I see the forecast for California is hot and dry again. PG&E Corp., having emerged last year from bankruptcy brought on by wildfires in northern California, has sold off as summer rolls around and the risk of blazes sparked by powerlines rises once more. About 85% of California is experiencing …

Former energy secretary Dan Brouillette raises a novel answer to the problem of the East Coast relying on a single, vulnerable pipeline for so much of its fuel: permits for more pipelines. To quibble, it’s one pipeline system. Still, he’s right that the Northeast, and East Coast in general, relies…

If the Colonial Pipeline hack is a wakeup call, it feels like we’ve been pushing the snooze button since at least 2003. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7, issued that December, identified “a wide array of critical infrastructure and key resources” as “potential terrorist targets,”…

US and European oil majors inhabit increasingly different planets. On that of Chevron Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp., oil demand remains robust despite the acknowledged challenge of climate change. Where BP Plc, Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Total SE live, meanwhile, renewable energy, batteries and…

“Secretary Blinken says that America becoming a green-manufacturing superpower will help democracy triumph over autocracy. That’s a lot to ask of a solar panel.” Kevin Book of ClearView Energy Partners was talking about the recent hawkish turn in the Biden administration’s cleantech rhetoric…

The chief benefit of the International Energy Agency’s new monthly data on global carbon emissions, published Tuesday, is getting to see just how awful our predicament is on a much more up-to-date basis. In its latest Global Energy Review, the IEA found that Covid-19 touched off the biggest…

Texas’ power crisis was also a gas crisis. The symbiosis of the state’s grid and its pipelines means one can take down the other. A critical element of the state’s multi-dimensional power crisis was centered on gas-fired generation, by far the largest segment of the state’s fleet to trip offline…

If ever a year needed a shot of glass-half-full attitude, it’s 2020. I got it recently from an oil executive. Conversation turned inevitably to the pandemic and 10 million barrels a day of oil consumption — one in ten — going *poof*. Against which they offered this: Despite epic disruption, we…

“You can’t let one segment of society become a sacrifice.” Michael Méndez, an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, was on the phone talking about the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd beneath a white police officer’s knee. But he was also talking about…