Energy Industry Archive

The United States has had its share of strong voices urging action — or inaction — on climate change. But it’s across the pond that things are really heating up. In the United Kingdom, it looks like the two sides might soon be holding pitched battles. Most serious are escalating intimidation tactics being used by both climate protestors and police. The latest example of this...

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Cadmium telluride-based thin film solar cells are certainly the technology of the moment. Following First Solar’s announcement in February that it’s producing cells for under $1 per watt, two more firms, Abound Solar (previously AVA Solar) and Sunovia have lined up with news of their own. Of the two, Abound is the more mature firm, having taken a big $104 million funding last year....

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Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s compensation rose 10 percent in a year when the most of his oil and gas peers watched their salary, bonuses and stock grants take a dive. Big multimillion compensation packages for oil execs rarely create warm and fuzzy feelings for the industry. In tough economic times – like the ones we’re living in — Bunyanesque compensation triggers...

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Brazil, Russia undermine OPEC’s efforts to cut oil production — OPEC-member countries, on a mission to keep oil prices from falling below $40 per barrel, have cut production at least three times. And their plan has worked — sort of. U.S. imports from OPEC fell 14 percent to 5.02 million barrels a day in January compared to a year earlier. Unfortunately for OPEC, other...

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Today’s hot news story is one that surely inspired cackles of glee at the marketing department for Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility that is taking all comers in hopes of meeting a (potential) requirement of 33 percent renewable energy by 2020. I mention marketing and not, say, business development, because the agreement PG&E made is almost certainly destined for failure. But...

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The ink has barely dried on Valero Energy’s $477 million check for seven ethanol plants and a development site from bankrupt VeraSun and it’s already investing more money into another renewable project. In this latest endeavor, Valero has become the lead investor in Terrabon, a company developing technology to convert trash from landfills into a renewable “green”...

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There’s just something attractive about building the city of the future — or trying to. In that grand tradition, an ex-NFL player wants to build a solar-powered city near Fort Myers, Florida called Babcock Ranch, which studiously follows the time-honored rule of assigning silly and/or pretentious names to suburban settlements. But in every other way, Babcock intends to be different:...

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Energy becomes a more politicized issue every day. Case in point: A new study showing that the renewable energy industry actually destroys jobs. Coming from Spain’s Juan Carlos University, the study “reveals with high confidence,” in its own words, that each new job in the green sector destroys 2.2 jobs in other industries. Here’s how: Of course, as we all know from...

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Gazprom, Shell pen deal that will bring liquefied natural gas to California — Gazprom, the world’s largest natural gas producer, is accessing a long-sought after piece of the U.S. gas market in a deal with Royal Dutch Shell. Russia’s state-controlled company will ship gas from the new Sakhalin-2 project to a LNG regasification facility in Baja California, Mexico and then...

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The electric grid has gotten plenty of attention lately for its apparently prehistoric construction, which bleeds electricity and keeps any of us from gaining insight to our usage patterns. That image is an interesting contrast to the one the Wall Street Journal presents with its latest story on Chinese and Russian hackers, titled Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies....

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