CleanTechnica

East Coast states gearing-up for a push to develop “energy” on the Outer Continental Shelf.

Just days after California lawmakers rejected a proposal that would have approved the first new offshore oil leases in state waters in forty years, industry organizations are lining-up on the East Coast to tout the economic benefits of offshore oil and gas development. According to a new report (pdf) released by the Southeast Energy Alliance—a consortium of utilities, oil and gas companies, manufacturing associations, and major power purchasers—North Carolina alone could receive up to $577 million annually in revenue sharing payments from offshore energy development.

But even though the Department of Interior recently reported that the shallow coastal waters of the Mid-Atlantic—including those in and around North Carolina’s Outer Banks—are ripe for large-scale wind energy development, the report defines energy solely in terms of fossil fuel. Read the rest of this entry »

Israel National News reported in early July that reserves of natural gas discovered near Haifa are larger than initially estimated, and could be enough to make the whole country energy self-sufficient for two decades.

CEO of Delek Energy, Yitzchak Tshuva, “Israel today is independent – completely independent with blue and white [Israeli-made] energy.”

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Cambridge-based Joule Biotechnologies has come out of the dark today to announce a radical technology designed to mimic photosynthesis using bio-engineered micro-organisms to make ethanol fuel from carbon dioxide and sunlight.

Because of the abundance of these raw materials, Joule Biotechnologies should be able to make ethanol economically, sustainably and at stable prices.

Prices would be competitive with fossil fuels at $50 a barrel.

By using materials with an unlimited supply, it solves most of the sustainability issues associated with making ethanol with corn, switch grass, or other plant materials. Joule’s system does not require raw materials in short supply like fresh water and agricultural land like traditional biofuel production. Quite the opposite.

An ideal “farm” might be a coal-powered electricity plant in Texas that’s belching out carbon dioxide in the sunshine.

Each acre can produce more than 20,000 gallons of ethanol or hydrocarbons annually; far more than recent algae estimates, which Sims says come in around 2,000 gallons an acre. It can make transportation fuels at $50 per barrel or less; rivaling current gas prices, but without the pollution or greenhouse gases of fossil fuel.

Here’s how it works:
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You’ve seen the headlines:

Cows Operate Power Company as Side Business
Onion Farmer takes $2.5 Million to Bank For Electricity Production
More Carbon Sequestration Needed: Farmers Paid to Not Plant

Every day there’s more news of the alternative energy that farms can make. From cow poop. From crop residues. From onion skins. From chicken feathers. From wind royalties. From solar power.

But you read cleantechnica.

Of course farmers will benefit from the climate bill. HR2434 is designed to make it cheaper to switch to low carbon energy than to keep using fossil fuels that destroy our future.

Farmers; however, are stuck with Fox News and Rush and the Heritage Foundation and CATO. They are told

Your energy cost will soar under socialist Al Gore climate bill!

So they worry. What Fox News and Rush won’t let them know is that…
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You’d think this would be a “Buy American” type of issue. Growth Energy, an ethanol industry trade group, wants to raise the content in gasoline from 10 percent to 15 percent in the United States.

The ethanol industry, of course, is firmly behind the proposal, made to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ethanol plant operators say a boost would bring jobs and investment on U.S. soil. Read the rest of this entry »

It looks as if Geothermal power could be the genie let out of the bottle to provide us with almost staggering amounts of electricity at just 0.04 cents per kwh.

Geothermal could be cheaper than fossil fuels, according to a study just published at NYU Stern. Yet, strangely, geothermal received the fewest Federal DOE dollars invested in R&D over the last 8 years.

Hm. I wonder why that was?

The first study to compare efficiency improvement of various renewable energy alternatives in response to government funding found  that geothermal has yielded the highest returns per R&D dollars invested by the Department of Energy.

NYU Stern Professor Melissa Schilling; an expert in strategic management and technology and innovation management found that of all renewable energy technologies the performance of geothermal improves the most per dollar of R&D invested. Wind power was the next, and solar power received the most Federal R&D funding.

But they have all lagged fossil fuel funding. The United States still invests more government dollars yearly on R&D for fossil fuel technologies than for all of the renewable energies combined. By contrast, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom spend more R&D on renewable energies than fossil fuel technologies, the study found.

Despite getting the most funding in the US, fossil fuel technologies are no longer improving efficiency much or at all.

Below the fold: one geothermal breakthrough birthed by $1 Million in US DOE R&D funding:

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Those yummy California lemons, avocados, oranges, pistachios or cherries on your table right now could have been very sustainably grown using solar panels.

That’s because a giant California grower has just installed 1 MW of solar power to water their 7,000 acre farm. The 6,400 solar panels power pumps to bring water up from deep wells for irrigation.

(Normally these irrigation pumps are run by fossil fuels - one of the reasons that our food is so unsustainable.)
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Renewable sources of energy are beginning to replace coal power in the U.S.:

Every year the percentage of U.S. electricity generated from renewables has been increasing, according to the latest figures released by the Energy Information Administration in its Electric Power Monthly report.

As a result, by April of 2009, the total was 12.97 percent, with hydropower accounting for 8.73 percent and other renewables like solar and wind 4.24 percent of all U.S. electricity on average among all the states.  Higher wind generation totals in just 4 states accounted for 62.2 percent of the national increase in wind powered generation: Texas, Iowa, New York, and Indiana.

By contrast the percentage of electricity from fossil power is now actually decreasing.

Comparing April 2008 to April 2009, coal-fired generation fell by 20,551 thousand megawatt-hours, or 13.9 percent. Declines in 7 states accounted for 52.3 percent of the national decrease in coal-fired generation: they were Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Texas.
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In January the Swiss insurer Zurich Financial Services AG launched two insurance products to cover liabilities for Carbon Capture & Storage.

It is now processing four submissions from some of the 10 to 15 European companies planning to have plants running by 2015. Additional companies in Europe, United States, Australia, China and Japan were also expressing interest in the coverage, a sign companies are beginning to explore implementing the as yet largely undeployed technology.

“There is a ‘fog of war’ surrounding the actual risks of CCS,” John Scott, head of risk insights at Zurich Global Corporate, said. “Operators need certainty. It is difficult as a business person to make any long-term investment decisions unless you have certainty about the costs of risks,” John Scott said.

“Actually, the most challenging thing is what happens beyond 50 years or when a storage site is sealed. Who then bears the risk?”
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A new study from West Virginia University exposes one more dirty little secret about America’s favorite fossil fuel, coal.  Though coal mining is touted as an economic boon to local communities, the study reviews mortality statistics to conclude that coal mining communities in Appalachia are among the weakest economies in their home states, and in the country.  The study, “Mortality in Appalachian Coal Mining Regions,” appears in the July-August issue of Public Health Reports, the official journal of the U.S. Public Health Services.

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