The reality is this is what the global energy generation is right now.’” (Guardian)
