Top panel maker First Solar just scored an important prestige hire, according to Greentech Media, luring away the chief scientist of Solyndra, a large startup with a different technology but similar market. The researcher, Markus Beck, helped create Solyndra’s distinctive tube-shaped solar arrays. Both First Solar and Solyndra rely on thin-film solar cells, but where the former lays its...
Energy Industry Archive
January 2009
Memo to onlookers worried that American consumers will never stop buying gas guzzlers: They may soon lack the choice to not change. That was the message of Toyota vice president Irv Miller, who warned at the Detroit Auto Show that last summers $4-a-gallon gas prices were but a “brief glimpse of the future” that come about with the advent of peak oil. Peak oil, the theory that oil...
The stars are aligning up once again for clean coal as Barack Obama approaches his presidential coronation. At both the Federal and state level, policymakers are talking about the technology. And sensing an inexorable change on its way, utilities and energy companies are duly lining up to help, albeit for a price. Within the states, several larger actors are working to pass laws encouraging or...
The Company: Frontline, the world’s biggest crude oil tanker fleet operator. The Filing: FORM 6-K filed with the SEC on December 03, 2008. The Finding: Crude oil transporter Frontline Ltd. said oil traders have chartered 25 vessels and may take as many as 10 more in order to store crude for future sales at sea, according to Bloomberg Press. The news suggests that average world oil...
The body blows just keep coming at the nation’s ethanol producers, among them big names like Verasun, Pacific Ethanol and Aventine Renewable Energy Holdings. Like everyone else, ethanol makers have been hit by the recession’s broad problems, including tight credit. But a side-effect of the falling economy, falling gas prices, has had a much worse effect on the alternative fuel...
Exxon now has money to burn, a move possible — With $40 billion in cash, Exxon Mobil could be poised to buy out or merge with one of its struggling competitors. Oil giants like Chevron, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips and Exxon itself face weak fourth-quarter profits and oil-prices remain depressed, so a major merger or acquisition is possible, analysts say. [Source: Oil & Gas...
With oil prices down from their highs in the summer of 2008, public outrage directed at America’s biggest oil companies has fallen from high boil to a slow simmer. Perhaps that’s why Shell Oil thought it might be able to quietly cut off its crude oil supply to Big West, a refinery owned by the bankrupted truck stop operator Flying J. Shell thought wrong. Since closing the tap early...
(CORRECTED: See below) Large stake in NRG tendered to rival Exelon — NRG Energy stockholders have tendered nearly half of the power generator’s shares to Chicago-based power company Exelon. The move is part of Exelon’s unsolicited $6.3 billion offer for NRG, which would create the country’s largest power company, according to Exelon. [Source: AP] Schlumberger,...
Permitting and building new power plants is never an easy process. But Duke Energy is getting an early peek into the bureaucratic nightmares of the future, which most large power companies will someday have to face. Duke Energy Carolinas, one of the mother company’s many subsidiaries, first saw its planned $100 million program to place solar panel on roofs in North Carolina cut in half,...
The Company: Linn Energy, an independent oil and gas company with core operating areas in the Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma. The Filing: FORM 10-Q filing with the SEC on November 6, 2008. The Finding: Consistent with its strategy of monetizing non-core positions, Linn Energy sold approximately $1 billion of oil and gas assets during the last six months of 2008, including the closing of about...
- "Sunshine to Petrol" Promises Fuel From CO2
- The Kidney Stone-Climate Bill Connection
- Week in Oil & Gas: Peak Oil, a Climate-Bill Interlude and Devon's Big Sale
- About Those Anti-Nuclear Arguments: They're Dishonest
- Week in Renewables: New Emissions Targets, Ausra to Sell, Tesla IPO
- The Great Climate Change Scandal of 2009
- Sour Market: With No Buyer in Sight, Valero Closes Delaware Refinery
- PG&E Smart Meter Case is Just the Beginning
- The Technologies for a Nuclear Resurgence
- Miasole Finally Begins Shipping as Next Generation Solar Gets Investment
- Chevron's Acquisition Strategy: Small Companies Need Not Apply
- Peak Oil? Not Here and Not For Decades, CERA Study Says
- Week in Oil & Gas: Punting in Copenhagen and Gulf of Mexico Leases -- Abridged
- Week in Renewables: Changes Afoot, Solar Growth, Electric Cars and Nukes
- Start Your Engines: Suncor CEO Marks Official "Restart" in Oil Sands Growth
- The Great Climate Change Scandal of 2009
- Week in Renewables: Glowing and Grim Reports, a New Bank, and Big Wind
- Sue Big Oil Over Global Warming? Court Tells Katrina Victims, Yes You Can!
- Clean Coal, a Global Failure in the Making
- The Technologies for a Nuclear Resurgence
- Boxer Rolls Political Dice, Climate Bill Moves Onto Senate Floor
- About Those Anti-Nuclear Arguments: They're Dishonest
- Week in Renewables: Obama vs. Public Opinion, and New Energy Bets
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- Clinton: Energy Efficiency Is Not Sexy, But Important Low-Hanging Fruit
- Trina Solar: Still Struggling to Bring Manufacturing Costs in Line With Falling Prices
- Boxer Rolls Political Dice, Climate Bill Moves Onto Senate Floor
- Valero to Shutter Some Refinery Operations, Cut Hundreds of Jobs
- Week in Oil & Gas: Climate Bill Hurdles and Refining Blues
- Spillover Effect: Another Pre-Salt Discovery in Brazil
- Canada Starts Doling Out Carbon Capture Dollars
- Natgas Conundrum: Calming Volatility Fears in Push for Clean Energy Alternative
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