Energy Industry Archive

Aquamarine lands massive ocean power deal — Aquamarine Power will develop 1,000 megawatts of wave and tidal power by 2020 in a joint deal with Airtricity, the renewable energy development division of Scottish and Southern Energy. Edinburgh, Scotland-based Aquamarine’s plan to build two different prototypes — one using tidal and the other using wave technology — would...

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Plans to create massive solar farms in southwestern states are multiplying, with companies that were tiny startups only a year or two ago promising to supply electricity for tens of thousands of homes and businesses. The latest, announced yesterday, is NRG Energy, a New Jersey-based utility, making a deal for eSolar technology to build 500 megawatts of generation in California. The deal follows...

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Is there a impending explosion in oil and gas M&A action? There’s certainly no lack of interest in acquiring reserves and acreage, if the latest North American Prospect Expo is any indication. The annual event, which brings together buyers and sellers of oil and gas properties, logged record attendance early this month despite the collapse in commodity prices and global credit...

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Recession fears, inventories spur oil’s wild ride this week – Crude oil was trading below $35 a barrel earlier this week as concerns of a global recession deepened. Prices suddenly rose 14 percent after a U.S. government report showed a drop in supplies for the first time this year, as imports declined. The gain, the biggest in seven weeks, was lost by the end of the week as new...

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The recession has gotten bad enough that solar, until recently the boomtown of energy, is now struggling to grow at all. The problem isn’t with manufacturers, though; the world, it seems, it awash in solar panels. The choke-point is development and installation of solar facilities, where there’s not enough financing to pay for panels, even discount ones. One of the more successful...

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Proving that Google Earth is a tool with nearly unlimited potential for fun and mischief, researchers at Purdue University have used the interactive map to put together data showing the carbon dioxide output of every major emissions source in the United States. The scientists created the project, called Vulcan, with data from 2002. I’ve been waiting for a good tool like this for some...

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No official studies today, but I do have some anecdotal evidence that energy saving measures, once a non-issue with corporations in the United States, are becoming de rigeur for cost-conscious companies. And in the recession, the number of firms that qualify as cost-conscious — even cost-obsessed — is growing by the day. The evidence is Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts, one of the...

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It’s hard to imagine a solar panel manufacturer having to use every available inch of their warehouse and production facility, clearing space to stack unsold panels all the way to the roof. But that’s the picture a new Lux Research report is painting. Demand for solar panels is expected to fall this year, leaving the industry gasping. The scenario is difficult to believe —...

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It’s not an easy year to be an oil company, with prices for the resource hovering below $40 and plenty of uncertainty over whether prices will rise. But Total, one of Europe’s biggest oil companies, thinks the cost of oil will rise dramatically over the next few years. That’s based on the company’s estimate that global production will peak at 89 million barrels a year,...

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Canadian oil sands, filled with 173 billion barrels of hard-to-reach oil, are quickly becoming the staging ground for the world’s largest oilpatch wrestling match. You’d think the $100 drop in oil prices, which caused companies to cut capital spending and delay projects, coupled with the threat of stricter environmental regulations and the costly process of retrieving the...

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