Energy

A BP cleanup crew shovels oil from a beach on May 24, 2010 at Port Fourchon, Louisiana (Getty/AFP/File, John Moore)

nytimes.com - by Clifford Krauss - March 13, 2014

HOUSTON — Four years after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, BP is being welcomed back to seek new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

An agreement on Thursday with the Environmental Protection Agency lifts a 2012 ban that was imposed after the agency concluded that BP had not fully corrected problems that led to the well blowout in 2010 that killed 11 rig workers, spilled millions of gallons of oil and contaminated hundreds of miles of beaches. . .

. . . Under the agreement, BP will be allowed to bid for new leases as early as next Wednesday, but only as long as the company passes muster on ethics, corporate governance and safety procedures outlined by the agency.

submitted by Margery Schab

Federal Analysis Says Sabotage of Nine Key Substations Is Sufficient for Broad Outage

wsj.com - by Rebecca Smith - March 12, 2014

The U.S. could suffer a coast-to-coast blackout if saboteurs knocked out just nine of the country's 55,000 electric-transmission substations on a scorching summer day, according to a previously unreported federal analysis.

The study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission concluded that coordinated attacks in each of the nation's three separate electric systems could cause the entire power network to collapse, people familiar with the research said.

A small number of the country's substations play an outsize role in keeping power flowing across large regions.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

News Release - FERC Directs Development of Physical Security Standards

greenbiz.com - by John Finnigan - March 10, 2014

Two seemingly unrelated announcements drew much attention in the electric utility industry recently. First, the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for the U.S. electric utility industry, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) jointly recommended (PDF) changing how utilities should be regulated. Second, Duke Energy announced it will sell 13 Midwest merchant power plants.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

usgs.gov - March 6, 2014

PASADENA, Calif. — In a new study involving researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, scientists observed that a human-induced magnitude 5.0 earthquake near Prague, Oklahoma in November 2011 may have triggered the larger M5.7 earthquake less than a day later. This research suggests that the M5.7 quake was the largest human-caused earthquake associated with wastewater injection.

"The observation that a human-induced earthquake can trigger a cascade of earthquakes, including a larger one, has important implications for reducing the seismic risk from wastewater injection," said USGS seismologist and coauthor of the study Elizabeth Cochran.

(READ COMPLETE NEWS RELEASE)

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Observations of static Coulomb stress triggering of the November 2011 M5.7 Oklahoma earthquake sequence