The US Air Force has placed an order for 100,000 gallons of Camelina-based jet fuel, in addition to the 40,000 gallons the Navy ordered last month for $2.7 million, with delivery to begin this year. Sustainable Oils is supplying them with a biofuel grown in Montana with 80% lower carbon … [continued]
You knew you keep a fire in a box in your laundry room, right? Not only is that kind of a scary thought, but it’s an extremely inefficient way to dry clothes; lighting a fire every time you turn on the clothes dryer. Lint catches fire all the time. But … [continued]
One year ago the French company Alstom began a year-long US test of capturing CO2 from the water+carbon-dioxide mix created using their chilled-ammonia technology, in the smokestack of the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant in Wisconsin. [social_buttons] This week the year’s results were announced. The years average CO2 capture rate was 90%, … [continued]
President Obama has just signed an Executive Order that compels the largest consumer of energy in the US economy to invest in energy efficiency improvements to get to huge reductions in energy use by 2020. Every Federal agency must measure, manage, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet specific targets … [continued]
Coal power is not base-load electricity by itself. To enable coal to reliably deliver electric power, it took the creation of an entire other national infrastructure; the trans-continental railroad system.
Without the unceasing rail-car-load delivery, every 12 hours, on the hour, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, of every next 12-hour-supply of fuel for the fire; the fire would go out, the water wouldn’t boil, the steam wouldn’t rise, the turbine wouldn’t turn; the next 12 hours of electricity wouldn’t be made. The fire must never go out.
Every barrel of oil extracted in the US also produces ten barrels of hot fluids in addition to the oil. Why not use that potential energy in the waste heat?
Rather than discard that “geothermal” resource created by the process of oil extraction, the DOE is going to show the traditional energy industry how to tap into those waste fluids to power equipment at the site. If generally applied by the industry, this would help reduce the high carbon cost of oil production in the US.
As the US finally moves into manufacturing our own clean energy, a new kind of engineering is starting to move to the forefront. Manufacturing processes engineering. Under the direction of associate professor Vinay Dayal; Iowa State U students are trying to find the way to make wind turbines roll off … [continued]
There’s a Bizarro World quality to this period in history. Anyone covering news in these Interesting Times cannot possibly chronicle all the news that really marks the journey as we careen into our unimaginably strange future. Add yours in comments, but here’s what I found: California regulators decreed that, by … [continued]
Not every breakthrough in the solar industry comes from efficiency gains from esoteric new Silicon Valley start-ups (though these are being catapulted by the recent funding bonanza) and university labs. Some come from understanding that half the cost of a solar installation is just the cost of getting boots up … [continued]
What we call Cap and Trade, (and what China is now considering) has already just been tried out in Europe, to meet Kyoto. They called theirs the EU Emissions Trading System. China will call theirs “Limit and Incentivize”. Regardless of whether we call it: capping or limiting emissions and trading … [continued]
