Saboteurs strike Iraq’s oil industry on daily basis: minister
Insurgents are carrying out at least one attack a day on Iraq’s vital oil infrastructure, at times shutting down all fuel lines to Baghdad, Oil Minister Thamer Ghadban said Thursday.
Thermodynamics of the Corn-Ethanol Biofuel cycle
Journal paper quantifying the degree of
non-renewability of a major biofuel: ethanol produced from industrially-grown corn. Extensive work seriously challenging the right of this process to renewable status, on net energy, soil depletion, and government subidy-dependence grounds.
America’s Finite Future?
Near the beginning of “Saturday Night Fever,” John Travolta’s Tony Manero, frustrated that his boss thinks he should save his salary instead of spending it on a new disco shirt, cries out, “fuck the future!” To which his boss replies: “No, Tony, you can’t fuck the future. The future fucks you! It catches up with you and it fucks you if you ain’t prepared for it!” Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but America has morphed into a nation of Tony Maneros.
Hungry for hemp
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration recently abandoned, without comment, its three-year effort to ban commercial foods made from or containing nonpsychoactive industrial hemp seed and hemp oil.
Worldwide capacity of solar thermal energy greatly underestimated
The International Energy Agency’s Solar Heating and Cooling Programme and major solar thermal trade associations have published new statistics on the use of solar thermal energy. The new data – expressed for the first time in GWth, rather than in square meters of installed collector area – shows the global installed capacity to be 70 GWth (70.000 MWth).
Sustainable Energy From Vegetable Oil
An excellent practical guide to the techniques of using vegetable oil as a transportation fuel which acknowledges also some of this approach’s large scale limitations.
World On Brink Of Ruin
Stephen Roach, the chief economist for Morgan Stanley & Co., one of the most powerful investment banks and one of the 50 largest companies in the world, says Greenspan has “driven the world to the economic brink.”
Project Cooking Up Stoves For The Poor
The World Food Program has commissioned Aprovecho to build fuel-efficient, low-polluting cooking stoves fashioned from the very tin cans in which food aid is delivered.
Oil find opens door to a less dependent Cuba
On Christmas Day, Cuban President Fidel Castro in the Gulf of Mexico in an area controlled by Cuba. Castro disclosed that the Canadian companies had discovered estimated reserves of 100 million barrels.
The End of Oil?
Ultimately, says Deffeyes, we may just have to resign ourselves to relying more on coal, wind, and nuclear fission for electricity and switching to high-efficiency diesel and hybrid automobiles in order to ration our remaining oil reserves for as long as possible. Abundant energy from fossil fuels was a one-time gift, Deffeyes concludes, that lifted humanity up from subsistence agriculture and has led to a future based on renewable resources
Prophets of doom: the coming oil crisis
The world economy has gotten fairly comfortable with oil at $45 a barrel. But how will it react to paying $100 a barrel three years from now? Or $150 in five years?
US: New Natural Gas Policy Sought
Seventeen organizations–chemical companies as well as environmental and conservation groups–fired off a letter to Congress last week urging a new energy policy to solve the nation’s natural gas crisis.
