Most of you reading this are already inclined toward green-type technology, whether that’s clean power generation, electric transportation, or more efficient ways to do things. Today, I’m going to give you one more reason to stop supporting – or at least vocally dislike – big gas and big oil. Yes, We’ve All Heard About This There are a number of people who will happily speak at length about dependence on foreign oil and how it leads to American troops being sent over to oil-rich hotspots to make sure we can still get affordable gas at the pump. There was a pun a while back about how Operation: Iraqi Freedom should have been called Operation: Iraqi Liberation (or O.I.L.), for example. I’m not really one of those people, but I listen when they talk. Oil is not cheap; from the ...

The Keystone XL Pipeline  is probably one of the last great infrastructure projects of the petroleum era in the U.S., and it will face a pivotal moment some time before the end of February. President Obama is under a two-month deadline to approve or disapprove the massive pipeline, which would bring oil from Canada’s notorious Alberta Tar Sands down to the midwest and on through to refineries on the Gulf Coast. But heck, why wait two months? Given the conditions of the deadline, President Obama might as well go ahead and cancel the project tomorrow.

Pipeline Politics in an Election Year

The two-month deadline was set by Republicans in Congress, as a rider attached to the new spending bill. Before the rider was voted through, the State Department already warned ...

The Finnish physicist Matti Nurmia has patented a different type of CO2 sequestration with real commercial potential, using very little energy in the conversion process and creating byproducts with high commercial value. His firm, Cuyha Innovation Oy (Oy means company) converts acidic CO2 into harmless bicarbonates.

Nurmia’s process differs from carbonization, where CO2 is neutralized with carbonate minerals such as limestone, the way that companies like California’s Calera are making cement with sequestered CO2. But Cuyha is sequestering CO2 in Feldspars, a group of rock-forming minerals, by washing the flue emissions with water at a very high pressure.

The process creates salable byproducts (depending on which feldspar is employed) of lithium carbonate ($10 a kg) or alumina (worth about $300 a ton) or quartz sand.

Neutralizing 1 ton of carbon dioxide with anorthite produces about 1 ton of alumina plus ...

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Fuel cells offer a highly efficient, reliable and increasingly durable means of generating clean electrical energy independent of the grid or integrated with grid power. Installations are growing across a wide range of applications, from combined heat and power (CHP) generation at commercial, industrial, government and educational facilities to hybrid electric vehicles and consumer electronics.

They’re also being evaluated as a means of storing intermittent electricity production from wind power farms and wastewater-to-energy treatment plants, as well as capturing CO2 and NOX emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Fuel cells’ “green” credentials continue to be questioned, however, especially when the fuel used to produce the hydrogen used by alkaline fuel cells is methane in the form of natural or biogas. According to the infographic above, ...

Fuel Cell Powered Chevrolet Equinox

Introduction to the Problem

You, like most people, may already be familiar with the fact that electric vehicles have a relatively short driving range compared to traditional gasoline powered vehicles.

Most people do not need to drive more than 80 miles per trip, but range anxiety is a problem helping to prevent the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.

People, in general, would like to have a driving range significantly more than the distance they usually drive, just in case they have to drive far, which is perfectly understandable.

This issue can be addressed, albeit with consequences, using a backup electricity generator that can either charge the electric vehicle’s batteries, directly power the vehicle’s electric motor if the battery dies, provide additional power to the motor if necessary, or all of the above.

One of the consequences ...

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project.

While Americans transition their electricity system to the 21st century, they should ask this question: Does it make sense to pursue strategies such as accelerating the development of new high-voltage power lines that reinforce an outdated paradigm of electricity delivery, or should scarce energy dollars be spent on adding new, clean, local energy to the grid in the most cost-effective manner?

Fossil fuel power lends itself to centralized power systems, requiring long supply lines (rail or pipeline) to provide a constant supply of fuel and significant economies of scale in thermal energy production. These supply lines and huge power plants require enormous concentrations of capital, concentrating not only power generation but control of the grid. This explains the 20th century electricity system.

Renewable energy is fundamentally different. Wind, solar, and geothermal ...

A regional cap-and-trade program launched in the northeastern U.S. three years ago has saved customers nearly $1.1 billion on electricity bills, helped create 16,000 jobs, and has retained more than $765 million in local economies by reducing the demand for fossil fuels, according to a new analysis. While the future of the so-called Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) remains in jeopardy — with New Jersey planning to drop out and other states also considering leaving — the study by the Boston-based Analysis Group finds that the project has had real benefits for the ten participating states. The program requires major power plants to buy allowances at auction for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. From mid-2008 to September, plant owners have spent about $912 million to buy those allowances, generating funds that were used to improve ...

U.S. fossil fuel use rose in 2010. This is the U.S. energy split in 2010.

Climate scientists have warned us (for decades). Some politicians have warned us. Military reports have warned us. And citizens of the world have certainly warned now. Now, the International Energy Agency (IEA) is warning us: if we don’t make a massive switch to clean energy in the next few years (5 years according to the IEA), climate change is going to wreck us.

Now, an important thing to remember is that avoiding the catastrophes of climate change is not like meeting a legislative or business deadline. It’s not like stopping the car before driving into the wall. It’s more like this: we’ve driven the car into the biggest hurricane the world has ever seen, ...

With one of the most anti-science, anti-climate-action, anti-clean-energy political parties in the world (perhaps the most), the United States Congress has been unable to move forward with any significant effort to cut our CO2 emissions. In case you missed it, though, the Supreme Court declared in 2007 that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had the right and the responsibility to determine if greenhouse gas emissions were a threat to human health and safety and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Based on the overwhelming scientific evidence showing that humans cause global warming and the effects of global warming are a huge threat to humanity, the EPA declared CO2 a public danger at the end of 2009, just before the Copenhagen climate conference.

With Republicans in recent set ...

Graphic courtesy of FuelCell Energy

Connecticut’s FuelCell Energy recently received an award from the Dept. of Energy (DOE) to employ its patented Direct FuelCell (DFC) technology in building a pilot demonstration CO2 capture system attached to a coal-fired power plant. This third post on the project – see Parts 1 & 2- explains the way the system is designed to work and what the project aims to achieve.

Back in August, the DOE announced $41 million of funding to help further develop and test 16 advanced post-combustion coal plant CO2 capture technologies. FuelCell Energy’s DFC-coal plant CO2 capture system was one of the 16 projects to win an award.

The DOE’s primary target objectives are straightforward and the same for all the projects receiving funding: capture at least 90% of the plant’s carbon dioxide (CO2) ...