May 23, 2008
The Transportation Department confirmed Fridaythat higher gasoline prices are curbing the number of miles logged on American roadways. The department’s Federal Highway Administration said monthly data shows that the estimated “vehicle miles traveled” (VMT) on all U.S. public roads for March 2008 dropped 4.3...
May 7, 2008
A car company in search of a new fuel that doesn’t rely on corn? That’s the story according to a joint announcement by General Motors Corp. and Mascoma Corp. In a press release dated May 1, the companies said they have partnered to “develop cellulosic ethanol focused on Mascoma’s single-step biochemical conversion...
May 5, 2008
A veto by Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of two proposed 700-megawatt coal-burning coal-fired plants stands. According to news reports, members of the state House rebuffed the effort to override her veto of the power plants. “The Kansas House voted 80-45, falling four votes short of the required two-thirds majority needed in the...
May 2, 2008
Duke Energy filed a report with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission updating the agency on the expected cost of completing a clean coal gasification power plant currently under construction in southwest Indiana. The company upped the cost estimate of the plant by $365 million to $2.35 billion. This translates into a 2% rate impact...
April 18, 2008
On Wednesday of this past week, the Department of Energy (DOE) released a report — first prepared and published in the summer of 2007 by Lynn Wright — titled Historical Perspective on How and Why Switchgrass was Selected as a “Model” High-Potential Energy Crop. The report is a detailed, chronological look at how...
April 16, 2008
Also at the White House press conference on Monday (previously discussed here), Press Secretary Dana Perino was asked about worldwide food shortages and whether President Bush feels “any responsibility himself for that, because he’s been such a hard backer of ethanol,” specifically corn-based ethanol which some...
April 16, 2008
In an article in the new issue of Foreign Affairs (“Blood Barrels: Why Oil Wealth Fuels Conflict”), UCLA political scientist Michael L. Ross argues that while the world has generally grown much more peaceful over the past fifteen years, oil-rich countries are a mess. How do we know the world is more peaceful? Ross looks at...
April 15, 2008
On Monday, the Washington Times shocked observers when it reported that President Bush is poised to “change course and announce as early as this week that he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming.” According to the article, President Bush is supposedly preparing a list of “principles” to...
April 9, 2008
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of the giant Switzerland-based beverage and snack-food maker Nestlé, told news outlets last weekend that if the world goes ahead and uses biofuels to replace 20 percent of the growing demand for oil products there will be “nothing left to eat.” Sound extreme — or maybe just...
April 9, 2008
A new report (Motor Gasoline Consumption 2008) released April 8 by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical arm of the Energy Department, has the look of just-another-government-report-on-oil-prices-and-gasoline-consumption. But the short report — it’s only 14 pages — contains some interesting facts...