The Peak Oil Crisis: A Stealth Revolution!

It is nearly a quarter of a century now since two electro-chemists at the University of Utah held a press conference to announce that they had discovered a new way of extracting energy from the nucleus of an atom. For a few weeks the announcement of what was then termed “cold fusion” made headlines as [...]

Is peak oil never going to happen?

You can make a coherent, logical argument for cars that don’t burn gasoline without once mentioning global petroleum supply. You can talk about international relations and the power of gasoline exporters (just read the first three paragraphs of this for a bit of history). You can talk about climate change. You can talk about the [...]

Nuclear Energy Industry Re-Energizing after Fukushima

The Fukushima incident has contributed to the lay belief that nuclear energy is a risk not worth taking. Although, according to the data of the non-profit World Nuclear Association only a very limited number of accidents occurred in over 14,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation in 32 countries. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and [...]

Fusion program at MIT is ending; Layoffs predicted; federal funds cut

A long-running Massachusetts Institute of Technology research experiment that explores nuclear fusion as a possible energy source will shut down within a year, as its already diminished federal funding has been cut. Miklos Porkolab, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center where the project is housed, said that unless Congress decides to step in, [...]

Energy in China: Construction of Biggest Hydropower Dam Yet to Come

Reuters reported on Wednesday that China’s environmental ministry has okayed the construction of a new hydroelectric dam on the Dadu River in the Sichuan province, which when completed will be the country’s largest. China’s energy mix was 9.4 percent renewable as of 2011, and the Sichuan project is part of the country’s effort to boost [...]

The road to a greener America is littered with road-kill

In October 2004, then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger rolled up to a pioneering fueling station at Los Angeles International Airport in a hydrogen-powered metallic blue Hummer loaned to him by General Motors Corp. The “California Hydrogen Highway,” Schwarzenegger’s vision to ensure that every Californian would have access to a hydrogen fueling station by the end [...]

Wind Energy Growing Faster than Coal in China: False Math

In a recent Slate piece Ramez Naam argues: In almost every way you cut it, China is already taking a much more aggressive approach toward climate change than the United States is. This is a rather bold claim seems perfectly fitted to Carl Sagan’s statement “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Naam’s evidence is extraordinary, unfortunately it is [...]

Crushed By Soaring Energy Costs, Japan Prepares To Reactivate Its Nuclear Power Plants

In what was painfully obvious to everyone with half a brain months ago (see here) Japan’s desperate gambit at reflating would backfire massively by sending energy prices soaring in a world in which Japan no longer has access to internally producer, nuclear power plants and is forced to import all of its energy from abroad. [...]

Avoiding the ‘Energy Abyss’

John Hofmeister doesn’t call it ‘peak oil,’ instead he calls it the ‘energy abyss,’ the point at which the global economy ceases to grow because the oil industry can no longer meet demand. Hofmeister is the former president of Shell Oil, the same Shell Oil that is preparing to drill the deepest hole yet drilled [...]

Conventional Wisdom About Clean Energy Is Still Way Out of Date

For Greentech Media this week, I reviewed some exhaustive recent research on energy trends and forecasts, which showed that the conventional wisdom about renewables and their future is way out of date, and the renewably-powered grid will be here sooner than most people expect. “It’s not 1990 anymore,” the report’s lead author observed at the [...]

DOE’s High Impact Energy Innovation Incubator Program

Buried in the President’s FY2014 budget proposal is an interesting reform that could impact energy innovation without relying on Congress for any new – and hard to come by – federal investments. The idea is to create eight new research incubator programs at the Department of Energy that forge collaborations with early-stage start-ups to bring [...]

Levy nuclear plant more costly than a natural gas facility

In the long run, nuclear power is cheap. This, for many of Florida’s top decisionmakers, is the Truth. Lawmakers have cast aside their worship of the free market — which long ago lost trust in building nuclear plants — and skewed state law to favor construction of new reactors. Lisa Edgar is a believer. As [...]

Garbage as Energy Commodity? Industry Booms in Europe

Oslo, Norway is known for many different characteristics; being Norway’s government capital, for one, along with being the economic hub for trade and home to over 1.4 million citizens.  One thing most people don’t know about Oslo however, is how much they really want your garbage. “I’d like to take some [garbage] from the United [...]

Robert Rapier: The Scientific Challenges To Replacing Oil with Renewables

So, assuming the Peak Oil camp is on to something, what’s the likelihood for a disruption-free transition to another energy source that can replace the energy output we currently enjoy from oil? There’s no shortage of promising claims from new laboratory experiments, and there is a lot of optimism in political and entrepreneurial circles that [...]

Plant proteins can help solve global food, fuel problems

Scientists have shown that certain proteins in plants that function as transporters can help solve global fuel and food problems, a study says. New discoveries of the way plants transport important substances across their biological membranes to resist toxic metals and pests, increase salt and drought tolerance, control water loss and store sugar can have [...]

Ex-Shell Chief Hofmeister Promotes US Fuel Diversity

Alternative fuels have lost some of their luster in the US, lately, for understandable reasons.  Oil production here is booming based on shale resources that keep expanding, while the market for ethanol, our most successful alternative fuel, has stalled at the long-anticipated “blend wall“, resulting in ethanol plant closures and bankruptcy filings.  More advanced cellulosic [...]

Is nuclear fusion power now possible?

On 26 April, the world largely yawned as a nuclear anniversary came and went. Twenty-seven years ago, the Ukrainian SSR nuclear power plant at Chernobyl exploded, providing a severe test of the USSR’s General Secretary of the Communist Party Mihail Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost” (“openness,”), which the sclerotic Soviet leadership signally failed, providing a less [...]

Solar Dreams, Spanish Realities

“We had a lot of hopes and now we’re more skeptical.” That’s how Pedro Prieto, a 62-year-old global telecom engineer and solar entrepreneur, sums up Spain’s famous solar revolution. Spain’s renewable dream, of course, began as sunny-multi-billion-dollar boom. Quasi-religious images of fields of photovoltaics and radiant concentrated solar towers wowed North American greens. (Concentrated solar [...]

Germany’s Nuclear Energy Phaseout: The Timetable

By the end of 2022 Germany will have no nuclear power plants remaining. I have covered why this policy is folly elsewhere, so won’t cover it again here. Instead let us consider in a little detail how things will pan out in the next decade. To put the numbers in perspective I will estimate how [...]

Can Rebulding Local Food Systems Help Promote Renewable Energy?

This is part 2 of our serialization of Chapter 4 (Energy) from the latest Resilience guide, “Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to Create Local, Sustainable & Secure Food Systems“. This excerpt looks at some areas where small to mid scale farming might have the edge.  Read Part 1 Farming is about energy flows. “Food production” is [...]

Is Solar Energy Prepared to Enter a Post-Subsidy World?

Let’s start out with a fact: the free market for energy is a myth. Every country uses subsidies in some way to encourage production and dictate consumption of different forms of energy. According to the International Monetary Fund, global post-tax subsidies for fossil fuels (which includes the external costs of pollution) amounted to $1.9 trillion in [...]

100 Percent Renewable Energy is 100 Percent Possible

The future is here — it’s just unevenly distributed. This old quote found a new application at the Pathways to 100% Renewable Energy conference in San Francisco last week. An international crowd of energy experts, financiers, clean energy advocates, elected officials, government employees, academics, and more gathered there to discuss how to bring the renewable [...]

China Leads in “Clean” Energy Investment

  “According to a new study (PDF) from Pew Charitable Trusts, China was the world leader in clean energy investment in 2012. The U.S., meanwhile, saw its grip loosen on many of the clean energy technologies it developed. According to the research, total clean energy investment totaled $269 billion worldwide last year, a decline from [...]

US wind energy tax credit extended

The Internal Revenue Service completed rules today that define how wind-farm developers can qualify for tax breaks. Under a law signed by President Barack Obama in January, wind projects must begin construction by Dec. 31 to qualify for the production tax credit. That’s looser than the standard from previous years, which required energy production to [...]

IEA: Global Progress on Clean Energy Has Stalled

Global progress towards low-carbon energy has stalled, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). In Tracking Clean Energy Progress 2013, the agency’s input to the 4th Clean Energy Ministerial conference, IEA asserts that despite some advances in renewable energy and developing world energy policies, the global energy supply is not getting [...]

The ITER Project: International Collaboration to Demonstrate Nuclear Fusion

As one of the few options for a large-scale, non-carbon future supply of energy, fusion has the potential to make an important contribution to sustainable energy supplies. Fusion can deliver safe and environmentally benign energy, using abundant and widely available fuel, without the production of greenhouse gases or long-term nuclear waste. From celestial fusion to [...]

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities

Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground. That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves. Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the [...]

Making Enhanced Geothermal Energy Real

Ormat has produced 1.7 megawatts of power using enhanced geothermal methods from inside an existing geothermal field, the first power from this source to get on the electric grid. Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) are controversial because drilling into hot rocks deep below the earth’s surface has been associated with earthquake-like seismic tremors in Switzerland and [...]

And You Thought Peak Oil Was Dead and Buried

Our resident lithium reserves expert, Juan Carlos Zuleta in La Paz, Bolivia brought to my attention an interview Washington Post reporter Brad Plummer did with energy analyst Chris Nelder, who in Plummer’s words, “has spent a lot of time scrutinizing the claims of the oil triumphalists.” Nelder’s view? “Our newfound oil resources, he argues, aren’t [...]

Nuclear Is NOT a Low-Carbon Source of Energy

Why Do People Claim that Nuclear Power is a Low-Carbon Source of Energy? Even well-known, well-intentioned scientists sometimes push bad ideas.   For example, well-known scientists considered pouring soot over the Arctic in the 1970s to help melt the ice – in order to prevent another ice age.  That would have been stupid.  Even Obama’s top [...]

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LATEST NEWS HEADLINES

• Bound by the Chains of Oil: The Need for Energy Innovation
• The Peak Oil Crisis: A Stealth Revolution!
• China’s SUV Fleet to Drive Oil Demand Growth
• Energy Return on Investment  
• April Saudi Oil Production

• Crushed By Soaring Energy Costs, Japan Prepares To Reactivate Its Nuclear Power Plants
• U.S. OKs liquefied natural gas exports to Japan, others
• Predicting the Weather, Corn, Ethanol and Oil Production
• Will the International Energy Agency’s oil forecast be wrong again?
• Al-Qaeda takes over oilfields once belonging to Assad…
• The Quiet Triumph Of Oil And Gas In Obama’s Policies