Policy

Cisco Systems' new market is urban management.

The router and switch kings are teaming up with cities like Seoul, Lisbon, Madrid, San Francisco and Hamburg, Germany, on energy efficiency experiments. It will then take the successful ones and export them around the world.

In San Francisco, for instance, Cisco has rigged up a municipal bus with wireless Internet access so commuters can get their e-mail, browse the Web, or get information on when their connecting bus or train is coming in. The idea is to make public transportation more attractive and popular, which in turn reduces carbon dioxide emissions by … Read more

BP has proposed capturing carbon dioxide underground. A start-up in Texas called Skyonic says it can capture the gas and turn it into baking soda.

And now Carbon Sciences says it will turn carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and factories into calcium carbonate, otherwise known as limestone or chalk. The company combines the gas with fine calcium powders in a way that doesn't require a lot of heat and pressure, or that much calcium for that matter. For every ton of carbon dioxide, you only need three tons of raw materials, says CEO Derek McLeish.

The good news … Read more

The CEO of ConocoPhillips, Jim Mulva, on Tuesday made a pitch for regulations to restrict carbon emissions. His comments came at CERAWeek, a confab of the energy industry's giants.

In his speech, Mulva argued that the incumbent energy companies need to be involved in the creation of rules that favor low-carbon technologies.

Like its competitors BP and Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips is developing some alternative-fuel technologies such as synthetic natural gas made from coal, which Mulva said is cleaner.

He said right now the U.S. is lagging other countries in establishing regulatory frameworks, a dynamic that "risks … Read more

Demand in China and a host of other factors are pumping coal prices to new levels, according to the Wall Street Journal.

As a result, coal prices could begin to push up the price of electricity, food, imports and other products that directly or indirectly rely on coal-burning power plants. (Coal supplies 40 percent of the world's electricity and roughly 50 percent of the U.S.'s electricity.) Demand is growing so fast that China in fact imported more than it exported in the first half of 2007 last year. Oil has already contributed to rising prices.

Thermal coal … Read more

There is a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which was created by the Hoover Dam and the Colorado River, will go dry by 2021 because of escalating human demand and climate change, according to a study by Tim Barnett and David Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego.

Lake Mead straddles the Arizona-Nevada border, and Lake Powell is on the Arizona-Utah border. Aqueducts carry water from the system to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other communities in the Southwest.

By 2017, there is a 50 percent chance that the … Read more

Waste to Oil

Think you need special enzymes to convert plant materials into fuel? It looks like science is getting closer to eliminating that step. Pretty soon we might be able to directly convert crop residues, waste paper, and pretty much anything organic into bio-crude, which is essentially oil.

The secret ingredient? Heat. It turns out that raising the temperature breaks the bonds of organic materials (in fact heat pretty much breaks any bond at a high enough temperature) through a process known as pyrolysis.

Jim Fraser, in a recent article at the Energy Blog, explains how this works:

Fast … Read more

Last week, three financial titans--Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley--announced "The Carbon Principles" to provide guidance to energy companies in managing carbon risks. The upshot of The Carbon Principles is that these big banks are stating explicitly that going forward, they will only provide debt financing to new power projects if proponents can prove that the proposed plants will remain economically viable under future climate change policies.

Put another way, Wall Street sees federal carbon legislation as imminent, and doesn't want power sector executives to try to "sneak in" any last coal plants … Read more

It's become a staple of conventional wisdom that increased ethanol production has caused food prices worldwide to skyrocket.

Unfortunately, many experts and crop data say that's not a complete answer. Granted, production of corn ethanol has surged in the U.S. and has boosted pricing pressure. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute noted in a recent column on Cleantech.com that demand for grain by ethanol distillers jumped from 54 million tons in 2006 to 81 million tons in 2007. That jump of 27 million tons effectively doubled the annual growth rate. Brown said that ethanol creates … Read more

Here's a novel twist on curbing greenhouse gases. Some scientists and companies are examining ways of using captured carbon dioxide to extract fossil fuels.

It works like this. Carbon dioxide from smokestacks would be captured and compressed, and then shuttled into pipelines to oil fields. The gas would then be forced into oil wells to extract more fossil fuels.

The scenario solves two major problems in the energy field. First, what do you do with all of the carbon dioxide? The leading idea is to store it underground in depleted mines or saline aquifers. By being forced into oil … Read more