STUFF

Oil industry threatening legal action to stop new Clean Water Act regs. What can be said? Hopefully it will come down to the law. For the spirit of it is clean drinking water, clean estuaries, clean rivers, etc. And we are well aware of the oil industry record, though they do have a tough job.

Duke E to avoid mountaintop coal development because of the costs.

GE announced a campaign to cut gas flaring (NG from oil wells being burned off into atmos). Worldwide, flaring now burns off equivalent of 23% of annual US NG use. 400met tons/yr of CO2. Equiv to 77M cars' exhaust. NOAA/World Bank '07 study found $40B/yr worth of NG being flared off. ~5.5% of world NG production (before fracking the shale). Though it would be worse if not flared off - methane 20x worse than CO2). Alternatives include reinjecting NG into wells to increase oil production, liquefying it, piping it or on-site elgen. If Russia would capture half its flared gas, they'd capture $2B/y worth of NG. Nigeria could offset $13B now spent on diesel fuel power. It's just everything. If people/businesses would just think and care.

Suniva, a solar startup, turned down DOE loan guarantee but raised $94M of $115 VC round. Frees up their plant siting, though they say they will still build here in US. They have high efficiency solar cells, the first manufacturing to successfully leverage ion implantation for solar cells. 16% efficiency in their modules. Current factory is 170 MW capacity.

Duke E selected Xtreme Power to build 36MW battery power storage at their Notrees, TX 153MW wind farm. Late '12 completion. Xtreme already awarded 4 other contracts for storage systems in Hawaii. Adds .5-1 cent/kwh to farm costs. Quiet on their tech, except to say it's solid core and "almost no E resistance".

Sauds, reportedly, actually slowed down their oil production increases recently, not making up for Libyan losses. G, wonder why.