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The notion of freeing ourselves in the US from foreign oil is a bumper-sticker type slogan that may as well be as old as the original automobiles. Another popular and populist refrain of late is that we can do so by boosting domestic renewable energy and making transmission systems improvements. But US power statistics put the lie to that idea, at least in the near term.

Unlike many Third World countries, oil use in US power plants is negligible. The share of power generated from petroleum liquids of the country's net generation capacity was 1.1% for 2008 through November, according to an Energy Information Administration monthly report issued earlier this month. Therefore adding renewable energy in the power sector has little to directly do with cutting oil demand.

US President Barack Obama's 6-hour trip to Ottawa on Thursday, while brief and lacking in the pomp and circumstance normally associated with presidential trips abroad, will arguably be one of the most important of the early period of his presidency.

Canada is the largest trading partner of the US, particularly in the energy and transportation industries. So how the two countries work out some particularly difficult issues running the gamut from the so-called "smart grid" technology in the power sector to carbon sequestration and cap-and-trade will have dramatic impacts in both countries for years to come.

The strongest advocates of renewable energy do seem to have one common, unstated theme in their arguments. Their tendency is to assume that the cost of extracting hydrocarbons, and the efficiency of using them, are stationary targets. By contrast, efficiency gains in wind, solar and other forms of renewables have been impressive, and are likely to continue to gain.

There's a problem with that analysis. There continues to be improvements in the old reliables of oil, natural gas and coal.

With feedstock prices at sky-high levels, alternative fuel producers had a lot to think about at the National Algae Association forum outside Houston this week.

The standing-room-only gathering that aimed to showcase the latest algae-for-fuel developments, attended by academics, algae growers, technical researchers and would-be financiers, proved that it's exhausting just to think about some of the problems that still need to be solved in this promising new niche of the alternative energy landscape. But in the curious realm of alternative fuels that insinuates biology into the purely physical sciences, there are no shortage of visionaries pursuing dreams of energy alchemy and eventual riches in a crude-strained future.

Hybrid vehicles have gone mainstream in just a few years, with soaring gasoline costs boosting demand for more energy-efficient cars and sending Priuses and Civics off the lots in droves.

Off on the "lunatic fringe" of the hybrid crowd were hobbyists and tinkerers who wanted more bang from their rechargeable buck. These folks toiled in their garages to fill their already-limited trunk spaces to the gills with batteries, which could be hooked up to the house power supply at night to recharge...the so-called "plug-in" hybrid.

At my very first job at a newspaper, which was actually an internship, I was sent out on the second day to cover a presentation touting the investment opportunities of worms. The pitchman talked about the wonderful capabiities of worms, how they could attack a pile of sewage, chomp their way to bliss and excrete something like soil, saving governments millions in their sewage treatment costs. This was about 30 years ago, so the details are a bit vague at this point about just how it was that worms performed their magic.

Despite that introduction to the news business, I kept at it. So I couldn't help but think of that worm presentation when I read this story.

This story in The New York Times today was entertaining, and shows that even crooks react to price signals sent out by the market.

I have to read the Straits Times, Singapore's national daily broadsheet, pretty much every day. It's part of my job, and like a lot of reporters it's not part of my daily life that I give a lot of thought to, most of the time.

I don't keep tabs on the ST so much to stay on top of energy news, because if Platts gets regularly scooped by the Straits Times in energy, we have bigger problems. But it is a handy insight into the mood of Singapore on energy issues, and particularly the mood of the government running our city state.

It is difficult to walk out of the peak oil meeting here in Houston and not feel miserable.

Yes, there are some attendees who might be considered a bit offbeat, ex-hippie types who see their long-held dreams of "the end of oil" nearing reality.

But the majority of the 500+ attendees at the US meeting of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil are not in that category. They are geologists, economists, professors, consultants, economists. And no matter who steps up to the podium to make a presentation, the forecast is grim.

The Cape Wind controversy is a satirists' delight. A project that has long been the type of energy development that everyone says they favor -- clean, not right next door to anyone, in an area that is energy-deficient -- should be supported by virtually everyone.

But it's not. Local residents, many of them wealthy and prominent, have banded together from various areas around Nantucket Sound to fight Cape Wind, which would install 130 turbines in the sound to produce, at peak, 420 Mw of electricity from the winds blowing over the sea off Cape Cod.