Here is a roundup of some of this week’s more interesting energy deals: The BP-led Shah Deniz consortium signed a 25-year sales agreement for more than 10 billion cubic metres per year of natural gas from the second phase of development at the giant Shah Deniz field offshore Azerbaijan. Shah Deniz will deliver gas directly… Keep reading →
Global investment in sustainable and cleantech businesses has softened during the last couple of years, and there are multiple reasons for the trend. In the US, an investment banker says, one of the key reasons is that government subsidies are scaring away capital. But the banker has detected a growth area that could become a significant driver for clean-tech and sustainability deals.
Most of the major investment banks don’t have stand-alone sustainability practices. But there’s a fair number of middle-market banking firms focused on clean tech and sustainability. Keep reading →
Information technology is the most powerful tool to accelerate cleantech adoption, but is being blocked by energy regulation developed during the industrial revolution, a leading investor told a Silicon Valley conference last week.
Sunil Paul, founding partner of Spring Ventures, which has invested in social networking
company LinkedIn and biofuels startup Solazyme, said: “Our entire regulatory regime is built for the industrial revolution and we have a different way of working today that requires a different code.” Keep reading →
A legal storm in the energy industry that has been rumbling in the distance for three years is likely to come to a head this summer as petroleum refiners, ethanol producers and Washington lobbyists pursue their battle with state agencies in Sacramento.
The latest flare in this clash between a powerful pantheon of US energy titans and federally influential regulators in California occurred last week, after a temporary injunction was lifted by a US court of appeals in San Francisco. Keep reading →
Developers of new advanced biofuels technologies are evaluating the entire energy production, service and delivery chains for commercial opportunities.
OriginOil’s ambitions are much larger than its small IPO from last year’s registration suggests, and the company claims it has pioneered technology that will revolutionize the service industry for advanced biofuels as Halliburton and Schlumberger had done in the petroleum and petrochemical industries. Keep reading →
Golden Gate Bridge
Over the next decade, a battle over the next generation of oil will be waged not in a Middle Eastern Gulf, but San Francisco’s Bay. Keep reading →
Financing is the first and final word on solar projects. And in these straitened economic times, one company in San Francisco’s Bay Area is aiming to spark a rooftop solar revolution–one tile at a time.
Solar Mosaic, based in Berkeley, will this week unveil its pilot community PV program in neighboring Oakland. Instead of turning to expensive lending rates at major banks, Solar Mosaic’s financing adopts a crowd-sourcing model through the sale of “tiles,” each worth $100. Keep reading →
