July 9, 2008
This week, billionaire oilman (and now wind energy investor) T. Boone Pickens has debuted his new energy policy to wean the U.S. off oil. Pickens says he is prepared to use his own money to advance this plan. At the center of his plan is another fossil fuel — natural gas — and renewable energy like wind power. What’s...
July 9, 2008
The Chicago Sun-Times blog reports on the business leaders that have met with Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Businessmen from the energy and auto industry incude: Vinod Khosla (Founder and Partner of Khosla Ventures), G. Richard Wagoner, Jr. (Chairman and CEO of General Motors), Alan Mulally (CEO of Ford Motor Co.), and...
July 9, 2008
Florida Governor Charlie Crist — who recently announced his support for oil and natural gas drilling in the outer continental shelf off the Florida coast — has signed an energy bill aimed at boosting renewable energy sources and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. But the bill contains no timeline or mandatory milestones, so...
July 9, 2008
Alaska has been working with major oil companies and Washington lawmakers to build a pipeline to the lower forty-eight states for years. But it appears an intra-state pipeline capable of moving 460 million cubic feet of natural gas a day may come first. Reuters reported on Tuesday that Governor Sarah Palin, a Republican, is teaming up...
July 9, 2008
The left-leaning Center for American Progress has published an issue alert outlining ten reasons to oppose the construction of new nuclear power plants in the U.S. The list is a round-up of reasons typically given by those who oppose nuclear (high capital costs, where to store waste, access to foreign uranium stockpiles, safety concerns)...
July 9, 2008
The Metaefficient blog has an interesting post about the dominance of solar water heaters in Israel and a great picture of Jerusalem “from above” that shows how the skyline there “often glitters with the shine of the thousands of solar heaters that adorn rooftops.” Amazing pictures — check them out.
July 9, 2008
Rob Routs, Executive Director of Oil Sands, Oil Products & Chemicals at Royal Dutch Shell, gave a speech in Germany on July 4 predicting that biofuels could come to represent 10% of the global fuel mix. Excerpts from the speech posted on Biofuel Review: I think biofuels could grow from a mere one percent of the world fuels mix today...
July 9, 2008
The Cost of Energy blog points us toward a terrific article in the LA Times titled Suburbia’s Not Dead Yet. The piece, written by Joel Kotkin, argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, high gas prices won’t send suburbanites running for the cities. Kotkin takes on the “urban boosters” (a.k.a. suburbia haters)...
July 9, 2008
The DTN Ethanol blog also points out an article in the Baltimore Sun about Republican Reps. Peter Roskam and John Shimkus and their new energy independence proposal (the Energy VISION Act) aimed at cutting American oil imports by 9.5 million barrels a day and eliminating oil imports from the Middle East.
July 9, 2008
The DTN Ethanol blog has a post about Sequesco, a start-up company that is “using synthetic biology to produce advanced biofuels.” The company’s plan is to take carbon dioxide from coal plants and biorefineries and feed it into the firm’s bioreactors, where “large colonies of bacteria would use the...