Energy Industry Archive

ExxonMobil recent sale of its On the Run convenience store franchise system to the owners of the Circle K brand didn’t get a ton of coverage compared to the lead up to its earnings and dividend announcement. But it’s important because it highlights the oil behemoth’s hankering to get out of the retail fuel business. Alimentation Couche-Tard, one of the largest convenience...

More...

Jatropha, a plant with toxic berries, is on its way to becoming the world’s newest cash crop, if companies can figure out how to make its growing cycles as predictable as those of other crops. SG Biofuels wants to be at the forefront, establishing a gene library for jatropha and working to increase the plant’s yield and geographic range. The prize is a plant that can be grown on...

More...

Vestas trims 1,900 workers despite rising profits — The world’s top wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, is cutting free almost 10 percent of its workforce despite a 70 percent rise in first-quarter profit over last year. The reason is a largely regional downturn in the market, with the pain is focused around two plants in the United Kingdom and Denmark. However, the company is also...

More...

UTS Energy,the Calgary-based company with a stake in the Alberta’s oil sands, resisted French oil giant Total’s attempts at a hostile takeover. Just don’t expect UTS to survive another bidding bout. Lots of folks will argue there is little interest in plunging dollars into the Canada’s oil sands — an expensive endeavor that involves an extraction process...

More...

Carbon capture schemes almost always require sequestration — compressing CO2 gas and pumping it underground for permanent storage. But those plans will be discarded as excessively complex if a simpler method to store CO2 can be found. The best idea so far is turning it into a liquid fuel that can be used, like gasoline, for transportation. Enter archaea, a primeval microorganism family of...

More...

Solar rebates are off and running in Pennsylvania, thanks to $100 million approved by the state last week. To get the program started, the state’s Commonwealth Financing Authority had to borrow $30 million, according to Philly.com. In turn, they’ll be able to cover about a third of the costs for new buyers. In not quite as strong a showing, Colorado has opened up $40 million to...

More...

The corn ethanol industry already reeling from low gasoline prices and higher corn and energy costs suffered another blow to its bottom line and possibly its future Thursday when the California Air Resource Board OK’d the nation’s first low-carbon fuel standard. In a 9-1 vote late Thursday CARB approved new rules that require producers, refiners and importers of gasoline and...

More...

Better Place, an electric car charging startup planning to launch in several countries soon, has been in the headlines since it was founded. So it’s no surprise to see it grabbing a fresh round of print. This time around, though, the stakes have gone up a notch — as Earth2Tech reports, the company is planning an “all-or-nothing rollout”. A single problem led to Better...

More...

Clean coal technology is the political football of the day. As soon as one side claims it’s absolutely necessary, the other says it doesn’t exist — or vice versa. But a consortium is ready to bet on the concept, with institutional investor AllianceBernstein, oil and engineering firm Fluor, legendary currency speculator George Soros, gas company Tenaska and several others...

More...

ConocoPhillips and Occidental Petroleum reported their first quarter earnings today and as expected the results were pretty abysmal as lower prices for oil and gas pushed net incomes for both companies down about 80 percent from the same period last year. And yet there were a few bright spots for both companies among all the gloom and doom. For one, Conoco and Occidental beat analyst estimates...

More...