Pipeline Bans Make Transporting Natural Gas by Rail an Economic Necessity

Natural gas pipelines are having a hard time getting built in the United States despite the advantages that natural gas provides to the public in terms of cost, environmental benefits, and efficiency. Environmentalists and some state politicians, such as Governor Cuomo in New York, are effectively banning natural gas pipelines, which has resulted in moratoria on new gas hookups in parts of New York and Massachusetts. As a first step to deal with this issue, President Trump signed executive orders that direct federal agencies to make changes to remove bottlenecks to natural gas transport in the Northeast and also to streamline federal reviews of border-crossing pipelines and other infrastructure. And, more recently, he started the process to allow natural gas to be shipped in railroad cars that would open new markets for natural gas. When pipeline protestors stopped or delayed oil pipelines (e.g. Keystone XL) from being built, rail became an important additional mode of shipment for oil.

Recently, President Trump ordered the Transportation Department to write a new rule permitting liquefied natural gas to be shipped in tank cars. If rail can be used to ship natural gas, customers in the Northeast, where there are not enough pipelines, will be able to get natural gas hookups. It would also make it possible to use natural gas to power ships and trains and help the railroad industry to offset lost revenues from declining rail shipments of coal. However, it could take more than a year for the Transportation Department to write new rules governing the shipment of liquefied natural gas in tank cars.

Executive Order on Infrastructure

President Donald Trump recently issued two executive orders to promote energy infrastructure, including projects like the long-stalled Constitution Pipeline and a natural gas pipeline in New York. Developers have been trying for six years to build a 124-mile natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York upon winning federal approval in 2014. But, regulators in New York have denied the pipeline a permit, invoking state powers under the Clean Water Act to reject projects if they believe that they are a threat to water supplies and the environment. Because the state is blocking pipelines that would provide gas service to the Northeast, New York is not only impacting its own natural gas supply, but that of the entire Northeast.

Properties of Liquefied Natural Gas

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is natural gas that has been chilled to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 167 Celsius) in a process that removes water, carbon dioxide and other compounds, leaving a fluid that takes up less than 1/600th the space it previously occupied as a gas. It is shipped across oceans around the globe, carried by trucks across the United States and stored in tanks to ensure availability when demand increases.

Trains already move some liquefied natural gas in North America and are statistically safer than transporting LNG in trucks. The Obama administration in 2015 authorized the Alaska Railroad Corp. to ship LNG using portable containers on flatcars. The Florida East Coast Railway, which is powered by LNG, also ships the fuel from a liquefaction plant to ports in the state under a government waiver. And Canada’s transportation department allows LNG to be shipped in tank cars.

LNG does not burn on its own and it does not ignite in its liquefied state. Natural gas dissipates rapidly and is only able to ignite when mixed with air at a ratio of about 5 to 15 percent, unlike other flammable materials carried by rail. LNG does not dissolve in water and, if spilled, generally evaporates, leaving no residue behind. LNG has similar properties to other materials that are currently authorized to be transported by rail such as crude oil, hydrogen chloride and other liquefied gases.

Existing and New Markets

Trump’s plan to move natural gas by rail would allow companies to get products to market quicker thereby expanding existing natural gas markets and opening up new ones. New England is a prime example due to its high winter natural gas demand and limited pipeline capacity, which have caused prices to spike and LNG to be imported from Russia. Instead, LNG could be shipped by rail from the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania to New England.

Rail shipments could out-compete other LNG sources in the region, factoring in the added costs to liquefy natural gas and transport it in tank cars. New England imported six cargoes of LNG at an average price of $8.88 per million Btu in January, even though the same quantity of Appalachian natural gas traded at $3.25 per million Btu. Liquefaction and transport costs of over $5 would still make it economic to liquefy U.S. natural gas and ship it by rail to New England.

Rail transport could similarly ease bottlenecks getting natural gas from the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Rail transport would also help natural gas to be used as a maritime fuel, given international restrictions on high-sulfur diesel that come into effect in 2020. Rail shipments of LNG could enable the creation of new fueling locations at ports in Florida and the U.S. West Coast, without requiring expensive new liquefaction infrastructure.

Conclusion

Shipping natural gas in the form of LNG by rail is one way to maneuver around bans and delays on gas pipeline construction that has occurred in some U.S. states. President Trump recently asked the Department of Transportation to write rules to accomplish it, which can take over a year to develop. LNG shipped by rail to markets in the Northeast will help with price spikes during winter months when demand is high and with moratoria on gas hookups in Massachusetts and New York that are not allowing the purchase of affordable, efficient and reliable natural gas for home heating and other uses of the fuel. Natural gas may soon be riding the rails in the form of LNG because of deliberate obstruction by some elected officials of natural gas pipelines.

The post Pipeline Bans Make Transporting Natural Gas by Rail an Economic Necessity appeared first on IER.

Google Ads Mistakes to Avoid - Whiteboard Friday

U.S. Reached Record Energy Consumption in 2018; Fossil Energy Supplied 80 Percent

Announcing the New Moz SEO Essentials Certificate: What It Is & How to Get Certified

Posted by BrianChilds

“Does Moz offer a certification?”

Educating the marketing community about SEO is one of our core values here at Moz. I worked at an agency prior to joining the team back in 2016, and much of what I learned about how to deliver SEO to our clients came from reading the Moz Blog and watching MozCon videos.

In 2016, one of Moz’s entrepreneurial product managers, Rachel Moore, launched a new catalog of SEO coursework called Moz Academy. This initiative enabled our community to learn faster through structured, interactive workshops. Since 2017, the team has taught SEO to almost 2,500 students through our various class offerings (I looked it up prior to writing this. That number made me really proud).

Across all these interactions, one question asked by our students kept surfacing: 

Can I get a certificate for completing this coursework? 

For agencies, the ability to show a certificate of completion is a way to differentiate themselves amongst a crowded market. I knew from my own experience how valuable having “HubSpot Inbound Certified” and “Adwords Certified” on my LinkedIn profile was — they allowed our team to show proficiency to our prospective clients. For our friends working as in-house marketers, showing a certificate of completion is a way of showing that the student made good on the investment they requested from their managers.

I’m proud to announce that Moz has put in a tremendous amount of effort to create a certificate program that meets this consistent customer demand. Today, Moz is launching the SEO Essentials Certificate through our Moz Academy platform. Check it out below:

I'm ready to check it out!

What is an SEO Certificate?

An SEO Certificate from Moz is all about developing familiarization with Moz tools and covering some of the essential types of projects you can use to hit the ground running. Though attendees of the Moz Academy come from a variety of backgrounds, we built the certification coursework with an Agency or freelance SEO in mind. However, I believe this material is valuable for anyone interested in learning SEO.

The certificate is focused on five core competency areas:

1. Fundamental SEO Concepts (Understand the Fundamentals)
2. Keyword research (Develop Keyword Strategies)
3. Page optimization (Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies)
4. Link building essentials (Build Effective Link Strategies)
5. Reporting on SEO (Create Efficient Reporting Strategies)

By completing this certificate, attendees should be able to articulate for their stakeholders where SEO fits in a digital strategy, how to find and target search engine results pages (SERPs) based on the competitive landscape, and how to approach delivering basic SEO tactics using the Moz toolset.

With this foundation, you'll be able to jump off into more advanced topics such as technical SEO fixes, local SEO, and how to set up your agency for success.

Check out just what's included in the coursework for the Moz SEO Essentials certificate:

1. Understand the Fundamentals

One challenge we observed in the development of SEO coursework: our users often started delivering organic traffic improvements without having a foundational understanding of where SEO tactics fit into a broader digital strategy. Often people will initiate optimization efforts without first conducting effective keyword research. Or, if keyword research was being done, it wasn’t framed within a repeatable, scalable process.

The Understand the Fundamentals course sets the stage for delivering SEO in a way that can be repeated efficiently. In addition to defining essential terminology used in the following classes, you learn how to organize keyword research in a way that produces insight about competition. This relatively simple framework can radically improve targeting of your SEO activities, especially for large enterprises that may compete in several different markets simultaneously.

2. Develop Keyword Strategies

After introducing a framework for conducting keyword research, the certificate program dives into a step-by-step process for creating large keyword clusters and identifying the keywords that will produce the best results. In the development of this coursework, we recognized that many articles and resources talk about keyword research but don’t define a repeatable, scalable process for actually doing it. So many articles about SEO promote hacks that may work for a particular use case, but lack step-by-step instructions. We developed this course to provide you with a practical process that can scale alongside your work.

You’ll learn the importance of mapping keyword clusters to the typical sales funnel customers follow as they move from exploration of solutions to purchase. I’ve presented this material in workshops to large enterprises and small companies — every marketing team that's used this process found it valuable.

By the end of the class, you’ll be familiar with the most valuable features of Moz Keyword Explorer and how to organize lists to help you identify and target the best keywords for your stakeholders.

3. Apply On-Page Optimization Strategies

For many websites, you can find quick wins simply by optimizing page attributes that target strategic keywords. For as much as search has evolved in recent years, we still operate primarily in a world where the text on a page defines the value of that page. This course provides an overview of those attributes and their relative importance.

You'll have a clear understanding of how to use site crawl and page optimization tools to identify, prioritize, and begin optimizing pages based on the keyword strategy they developed in the previous class. Often one of the challenges our students have discovered is that they moved too quickly into optimization without first having their strategy defined. This class will show how strategy and implementation fit together.

4. Build Effective Link Strategies

Link building is another practice that, as an agency marketer, I found difficult to scale. Many articles describe the importance of how relevant links relate to ranking, or hacks that produced a particular result for a page, but not how to create a repeatable process.

As you'll discover in the class, link building is more about process than tools. You’ll understand how to use Moz Link Explorer to isolate the best domains to target amongst the thousands you might consider. I use this process myself whenever launching new websites and it turns a week-long project into a few hours of work. For any agency, where time is literally money, driving down the cost of link analysis with Moz tools can be a big windfall.

5. Create Efficient Reporting Strategies

Whether you're working at an enterprise brand or providing digital marketing services, reporting on outcomes is a big part of your job. Because of the challenges inherent in reporting on attribution with SEO strategies, it's vital to understand both how to set up your data and some common ways to tie SEO projects to broader digital marketing initiatives. This course provides a framework for reporting on SEO that you can adjust to suit your needs. You’ll learn how to use Google Analytics and Moz tools to create actionable reports you can share with your team and stakeholders.

SEO Essentials Certificate FAQs

Here are some of the common questions our community has asked us about the SEO Essentials Certificate during the development process.

How do I get SEO Certified?

Moz offers the SEO Essentials Certificate program via the Moz Academy platform. When you visit Moz Academy, you will see the SEO Essentials Certificate program listed in the catalog. All you have to do is select the course and proceed through the login process.

How long does the SEO Essentials Certificate take?

The Moz SEO Essentials coursework consists of several hours of online instruction, as well as a few quizzes and a final exam. The coursework is developed to be completed within a week of starting. Some attendees have completed the coursework in two days, but for most folks, it takes about a week.

Will I get an SEO certificate and LinkedIn badge?

Yes! We've developed a way for you to get both a SEO certificate you can print and a LinkedIn badge to show you've completed the program. When you pass the final exam, you'll find links to both of these assets and instructions on how to generate them.

How long is the SEO Essentials Certificate valid?

The Moz SEO Essentials Certificate is valid for one year after registration. When the certificate expires, you'll need to retake the coursework to maintain your certification. We set the expiration at one year because SEO changes a lot! (Seriously — just take a look at the Google Algorithm Change History.) We want to make sure that you have the most up-to-date information when displaying your credentials online and to stakeholders.

Sign me up!

Find yourself with questions not addressed in this post? Drop them in the comments and we'll do our best to get them answered.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Pennsylvania Should Choose Markets Over Mandates

There are currently bills working their way through the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate that would provide subsidies to help prop-up unprofitable nuclear power plants in the state. Senate Bill 510 and House Bill 11 would declare nuclear energy to be a carbon-free energy source, allowing it to receive benefits under the state’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard (AEPS).

Currently, Pennsylvania’s existing Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard program requires 18 percent of electricity to come from renewable energy sources by 2021. Those sources are currently split into two tiers that carve out guaranteed market shares for different types of renewable energy. The new legislation would create a third tier for nuclear energy credits and require distribution companies to purchase those credits for half of their electricity sold.

Stop compounding government intervention

These new proposals come in the wake of previous efforts to achieve similar policies at the federal level. Last year, the Department of Energy made two efforts to provide cost recovery (subsidies) for at-risk coal and nuclear power plants, however, these programs never got off the ground. Regardless of the energy source, government should not be providing subsidies to power plants that are failing to turn a profit. Now that the debate has shifted from the federal to the state level, it’s worth revisiting the arguments against providing subsidies to nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania.

Senate Bill 510 and House Bill 11 should be rejected because, by requiring utilities to purchase energy from nuclear power plants at a higher cost, legislators would be further distorting the price mechanism for power generation in the state, replacing it with a system that grants the nuclear energy industry a guaranteed share of the market. This sort of intervention will introduce a number of unintended consequences, which Katie Tubb of the Heritage Foundation outlined in a report earlier this week. Here, I’ll repeat a few of her main points and then add some of my own concerns about these proposals.

First and foremost, people who would like to see nuclear energy technology develop going forward should strongly resist any policy that undermines competition in the market because market competition is the most effective means of driving innovation. By introducing this new program of mandates and thus granting the recipients of the subsidy a guaranteed market share, legislators will be undermining competition in the generation market in Pennsylvania. This will diminish the pressure placed on the power plants receiving the subsidy by their competitors to innovate and reduce costs.

This new proposal would also diminish the environment for future investment in Pennsylvania’s market. It sends a clear signal that in order to compete in Pennsylvania, future investors will have to invest heavily in the political process in order to overturn entrenched nuclear power plants that are guaranteed a certain percentage of the market. Obviously, this represents another barrier to innovation by raising costs to enter Pennsylvania’s market. But another, less discernible, impact of this policy is the spillover effect it will likely have on the political and business culture within the state more broadly. If this new subsidy program is enacted, politicians and businesses in other industries that are observing the investment landscape in Pennsylvania may recognize the special privileges that are awarded to the nuclear energy industry through this program and, through lobbying and other forms of political exchange, try to establish a similar regulatory framework that favors their own business or industry. In other words, cronyism in one part of your economy bleeds over to the rest as individuals working within that system learn from the “success” of other industries and firms.

Finally, firms that receive subsidies, either through direct transfers or indirectly through energy mandates, tend to engage in riskier behavior as they do not expect to have to bear the full costs of future losses. If market participants are not paying the full costs for their mistakes, over time, this causes risks to accumulate, creating an unstable environment where firms are no longer able to adapt to changing price signals brought about by market dynamics.

On the high regulatory costs for nuclear

Despite the fact that a recent report suggests that there is no merit to Exelon’s claim that these power plants are in financial trouble, there are many people who will be quick to point out that the nuclear industry faces an unfavorable regulatory climate and that this is part of the reason why the power plants in question are struggling financially. It might also be the case that wind and solar subsidies are playing a role in undermining the profitability of the nuclear power plants in question. There is reason to be sympathetic to these positions, however the proper response should be to work towards removing the regulatory barriers that raise the costs of producing nuclear energy, not to subsidize the industry altogether.

If advocates of nuclear energy are sincere in their concern about regulatory costs and wind and solar subsidies, then they should take a principled stand against all subsidies and promote a policy framework that favors the deregulation of the entire energy industry. Until that happens, free-market advocates should remain skeptical of most nuclear energy firms as their behavior suggests that they are content with the status quo. For politicized energy companies such as Exelon, the high regulatory costs prevent new competition from entering the nuclear energy industry and their politically protected market share positions them to demand subsidies when they run into trouble.

The way forward 

If nuclear energy wants to truly live up to its promise, then the industry must stop pursuing political advantages at the first sign of adversity and embrace a business culture of permissionless innovation going forward. By demanding subsidies and a guaranteed market share, nuclear energy companies such as FirstEnergy and Exelon have made it clear that they have no interest in competing in a market economy. The people of Pennsylvania should recognize the obvious injustice of transferring hundreds of millions of dollars worth of subsidies to prop up the failed projects of a group of Fortune 500 companies and demand that the nuclear energy industry and their state and local politicians give up their plans to undermine the state’s competitive electricity market.

The post Pennsylvania Should Choose Markets Over Mandates appeared first on IER.

Give it up for Your MozCon 2019 Community Speakers!

Posted by cheryldraper

High fives and fist bumps for each and every person who took the time to pitch their hearts out for this years’ six community speaker spots — a whopping 130 entries were submitted!

Our selection committee read, watched, and researched, whittling things down to a shortlist of top contenders and then read, watched, and researched some more to determine if a potential speaker and their talk would be a perfect fit for the MozCon stage.

We take lots of things into account during our review, but ultimately there are three main factors that determine our final selections:

• Strength of the pitch (e.g., value, relevance to the audience, etc.)
• Can the content reasonably be delivered in the time allotted?
• Does it fit with overall programming and agenda?

After much deliberation, we’re confident these six community speakers are going to be a great addition to the MozCon Stage.

Grab a seat and see for yourself!

Ready to meet your MozCon Community Speakers?

Areej AbuAli, Head of SEO at Verve Search

Fixing the Indexability Challenge: A Data-Based Framework

How do you turn an unwieldy 2.5 million-URL website into a manageable and indexable site of just 20,000 pages? Areej will share the methodology and takeaways used to restructure a job aggregator site which, like many large websites, had huge problems with indexability and the rules used to direct robot crawl. This talk will tackle tough crawling and indexing issues, diving into the case study with flow charts to explain the full approach and how to implement it.

Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Search at Microsoft

What Voice Means for Search Marketers: Top Findings from the 2019 Report

How can search marketers take advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of today's voice assistants? Diving into three scenarios for informational, navigational, and transactional queries, Christi will share how to use language semantics for better content creation and paid targeting, how to optimize existing content to be voice-friendly (including the new voice schema markup!), and what to expect from future algorithm updates as they adapt to assistants that read responses aloud, no screen required. Highlighting takeaways around voice commerce from the report, this talk will ultimately provide a breakdown on how search marketers can begin to adapt their shopping experience for v-commerce.

Emily Triplett Lentz, Content Strategy Lead at Help Scout

How to Audit for Inclusive Content

Digital marketers have a responsibility to learn to spot the biases that frequently find their way into online copy, replacing them with alternatives that lead to stronger, clearer messaging and that cultivate wider, more loyal and enthusiastic audiences. Last year, Help Scout audited several years of content for unintentionally exclusionary language that associated physical disabilities or mental illness with negative-sounding terms, resulting in improved writing clarity and a stronger brand. You'll learn what inclusive content is, how it helps to engage a larger and more loyal audience, how to conduct an audit of potentially problematic language on a site, and how to optimize for inclusive, welcoming language.

Greg Gifford, Vice President of Search at DealerOn

Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and Q&A

Google Posts and Questions & Answers are two incredibly powerful features of Google My Business, yet most people don't even know they exist. Greg will walk through Google Posts in detail, sharing how they work, how to use them, and tips for optimization based on testing with hundreds of clients. He'll also cover the Q&A section of GMB (a terrifying feature that lets anyone in the community speak for your business), share the results of a research project covering hundreds of clients, share some hilarious examples of Q&A run wild, and explain exactly how to use Q&A the right way to win more local business.

Joelle Irvine, Director, Marketing & Growth at Bookmark Content and Communications

Image & Visual Search Optimization Opportunities

With voice, local, and rich results only rising in importance, how do image and visual search fit into the online shopping ecosystem? Using examples from Google Images, Google Lens, and Pinterest Lens, Joelle will show how image optimization can improve overall customer experience and play a key role in discoverability, product evaluation, and purchase decisions for online shoppers, while at the same time accepting that image recognition technology is not yet perfect. Learn actionable tactics around image optimization, including image framing, categorizing, structured data, and indexing to better optimize for visual search.

Marie Haynes, Owner at Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.

Super-Practical Tips for Improving Your Site's E-A-T

Google has admitted that they measure the concept of "Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness" in their algorithms. If your site is categorized under YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), you absolutely must have good E-A-T in order to rank well. In this talk, you'll learn how Google measures E-A-T and what changes you can make both on site and off in order to outrank your competitors. Using real-life examples, Marie will answer what E-A-T is and how Google measures it, what changes you can make on your site to improve how E-A-T is displayed, and what you can do off-site to improve E-A-T.

Be sure to check out the initial agenda here to get a taste of all the MozCon goodness we've got in store for you.

Snag your ticket!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Solar Energy International (SEI) and Red Cloud Renewable Launch Tribal Train the Trainer Program

SEI is proud to once again join hands with Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center (RCR), bringing advanced solar PV expertise, with an accessible technical curriculum that puts power into the hands of learners.  Our ‘Train the Trainer’ model creates a new web of skillful solar trainers, equipped to initiate solar teaching and related projects in their own communities.

Collaboratively, with generous support from All Points North Foundation, the project will provide in-depth training, equipment, curriculum, and mentored co-teaching to a cohort of Native Americans selected from across the Great Plains tribes.  Learning will take place both at SEI’s Colorado campus, as well as Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center.  Participants will also have the opportunity to sit for NABCEP certification, and expand their skills and opportunity networks.  In the words of Henry Red Cloud, RCR Manager, “additional hands-on training is needed for these solar warriors to understand and implement the technical aspects of solar electric within their communities as they increase adoption and scale of solar PV.”

RCR is one of the first 100% Native American owned-and-operated renewable companies in the nation. It is located on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  Their campus includes the Sacred Earth Lodge, which welcomes visitors, and provides ongoing learning related to green building, food sovereignty, and much needed solar furnaces.

There are 567 federally recognized Native American and Alaskan Native Tribes in the United States. In these communities, native people suffer from extremely high rates of poverty and unemployment. On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home to Henry, Red Cloud Renewable and the Oglala Lakota, over 40 percent of residents live without access to electricity.

We thank All Points North Foundation for believing in systems-change through solar potentials.  Supporting skill development through Train the Trainer creates a powerful opportunity to improve quality of life, create jobs, and expand renewable energy.  Read more: http://bit.ly/2IzzZWh

#AllPointsNorthFoundation

 

The post Solar Energy International (SEI) and Red Cloud Renewable Launch Tribal Train the Trainer Program appeared first on Solar Training - Solar Installer Training - Solar PV Installation Training - Solar Energy Courses - Renewable Energy Education - NABCEP - Solar Energy International (SEI).