In the coming weeks, we will see the rollout of the two most-watched entries in the global electric-car race, the Nissan Leaf and the Chevrolet Volt. Both are in the headlines today, and here is the detail that caught my attention: The Leaf, writes Nick Bunkley in the New York Times, will get the equivalent of 99 miles per gallon.

For months, a drumbeat of pessimism has threatened to drown out earlier optimism about the possibility of an electric-car juggernaut over the coming decades. Electric cars and hybrids will overwhelm power grids, we are told. Governments, specifically President Barack Obama and the leaders of most of Europe, Japan, and China, are too far ahead of consumers, warns the Economist. Few will buy a car that could stall on the way home from work, U.S. News predicts. At 24/7 Wall Street, Douglas McIntyre writes, "The dream of a highway populated by electric and other low emissions cars may be no more than hope. If wishes were horses, all the beggars would ride."

And yet, that figure -- 99 miles per gallon, calculated using an Environmental Protection Agency formula in which 33.7 kilowatt hours equals a gallon of gasoline  -- tips the scales a bit in my eyes. We've all been on the showroom floor, and after admiring the design lines of this or that model, we take a sharp look at the sticker, and the prominent display of the premier maintenance cost we will face, which is fuel. Consumer psychology is a tricky thing, but suffice it to say that the number 99 is a lot different from 28 or 36. The EPA hasn't certified what the Volt will get on the road, but it's going to be in the same ballpark, and I think that is going to turn a lot of heads.

In the Financial Times, Ed Crooks writes that Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn is already doing a victory lap, arguing that his $5 billion bet on electric cars has been vindicated. That's a bit premature. But pay attention to the number 99. It's important.

Peak coal in China. First it was rare earths, now it's coal: Ravenous China is using so much coal that it's considering a cap on production of the fuel, writes David Winning in the Wall Street Journal. China accounts for some 47 percent of the world's coal consumption at the moment, and its 2010 imports of the fuel are already higher than all of last year. In fact, here is an area of unaccustomed Chinese global weakness: Wholly fixated on energy security to the extent that it's willing to burn domestic coal with abandon, China is facing a coal deficit -- it will run out of the fuel sometime in the next two to three decades at current rates of consumption, according to Winning's sources. The United States, meanwhile, has some 240 years of reserves, and India has about a century's worth. As a result, China may turn more fully to imports, while capping production at current levels.

The oil boom town of Havana? Moscow was Cuba's closest ally for decades until the Soviet collapse, when Russia simply didn't have the money any longer to support its foreign friends. Now, Gazprom is moving in to fill the gap. The Russian gas giant is joining a half-dozen other companies in a rush to explore for oil in Cuba's waters, writes the New York Times' Andrew Kramer. Since Gazprom has no actual experience drilling offshore, its oil arm, Gazprom Neft, has bought a 30 percent share of acreage controlled by Malaysia's Petronas, which will handle the actual work. Other companies drilling include Spain's Repsol, India's ONGC, Norway's Statoil, Venezuela's PdVSA, and Vietnam's Petrovietnam. China's Sinopec is working onshore in the country. No U.S. companies are present because of a 48-year-old trade embargo. President Barack Obama has been allowing a thaw in relations, but that is likely to slow given the composition of the new Congress, in which more members are opposed to closer contact with Havana.

Peak confusion. The Saudi kingdom is reacting to a fresh spate of reports predicting a waning of global oil supplies and a corresponding spike in prices. In a talk at Rice University, Prince Turki Faisal said that, regardless of China's and India's growing demand, Saudi Arabia will use its massive resources to keep global oil prices stable, according to Business Insider. "As the demand for oil continues to rise, especially in China and India, the kingdom has every intention of meeting that demand," Turki said. His remarks came the same week as an International Energy Agency report that conventional oil production has peaked, and higher prices are on the way.

Tony Hayward's next chapter. Run out of BP after mangling the company's public message during the Macondo oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, former CEO Tony Hayward is setting up a private oil consulting firm, called 3E Capital, writes James Quinn of London's Daily Telegraph. Hayward is also serving on the board of TNK-BP, BP's Russian joint venture.

Tariff-supported ethanol industry boosts exports. The U.S. agricultural lobby and its congressional supporters have long argued that American corn ethanol producers cannot stand on their own feet -- they need a government subsidy, which currently stands at 45 cents a gallon. Yet it turns out that U.S. producers have been churning out so much of the fuel additive that there is a surplus, and they have been exporting this bounty at record volumes, writes Gregory Meyer of the Financial Times. Nearly four in 10 bushels of this year's corn crop will become ethanol fuel, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of that, government mandates add up to 12 billion gallons of the fuel, but the industry is on track to produce some 13.6 billion gallons this year, while Americans are driving less. So it is that, according to government data, the industry had exported some 250 million gallons of ethanol as of Sept. 30, more than double the entire figure for 2009. Rob Vierhout of ePure, a European ethanol trade association, said the subsidized exports are not fair, and that the group may seek to stop the United States from allowing them.

Do you ever get the feeling that some people want the world to run out of oil, really really soon? That runs through my mind sometimes with the flood of peak-oil material at conferences, in books and in the media. Among the latest are a couple of new reports with yet more alarming findings. The headline: We're in trouble.

At the University of California Davis, researchers use a novel approach to reach the conclusion that we will run out of oil a full century before any alternative can take its place, reports Karin Zeitvogel of Agence France-Presse. Needless to say, that's a long time in the dark.

The Davis researchers -- engineering professor Debbie Niemeier and postdoc researcher Nataliya Malyshkina -- published their conclusions in Environmental Science & Technology. Their methodology involves inferring the behavior of oil and alternative fuel companies through their stock prices, and then mathematically reaching the conclusion that oil runs out three or four decades from now -- somewhere between 2041 and 2054 (in their equations, alternative energy scales up only around 2140).

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Big Oil was born in Pennsylvania, and a growing number of the industry's major players seem convinced that its future is there, too -- specifically, in the natural gas deposits of the Marcellus Shale formation. The latest evidence? Chevron just dropped $4.3 billion on it. The company is acquiring Atlas Energy, a Pittsburgh-based independent producer that has an estimated 9 trillion cubic feet of gas to its name in the region, which geologists think may contain at least 262 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas.

Today's deal makes Chevron the third member of the Big Oil elite to seek refuge from an increasingly stormy oil business in the United States' burgeoning shale gas industry. In December Exxon Mobil bought the shale gas company XTO for $41 billion. In May, Royal Dutch Shell picked up East Resources, another company active in the Marcellus Shale, for $4.7 billion. On news of the Chevron acquisition, shale gas stocks are up 3 percent today. The Center for Strategic and International Studies' energy policy expert Frank Verrastro is also bullish on the deal. He emails:

It reinforces Chevron's move into unconventional gas (like Exxon, BP, Total, Shell and Statoil) and positions them well as gas is looked to play a significant role in a cleaner fuels economy. In Atlas's people, Chevron also acquires the expertise in operating in the Marcellus (and elsewhere). Nice package.

A few things are worth noting about the deal. One is how differently it's being received than Exxon's XTO acquisition, for which the company had to endure some grumbling. Critics said the oil giant paid too much and offered too few opportunities for the efficiency gains for which Exxon's acquisitions are known; Exxon's CEO, Rex Tillerson, countered that it was a long-term move, not a short-term one.

The second is what an international enterprise the shale gas business has become. Chevron's deal makes it a partner with an Indian company, Reliance Industries, which was working with Atlas in Pennsylvania. As Verrastro notes, Norwegian giant Statoil is investing in U.S. shale drilling, as is the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC).

The third is that Chevron must not be overly concerned about the risk to their long-term business posed by environmental concerns over shale drilling. The process of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," in which chemical-laced water is used to loose the gas from the shale, is controversial enough to have spawned its own documentary; when Exxon signed its XTO acquisition, it included a clause by which the oil company could walk away from the deal if the technology proved problematic. "Chevron and Exxon, they may know how to manage these risks, bring the best practices to bear," Lucian Pugliaresi, the president of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, says. "They may be the right companies for these projects."

Over at the New York Times, I'm part of a panel discussing whether the United States needs to re-create a homegrown rare-earths industry even though such mining can be highly polluting. One point I make is that so many companies are responding to China's actions that we are actually in danger of a rare-earths bubble in a few years. The trick will be bridging the gap between the current shortage - in which China enjoys a near monopoly -- and a future period of abundance.  Reuters raises the same point in an interview with a clutch of experts. One answer seems likely to be found in countries like South Korea, which says it has found a new rare earths deposit.

There has been talk that China is going to further tighten rare earth exports next year. On Friday, Trade Minister Chen Deming sought to tamp down the alarm by saying that exports will remain the same in 2011 as this year. But that served to confuse the situation as just three days earlier a ministry spokesman said the exports will be cut slightly in 2011. China meanwhile is also mulling tighter environmental rules governing rare earth mining.

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In the weeks before President Barack Obama took his oath of office, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson determined to get a march on the new, less greenhouse-gas-emitter-friendly world that he and almost everyone else believed was coming, in the form of some sort of carbon-trading system. Tillerson was so certain of facing this new set of circumstances that he went to Washington to push publicly for something that Exxon opposed constitutionally: A straightforward tax on carbon.

As we all know now, the political sausage machine on Capitol Hill chewed up cap and trade, and the conventional wisdom now is that if such a system ever does materialize, it may be decade or more down the road. So it's surprising to find that Tillerson's lobbying wasn't just a matter of short term political triage -- he actually believes this stuff.

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The rare earths imbroglio continues. The New York Times' Keith Bradsher has another report on the slowdown of rare-earth exports from China: This time, he wrote, the flow of the strategic elements has slowed to not just the United States but also Europe. The Obama Administration ordered an investigation into the report. Two weeks before the U.S. mid-term elections -- in which the dastardly Chinese are already emerging as a popular bogeyman -- the elements are likely to come up as a political issue.

Sanctions tighten on Iran. The United States succeeded in further tightening oil sanctions on Iran this week, when Japan's Inpex said it would join European companies and halt its relationship with Tehran, which Washington is attempting to push to the negotiating table over its nuclear development program. (The Iranian government, meanwhile, played down Inpex's announced withdrawal from development of the Azadegan natural gas field.) That now leaves China as the last major country with significant energy investments in Iran, John Pomfret reported in The Washington Post.

Did Britain just institute a carbon tax? Earlier this year, Britain's Department of Energy and Climate Change launched a carbon emissions reduction policy that would have levied a pollution charge -- about $22 per ton of carbon -- on Britain's 4,000 biggest energy users, then paid the money back to the same companies in the form of energy efficiency incentives. It was a revenue-neutral approach -- until Wednesday, when the government quietly decided to keep the money, on the order of $1.58 billion a year. David Roberts at Grist explains.

China braces for a flood of LNG. If you want to gauge how much liquefied natural gas a country plans on using in the coming years, look to the shipyards. Case in point: The Chinese shipbuilding company that has built all of China's LNG tankers to date is ramping up its tanker construction efforts in preparation for what it anticipates will be a quadrupling of LNG imports between now and 2015, one of the company's top executives told Bloomberg News on Thursday. China's LNG consumption, if it lives up to the current projections, will have ramifications far beyond the country's shores -- just ask the companies building pipelines in Alaska.

Another $1.5 billion for biofuels in the United States. After the collapse of efforts to pass cap-and-trade legislation and hopes fading for even more modest renewable energy legislation, these are not the best of times for the clean energy industry in Washington -- unless, of course, you're in the biofuels business. Reuters reports that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is throwing another $1.5 billion at the industry in an effort to meet congressionally mandated targets for the production of still-commercially-unproven advanced biofuels by 2022. As for the 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol -- a reliable source of teeth-grinding for Brazil's government and sugar cane industry -- Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says it's probably sticking around, though it's likely to be phased out in the future. File that in the "I'll believe it when I see it" folder.

Chevron drills deeper. Well, that didn't take long -- barely a week after the Obama administration lifted its moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Chevron announced Thursday that it would develop two fields in the Gulf estimated to contain some 500 million barrels of oil. The project is pegged at $7.5 billion, and would involve drilling wells deeper than BP's ill-fated Macondo operation. "In the end, the United States needs the oil and gas and other countries need the oil and gas, and some of the best places to explore are deepwater environments," Bobby Ryan, Chevron's vice president for global operations, told the New York Times' Clifford Krauss.

Luck has not been BP's dominant experience this year. But the company is trying to align the stars as it can by shoring up relations where it needs to, while scaling back where it has to. Case in point: The company has sold oilfields in Venezuela and Vietnam to its volatile Russian joint venture, TNK-BP. That raises $1.8 billion for BP, and throws wood on the fire of its newly warm relations with its sometimes-restive Russian associates.

The four oligarchs who are BP's partners in TNK-BP have had two main complaints over the years. One is BP's reluctance to broaden TNK-BP's reach outside of Russia; the purchases in Venezuela and Vietnam, plus plans to try to buy BP gas assets in Algeria, address that. The other gripe has been cold cash: The Russians want more dividends for their 50 percent stake in the company. BP has addressed that one too, last week announcing a record $4 billion cash dividend to shareholders.

New CEO Bob Dudley is on a similar charm offensive with BP shareholders. A couple of weeks ago, he announced that he will try to restore BP's usual Big Oil-leading dividend next year. The dividend payment, which had been 9 percent, was frozen in June amid the Gulf of Mexico oil spill crisis.

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The geopolitics of energy has rarely seen such a crowding of potentially disruptive events at the same time -- the Texas shale-gas breakthrough; the Qatari liquefied natural gas behemoth; the global push for electric cars; and Iraq's ambitions to multiply its oil production. What separates these from research into renewable fuels such as algae is that they are not notional -- they are really happening. Should they reach their potential and converge, they will shake up the geopolitical order as we know it.

But will they do so? As regular readers of this blog know, I think that these shifts are changing geopolitics as we speak, the most visible evidence being Russia's much-reduced fear factor in Europe. But it's useful to heed cautionary voices -- though even there, dispassionate doesn't always mean unemotional.

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The crazes come upon us with such increasing frequency that it's easy to become jaded. There are the "i's" for instance -- the iPod, iPhone, iPad. Before we know it, many of them become bubbles -- solar panels, mortgage-backed securities, ocean-front Florida real estate. So is President Barack Obama feeding another of these manias with his push for advanced batteries and electric cars? He is getting push back, to be sure. At Slate, for example, Charles Lane says basically that Obama has gone in for rich, snobbish sissies. The Economist says electric cars are "neither as useful nor as green as their proponents claim."

But, in a piece in the new issue of Foreign Policy (just out today), I argue that, notwithstanding whether the surge of electric cars upon us actually gains traction, the race to create and dominate this new industry is very real. And the contestants - every major economy on the planet, and more - think the prize to the winner will be geopolitical power. In a nutshell, China, Japan, South Korea, a bunch of European nations, the U.S. and others think the winner will dominate the last half of this century. All could be wrong, but they would feel worse if they weren't in the race at all. Here is a slide show of some of the cars we are talking about.

At Newsweek, meanwhile, R.M. Schneiderman has two good pieces this week, one on diesel hybrids and another on ARPA-E, the U.S. government's radical energy research laboratory.

Tianjin climate talks get underway -- but does anyone care? A new round of international climate talks opened on Monday, as delegates from 177 countries met in the northeastern city of Tianjin for preliminary discussions on a carbon emissions agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire in 2012. The talks are to be followed by a more formal climate summit in Cancun set to open on November 29, and the Tianjin meeting was a chance for delegates to discuss the complex legal framework and cost estimates that will come with instituting a global emissions reduction scheme. The finger-pointing that plagued the abortive Copenhagen talks last December resurfaced, as Chinese officials accused developed countries of not doing enough to reduce their own carbon emissions and argued that those countries should accommodate the growth of emerging economies such as China. The conference stalled as Beijing repeatedly refused to discuss a global emissions reduction scheme, favoring a system of varying individual commitments. Although China has great ambitions in clean energy development, it has long been reluctant to adopt any globally-binding set of carbon reductions for fear of curbing its economic growth.

Shale gas boom could turn U.S. into exporter. The U.S. is continuing to experience a shale gas boom, as companies sunk $21 billion into the shale gas investments for the first half of 2010, according to a report by consultancy Wood Mackenzie. High-profile investments in gas have also come this week, as Barclays paid $1.15 billion for some of Chesapeake Energy's shale assets and General Electric announced its $3 billion acquisition of Dresser, which makes gas engines used in natural gas production. As new extractive technologies have made shale gas commercially viable, U.S. gas supplies have continued to grow ever larger, pushing prices down to some of their lowest levels in the last decade. But despite the adverse pressures of a domestic gas glut and low prices on U.S. gas production, companies are eager to enter the market for what they see as a potential growth prospect. As Sheila McNulty reports in the Financial Times, that growth could come increasingly from U.S. natural gas exports, as some companies are already looking to refit expensive liquefied natural gas import terminals for export. Natural gas exports would give a boost to U.S. gas producers by raising the price slightly at home and thus discouraging cutbacks in production. While natural gas prices in Asia remain high thanks to strong demand, U.S. gas exports could join those from Russia, Qatar, and Australia in bringing down world natural gas prices for years. The upside from this domestic gas glut? Lower prices could see gas continue to become a highly attractive and cleaner alternative to coal and oil as a power source, though admittedly, as McNulty writes on the FT's Energy Source blog, U.S. energy policy and infrastructure have a way to go before that happens. So for now, look for exports to be the path to profitability for U.S. gas producers.

First U.S. wind farm finally moves forward. The Cape Wind development off the coast of Massachusetts, the first U.S. offshore wind farm project, cleared the last regulatory hurdle this week nine years after it was submitted for approval, as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar signed the federal lease for the project on Wednesday. The project is expected to generate enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, but it had faced stiff opposition from wealthy landowners and local businesses on Cape Cod and neighboring islands. The Obama administration is expecting news of the project's green light is shore up its commitment to green energy, particularly after an accompanying announcement this week that the Interior Department has approved the first solar power plants to be constructed on federal land.

How the Senate energy bill was lost. Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker has a detailed and comprehensive piece out this week chronicling the failure of the Senate's climate change bill. According to Lizza, the Senate and the Obama administration had a golden opportunity to pass a comprehensive climate change bill in 2009 and early 2010, especially as bipartisan support in the Senate seemed likely. Sens. John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsay Graham had formed a working partnership to getting a bill passed. But the bill foundered as the administration's commitment to climate change took a backseat to healthcare reform, and the White House repeatedly gave up concessions -- such as an easing of offshore drilling restrictions in March -- that the three senators had planned on using as bargaining chips to attract Republican support. The bill was further strained by the influence of utility special interests, and as the political atmosphere ahead of the midterm elections turned increasingly partisan, the partnership at the heart of the bill ultimately disintegrated.

Oil continues rally to new highs this week. Crude oil remained above the $80 mark this week, reaching five-month highs above $83 a barrel on Wednesday and Thursday before declining late Thursday. Crude rebounded on Friday, currently trading at $82.56 per barrel in New York. The price climb has been driven primarily by a weak dollar, which hit a 15-year low against the Japanese yen this week. Contributing to the dollar's decline was speculation that the Federal Reserve would act soon to print more money in order to bolster the economy, a procedure known as quantitative easing. The release of the Labor Department's jobs report on Friday, which detailed no change in the unemployment rate for September 2010, only fed that speculation, lessening the appeal of the dollar and boosting the appeal of crude, which are denominated in dollars and become attractive when the currency weakens. As OPEC prepares to meet next week in Vienna, the cartel is unlikely to respond to the recent price rise by increasing production quotas.

Today, the Taliban set 22 NATO fuel tankers ablaze in the southern Pakistani border city of Quetta. That's a day after a fuel tanker was blown up at Torkham, the border post leading into Afghanistan. On Monday, the Taliban set 20 NATO oil tankers afire in Rawalpindi, outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

In all, the Taliban's oil war has gone on for a week straight. This is a page straight out of the histories of the two world wars, in which access to -- and the absence of -- oil was the deciding factor in both making and breaking enemies.

Until now, the attacks have been explained as the Taliban capitalizing on a standoff between the United States and Pakistan over Pakistani casualties in drone attacks, to which Pakistan has responded by closing the border at Torkham, and leaving the fuel trucks exposed. But that doesn't explain today's attack in Quetta.

In fact, as the U.S. military has clearly documented, long  fuel convoys have been among the main sources of American casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The Taliban are Exhibit No. 1 as to why the military is working to untether itself from fossil fuels.

One of the strongest current global trends, as we've been discussing, is the world's growing glut of natural gas. We are swimming in it, and yet more keeps coming. This has both financial and political implications. On the financial side, nations relying on gas income -- Australia and Qatar among them -- have years to wait until prices recover from their current fire-sale lows. On the political side, the ocean of gas is likely to push its way on a much larger scale into China, which will be a much cleaner industrial power than feared.

But how much of a game-changer is this surplus? Could it, for example, seriously curb the world's appetite for abundant and cheap, but dirty, coal? If it does, it will mean an additional political shift, since coal is the key driver of current projections of the rise of heat-trapping gases over the coming decades. John Malone, an analyst with New York-based Ticonderoga Securities, tells me that the chessboard extends to developments in India, East Africa and South Korea, and that a general gas-triggered shift away from coal "seems inevitable:"

On the supply side, there's all the sources you mention, plus the domestic unconventional gas potential, plus the Turkmenistan supply, and further out, as Central Asian infrastructure supplying gas to China expands, you could finally see a real outlet for the world's second-largest gas reserves next door in Iran. And there are going to be plenty of significant gas finds as exploration ramps up in East Africa, where I suspect the Chinese will be bumping up against India and the old-school Japanese and Korean LNG players to get export plants lined up.

On the demand side I think gas has a lot of support as well -- plentiful, diversified supply, relatively cheap and clean (especially important given the anecdotes I've heard about local disturbances over pollution). China is putting serious effort into electric transportation, which gas will support until renewables take hold. They have the right idea about transportation -- take the pain now of building the infrastructure needed to solve the chicken/egg problem, then use every means possible (gas, coal, hydro, solar, etc) to make the power -- an electron's an electron, doesn't matter how it's created. And after all that Beijing gets to brag about Chinese greenhouse gas cuts, all for doing something they'd have done regardless of the emissions reduction. Not a bad deal.

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Moscow and Beijing have spent two decades trying to patch up relations that went bitter long ago in a battle over Communist purity. In the latest installment in the rapprochement, they are using their most hallowed mutual interest -- oil and gas -- to signal that this time bygones really are bygones. In Beijing today, Russia's Dmitry Medvedev agreed to supply a huge volume of oil and gas to China, not to mention coal and two 1,000 megawatt nuclear power reactors. Then came the pipelines. In a ceremony, Medvedev and China's Hu Jintao marked the completion of the first oil pipeline connecting the countries, a 624-mile project. Not to be outdone, another Chinese neighbor, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, debuted new equipment that allows the former Soviet republic to almost double its natural gas supplies to China through a 4,300-mile long pipeline.

This is a multi-dimensional charm offensive. Beijing wants to show that, just because it's quarreling with Japan and the United States, it also can be quite a friendly chap. As for Russia, it wishes to issue a warning to Europe, which has spent much of the last four years loudly proclaiming an intention to wean itself off of reliance on Russian gas. The message: There are other fish in the sea.

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