Fuel

Nuclear Fusion: ‘This is the Adventure Part of Venture Capital’

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While eating lunch at a recent energy conference with the usual random selection of delegates and speakers, I asked the co-founder of a leading energy venture capital firm what technology he finds most exciting right now. Without hesitation, he began telling me about his company’s ambitious, longer-term bet on a small nuclear fusion company. He then put me in contact with his partner and co-founder, who helped fill in the details for this story. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 19, 2012 at 8:30 AM

Greenpeace Not Sold On Apple’s Data Center Moves

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Tough week for Apple on the green front. It ran into a buzz saw of ridicule for its decision to withdraw from the EPEAT product registry, and now Greenpeace is saying the company’s ballyhooed ultra-green North Carolina data center amounts to “mostly talk and not enough walk.”

Greenpeace on Thursday did boost Apple’s “How Green Is Your Cloud?” score, moving it to 22.6 percent from the 15.3 percent the company received in April. That puts Apple well ahead of Amazon (13.5 percent) but a long way behind Dell (56.3 percent), Google (39.4 percent) and Facebook (36.4 percent), among others. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM

Plunging EV Battery Prices Seen Boosting Industry

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An expected sharp fall in the price of automotive lithium ion batteries over the next decade could make electric vehicles competitive with conventional cars, raising wide-ranging questions for the future of the electric power and petroleum industries, as well as for car makers, according to a new report from the management consultants McKinsey & Co.

The study predicts prices for the automotive battery packs could drop to about $200 per kilowatt hour by 2020 and $160 by 2025 from $500-$600 currently because of manufacturing economies of scale, lower component prices, and improvements in battery capacity. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 11, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Coal Versus Gas Power Generation Dynamics: Who’s Buying and Who’s Selling?

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With natural gas competing more strongly than ever with coal for power generation due to near commodity price parity, the mergers and acquisitions market for utilities has entered rarely charted territory.

Of the coal or natural gas utility merger and acquisition deals done in the last 18 months, there were probably 10 times that amount worked on but not closed, John Dingle, Partner at management consulting firm Thorndike Landing told the Platts Utility M&A Conference held June 25th – 26th in New York. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 5, 2012 at 11:15 AM

Optimistic Realism in Commercializing Biofuels

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The theme of this year’s recent Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference was “Go Big, Stay Strong,” an allusion to the move of biofuels out of the lab and into commercialization.

But the theme emerging from the remarks of the more than 100 biofuel executives who spoke at the conference was that biofuel companies should execute this “go big” strategy in carefully considered steps rather than in giant leaps and that the key to staying strong is to hedge their bets at every opportunity, including by increasing the range of feedstock, product and financing options. Keep reading →

 /  Published July 3, 2012 at 11:30 AM

What The Frack? Natural Gas Producer Buys Into Solar

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Trucks associated with hydraulic fracturing natural gas wells drive through the countryside on January 18, 2012 in Springville, Pennsylvania.

Consol Energy, which produces billions of gallons of wastewater doing hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale in the Northeast U.S., is turning for help to a startup that’s got a solar-powered method of purifying water. Keep reading →

 /  Published June 28, 2012 at 8:30 AM

Augmenting Natural Gas Electricity Generators with Liquid Fuel Gasification Capability

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 /  Published June 26, 2012 at 1:30 PM

Murphy Oil Evacuates Some Workers from Gulf of Mexico as Storm Approaches

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Murphy Oil Corp. (MUR) is evacuating all non-essential personnel from its operations in the Gulf of Mexico as the likelihood of a tropical storm in the region increases, the company said Friday.

 /  Published June 22, 2012 at 1:15 PM

The Fracked Internet: Data Centers Could Emerge on Gas Fields

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Could data centers someday stand alongside drilling rigs in the Marcellus Shale gas fields? It is an increasing possibility, says an energy expert at an international buildings efficiency firm.

Data centers are sometimes built for the exclusive use of such giants as Google and Facebook, but most of them are intended for hosting companies, which process data for multiple tenants. Keep reading →

 /  Published June 14, 2012 at 8:30 AM

Biofuels: Better for Airplanes, Too?

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Biofuels could be a “game changer” for both military and commercial aviation, says Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Terry Yonkers, because they’re proving to have advantages over petroleum-based jet fuels that go beyond the environment.

Biofuels are produced from plant feedstocks or organic wastes. Public and private research has been focusing on production from non-food sources like algae, camelina, and jatropha, and on sustainable and economic ways to cultivate them. Keep reading →

 /  Published June 13, 2012 at 3:00 PM
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