colorado

ClearFuels Technology announced Thursday it signed a letter of cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to build a biorefinery in Colorado.

ClearFuels will receive an initial $7.7 million toward the construction of the Colorado refinery as part of an overall $22.6 million DOE grant.

The biorefinery will contain a biomass gasifier capable of producing diesel and jet fuel from clean biomass, and be installed at Rentech's Energy Technology Center in Commerce City, Colo. Rentech has a 25 percent investment in ClearFuels and is partnering with it to develop commercial biorefineries.

The ClearFuels-Rentech biorefinery in … Read more

I can't decide if this is brilliant or ridiculous.

A few minutes ago, I saw a tweet go by from @sf_giants, the official fans' Twitter account of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. "The Giants want to have the largest tweet-up in history! Check out this exclusive $20 tweet-up only for Giants followers," it read.

One the one hand, if you say you're doing something like the "largest tweet-up in history," that's sure to get my attention. On the other, if you follow that up by saying that it's going to cost … Read more

After more than five weeks and 5,765 miles of driving through Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and very, very small parts of Arizona and Nevada, Road Trip 2009 is over.

This was the fourth year I've done this project, and I've now covered a fourth major region of the United States. In 2006, it was the Pacific Northwest; in 2007, the Southwest; in 2008, the deep South; and this year, it was the Rocky Mountain region. All told, my CNET Road Trips have taken me through 21 states and have covered 18,618 miles. And while there … Read more

LAKE GRANBY, Colo.--The question was: is it possible to set up a functional workspace deep in the wilderness?

That's what I set out to do, as one of my last goals of Road Trip 2009. I planned on driving well into the mountains of southern Wyoming to see if I could get some work done far from any modern communications infrastructure.

To that end, I ended up driving south from Rawlins, Wyo., and headed into the Sierra Madre mountains, not far from the Colorado border. However, the campground there that I had intended to try out had been … Read more

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.--If you're in charge of what is thought to be one of the most powerful, influential and important megachurches in the United States, if not the world, how do you make sure that your message is reaching the largest possible audience?

To Brady Boyd, the lead pastor at the New Life Church here, the famous, 10,000-plus member nondenominational church that's directly across Interstate 25 from the Air Force Academy, the answer is technology.

It's not that the New Life Church is light years ahead of anyone else--in fact, it may well even be … Read more

BOULDER, Colo.--When President Obama said that he wanted to put 1 million plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2015, it sounded good to many people worried about the effects of fossil fuels.

But when you consider that there are currently about 230 million vehicles on the road in the United States alone, you realize that Obama's goal amounts to less than one half of 1 percent--hardly what's going to move the U.S. into a post-gas future.

Still, to the people at Project Get Ready, an initiative of the Rocky Mountain Institute, anything that can jump-start … Read more

Update at 9:22 a.m. PDT: We have a winner. It's a BOMARC B--Boeing/Marc CIM-10B surface-to-air missile housed at the Hill Air Force Museum, near Ogden, Utah.

BOISE, Idaho--Out here on the highways of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, I've seen a lot. I'm on Road Trip 2009 and making daily stops at military installations, national parks, small towns, big cities, energy research institutions, and more.

That means I take a lot of pictures, and every day from here until the end of Road Trip 2009, I'll be presenting you with one picture--and a challenge. … Read more

ASPEN, Colo.--One thing I love is finding uses for things that perhaps no one has thought of before.

I'd already been on Road Trip 2009 for several days when I arrived in this tony Colorado mountain town known best as a playground for the rich and famous. I was hoping to go for a walk and find something good to eat.

It had been a long day of driving, starting in Colorado Springs, and traveling over Independence Pass, a 12,095 "Top of the Rockies" spot just on the Continental Divide. I had planned to stroll … Read more

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.--It's one thing for a track runner to bolt when the gun fires. Imagine how hard it is to jump up from a crouch and race up six flights of stairs while dressed in full firefighting gear and lugging a 42-pound pack of hose.

That's just the very first task in what is known as the Firefighter Combat Challenge (see video below), a nationwide competition involving a series of intense tasks that simulate what fighters deal with on a daily basis.

The tour, which appears in cities throughout the country, pulled through Colorado Springs on … Read more