Fossil fuels

LOS ANGELES--The 2012 Green Car of the Year was announced at the Los Angeles Auto Show today. It's a 2012 Honda Civic, but it's not the hybrid model.

When the curtain dropped on the stage where the 2012 Green Car of the Year was announced this morning, it was the oft-overlooked 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas that stood before the room full of journalists.

Green Car Journal cites natural gases abundance in the United States, low tailpipe emissions, and lower fuel cost (by about 30 percent) than gasoline among its reasons for selecting the Civic Natural Gas as … Read more

Environmentally conscious consumers these days have more choices when it comes to deciding on a greener car. Hybrid? Plug-in hybrid? All-electric?

Well, what about natural gas, says Honda. The automaker has been rolling out its Civic that runs on natural gas to more states. But how common are fueling stations with natural gas? (As with electric vehicles, it's all about the infrastructure.)

In the video above, SmartPlanet's Sumi Das talks to Jay Guzowski, senior product planner with Honda, about the automaker's plans to sell the Civic nationwide.

This video first appeared at SmartPlanet under the headline "… Read more

The Alaska Air Group is joining the commercial aviation biofuel movement.

The airline launched two flights yesterday running on a blend consisting of 20 percent biofuel and 80 percent petroleum-based fuel. The sustainable biofuel used for the blend was made from cooking oil.

One flight was via a Boeing 737-800 plane from Seattle to Washington, D.C., and the other a Bombardier Q400 plane headed from Seattle to Portland, Ore. Both planes were flown as part of a program to fly more than 75 flights on a cooking oil-based biofuel blend within the coming weeks on Alaska Air's Alaskan … Read more

Scrappy green-tech start-ups aren't the only ones who make big bets on technology.

A spate of articles this week points to the fact that new technologies in the fossil fuel industry are making it harder for alternative clean energy technologies to get a larger foothold.

A New York Times article this week says new techniques allow drillers to tap oil and gas from a variety of "unconventional sources" that were once considered too difficult, a shift that changes the global picture on energy supply.

The most dramatic example in the U.S. is freeing natural gas from … Read more

Some Virginians will soon have forests to thank for their electricity.

Biomass manufacturer Enviva has signed a contract with Dominion Virginia Power, a subsidiary of Dominion, to supply wood waste chips to two power plants that are being converted from using coal to renewable biomass.

Dominion Virginia Power had announced in April its intention to convert three 63-megawatt coal-burning electricity plants into three 50-megawatt renewable biomass electricity plants. Specifically, it plans to convert its Altavista, Southampton, and Hopewell, Va., plants. The Southampton and Hopewell plants have contracted to use Enviva wood waste chips pending approval from the Virginia State Corporation … Read more

To measure a country's greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels, it makes sense to consider the whole carbon supply chain, from oil well or coal mine to a consumer's shelf, scientists reported today.

Currently, putting a price on climate-warming carbon dioxide generated by oil, coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuels typically takes place where the fuel is burned.

However, this may not be the most effective way to calculate carbon emissions' cost, the researchers wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Carbon dioxide generated by human activities such as coal-fired power plants and factories … Read more

In the quest to get more oil from the ground, Glori Energy is enlisting microbes.

The Houston, Texas-based company today filed to go public on the stock market in a bid to raise $115 million with a biotechnology designed to extract more oil from existing wells.

Well more than half of the oil in oil wells typically stays trapped underground because conventional techniques can't reach it all. About 10 percent to 15 percent of available oil can come out based on pressure. Then drillers flood wells with water in one well to help push the oil out of a … Read more

It's no secret to anyone following green tech that the Department of Defense has taken a particular interest in advanced biofuels, vehicle fuel efficiency, renewable energy, and building efficiency. But many may not realize to what extent the DOD has changed its policy, or the large impact this shift is going to have on the economy, according to a report released yesterday afternoon by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The report (PDF) asserts that the DOD is one of the world's largest institutional consumers of fossil fuels, consuming 300,000 barrels of oil a day in 2009. The DOD's energy cost for 2010 was $15.2 billion (PDF) … Read more

U.S. emissions of the main greenhouse gas rebounded nearly 4 percent last year as factories ran harder while the economy recovered and as consumers boosted air conditioning during the hot summer, the government said today.

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of oil, coal, and natural gas, which accounts for about 80 percent of U.S. overall greenhouse gas output, rose 213 million tonnes, or 3.9 percent, last year, the Energy Information Administration said.

It was the first rise in the emissions blamed for global warming since the recession pushed them down in the previous two … Read more