If you missed Saturday’s WSJ, you missed a lot of energy news:

1.  Ana Campoy and Stephanie Simon reported on a dispute in Oklahoma over a wind farm that may interfere with oil production.  The Osage Nation owns the mineral rights to nearly 1.5 million acres in Osage County, and has since the early 1900s. The Missouri-based Wind Capital Group has leased land to set up windmills from private parties on that same real estate.  The interesting legal question is whether building a wind farm will impair access to the land needed to develop the mineral rights.  And of course the wind farm side of the dispute is pleading urgency, as financing is “contingent on a government tax credit that is only available until the end of 2012.”

Here’s the problem with that:  Those tax credits are production tax credits that only make wind economical — if at all in the face of cheap natural gas — if they are extended every year, not just once.  And even if they are extended, long-range they are doomed.  In a time of abundant fuel for electricity contrasted with extremely expensive oil, the right answer in this dispute is to shelve the wind project and produce the oil, if that’s what it takes.

2.  Bravo to the EU, and specifically the French, for seeking to ban Iranian oil imports in an “unprecedented step against the world’s third-largest oil exporter over its alleged nuclear-bomb program,” according to reporters Laurence Norman, Max Colchester, and Benoit Faucon.  While it’s great to see the French pushing this, it would be nice to hear US policy-makers lending support.

3.  Sharon Terlep reported on the NHTSA investigation into the fire risk posed by the Chevy Volt after “crash tests caued fires in two instances, a development that could be a serious setback for electric vehicles.”  On one level, this makes sense, but should we really worry about brief fires “within hours or days” after “the agency intentionally damaged the battery compartment and ruptured the coolant line”?  Sounds like a bit more than a crash risk, and more like sabotaging a machine to cause a problem.  We’ll be following this story.

4.  And finally, the WSJ editorial page took another shot at the “green jobs” ideology, pointing out that “the real employment boom is taking place in oil and gas.”  Not surprisingly, our recent explosion in domestic oil and natural gas production has been good for workers.  We’ll end on the good news:

“(O)il and gas production . . . now employs some 440,000 workers, an 80% increase, or 200,000 more jobs, since 2003.  Oil and gas jobs account for more than one in five of all net new private jobs in that period.”

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